The Earth
In a touch of nature, the whole world is kin. - – John Muir
With climate change looming as a global crisis, it is imperative that we begin to look at how destructive our familiar lifestyle patterns have become. While most people accept the destruction of animal life as a part of normalcy, few are aware of the environmental destruction it wreaks and the way in which it is intrinsically involved in creating climate change. Livestock production exceeds transportation as a contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and is responsible for 65% of human-related nitrous oxide (296 times the CO2 Global Warming Potential), mainly from manure. (See FAO article of 29 Nov 2006.)
Land use for meat has resulted in rapid deforestation, with nearly 70% of former rainforests in the Amazon now in use for grazing livestock. Livestock production is one of the most damaging to the environment, causing water pollution, destruction of coral reefs, chemical runoffs which destroy fish populations, soil erosion (55%), and major biodiversity decline. A single cow produces about 120 pounds of wet manure per day, or about the waste of 20-40 people. Just in California alone, that means their 1.4 million dairy cows produce as much waste as 28-56 million people! (See RapSheet from the Sierra Club.) Since 1995, organisms related to meat production have killed more than a billion fish in the estuaries and coastal areas of North Carolina and the Maryland and Virginia tributaries to the Chesapeake Bay and contribute significant nitrogen and phosphorus to these waters. (EPA, 1998)
Want to save water? Give up meat. A single pound of meat uses up more water than you will use showering for an entire year! Want to save land space? A similar analogy holds for land use. According to John Robbins, a vegan uses about one-sixth of an acre of land for food for a year; the average vegetarian who consumes dairy products and eggs requires about an acre of land, and the average meat-eater requires about 20 times that much land. (See goveg.com for more detailed information.)
A few more statistics, or food for thought:
- Meat consumption is on the rise
- In the U.S., livestock outnumber humans by 5 to 1
- Animal protein uses 11 times more fossil fuel than plant protein
- Animal protein uses 100 times more water than plant protein
Veganism is not the only answer to solving environmental problems, but it is one of the most significant things any person can do to help save the planet. Th environment, animals, and humanity are linked. As Chief Seattle warned us many years ago, ”Man did not weave the web of life – he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” (1854)
