Vegetarianism and the Environment

There are great environmental costs to a meat based diet. Thirty years ago, Frances Moore Lappe published her groundbreaking Diet for a Small Planet, which looks at the environmental consequences of funneling crops through animals, as well as the consequences of first world meat consumption on global poverty and destitution. Lappes statistics hold up today as well. Eating meat is incredibly inefficient and wasteful. It takes many pounds of grain to produce one pound of edible animal meat and that animal is typically fed cash-crop imports that cause starvation in the developing world. The environmental think tank Worldwatch Institute explains that the grain fed to animals would be used more efficiently if consumed directly by humans.

Continued growth in meat output is dependent on feeding grain to animals, creating competition for grain between affluent meat eaters and the world's poor. Her again if something if better for you, it's likely to be better all around. A plant based diet reduces our dependence on a system of trade that harms the environment and the global poor. And this is good for everyone.

The sad fact is that 83% of U.S. agricultural land is used for pasture or to grow crops to feed animals, to fatten them up so that we can eat them.

Raising animals for food is a primary cause of land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, loss of biodiversity, and not least of all, global warming.

The UN report says that almost a fifth of the emissions that contribute to global warming come from livestock (including chickens, pigs and sheep in addition to cattle); more emissions than from all of the world's cars, trucks, and planes combined! In fact, a University of Chicago study determined that switching from a standard American diet to a vegan diet reduces greenhouse gas emissions more than switching from a regular car to a hybrid. (and so much kinder!!)

Animal agriculture takes up an incredible 70 percent of agricultural land worldwide; as a result, farmed animals are probably the biggest cause of the slashing and burning of the world's forests. Today 70 percent of former Amazon Rainforest is used for pastureland, and feed crops cover much of the remainder. These forests serve as "sinks" absorbing carbon dioxide from the air, and when the forests are burned all the stored carbon dioxide is released, in quantities that by far exceed the fossil fuel emissions of animal agriculture. As if that weren't bad enough, the real kicker comes when you look at gases besides carbon dioxide gases like methane and nitrous oxide, enormously powerful greenhouse gases with an estimated 23 and 296 times the warming power of carbon dioxide, respectively.

If carbon dioxide is responsible for about one half of human related greenhouse gas warming since the industrial revolution, methane and nitrous oxide are responsible for one third. These superstrong gases come primarily from farmed animals digestive processes and manure. Animal agriculture accounts for 9 percent of our carbon dioxide emissions, it emits 37 percent of our methane and a whopping 65 percent of our nitrous oxide.

It's all a bit hard to take in when you think of a small chick hatching from her fragile egg. How can an animal, so seemingly insignificant against the vastness of the earth, give off so much greenhouse gas as to change the global climate? The answer is in their sheer numbers.

With 10 billion land animals slaughtered every year to satisfy a meat ravenous culture of half-pound steaks and all you can eat buffets, it's hard to remember that not so long ago, meat was considered a luxury. Land animals raised for food make up a staggering 20 percent of the entire land animal biomass of the earth. You could say we are eating our planet to death. And what we are seeing is just the beginning. Meat consumption has increased fivefold in the past fifty years and is expected to double again in the next fifty..

Notes from Kathy's Book Quantum Wellness

Be sure to get this book it is so enlightening!!!