Anyone who is concerned with our species damage to the
life systems of our planet is faced with making many personal choices to limit
their individual foot print. We must first become aware of what we are doing
that is polluting our air and water, degrading our forests, destroying our
soils, and causing the extinction of many life forms. Our use of all types of
chemicals like pesticides and herbicides must be considered. Our use of fossil
fuels is probably at the top of many people’s lists. Our consumerism which
needs an endless supply of raw materials and creates immense amounts of waste
needs to be on the list. Maybe the single most destructive of human activities
is the practice of animal agriculture - something on which the environmental community
has not placed enough emphasis.
There is a considerable amount of evidence that human
consumption of meat, dairy, and fish is the single most destructive of all our
activities. Animal agriculture is the largest contributor to global warming,
water pollution and depletion, habitat destruction, and erosion of our topsoil.
Our over consumption of fish is putting over 70% of all fish stocks under
threat.
Humans raise and kill 70 billion creatures for food each
year which produce 89,000 pounds of excrement each second. This is 130 times
more excrement than humans create. Anyway you think about it, this is a lot of
….. stuff. Much of it ends up polluting our streams causing dead zones in
places like the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. While cow burps play
their share in producing the powerful greenhouse gas methane, all of this waste
makes its contribution. Especially egregious contributors to this waste problem
are confined animal feeding operations (CAFO).
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| Swine in a CAFO - unable to turn around, lay down, or move for the duration of their lives. Image courtesy of shealynnbenner.com |
Animal agriculture makes the single largest use of the
earth’s land area and the destruction of its soils and forests. 70% to 90% of
grains raised in this country goes to feed animals. We could produce all the
food we need with plants on far less land. Over grazing has transformed entire
areas of rangeland with an estimated 700 million acres of destruction.
Desertification is a world-wide problem. Our precious top soil is being washed
and blown away. All the crops being grown for animal feed greatly increase
pesticide an herbicide use. Livestock occupies 30% of the earth’s land mass.
Slash and burn destruction of the rainforest to raise cattle is the leading
single cause of rainforest and species loss.
Not only is animal agriculture directly responsible for
polluting water, it is also putting a tremendous strain on clean water
resources. While we in the eastern part of the United States may not be
conscious of the problem, the Western United States consists of much arid and
semi-arid land. Great deals of the cattle raised in this country are raised in
this area. The Colorado River is so over used that it never makes it to the
sea. The vast Ogallala Aquifer is rapidly being drained, mostly to grow feed
for cattle. Vast quantities of water are needed to meet livestock’s direct
needs, to grow crops to feed them, and to process and package. Each quarter
pounder you eat requires at least 660 gallons of water.
The big environmental groups have been unwilling to take on
the issue of animal agriculture directly. They skirt around the edges with the
issue such as rainforest destruction for cattle, CAFO’s, over fishing, and
antibiotic use, but they never go after the root cause of these problems: our
unnecessary and unhealthy consumption of so much meat, fish, and dairy.
Why aren’t they putting the reduction of our consumption of
animal products right up there with other environmental concerns? Why aren’t
they suggesting that we should greatly reduce our consumption of animal
products? If adopting a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle is the single
biggest step any of us can take to lighten our impact on the biosphere, why
isn’t this front and center? I suspect that they don’t want to
alienate any of their members. Are they more concerned with the health of their
groups than they are with the health of the planet?
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| The "cage free" label carries no standards or regulation and simply indicates that hens are not kept in battery cages- but are still raised in CAFOs which deny birds' natural behavoirs likes nesting, roosting, foraging, even flapping their wings. No grass, no insects, no sunshine. Many die from stress and disease. Image courtesy of 7thwavewellness.blogspot.com |
I don’t know that such a conscious decision has been made,
but they are committed to their organizations and they don’t want to lose any
of their supporters. I don’t want to in anyway diminish what many of these
groups do to protect the environment, but only propose that they must take on
directly the problem of animal agriculture if we are going to solve a whole
range of environmental problems. While the environmental community promotes
many lifestyle changes such as using less energy and buying local, it must
strongly add a great reduction of the consumption of animal products to the
list. Using less doesn’t mean (for most of us) a lower quality of life. In fact
lowering our individual consumption by of just about everything can improve the
quality of life for all of us.
As a nation we have been very successful in exporting an
over-consumption driven lifestyle. As consumption of consumer products grows
throughout the developing world, there is an ever growing stress placed on the
earth’s life systems. We are also exporting our “meat eating” lifestyle, an
unsustainable development. It is time for us who are concerned with defending
the planet lead by real example. Let us not ask others to do what we are not
willing to do. Meatless Mondays are not nearly enough!
Written by Jack Miller - Sierra Club PA Chapter Vice Chair
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