The Impact of Meat and Dairy on the Environment
One of the current biggest concerns internationally is for the environment and the damage which humans are causing to it. Farming and eating animals plays a large part in the warming of the Earth's atmosphere as well as wasting resources such as water and land. In fact the livestock sector is the biggest contributor to green house gas emissions.
The livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO2 equivalent - 18 percent - than transport, according to a new report published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. It is also a major source of land and water degradation.
Rising world temperatures will cause artic ice to melt, increasing sea levels worldwide. This will put the most pressure on the worlds poor and reduce the living space for humans and animals alike. The weather will change, with equatorial regions becoming hotter and less habitable than they are now. Other areas will become warmer but wetter, and hurricanes and other 'natural disasters' will increase. With an ever rising human population this will put further pressure on all the world's resources. Something needs to be done soon. Although measures like changing to energy efficient light bulbs and refusing plastic bags need to become the norm, much more radical action is required. Going vegan can drastically reduce your carbon footprint. In fact it is the most efficient thing you can do.
A meat-eater on a bike releases more carbon dioxide than a vegan in a 4x4! We are not advocating the use of 4x4s, but think how much better things would be for us, animals and the environment if you were a vegan on a bike. A kilogram of beef is responsible for the equivalent of the amount of CO2 emitted by the average European car every 250 kilometres, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.
Ruminants - cows, sheep and goats produce large quantities of methane when they digest their food. They fart out methane, a gas 23 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2, which increases global warming. Breeding animals to produce meat increases the quantity of the gasses produced, as without animal agriculture there would be far fewer of these animals. At current the number of farmed animals on the planet is far greater than the human population. As more people turned veggie there would be fewer animals bred, as demand decreases. Although it is commonly thought, if everyone went vegetarian we would be over run with 'useless' farmed animals, polluting the atmosphere for no gain, not everyone will go veggie at once, so the number of farmed animals will simply decrease.
Livestock occupy and eat produce from 30% of the earth's land surface. Farmed animals must eat 10kg of plant protein in order to produce 1kg of animal protein for consumption. It is more efficient for people to eat the cereals fed to animals, then to eat the animals. It is often argued that animals can survive in areas where food cannot be grown. In some ways this is true, but these animals are generally brought inside during the winter, where they are fed hard feed humans could otherwise eat. The large amount of land used by animal agriculture encroaches on the few wild areas left, pushing wildlife and plants to extinction. In the Amazon basin deforestation is still occurring on a wide scale. Habitats are destroyed and species are lost to provide land to graze cattle and grow crops to feed animals. 95% of all soya grown is fed to farmed animals. Because of these factors it is believed that every individual hamburger, from a restaurant which sells meat from deforested areas, is directly responsible for the felling of an area of rainforest the size of a kitchen.
Consumption of animal products also wastes water as well as land. Meat-eaters consume the equivalent of about 5,000 litres of water a day compared to the 1,000-2,000 litres used by people on vegetarian diets in developing countries. This is because, on average, it takes 1,790 litres of water to grow 1kg of wheat compared with 9,680 litres of water for 1kg of beef. This is because animals require water for their daily functioning and pollute water with their affluence. Whilst global warming may make the climate wetter in some parts of the world, regions already struggling with desertification (the process of land near the equator turning into desert) will increase in area.
The human population world wide is increasing. Consumption based on animal farming wastes cereals, land and water, which in turn puts pressure on wild spaces, wildlife and human populations, especially the worlds poor. At present about 840 million people in the world are undernourished with a further 2 billion expected to be born within 20 years. Finding water to grow food will be one of the greatest challenges facing governments. Feeding these people will be a second. Consumption of animal products is a luxury the planet simply can no longer afford.
Destruction of the Seas
The seas are becoming vast wastelands, over fished, polluted and littered. Increased demand on world fish stocks has pushed marine populations to the brink of collapse; in 1998 the United Nations estimated that nearly half of the world's fish stocks were fully exploited. As large popular fish disappear the industry's response is to hunt longer living animals at deeper depths and to catch younger animals. These pressures cause further population devastation. Long living bottom dwelling species can live for 75 years; they mature late in life and can be caught prior to reproducing, causing population collapse. Catching younger fish can also prevent animals from species which mature earlier from reproducing.
Modern methods of fishing include the use of vast drift nets up to 40 miles long. Everything gets caught in the nets, including juvenile fish, fish which are prohibited by quotas, marine mammals, sea birds, rocks and coral. The animals are dragged along for hours, those which are still alive are then gutted or drown on the deck of the ship. Non-target species or specimens deemed too small are returned to the ocean where they are likely to die because of the stress and trauma.
Fish farms are an increasing feature of coastal areas. Where fish stocks are decreasing people are pushing for other ways to be able to continue their lives without change. Fish farms may seem like the answer, but in reality they exacerbate the problems of declining populations. When fish in farms are predatory species they require high amounts of other fish as food so large amounts of small fish are captured to be fed to bigger fish. Pollution in the sea accumulates in predatory animals, so people are consuming fish with high levels of PCBs and dioxins in them. Catching fish when they are small prevents them from ever reaching an age where they can breed and keep populations stable. As with other forms of animal farming the fish are kept in close quarters. They have to be dosed with chemicals and anti-biotics to combat the problems of over crowding. These chemicals pollute the surrounding waters. Lice are attracted to the large concentration of animals so fish farmers dose animals with anti-louse chemicals. This causes the lice to fall off. Wild fish attracted, because of the food concentration in the area, fall prone to infestation by lice which have dropped off the imprisoned fish.
The real affects of fishing are wide spread. In 1984 there were 6 million penguins on the Falklands islands, in 2005 there were 1 million. Research conducted by the British Antarctic Survey blame commercial fishing for the decline in numbers. Coastal bird and marine mammal numbers are falling because they are caught by accident and because they simply cannot find sufficient fish to survive. Man must stop fishing as the only sustainable level of commercial fishing is none at all.