The Environmentally Conscious Vegetarian
A reduction in beef and other meat consumption is the most potent single act you can take to halt the destruction of our environment and preserve our natural resources. Our choices do matter. What's healthiest for each of us personally is also healthiest for the life support system of our precious, but wounded planet.
John Robbins,
author of Diet for a New America,
There are innumerable environmental reasons to go vegetarian, and one of these is to help combat global warming. As we all know, global warming threatens the world’s climates and ecologies. This danger is caused by the pollution from burning fossil fuels: coal, gas and oil. The main culprit is carbon dioxide, but nitrous oxide, methane, manmade CFCs, and ozone all contribute as well. While scientists still debate the rate of global warming and its consequences, they agree that global warming is a reality and potentially a looming menace. (Reducing these pollutants is a very desirable goal in any case!) The vegetarian diet produces far less of these treacherous greenhouse gases. Here’s the numbers:
- A tremendous amount of energy is used to transport food throughout the world. A colossal 70% of the world’s agriculture resources are consumed in meat production and according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, agricultural products are transported 566 billion ton-miles within U.S. borders each year, constituting more than 20% of total U.S. commodity transport. These figures are similar in parts of Asia and all of Europe. Petroleum is used in the raising, harvesting and transporting of vast amounts of crops fed to farm animals, the transportation of these animals, the processing of the animals into meat and the transportation of the meat to the consumer. The global economy sends the amount of petroleum used in meat production skyrocketing: for instance the European Union imports most of its animal feed from South America; the United States exports beef to Japan; New Zealand sends lamb meat to the Middle East, the EU and North America. In fact, it takes a massive three times more fossil fuel to produce a meat-centered diet than a plant-centered diet (Singer, 2002).
Or put another way: Going vegan does more to alleviate global warming than driving an eco-friendly car such as a Prius. About 28 percent of the average person’s diet comes from animal sources. This creates approximately 1.5 tons more carbon dioxide than a vegan diet with the same amount of calories. Switching to a hybrid car saves about 1 ton of carbon dioide in comparison. - Livestock accounts for nearly 25% of total methane emissions (EPA, 2005), which is the second biggest contributor to global warming.
- Livestock also accounts for 7% of all nitrous oxide emissions worldwide. (Fritschel, 1999)
- Trees convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, and the destruction of forests around the world furthers the greenhouse effect. The Food and Agricultural committee of the UN reports that the annual tropical deforestation has increased from 9 million hectares in 1980 to 16.8 million hectares in 1990, and unfortunately this destruction has accelerated in the last decade. To date a staggering 200 million hectares of rainforest has been destroyed in South America to make room for grazing cattle (Gussow, 1994). According to the Center for International Forestry Research, an Indonesia-based NGO, the rain forest lost just in Brazil in 2002-2003 is expected to exceed 25,000 square kilometers, a plot the size of Uruguay. The cattle population has exploded in the Amazon, from 26 million in 1990 to 57 million in 2002. Likewise much of the deforestation in Central America, Brazil and Indonesia goes to create farmland that generates the feed used in European factory farms. To put the numbers in perspective: the average car emits 3 kg/day of CO2, but to clear enough rainforest to produce beef for one hamburger results in an output of 75 kg of CO2. In this way, eating one pound of hamburger does as much damage as driving your car for more than three weeks (Boyan, 2005).
Carl Pope could probably affect the world more by being a vegetarian than through his job as president of the Sierra Club.
Jennifer Horsman
According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization 1.3 billion cattle, nearly 1 billion pigs, 1.8 billion sheep and goats, and over 15 billion chickens are raised and slaughtered for food every year on earth. Each one of these animals produces waste. This is the earth’s largest environmental problem: animal waste is the number one source of water pollution in the world; it is responsible for over half of all water pollution.