Veganwolf.com
Meat just doesn't cut it in today's environment
The Georgia Straight
(Vancouver) January 21, 2009
http://www.straight.com/article-197476/meat-just-doesn%3F%3Ft-cut-it-todays-environment
Meat
just doesn't cut it in today's environment
By Dave Steele
There's
little doubt about it. Humans evolved as omnivores. The shapes of our teeth,
the lengths of our intestines, and a wealth of fossil evidence (arrowheads,
butchered animal bones, et cetera) all point to an omnivorous
past.
Natural selection favoured meat eating because it allowed our
ancestors to survive where edible plant supplies were in short supply.
Our forebears could flourish on fruits and grains and berries when those
were plentiful and switch to meat when edible plants were scarce. Had early
humans not led omnivorous lives, they almost certainly would have died
out.
But that was then. This is now.
In the past, humans were few
and far between. The pressure we exerted on the world around us was slight.
Today, with our population approaching seven billion, the pressures we exert
are enormous. No longer a boon to humanity, our hunger for meat has become
the single biggest contributor to planetary degradation. Be it global
warming, fossil-fuel depletion, water depletion or desertification, meat
consumption is a prime factor in the problem. And meat takes food out of
the mouths of the hungry.
On today's factory farms, it takes 2.4 pounds
of dry corn, soy, and oats to produce a pound of chicken; eight to 10 pounds
of similar feed is required for every pound of beef. According to Cornell
University's David Pimentel, nearly 800 million people could fill their
stomachs for a year on the grain fed to U.S. animals alone. And that's just
the tip of the iceberg.
According to Pimentel's careful reckoning, modern
western diets could not exist at all were it not for the enormous amount of
fossil fuels we pour into them. Just getting nitrogen into our fertilizers
takes the equivalent of nearly one million barrels of oil each day. Add in
the other components-the pesticides, the herbicides, the combines, the
tractors, and all the rest-and the numbers become astronomical. As Pimentel
shows, the way we raise meat, it takes some 28 calories of fossil fuel input
to generate one calorie of food value. Even modern lacto-ovo vegetarian
diets, he warns, can't be maintained in our world without excessive amounts
of oil and gas.
Meat production accelerates global warming, too. All
those burned fossil fuels have to go somewhere. Worse, our cows and sheep
and other ruminants emit methane as they digest their feed. Together,
Canada's 10 million cows release the methane equivalent of a half ton of
CO2 for every man, woman, and child in the country. According to the UN Food
and Agriculture Organization, animal agriculture is responsible for a bigger
share of global warming than all of the cars and trucks and ships and planes
in the world combined!
And animal agriculture emits other pollutants,
too. Nearly three-quarters of North American ammonia emissions are due
directly or indirectly to animal farming. Manure contaminates our ground
water. The Worldwatch Institute reports that farm animals in the United
States generate 130 times more bodily waste than humans.
Animal
agriculture destroys land and habitat, too. Raising livestock and the
soybeans to feed them is easily the biggest contributor to rainforest
destruction. More than two acres of tropical rainforest are cleared per
second to graze or feed farm animals. Around the world, tens of billions of
tons of topsoil are lost each year to cultivation of animal feed
crops.
Fish are no solution either. We've mined the oceans so badly that
almost all of the world's fisheries are in serious decline. Hunting?
Sorry. All of North America's wildlife would be wiped out were we to
satisfy our current hunger for meat that way.
In the past, the meat
eating was a boon to us. But today, the opposite is true. Natural selection
operates on the here and now. If we don't curtail our consumption of meat
and eggs and milk and cheese, natural selection will eventually work in the
strongest way against our meat-eating habits.
But we're lucky. We
evolved as omnivores. We can choose what we eat. Plants or
animals.
Choose plants. There's an awful lot at stake.
Dave Steele
is the vice president of Earthsave Canada http://www.earthsave.ca/
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