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the free encyclopedia.
The production of meat and
animal products at current and
likely future levels is often
considered as
environmentally and
ecologically
unsustainable. It is also
argued that even if sustainable,
modern industrial agriculture is
changing
ecosystems faster than they
can
adapt. While vegetarian
agriculture produces some of the
same problems as animal
production, the environmental
impact of animal production is
significantly greater.
[1] Environmental vegetarians
can be compared with
economic vegetarians, who
consider the meat industry
economically unsound, and both
citing the same efficiency
concerns, many vegetarians see
natural resources as being freed
up by vegetarianism and veganism.
"The cost of mass-producing
cattle, poultry, pigs, sheep and
fish to feed our growing
population... include highly
inefficient use of freshwater and
land, heavy pollution from
livestock feces... and spreading
destruction of the forests on
which much of our planet's life
depends." - Time Magazine 11/8/99
Water resources
Water is becoming an
increasingly scarce resource in
many parts of the world. Overuse
by humans is damaging to rivers
and
ecosystems and leads to
salinity and
desertification. A vegetarian
diet uses considerably less water
than a meat based diet. This is
because to produce meat, water
must be used in the production of
feed for animals, which must be
fed to the animals during their
entire life. The loss of water
(and energy) between
trophic levels is very large.
When the grains go directly to
humans this inefficiency is
avoided. As an illustration, the
water needed to produce a pound of
wheat in the USA is 14 gallons
whereas the water needed to
produce a pound of beef is 441
gallons. More than half of the
water use for all purposes in the
USA is used for
livestock production.
[2]
Emissions
For reasons of inefficiency
similar to that of water
consumption, animal protein
demands far greater expenditures
of fossil fuel energy — eight
times as much for a comparable
amount of plant protein.
[3] This is
wasteful of non-renewable
fossil fuels and produces
carbon dioxide, a
greenhouse gas.
Animal production also creates
damaging animal
waste. In the
United States,
livestock account for nearly
20% of total
methane emissions.
[4] One ton of methane has the
global warming potential of 23
tons of carbon dioxide.
Substituting meat products with
protein containing alternatives
such as soy or beans would greatly
reduce the amount of land, water
and energy needed to feed a
population.
Grazing and Land use
Factory farm animal
production, while having a smaller
land-use footprint, still requires
large quantities of
feed that must be grown over
large areas of land. Mass
free-range animal production
requires land for
grazing, which has prompted
encroachment on undeveloped lands
and
clear cutting. The move into
wild lands has increased the rate
of
species
extinction and damaged the
services offered by nature, such
as the natural processing of
pollutants. Over-grazed lands,
especially in
semi-arid regions lose their
ability to support animal
production due to rapid
topsoil erosion and
desertification because of the
trampling hoofs of animals at
unusual concentrations on the
land.
[5] This makes further
agricultural expansion necessary.
According to the United Nations,
ranching-induced deforestation is
one of the main reasons for the
loss of plant and animal species
in tropical
rainforests.
[6]
Trawling
- Main article:
Trawling
Trawling is similarly
destructive to sea
ecosystems, removing around
5-25% of an area's seabed life on
a single run, although if
conducted only at low levels and
well managed it can be a
sustainable practice.
[7]
Overfishing has been widely
reported because of increases in
the volume of fishing hauls to
feed a quickly growing number of
consumers. This has lead to the
breakdown of some sea ecosystems
and several fishing industries
whose catch has been greatly
diminished.
[8]
[9] The extinction of many
species has also been reported.
[10] According to a Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO)
estimate, over 70% of the world’s
fish species are either fully
exploited or depleted.
[11]
“Overfishing cannot continue,
the depletion of fisheries poses a
major threat to the food supply of
millions of people.” - Nitin
Desai, Secretary General of the
2002 World Summit on Sustainable
Development
Petroleum
Petroleum is one of the
resources freed up for other usage
by a vegetarian diet: Within the
Pulitzer-winning book by
John Robbins, "Diet for a New
America," which uses data
primarily sourced from the world's
largest body of scientists,
AAAS, Robbins explains how the
petroleum used in the
transportation of farm-animals,
the later processing of them, and
the raising and harvesting of the
vast amount of crops fed to
farm-animals (which is much
greater than the amount of crops
people would need if we were to
eat the crops directly, rather
than feeding them to animals, then
eating the animals), adds up to
greatly increase the amount of
petroleum used. So, if more people
adopt a vegan diet, not only is
more food available, but more
petroleum to deliver that food is.
World hunger
Many believe that if everyone
followed a vegetarian diet, thus
freeing up resources that would be
used in meat production, we would
be many steps closer to
eliminating world hunger. A
popular saying is that even with
more food, the problem is
transporting all of that food to
the starving people. The petroleum
freed up by a vegetarian diet as
shown above may answer that
dilemma.
Critics of this view may
observe that the root causes of
world hunger are often traceable
to harmful political structures
rather than genuine resource
shortages. Moreover in
developing countries where
hunger is more common, animals
bred for meat are seldom fed food
that is consumed by human beings;
instead they are often free
ranging
cattle or
goats or
chicken that simply eat grass
and other food stuff that is
thrown away by people. The exact
extent to which animals are free
ranging against domesticated is
not known, but there is no doubt
that the trend is towards
increased domestication, with only
a small proportion of meat
consumed coming from wild animals.
