Vegetarian and Ecology?!
Vegetarian and Ecology?
Consider the impact of food. Come up with an ecological justification for being a vegetarian.
I need some help with this. I am not sure what to say!
Answers:
Would you ever open your refrigerator, pull out 16 plates of pasta and toss them in the trash, and then eat just one plate of food?1 How about leveling 55 square feet of rain forest for a single meal or dumping 2,500 gallons of water down the drain?2,3 Of course you wouldn't. But if you're eating chicken, fish, turkey, pork, or beef, that's what you're doing―wasting resources and destroying our environment.
Animals raised for food expend the vast majority of the calories that they are fed simply existing, just as we do. We feed more than 70 percent of the grains and cereals we grow to farmed animals, and almost all of those calories go into simply keeping the animals alive, not making them grow.4 Only a small fraction of the calories consumed by farmed animals are actually converted into the meat that people eat.
A major 2006 report by the United Nations summarized the devastation caused by the meat industry. Raising animals for food, the report said, is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. The findings of this report suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity. Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale ….”5
Growing all the crops to feed farmed animals requires massive amounts of water and land―in fact, nearly half of the water and 80 percent of the agricultural land in the United States are used to raise animals for food.6,7 Our taste for meat is also taking a toll on our supply of fuel and other nonrenewable resources―about one-third of the raw materials used in America each year is consumed by the farmed animal industry.8
Farmed animals produce about 130 times as much excrement as the entire human population of the United States, and since factory farms don't have sewage treatment systems as our cities and towns do, this concentrated slop ends up polluting our water, destroying our topsoil, and contaminating our air.9 And meat-eaters are responsible for the production of 100 percent of this waste―about 86,000 pounds per second!10 Give up animal products, and you'll be responsible for none of it.
Many leading environmental organizations, including the National Audubon Society, the WorldWatch Institute, the Sierra Club, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, have recognized that raising animals for food damages the environment more than just about anything else that we do. Whether it's the overuse of resources, unchecked water or air pollution, or soil erosion, raising animals for food is wreaking havoc on the Earth. The most important step you can take to save the planet is to go vegetarian.
Vast tracts of land are needed to grow crops to feed the billions of animals we raise for food each year. According to scientists at the Smithsonian Institute, the equivalent of seven football fields of land is bulldozed every minute, much of it to create more room for farmed animals. Of all the agricultural land in the U.S., nearly 80 percent is used in some way to raise animals―that's roughly half of the total land mass of the U.S.10 More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals.11
The U.S. certainly isn't alone in its misuse of land for animal agriculture. As the world's appetite for meat increases, countries across the globe are bulldozing huge swaths of land to make more room for animals and the crops to feed them. From tropical rain forests in Brazil to ancient pine forests in China, entire ecosystems are being destroyed to fuel our addiction to meat. According to scientists at the Smithsonian Institute, the equivalent of seven football fields of land is bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals.12
In the United States and around the world, overgrazing leads to the extinction of indigenous plant and animal species, soil erosion, and eventual desertification that renders once-fertile land barren.13 Livestock grazing is the number one cause of threatened and extinct species both in the United States and in other parts of the world.14 Philip Fradkin, of the National Audubon Society, states, "The impact of countless hooves and mouths over the years has done more to alter the type of vegetation and land forms of the West than all the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways, and subdivision developments combined."15 As more and more land both in the U.S. and around the world is irreparably damaged at the hands of the meat industry, what little arable land does remain may not be enough to produce crops to feed the burgeoning world human population.
Overgrazing leads to the extinction of indigenous plant and animal species, soil erosion, and eventual desertification that renders once-fertile land barren.
While factory farms are ruining our land, the commercial fishing industry is pushing entire oceanic ecosystems to the brink of collapse. Commercial fishing boats indiscriminately pull as many fish as they can out of the sea, leaving ecological devastation and the bodies of nontarget animals in their wake. Fishing methods like bottom trawling and long-lining have emptied millions of miles of ocean and pushed some marine species to the brink of extinction.
Raising animals for food is grossly inefficient, because while animals eat large quantities of grain, they only produce small amounts of meat, dairy products, or eggs in return. This is why more than 70 percent of the grain and cereals that we grow in this country are fed to farmed animals. It takes up to 16 pounds of grain to produce just one pound of meat, and even fish on fish farms must be fed 5 pounds of wild-caught fish to produce one pound of farmed fish flesh.17,18 All animals require many times more calories, in the form of grain, soybeans, oats, and corn, than they can possibly return in the form of animal flesh for meat-eaters to consume.
The world's cattle alone consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people―more than the entire human population on Earth.19 About 20 percent of the world's population, or 1.4 billion people, could be fed with the grain and soybeans fed to U.S. cattle alone.20 Learn more about the link between meat consumption and world hunger.
E, the respected environmental magazine, noted in 2002 that more than one-third of all fossil fuels produced in the United States are used to raise animals for food.21 This makes sense, since 80 percent of all agricultural land in the U.S. is used by the meat and dairy industries (this includes, of course, the land used to raise crops to feed them).
Simply add up the energy-intensive stages: (1) grow massive amounts of corn, grain, and soybeans (with all the required tilling, irrigation, crop dusters, and so on); (2) transport the grain and soybeans to manufacturers of feed on gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing 18-wheelers; (3) operate the feed mills (requiring massive energy expenditures); (4) transport the feed to the factory farms (again, in inefficient vehicles); (5) operate the factory farms; (6) truck the animals many miles to slaughter; (7) operate the slaughterhouse; (8) transport the meat to processing plants; (9) operate the meat-processing plants; (10) transport the meat to grocery stores; (11) keep the meat refrigerated or frozen in the stores, until it's sold. Every single stage involves heavy pollution, massive amounts of greenhouse gases, and massive amounts of energy.
Most of us turn off the lights when we leave a room and attempt to conserve energy in other ways, but eating meat is the most inefficient and resource-intensive thing we do. If we Americans cut our meat consumption, our oil problems would be drastically reduced.
Between watering the crops that farmed animals eat, providing drinking water for billions of animals each year, and cleaning away the filth in factory farms, transport trucks, and slaughterhouses, the farmed animal industry places a serious strain on our water supply. Nearly half of all the water used in the United States goes to raising animals for food.22
It takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat, while growing 1 pound of wheat only requires 25 gallons.23 A totally vegetarian diet requires only 300 gallons of water per day, while a meat-eating diet requires more than 4,000 gallons of water per day.24,25 You save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you do by not showering for an entire year.26
While millions of people across the globe are faced with droughts and water shortages, much of the world's water supply is quietly being diverted to animal agriculture. As the Western diet spreads to the rest of the world, even desert nations in Africa and the Middle East are pouring what little water they have into meat production.
It is clear that raising animals for food puts a tremendous strain on our already limited water supply, and water is used much more efficiently when it goes toward producing crops for human consumption.
Between watering the crops that farmed animals eat, providing drinking water for billions of animals each year, and cleaning away the filth in factory farms, transport trucks, and slaughterhouses, the farmed animal industry places a serious strain on our water supply. Nearly half of all the water used in the United States goes to raising animals for food.22
It takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat, while growing 1 pound of wheat only requires 25 gallons.23 A totally vegetarian diet requires only 300 gallons of water per day, while a meat-eating diet requires more than 4,000 gallons of water per day.24,25 You save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you do by not showering for an entire year.26
While millions of people across the globe are faced with droughts and water shortages, much of the world's water supply is quietly being diverted to animal agriculture. As the Western diet spreads to the rest of the world, even desert nations in Africa and the Middle East are pouring what little water they have into meat production.
It is clear that raising animals for food puts a tremendous strain on our already limited water supply, and water is used much more efficiently when it goes toward producing crops for human consumption.
Source(s):
peta.com
goveg.com
There is none its just a preference.
The basic idea is that if an acre of land is used to raise cattle, it will feed only a certain number of people. If that same acre of land is used to grow crops for humans, much more food can be produced than the cattle on that same land could provide. A simplified comparison would say that it takes 10 acres of land for cattle to feed the same number of people that 1 acre of crops could. This is based on the idea of ecological pyramids and the transfer of energy as you move up the pyramid. Basically, only 10% of energy moves its way up the pyramid. So by eating cattle, we get 10% of the energy that the animal obtained by eating plants.
-Half of the water used in the U.S. is used for animal agriculture.
-Every year in the US an area the size of Connecticut is lost to topsoil erosion--85% of this erosion is associated with livestock production.
-Livestock already consume half the world's grain, and their numbers are still growing almost exponentially.
-Every kilogram of beef we consume, according to research by the agronomists David Pimental and Robert Goodland, requires around 100,000 litres of water.
-Approximately 1.3 billion cattle populate the earth at any one time. They exist artificially in these vast numbers to satisfy the excessive human demand for the meat and by-products they provide. Their combined weight exceeds that of the entire human population. By sheer numbers, their consequent appetite for the world's resources, have made them a primary cause for the destruction of the environment.
-In the US, feedlot cattle yield one pound of meat for every 16 pounds of feed. It takes an average of 2,500 gallons of water to produce a single pound of meat. According to Newsweek, "The water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer could float a destroyer." In contrast, it takes only 25 gallons of water to produce one pound of wheat. Feeding the average meat-eating American requires 3-1/4 acres of land per year.
-Feeding a person who eats no food derived from animals requires only 1/6 acre per year. - Studies by North Carolina State University estimate that half of the some 2,500 open hog manure cesspools (euphemistically termed "lagoons"), now needed as part of hog productions there, are leaking contaminants such as nitrate--a chemical linked to blue-baby syndrome--into the ground water.
-Worldwide demand for fish, along with advances in fishing methods--sonar, driftnets, floating refrigerated fish packing factories--is bringing ocean species, one after another, to the brink of extinction. In the Nov., '95 edition of Scientific American, Carl Safina writes, "For the past two decades, the fishing industry has had increasingly to face the result of extracting [fish] faster than fish populations [can] reproduce." Research reveals that the intended cure--aquaculture (fish farming)--actually hastens the trend toward fish extinction, while disrupting delicate coastal ecosystems at the same time.
-A scientist, reporting in the industry publication Confinement, calculated in 1976 that the planet's entire petroleum reserves would be exhausted in 13 years if the whole world were to take on the diet and technological methods of farming used in the US.
-If tomorrow people in the US made a radical change away from their meat-centered diets, an area of land the size of all of Texas and most of Oklahoma could be returned to forest.
-It is estimated that livestock production accounts for twice the amount of pollution in the US as that produced by industrial sources.
-Livestock in the US produce 130 times the excrement of the entire US population. Since farm animals today spend much or all of their lives in factory sheds or feedlots, their waste no longer serves to fertilize pastures a little at a time. One poultry researcher, according to United Poultry Concerns literature, explains: "A one-million-hen complex will produce 125 tons of wet manure a day." To responsibly store, disperse, or degrade this amount of animal waste is simply not possible. Much of the waste inevitably is flushed into rivers and streams.
-Methane is one of the four greenhouse gasses that contributes to the environmental trend known as global warming. The 1.3 billion cattle in the world produce one fifth of all the methane emitted into the atmosphere.
-.Agricultural engineers have compared the energy costs of producing poultry, pork and other meats with the energy costs of producing a number of plant foods. It was found that even the least efficient plant food was nearly 10 times as efficient in returning food energy as the most energy efficient animal food.
-Since so much fossil fuel is needed to produce it, beef could be considered a petroleum product. With factory housing, irrigation, trucking, and refrigeration, as well as petrochemical fertilizer production requiring vast amounts of energy, approximately one gallon of gasoline goes into every pound of grain-fed beef.
-The direct and hidden costs of soil erosion and runoff in the US, mostly attributable to cattle and feed crop production, is estimated at $44 billion a year.
- Each pound of feedlot beef can be equated with 35 pounds of eroded topsoil.
-A nationwide switch to a pure vegetarian diet would allow us to cut our oil imports by 60%.
-Compared to a vegan diet, three days of a typical American diet requires as much water as you use for showering all year (assuming you shower every day).
-An acre of land can produce 20,000 pounds of potatoes, but only 165 pounds of beef.
-In the U.S., 260 million acres of forest have been destroyed for use as agricultural land to support our meat diet (over 1 acre per person).
-Since 1967, the rate of deforestation has been one acre every five seconds.
-Trees are being cut down at an alarming rate in the US, as well as around the world, for meat production. For every one acre cleared for urban development, seven acres are cleared to graze animals or grow feed for them.
Trophic levels!
At each trophic level, 90% of the energy from the last level is lost as heat. So each trophic level only has 10% of the energy of the previous level.
Example...
Let's say you feed some grain to a cow. The cow eats the grain. The cow secretes feces. The cow produces body heat. Energy is thus lost. It would be more efficient to eat the grain than to use it to feed the cows.
Not to mention, cows release a lot of methane...a potent greenhouse gas, twenty times worse than carbon dioxide...This worsens global warming.
There is this belief that we look after animals that we should be kind to animals, that Maneka Gandhi looks after animals because she loves animals and that love becomes the important factor that we believe, people who look after animals are usually women who have nothing better to do. Soft hearted girls, this is something that people do when they are young, when they have to come out, when they grow up or when they become big men and they have industries and they have factories and they forget about all this. This love business is associated with weakness, with sentimentality and this belief that we look after them. There is no better environmental protection than animals. We do not look after them. Every single one of them looks after us. From the Tiger to the vulture to the cockroach to the butterfly to the earth warm, there is not one animal that is not there.
I mean, in which way, does not impact well on our life? Let's take one example. When I was young my mother used to tell me the story about a king who could not be killed because he put his heart into the heart of a butterfly. When they kill the butterfly then only the king could be killed and it is quite; rue. My life and my son's life depend on that butterfly’s life. Why? Because butterfly pollinates flowers. If you don't have the butterfly you won't have the flowers and if you don’t have the flowers you won't have the insects that live on the flower. If you won't have the insects you won't have the birds that if you don’t have birds you don’t have the seeds that makes the forest; if you don’t make the forest you won't get rain and if you don't get the rain.
Let us examine the different animals and what they do for us. Let us take the vulture. In North India, they used to keep stoning vultures. I remember one Member of Parliament told me very proudly that these vultures used to come and nest in his house and so they cut down all the trees and drove them away. This is how we hurt them away, we hit theme call them dirty and so now the vultures have disappeared. There are no vultures in North India. As a result single village has a crisis, a medical crisis because when earlier the animals used to die or when they are used to be a garbage the vulture would clean it off. Now there is nobody to clean it up and so the carcasses lie there completely putrefying and stinking.
The green flies and the butterflies sit on it. They then sit on people and spread disease. So many villages that I have seen where they take the carcass of dead cow and throw it into the village pond, spreading disease to every single person who drinks from that, play in that and wash the clothes in that and why because one bird has finished there, one vulture has vanished there.
Let us take the stray dog. We tend to believe that all the stray dogs are such a
nuisance. What is the purpose of the dog? Why does he live in the city? Why has it come to city? Doesn't it like being with humans? Out of every 10 puppies that are born, 9 puppies will die under starvation, being hit, having their legs broken, and their mothers will be killed; will have nothing to feed on, so why do they live here? Because, they do the work of a scavenger. They keep your city clean. What is the important part of the city? Human beings produce garbage. We take that garbage and we throw it in the open; specially in India in every city what does this garbage do? It attracts rats- One pair of rat becomes 3300 rats every year. They are not scared of human beings as you know. But why do they live underground? Why do we not see them work commonly? Why do they not come on the surface? Because, they are scared of dogs and cats. If you have a dog, it patrols the city. Otherwise you would have rats taking over the entire place and now let me give you the case study of Surat.
In Surat there was a commissioner who came and said "Oh! I am the new Commissioner, I want to clean the city" and whenever a new commissioner comes and says this in the paper, 1 always feel very frightened because he is going to do only 2 things. What does he mean by cleaning-the He is going to kill out the dogs and he is going to remove all the Beggars. Bus.... So this Commissioner did exactly that. He killed the dogs and removed the beggars and then he gave interviews to India Today. So, when as soon as he killed all the dogs and there wasn't a single .dog left, What happened do you remember? What happened in Surat, many of you were little children then, the Plague happened and how did the plague happen?. I will show you huge pictures that we took at that time. There were 1000's and 1000's of rats who were above board all over the city because there were no predators left. There is a balance here between the prey and predators and when we upset it by killing predators the prey get multiplied and that is how Sahara desert spread. A large part of the desert was forested. It had tigers and large cats in it. The Arabs destroyed it and thus the desert spread. This is something that has' been repeated again and again. It is very much part of our life. So the dog is here to serve the purpose-In Bombay for instance, they have decided to remove the dogs in 2 to 3 areas and they killed all the dogs. After all, for 50 years they were killing them until the High court, WHO showed them that this is the wrong way to do it. However in 2-3 colonies they killed the-dogs especially in outer Mumbai. What happened immediately? The pigs came, because nature provides clearance for the garbage as soon as the pigs came, they killed the pigs. Now there arc only rats left. Now who will kill the rats? So thus everything protects us.
Let us look for instance at the cockroach. Now the cockroach is the worst possible example. No body likes cockroaches. You know the first reaction you have when-you see a cockroach "Mummy kill it, kill it, kill the cockroach", where the men and women run, but if we did not have the cockroach you and I would not be sitting in Chennai Today. We would not have a single city in India or the world. The human being produces very poisonous feces, urine, sweat. Even a little new born baby that is still suckling at its mother's breast, even this the nappy waste is extremely poisonous. Now when we have a bath, when we spit, when we go to the bathroom, all this comes out, through the sewage. Now and when it comes through the sewage it goes into water body and this goes into water body and now if it were to go into a water body untreated, within 15 minutes we would have no water body left because all the waste are so poisonous. As soon it goes into the sewage, the cockroach eats at and then the cockroaches' waste is totally biodegradable.
The cockroaches' waste is harmless because he has been invented by mankind to clean up your filth and make it biodegradable. He is therefore invented for sewer. When you get into a kitchen it is not that the cockroach is coming there to say Hello to you all because he likes your face. If you leave filth in the kitchen sometimes you can't even see the filth you left. This poor chap comes out to clean up your filth and go back, or not go back if he is killed.
Let's take every single thing, take the earthworm. If you let the earthworm work, your soil will never need fertilizer or pesticide. What we have done is we have killed the earthworm. We use pesticides so we use fertilizers and when we use fertilizers and pesticides we need 50 times more water. Electricity, so, you create a situation in which the farmer goes bankrupt in which Kamataka, Tamilnadu, U.P., Haryana, Punjab all fight with each other for water, only because you are using pesticide. Why are we using pesticide? Because you kill the earthworm. It brings us all back to the Gaya machine.
Let us look into the Meat. The single biggest environmental crisis in India, Forget the cruelty that you cause, forget the fact that these animals are killed with great pain and suffering, and that pain and suffering becomes all part of our Meal. How are going, to suffer? Let us look at the economic side One goat eats two and half hectare of land before it is killed. This goat belongs to the people who do not have land because if they have land they do not grow goat, the; will grow soyabean. Now this goat and all his brother's and sister's, where do they feed? They feed only in two places i.e. what is known as free or common land belong to me and you which are important for our survival. They either feed in the jungle or they feed in on the hill side.
Whenever the goat feeds he pulls out the roots: Goats don't feed like cows. When
they pull out the grass it will never grow, again because the top soil-starts flying. There is no grass to keep the top soil it starts flying, and thus it creates pollution problem and Asthma etc., There will be no growth on the earth. Now when it destroys the hill part, all the little rivulets of the water may dry. So you have no water. When the goat goes into the jungle, they finish every little tree that is growing, every little bush that is growing. People cut trees for wood and for other things and on the other hand you have no more little trees growing because the goat has eaten it. So you have
now forest cover less than 6% that is why sometimes you have the rain, sometimes you don't have the rain. We no longer have climates. We have weather conditions
changing from day to day, because we have no regulatory mechanism.
If you don't have forest you won't have rain. Dubai had monsoon in the past.
They planted so may trees last year, they got their first monsoon. There is a simple correlation between trees and rain. That is part of gaya's regulatory mechanism. Now why do you not have forests? Because people are eating meat and have traded water for meat. Secondly every time you eat a goat, you have also eaten a tiger. When the goat is going to the forest, we did a study on who is killing tiger? Why are the leopards disappearing? Why are we losing this huge heritage of India? Why every single one of them is killed by goater. They are killed by the goater
who has been frightened. So the first thing that the goater does he kills the goat. He puts poison into its stomach put it near the
water hold and the tiger dies.
Only after that skin and bones are sold. So, when you have eaten the meat,
you have eaten the jungle, you have eaten the water, you have eaten the tiger, you have eaten all the animals which live in the jungle. If you do not believe, go to jungle in the morning, where these is National Park or Sanctuary. -You will see thousands of buffaloes, thousands of gout coming in and in the evening you will hear them coming out. The whole day they have destroyed everything that makes us alive.
Look at any energy conversion. When you eat meat it takes 1 1 kilos of grain and
cereals to make meat. When you eat that 1 kilo of meat you have eaten 1 1 Kilos of grains and cereals and not only that you eat raw meat by itself, so you eat onions and garlic ond this and that to make it, use oil,then you have chappatis with it-and then you want sambar, Dal because the meat by itself you cannot eat. So therefore in effect you have eaten upto 12 kilos of food at one meal. If that 12 kilos is available for a family they could have existed for a week.
The actions of the minute percent of people that are vegetarians will not make an ecological impact on a planetary scale. But, that's what they all seem to believe.
Okay, so by global population increasing, dear Karen, how do you expect the actions of a disproportionate ratio of vegetarians vs. meat eaters to make a difference?
This is for the person that posted before me. Even one person will make a difference. One single vegetarian saves about 95 animal lives a year. Now when you think of all the resouces that would be used to raise, slaughter, package, ect. all those animals, I wonder how many human lives that one person is also saving?
It makes me sad that you are so jaded :(
Here was an answer I gave to another post:
Given the statistics it will be hard to sustain animal foods in the future since it is an inefficient process (basic science).
The world population will increase considerably:
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/img/worldp...
While the marine food supply will decrease:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/dis...
http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/ocean_plane...
And the planet's environment will be damaged to sustain livestock:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/satelli...
http://www.rainforestweb.org/rainforest_...
I agree with many of the above answers especially the answer on trophic levels.
In terms of energy it's better to eat lower in the food chain because of considerable amount of energy loss with each succeeding level from the producer to the tertiary consumer. Being a vegetarian we are primary consumers and eat the plant directly. Eating higher up the food chain also wastes some energy incoporated into the animal becasue we don't eat certain parts of the animals.
The most obvious problem with rearing animals is the methane gas they (especially cattle) give off. Although there's less methane in the atmosphere, molecule for molecule it's 20 more harmful as a greenhouse gas than CO2. Of course there's always the counter-argument that the paddy fields give off just as much methane gas as animals, but there's more animals.
Slurry and silage run-off from farms contaminate lakes, rivers and water supplies, causing the water to become oxygen depleted and killing the aquatic life.
If you want to be really fussy, cooking meat takes more energy than cooking veg so CO2 emissions from this may be higher.
For more information on ecological implications of rasing cattle and the contamination of rivers through farm waste, go on an A level website, as ecology is on the A level syllabus.