How does vegetarianism help the environment?!
Answers: does it help mostly if we would just stop eating the cows?
Hi
found this info on the earthsave website, a bit long but good information!
In 1990, when I first read that 10 people could be fed with the grain that you would feed a cow that would be turned into food for one person, I was impressed. But I was not moved. The reason: If 10 people would be fed because I gave up meat, I’d give it up. But, I thought, if I give up meat, it won’t have that impact: it probably won’t have any impact on anything at all, except me.
I was wrong. If I had known that for every pound of beef I did not eat, I would save anywhere from 2,500 to 5,000 gallons of water, I would have been moved. It’s a good idea to save water; we are depleting our underground aquifers faster than we are replenishing them. The largest one, the Ogallala, which covers a vast part of the country from the Midwest to the mountain states, is being depleted by 13 trillion gallons a year. It is going to run out. Northwest Texas is already dry. They can’t get any water from their wells.
John Robbins points out that in the 1980s and 1990s, to conserve water, most of us went to low-flow showerheads. If you take a daily seven-minute shower, he says, and you have a 2-gallon-per-minute low-flow showerhead, you use about 100 gallons of water per week, or 5,200 gallons of water per year. If you had used the old-fashioned 3-gallon-per-minute showerhead, I calculate you would have used 7,644 gallons of water per year. So by going low flow, you saved almost 2,500 gallons of water per year. Wonderful. But by giving up one pound of beef that year, you’d save maybe double that. You’d save more water than you would by not showering at all for six months! And that’s just one of the environmental impacts you’d have.
The modern factory farming system is a prolific consumer of fossil fuel and a prolific producer of poisonous wastes. Up to 100,000 animals are herded together on huge feedlots. These animals do not graze on grass, as picture books tell us; they can’t graze at all. Feedlots are crowded, filthy, stinking places with open sewers, unpaved roads and choking air. The animals would not survive at all but for the fact that they are fed huge amounts of antibiotics. It is now conceded that the antibiotics fed to cattle are the main cause of antibiotic resistance in people, as the bacteria constantly in these environments evolve to survive them. The cattle are fed prodigious quantities of corn. At a feedlot of a mere 37,000 cows, 25 tons of corn are dumped every hour. It takes 1.2 gallons of oil to make the fertilizer used for each bushel of that corn. Before a cow is slaughtered, she will eat 25 pounds of corn a day; by the time she is slaughtered she will weigh more than 1,200 pounds. In her lifetime she will have consumed, in effect, 284 gallons of oil. Today’s factory-raised cow is not a solar-powered ruminant but another fossil fuel machine.
And she will produce waste. Livestock now produces 130 times the amount of waste that people do. This waste is untreated and unsanitary. It bubbles with chemicals and diseasebearing organisms. It overpowers nature’s ability to clean it up. It’s poisoning rivers, killing fish and getting into human drinking water. 65% of California’s population is threatened by pollution in drinking water just from dairy cow manure. It isn’t just cows that produce this waste. Factory-raised hogs produce four times the waste in North Carolina as the 6.5 million people of that state do. Even the oceans are polluted: 7,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico are a dead zone.
Cows and sheep emit CO2 which is causing global warming, but hey, so are humans and we don't each other.
Yea first off:
jungles are torn down all the time to make room for cow farms
Second:
cow farts/burps put a HUGE amount of methane in our atmosphere. Although the actual quantity of it is less than carbon emissions the methane can be a lot more harmful. There are more cows on the planet than humans. Stop drinking milk, stop eating beef or even better meat all together.
To the person above me: cows don't emit CO2 they emit methane
# Conservation of Fossil fuel. It takes 78 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of beef protein; 35 calories for 1 calorie of pork; 22 calories for 1 of poultry; but just 1 calorie of fossil fuel for 1 calorie of soybeans. By eating plant foods instead of animal foods, I help conserve our non-renewable sources of energy.
# Water Conservation. It takes 3 to 15 times as much water to produce animal protein as it does plant protein. As a vegetarian I contribute to water conservation.
# Efficient use of grains. It takes up to 16 pounds of soybeans and grains to produce 1 lb. of beef and 3 to 6 lbs. to produce 1 lb of turkey & egg. By eating grain foods directly, I make the food supply more efficient & that contributes to the environment.
# Soil conservation. When grains & legumes are used more efficiently, our precious topsoil is automatically made more efficient in its use. We use less agricultural resources to provide for the same number of people.
# Saving our forests. Tropical forests in Brazil and other tropic regions are destroyed daily, in part, to create more acreage to raise livestock. By not supporting the meat industry, I directly reduce the demand to pillage these irreplaceable treasures of nature. Since the forest land "filters" our air supply and contains botanical sources for new medicines, this destruction is irreversable.
# Asthetics. Decaying animal parts, whether in a freezer case or served in restaurants, can never be as asthetically pleasing to the senses as the same foods made from wholesome vegetable sources. Only habit can allow one not to perceive this: a change in diet makes this self evident.
Cattle contributes a HUGE amount to deforestation. Additionally, the gas that their farts and poop produce contribute a good percent to global warming (i know it's greater than 5%)
A dairy cow produces 120 lbs of waste every day and drinks two bathtubs worth of fresh, clean water. (while only producing 9 gallons of milk)
I have read that if every American was vegetarian for 1 day a week, we would save enough food to end world hunger.
Biomass pyramids are the answer. This website probably explains it quite well:
http://qldscienceteachers.tripod.com/jun...
Basically, the more levels in the pyramid, the more energy is lost in each layer, i.e. we lose less energy directly eating the crops than we would lose from eating the cows which ate the crops.
the two biggest things are that cows produce methane, which helps to cause global warming, and antibiotics and hormones that we feed both cows and chickens getting into our water supplies from the animal excriment. Although in addition over-fishing is an issue as well. The comment that we need to eat cows to keep methane levels down is, of course, showing a poor understanding of supply and demand. Eat less meat, less will be bread and then there will be less. So no, it is not just cows that effect the environment, all livestock are straining the environment in the numbers that we breed them, and with the hormones and antibiotics that we give them.
Why do cows not producing CO2? They breathe in oxygen and emit carbon dioxide like us, or else they will will be plants as well?? Or everybody above (almost) questions the premise of the question that animals are different from plants?
The U.N. has determined that animal industry contributes more to global warming than all the vehicles in the world.
The U.S. Environmental "Protection" Agency determined that runoff from factory farms causes more water pollution than all other industrial sources combined.
I have read that the amount of water it takes to bring a steer to slaughter weight could float a destroyer.
I'm not going to pretend that if eveyrone went veg we could do away with world hunger, as that's all too often an issue of distribution. But it's certainly a waste to have 70 percent of grains grown in the U.S. going to feed animals who will become our food. Quite a bit of land space goes to grow the crops for the animals and to house these animals. It's incredibly inefficient.
Check out www.biteglobalwarming.org for more information.
In a groundbreaking 2006 report, the United Nations (U.N.) said that raising animals for food generates more greenhouse gases than all the cars and trucks in the world combined. Senior U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization official Henning Steinfeld reported that the meat industry is “one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems.”
Carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide together cause the vast majority of global warming. Raising animals for food is one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide and the single largest source of both methane and nitrous oxide emissions.
The more people who are vegetarians and vegans the less animals (such as cows) are breeded for food, which would lower the carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous emissions and help the environment. Both the U.N. and the UK's Environment Agency along with others have all stated that vegetarianism and veganism is an extremely beneficial way to help the environment and reduce global warming.
According to a recent landmark study by the UN, the production of animals for food is responsible for creating more greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation COMBINED!
Many factors are involved, including deforestation, cycling our grain supply through cows with severely decreasing yields, and the toxic effects of methane released by livestock.
I believe the vast majority of methods used for raising all animals for food are needlessly cruel, which is why I became a vegetarian at 13. You are correct, however. If everyone just quit eating beef we could change, save, and feed the world.
The reason people think it doesn't is beacause "cows are causing global warming" which they're not.
err, they wouldn't if humans didn't keep breeding them like crazy.
Also, eating plants, is more local which reducing transportation and air pollution, so yes, it does help the enviroment.
Think of it this way.
You need water, petrol, and land to produce the grain. Which is then harvested and trucked on over to be precessed to be fed to the cows. Which require, antibiotic, water and petrol to maintain.
The cow is the taken to a slaughter house, where it is cut up and taken to a butcher, where is is portioned further then shipped to your grocery store.
It is a lot of steps to get cow on your table.
However say I am eating corn.
it takes land, water and petrol to farm the corn, which is harvested, put on a truck and shipped to the grocer.
So really by not contributing to commerical farming we are not only saving water and petrol but no lacing the land with unnecessary pesticides and antibiotics.
No. We gotta kill the cows and eat them to keep the methane levels down. :-D
It does not help the environment. Cows are just a part of the food chain.
It Doesn't. It helps put livestock farmers out of buisness so they have to sell there land. Then the housing companies buy it and put buildings on it.
Vegatarians dont...becuase animals are here to start a food chain and if thats not being done it will cause over population which is NOT good for then environment
it doesn't.
but cows destroy sum of the ozone layer in a form of a gas...
No, vegetarians cause climate change because they expel noxious greenhouse gases as a result of their diet.
Cows also cause climate change with their mighty & evil flatulence so we must eat all the cows asap.