article by college student on the environmental impacts of meat-eating

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Written by Katie Setzer

/The University Register/, Sunday, 01 February 2009

While many people associate vegetarian and vegan diets with animal

rights concerns, far fewer consider the environmental impacts of a

vegetarian diet. The current methods of meat and dairy production

greatly contribute to land degradation, clear cutting, climate change,

water shortage, water pollution, loss of biodiversity, and air pollution.

 

The Sierra Club estimates that one pound of vegetarian-fed beef requires

16 pounds of grain and an estimated 2,500 to 5,000 gallons of water.

Growing all that grain to feed farm animals requires land. Over 260

million acres of forest in the United States have been cleared for this

purpose. Meat production also contributes to soil erosion, which is

crucial to land integrity and water filtration. According to Worldwatch

Institute, the meat industry is directly responsible for 85 percent of

soil erosion in the United States.

 

Eating one pound of meat is the greenhouse gas equivalent of driving an

SUV forty miles. A United Nations report released in 2006 stated that

the meat industry is responsible for more carbon emitted than every

single car on the road, every single plane in the sky, and every train

on the tracks combined. Noam Mohr notes in his EarthSave report entitled

" A New Global Warming Strategy: How Environmentalists are Overlooking

Vegetarianism as the Most Effective Tool Against Climate Change in Our

Lifetime " that methane is 21 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than

carbon dioxide. The meat industry is the number one producer of methane.

Human-produced carbon dioxide accounts for less than five percent of

natural sources, while human-produced methane is 150 percent. In

addition, carbon dioxide emissions have only risen roughly a third since

the pre-industrial age while in comparison, methane emissions have

doubled. Mohr, a Yale physicist, is an environmentalist who has

researched for USPIRG and EarthSave, and calls on those wishing to

reduce climate change and their carbon footprint to consider adopting a

vegan or vegetarian diet rather than concentrate on energy efficiency

and reduction.

 

According to John Robbins, author of The Food Revolution, half of the

world fresh water supply is used in meat production in one way or

another. Robbins goes onto say that one pound of grain uses less than

one one-hundredth of the water used to produced one pound of meat. A

choice to opt out of eating a pound of beef is the water saving

equivalent of not showering for a year. In addition to water waste, meat

production also contributes to water pollution.

 

Water runoff from factory farms pollutes rivers with toxic amounts of

feces laden with growth hormones and antibiotics. Antibiotics in fresh

water sources pose a health threat because of the development of

" superbugs. " Pharmaceutical companies must race in order to create

stronger and stronger antibiotics while doctors prescribe higher doses

because of the simple natural selection of bacteria placed in cesspool

breeding grounds laced with the same antibiotics at your local pharmacy.

The EPA claims that animal feces from farms have been responsible for

the pollution of 35,000 miles of river in the United States.

 

In addition to feces, growth hormones and antibiotics, fertilizers used

to grow grain for meat production in run-off create sky-rocketing

populations of algae, causing " dead zones " in oceans, lakes and rivers

and reducing biodiversity.

 

The problem is not that people eat meat. The problem lies in the way

most meat is produced on a large scale, and the large portions of meat

that first world countries eat. Eating meat is a luxury. In the US,

where the quarter pounder is practically a cultural staple, it's hard to

realize what the effects of excessive meat consumption are. Currently,

around forty percent of the world's grain supply is used to feed farm

animals. Harvard nutritionist, Jean Meyer estimated that a one-tenth

reduction in meat consumption would leave enough grain to feed 60

million people. One billion go hungry each day. The effects of meat

consumption are both far-reaching and profound.