By David Rafter
Being a Vegan you might not think of yourself as being a environmentalist. Recent research has established that the livestock industry is the single largest producer of Global Greenhouse Gases (GHG), more than global transport and industry put together.?? Today’s meat-filled Western world is unsuitable for today’s world. If you go back to the early 50’s where the population was a 1/3 of what it is today, the need for mass livestock factory farms were not needed. ??However, today, pollution, overuse of fossil fuel, water and land resources are causing massive wide spread environmental and land degradation.
These are the by products of the burger that you are so disconnected from. How easy has it been for today’s society to pop down to their local macca’s store and pick up what ever they wanted. No longer do they have to see how much pain and suffering the animals have to live in, let alone the massacre that occurs for their meal.
As stated, the livestock industry is the single largest cause of GHG’s. This is due to the huge crop fields that are needed to sustain the animals. These crop fields have to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the Amazon. They have found it more efficient to chop down a massive slice of the rainforest in order to produce soy farms.?? 55sq feet of tropical rainforest are consumed along with every quarter pound of rainforest beef, and 85% of lost topsoil is directly related to livestock grazing. If you mix this with the industries massive use of fossil fuels and water required you are looking at an industry that is stripping the planet bare.
The average person in the Western World consumes 260 pounds per year and to produce that quarter pound of beef is 55sq feet of tropical rainforest. Each person is responsible for 14,300sq feet of rainforest destroyed per year.
Adopting a plant based diet (a kinder diet) can have massive reversible environmental impacts on our Planet. By each person making that simple choice to stop consuming meat, they are helping to save our precious resources, and precious human lives that are starving, and of course our precious animal friends lives.
