• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 402 0

meat—from how it makes us feel to the diseases it promotes to the environment and our fellow creatures. The production of meat is a direct cause of climate change (see Promise 6), the annual cost of which in the U.S. alone is expected to reach more than $2 trillion. The Natural Resources Defense Council recently published a report by Tufts University climate scientists indicating that “four global warming impacts alone—hurricane damage, real estate losses, energy costs, and water costs—will come with a price tag of… almost $1.9 trillion annually (in today’s dollars) by 2100.” Animal waste pollutes our waterways, workers are made sick both physically and psychologically by working in slaughterhouses and CAFOs, and we are sickened, too.

It’s easy to see that the hidden costs of eating meat are everywhere—in how you feel day to day, in your prospects for a long life of good health, in the health of the land, the water, the animals, the workers,… and your pocketbook. It’s pretty compelling, isn’t it?

Becoming a veganist is about very consciously choosing to disengage from an industry that makes us sick, abuses animals, pollutes the planet, and squanders precious resources. It’s also about a better quality of life—having more energy and a lighter load (as well as a lighter conscience) and living longer and healthier.

And that’s not something that can be measured in dollars and cents.

PROMISE 6:

You Will Radically Reduce Your Carbon Footprint and Do the Single Best Thing You Can for the Environment

Did you know?

The business of raising animals for food (with its continuous heavy waste stream of methane and nitrous oxide—leading global warming gases) is responsible for about 18 percent of global warming.

Animal agriculture takes up an incredible 70 percent of all agricultural land, and a whopping 30 percent of the land surface of the planet.

As a result, farmed animals are probably the biggest cause of slashing and burning of the world’s forests.

The United States’ most influential environmental group—Environmental Defense Fund—has calculated that if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as if the nation removed more than half a million cars from U.S. roads.

A person prevents more climate change pollution by going vegetarian than by switching to a hybrid car.

It takes, on average, more than ten times as much fossil fuel to make one calorie of animal protein as it does to make one calorie of plant protein.

A few years ago, the environmental journalist Paul Hawken challenged students from the University of Portland with a thought experiment:

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run, as if your life depends on it.

We all know it so clearly that it almost seems silly to say it: our planet is in trouble. But it’s also critically important to say it—perhaps it’s more important than anything