Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [55]
Everywhere, water is drying up and getting filthier, fires are burning out of control because of hotter temperatures and drought-ridden brush; fish are disappearing (and with them goes the food chain), storms are getting wilder, species are becoming extinct, and the very air itself is making some of us sick. Again, Hawken is right: Time is running out. The time to act is now.
The good news is that we can tilt things in a better direction by shifting the way we eat. It turns out that the single most potent thing we, as individuals, can do for the planet’s well-being is to eat a more plant-based diet. More than changing your lightbulbs, or driving a hybrid car, or turning down the heat, you can do better by the environment by cutting back on animal-based food.
Think of it this way: Just like humans, animals have to eat to survive. You probably consume between 1,200 and 2,500 calories per day, depending on your size, the nature of your job, and how much time you spend exercising. And you burn all those calories off, simply existing. Farmed animals, also, burn the vast majority of their caloric intake off keeping their bodies going. And then some significant portion of their caloric intake produces feathers, skin, blood, and other parts of their bodies that we don’t consume. Once you crunch the numbers, you find that feeding animals for meat, dairy, and egg production requires growing some ten times as many crops as we’d need if we just ate pasta primavera, veggie sausage, and other plant based foods directly (rather than funneling those crops through animals).
On top of this inherent vast inefficiency of the animal foods industries, we also have to transport the animals to slaughterhouses, slaughter them, refrigerate their carcasses, and distribute their flesh all across the country. Producing a calorie of meat protein means burning more than ten times, on average, as much fossil fuel (with all the greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution that entails) as producing a calorie of plant protein does.
Plus, 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. (More than 95 percent of soy is fed to animals—not human beings.) Today, 70 percent of former Amazon rain forest is used for pastureland, and feed crops cover much of the remainder. These forests serve as “sinks” and are often referred to as the lungs of the planet, absorbing carbon dioxide from the air, so turning these forests into soy fields so that those of us in the first world can have cheap chicken releases all that stored carbon dioxide, further warming the planet.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won the Nobel Peace Prize for working to raise global consciousness about the issue of climate change, has described the existence of human-caused global warming in its final assessment report as both “unequivocal,” and as having “abrupt and irreversible” effects on global climate. Worse still, these effects are coming stronger and faster than predicted in the panel’s most recent report. Alarmingly, some effects that had been expected to arrive decades from now are already here.
The report warns that hundreds of millions of people are threatened with starvation, flooding, and weather disasters. Rain-fed crop production will fall by half, a quarter of the world’s species will go extinct, and some arctic ice will completely disappear during the summer. We will see more deadly heat waves, stronger hurricanes, and island nations completely