Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [57]
As I struggle to figure out what to include—and what not to include—in this chapter, I am struck by the sheer enormity of the problem. Remember, that UN report is more than 400 pages long. It concludes that meat production contributes to “problems of land degradation, global warming and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.” Similarly, books like John Robbins’s The Food Revolution devote hundreds of pages to the issue of farmed animal waste and pollution. Please take a close look into those two sources; the information therein is just stunning.
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From the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow”: eating meat is “one of the most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”
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I’ll close out this discussion of farmed animal waste and pollution with these few additional facts: Animal agriculture accounts for most of the water consumed in this country, emits two-thirds of the world’s acid-rain-causing ammonia, and is the world’s largest source of water pollution—killing entire river and marine ecosystems, destroying coral reefs, and of course, making people sick. Try to imagine the prodigious volumes of manure churned out by modern American farms: 5 million tons a day, more than three times the fecal waste of the human population, and far more than our land can possibly absorb. The acres and acres of cesspools stretching over much of our countryside, polluting the air and contaminating our water, make the Exxon Valdez oil spill look minor in comparison.
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Trawlers each as long as a football field clear-cut the ocean floor and can take in 800,000 pounds of fish in a single outing.
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I do, however, want to say a few words about the most neglected of all animals we eat: sea animals. Fishing, like farming, isn’t what it used to be. This fact was most clearly hammered home for me when I saw a video that Sir Paul McCartney put out called Glass Walls. McCartney is probably the West’s most famous and outspoken vegetarian, and the title comes from the fact that, apparently, Sir Paul is always telling people, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.” Anyway, I have seen quite a few videos—including undercover investigations—that document the cruelties of factory farms, but I had not seen much on the fish industry. Sir Paul’s video (which you can find easily with an Internet search of his name and “Glass Walls”) opened my eyes, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Trawlers each as long as a football field clear-cut the ocean floor and can take in 800,000 pounds of fish in a single outing. Obviously, they are scooping up anything and everything that is in their path: dolphins, turtles, and coral reefs get scraped up and destroyed right along with whatever the boat was actually trying to catch. Large chunks of the ocean floor are dredged up as about 30 million tons of dead sea animals (called bycatch) along with fatally injured creatures of all sorts, are tossed back overboard (throwing delicate aquatic ecosystems into disarray). As a result of the growing demand for fish, the populations of some of the most common fish species have dropped by 90 percent in the past fifty years.
And farmed fish is even worse, because it requires about five pounds of wild-caught fish to reap one pound of farmed fish. Huh? I hear you cry. It what? As with so much about the meat industry, this reality blows my mind, too. You see, because our oceans are being destroyed, the most desirable fish for human consumption are now, to a huge degree, farmed. The fish the trawlers catch are, often, fish that are