The Georgia Straight (Vancouver)
January 21, 2009
http://www.straight.com/article-197476/meat-just-doesn%3F%3Ft-cut-it-todays-environment
Meat just doesn't cut it in today's environment
By Dave Steele
There's little doubt about it. Humans evolved as omnivores. The shapes
of our teeth, the lengths of our intestines, and a wealth of fossil
evidence (arrowheads, butchered animal bones, et cetera) all point to
an omnivorous past.
Natural selection favoured meat eating because it allowed our ancestors
to survive where edible plant supplies were in short supply. Our
forebears could flourish on fruits and grains and berries when those
were plentiful and switch to meat when edible plants were scarce. Had
early humans not led omnivorous lives, they almost certainly would have
died out.
But that was then. This is now.
In the past, humans were few and far between. The pressure we exerted
on the world around us was slight. Today, with our population
approaching seven billion, the pressures we exert are enormous. No
longer a boon to humanity, our hunger for meat has become the single
biggest contributor to planetary degradation. Be it global warming,
fossil-fuel depletion, water depletion or desertification, meat
consumption is a prime factor in the problem. And meat takes food out
of the mouths of the hungry.
On today's factory farms, it takes 2.4 pounds of dry corn, soy, and
oats to produce a pound of chicken; eight to 10 pounds of similar feed
is required for every pound of beef. According to Cornell University's
David Pimentel, nearly 800 million people could fill their stomachs for
a year on the grain fed to U.S. animals alone. And that's just the tip
of the iceberg.
According to Pimentel's careful reckoning, modern western diets could
not exist at all were it not for the enormous amount of fossil fuels we
pour into them. Just getting nitrogen into our fertilizers takes the
equivalent of nearly one million barrels of oil each day. Add in the
other components-the pesticides, the herbicides, the combines, the
tractors, and all the rest-and the numbers become astronomical. As
Pimentel shows, the way we raise meat, it takes some 28 calories of
fossil fuel input to generate one calorie of food value. Even modern
lacto-ovo vegetarian diets, he warns, can't be maintained in our world
without excessive amounts of oil and gas.
Meat production accelerates global warming, too. All those burned
fossil fuels have to go somewhere. Worse, our cows and sheep and other
ruminants emit methane as they digest their feed. Together, Canada's 10
million cows release the methane equivalent of a half ton of CO2 for
every man, woman, and child in the country. According to the UN Food
and Agriculture Organization, animal agriculture is responsible for a
bigger share of global warming than all of the cars and trucks and
ships and planes in the world combined!
And animal agriculture emits other pollutants, too. Nearly
three-quarters of North American ammonia emissions are due directly or
indirectly to animal farming. Manure contaminates our ground water. The
Worldwatch Institute reports that farm animals in the United States
generate 130 times more bodily waste than humans.
Animal agriculture destroys land and habitat, too. Raising livestock
and the soybeans to feed them is easily the biggest contributor to
rainforest destruction. More than two acres of tropical rainforest are
cleared per second to graze or feed farm animals. Around the world,
tens of billions of tons of topsoil are lost each year to cultivation
of animal feed crops.
Fish are no solution either. We've mined the oceans so badly that
almost all of the world's fisheries are in serious decline. Hunting?
Sorry. All of North America's wildlife would be wiped out were we to
satisfy our current hunger for meat that way.
In the past, the meat eating was a boon to us. But today, the opposite
is true. Natural selection operates on the here and now. If we don't
curtail our consumption of meat and eggs and milk and cheese, natural
selection will eventually work in the strongest way against our
meat-eating habits.
But we're lucky. We evolved as omnivores. We can choose what we eat. Plants or animals.
Choose plants. There's an awful lot at stake.
Dave Steele is the vice president of Earthsave Canada http://www.earthsave.ca/