Going vegetarian for the planet?
Published: 4 November 2009
Author: Claire Baylis
[ 4 ] Recommendations
[ 6 ] Comments
Who do you agree with? Read both sides and then vote at the end of the page.
Eating meat wastes resources and fuels climate change
If you’re considering trading Sunday roasts for a meat-free existence, there is certainly evidence to suggest you’d help the environment in the process.
Focusing on the issue of climate change alone you’d be hard pushed to argue with the significance of the statistics - livestock production has been blamed for 18% of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions - more than the entire transport sector... while a new report by the Worldwatch Institute puts the figure at 51%.
A growing population - by 2050, we’re predicted to number 9.1 billion - combined with increasing demand for livestock products means this issue won’t disappear soon.
If you read the recent Times interview with Lord Stern of Brentford, an authority on climate change and author of the Stern Review, you may have believed so, with Lord Stern quoted as saying meat is “a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases” and “a vegetarian diet is better.” Cue ecstatic advocates and furious farmers the nation over.
In a subsequent letter to the Times, Stern insisted he was not demanding that people become vegetarians but suggesting they should “be aware that the more meat that they eat, the higher the emissions of greenhouse gases that are implied by their diets.”
Su Taylor, spokesperson for the Vegetarian Society believes meat’s environmental impact is reason to quit. “What we choose to eat is one of the biggest factors in the personal impact we have on the environment,” she tells Sideways.
“A vegetarian diet avoids excessive carbon dioxide production and reduces methane and nitrous oxide production,” she adds. Not only that, “By feeding grain and vegetables directly to people - rather than livestock - we can increase the amount of food available to everyone.”
Then there’s the biodiversity impact... The livestock sector has a gargantuan “forest footprint” with huge swathes cleared to provide grazing or produce soy for feed. "Brazil's beef industry is booming to meet world demand, so cattle ranching there expands into rainforests where land is cheap and apparently limitless,” says Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Programme. “Biodiversity has little value to compare, so forests burn and this drives global warming. Burning forests for food is an evolutionary disaster and a climate catastrophe."
According to Friends of the Earth, 90% of the South American Atlantic Forest – home to some 20,000 plant species – has been destroyed, much of it for soy farming and if current trends continue, soy farming and cattle ranching alone will destroy 40% of the Amazon rainforest by 2050.
Supporters say that these factors only add to the list of reasons to “go veggie”. “The environmental arguments are strong, but many vegetarians simply believe that it is wrong to kill when there is no need to,” says Taylor.
“Others love and respect animals and want to minimize their suffering. Some are specifically opposed to intensive farming and choose vegetarianism because it sends a strong signal, guarantees you won’t be eating an animal reared in appalling conditions, and avoids the distress experienced by all animals slaughtered for their meat."
It’s about reduction and sustainable production
In fact, it's not whether we quit meat but why aren’t we making farming sustainable? This may mean producing less meat but doesn’t mean eating no meat.
Friends of the Earth backs eating less meat alongside changes to the way meat is farmed. Patrick Holden, Director of the Soil Association believes eating no meat is unnecessary for sustainability reasons, “at least in this country”, but that we do need to change farming and eating habits. “Within the next ten years, we’ll have to switch our farming systems to farming within the limits of renewable external resources,” he tells Sideways News. “At the moment we’re farming with non-renewable external inputs, which includes nitrogen fertilisers and pesticides. We’re treating environmental capital as if it were income and that’s why our current farming systems are unsustainable and contribute seriously to greenhouse gas emissions.”
A sustainably-farmed Britain, he says, would result in a very different landscape but one that has a place for cows and sheep. “If you give up using nitrogen fertiliser, which is the main contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, you return to using solar energy through nitrogen-fixing bacteria to build fertility, so that means clover and grass for up to 40% of a typical farm rotation,” he explains. What will you do with that grass, Holden adds. “We can’t eat grass, so the best way to produce food out of it is with sheep, beef cattle or dairy cows. And the best thing to do with those animals is feed them virtually no grain, because if they were fed grain that would compete with us. So, a diet compatible with a sustainable farming future would or could include red meat.”
Intensively farmed chicken should be struck off the menu. “It’s intensive chicken that’s stealing the grain that otherwise could be fed to people, or importing fats from soya and other sources which are from felled rainforests,” says Holden. “The footprint of intensive chicken is environmentally unacceptable. It’s unacceptable morally and it’s unsustainable.”
Colin Tudge, biologist and author of Feeding People Is Easy, agrees that we don’t need to be vegetarians, but says we must root farming in “good biological principles”. Although farming is a highly artificial exercise, he continues, we should try to emulate nature because nature is productive and sustainable. “How does nature do it?” Tudge asks. ”By being incredibly diverse. You have ecosystems, not monocultures... and one has to re-conceive farms as ecosystems.”
He explains it is about producing lots of plants, not much meat but maximum variety. “And this combination really summarises modern nutritional theory. It’s also the basis of the world’s great cuisines.”
What about methane? It’s impossible to dismiss livestock’s contribution but it’s important to recognise additional factors. While cows are responsible for methane emissions, their grazing land can potentially sequester carbon, whereas ploughing land for grain releases it. “Traditional pastoral land that you don’t plough becomes a significant carbon sink over time,” says Tudge. Grazing is also a conservation tool for nature reserves, benefiting biodiversity.
The sustainability of what feeds our meat is key. “The Government is pushing the meat and dairy industry in the wrong direction by propping up factory farms and subsidizing imported animal feed instead of backing planet-friendly farming and home-grown feeds,” says Clare Oxborrow, Friends of the Earth’s Senior Food Campaigner.
Ultimately, says Holden, we’ve got to re-think our relationship with agriculture. “It isn’t about all or nothing with meat,” he insists. “It’s a more interesting discussion than that."
Comments
Lunatics and otherwise uninformed folk are taking over thought processes without any thought. Once upon a time buffalo and other grass eating species were plentiful, all eating grass and farting. The problem is that now there are too many people doing the same but bypassing the essential first step - consuming grass.
Population growth wastes resources and fuels climate change, not eating meat.
We live in a 'Black Sea Scenario':
The Black Sea weakened slowly at first and then collapsed with shocking suddenness, has been used to compare with our Oceans as big ponds.
Where giant factory-processing ship, stay at sea for months at a time, scrapping the deep sea-bed of our Ocean for all life forms in the bottom.
These factory-freezers kept trawling the Ocean for fish until all edible are gone by the eve of the millennia.
And in a farm-pond, weeds growth slowly, farmers only need to occasionally clear the weed for an ecological balance before it choke-off all life-forms in it.
Though our planet looks big, and part of it is still green because one fifth of its forests remain, the rest have been cut and burn for domesticated cattle.
The human animals even have to cut the branch they are sitting as millennia unfold. Now only one sixth of the forests are left on Earth.
With 100 nations importing wheat from just 6 supplying the world, that number of suppliers will dwindle down to 3 in a generation's time.
The examples of this type of danger have a fixed ecological ratio, and we can be deluded into thinking that there is no cause of alarm.
We celebrated on the eve of the new millennia with 6 billion people on Earth, since another billion people had joined our party by 2010 -- 6 billion in 1999 now 6.8 and by next year today 7 billion.
Though the world accepts the CO2 another billion people could induce, but can’t agree on the amount of methane (CH4), the potent greenhouse warming gas, those extra billion omnivores could emit, as some are vegans.
Methane is a significant contributor to climate change and a third of the world's methane (about 37%) is human induced, primarily from our meat producing cattle, chicken or pig.
Methane (CH4) is dubbed the mega-fart of mother Earth, and is in prodigious quantities in many part of the world, from permafrost to frozen bogs and underneath sea bed or by-products of oil fields, exported as liquefied natural gas.
By the state of human nature, the half-life of methane ultimately decomposed to form carbon dioxide.
The scariest scenario by glaciologists was to build a city in Greenland, where human activities will force the ancient glacial ice mountains down to sea, which is enough to lower sea temperature worldwide, to restore climate equilibrium. What a lot of pseudoscience.
What rubbish. Global warming is happening anyway - ice and warm ages alternate every few hundred thousand years. The ice caps show we are not yet out of the last ice age. Evidence of afforestation exists a mile below the Arctic. We should be focusing on how to live with warming and its impact on our way of life, not throwing away billions at futilely trying to reverse the irreversible
It's not so much about what we eat, it's about the consciousness of species. We cannot survive the climate test with the same short sighted, unfeeling concepts. We must evolve in compassion and love for all beings in order to secure our place on this magnificent planet!
I've considered going vegetarian, but decided not to. Less meat but better meat is what the planet needs - and to be honest is a much healthier and more enjoyable diet anyway.
I think the clear cut choice of Yes or No is a little limiting. Is it not possible to think of the planet and continue to be an omnivore?
For what it's worth, I agree with the meat suggestions. Eat meat more sustainably. Eat vegetarian several times a week, that's sustainable meat eating.
But, take the whole thing a step further and pay attention to WHERE your food comes from. Sustainability is also about helping people in the developing world develop.
How about eating some meat, some vegetables and switch what you can to Fair Trade Certified products. THAT's real sustainability.
@Pepperfire