The Carnivore’s Dilemma
Low-carbon diet? What’s a meat-eater to do?
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The Carnivore’s Dilemma
Hello, all, and welcome to another episode of Make it Green Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for an Earth Friendly Life. Today’s episode is bound to raise a little dander, because this subject is not covered in a lot of green publications. Listener Josh from Sacramento had a lot to say about how eating meat impacts our environment. This show is dedicated to him. Over the next five minutes, I hope to convince earth-friendly people everywhere that the most effective way to reduce your impact on this earth is to become a vegetarian.
“Oh dear,” you’re thinking to yourself. “She’s really gone off the deep end now. First she takes my SUV away so that I have to hoof it to the restaurant, and now she tells me I can’t even have a big juicy steak to make up for the extra exercise I’m getting.” OK, here goes.
The Impacts of Agriculture
The effects of the livestock industry on the environment don’t get a lot of press. Most of us (myself included) have never been to a cattle yard, never seen an animal slaughtered, and never had to do our own de-boning, much less more gruesome butchering tasks. So we’ve become very disconnected from what supports our meat consumption.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations calculated that livestock contribute nine percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. (This is considered human activity because animals would not exist in numbers and environments they do without humans.) This number was calculated in carbon dioxide equivalents, which takes into account greenhouse gases from animal waste, emissions caused by changes in land-use, the energy used to raise the animal’s feed, and so on. While that may seem a wide net, consider this: livestock-related carbon dioxide emissions total almost 18 percent of the world’s total emissions from all sources, which is more than all global transportation combined.
Why Vegetarianism?
Like ditching your car and taking your bike out for a spin, going veggie is the way to go full throttle. Not to mention vegetarians benefit from lower cholesterol and a lower risk of obesity and hypertension. By saying no to meat products, you say no to all the negative externalities of the meat industry. In case you’re still not convinced, here’s a garishly short list of reasons to reduce or eliminate your carnivorous habits.
Land Use Issues
Raising livestock is hard on the land. The Greenland Norse found this out the hard way a couple hundred years ago, not realizing their cattle and sheep were overgrazing their fragile Greenland soil, allowing it to erode away down to bare rocks. Four hundred and fifty years after settling Greenland, the Norse settlement disappeared, in part because they had exhausted their land.
In other fragile environments like Brazil’s rain forest, farmers and industries looking to raise livestock are major culprits in slash-and-burn deforestation. The fire not only releases tons of greenhouse gases and air pollutants — once stored in plant form — into the atmosphere, but it also robs each acre of land of its ability to purify even more carbon dioxide and create the oxygen we need to breathe. More problems arise when ranchers find out that livestock over-grazing causes major soil degradation, and they have to move on to new land. Twenty-six percent of all ice-free land in the world is used for livestock grazing according to the FAO, and over 20 percent of that land is suffering from erosion from the animals clearing the vegetation, and poor soil health caused by compaction from animal movements.
Most grain-fed animals also eat huge amounts of feed that was grown on acres of land cultivated with machines that use fossil fuels and emit greenhouse gases and air-pollution in the process. Not to mention this grain was fertilized with millions of pounds of nitrogen fertilizer, which was created by a process that requires energy called the Haber-Bosch process. Many of those pounds of fertilizer are wasted and run off the land with the rains, draining into the local waterways where they cause algal blooms that can be lethal to aquatic life-forms.
When you’re at the grocery store craving a steak, grass-fed beef might ease your guilt a little bit. Ruminant animals like cows evolved specifically to get nutrients from grasses, so grass-fed beef contains noticeably higher levels of vitamins, anti-oxidants, and good fats like omega-3 fatty acids. Although you cannot ask your ruminant dinner if it was overgrazing the pasture at the time, you can at least be sure that there was no wasteful cultivation and fertilization of it’s feed — it was doing what it does best, taking fibrous grasses that humans cannot digest and turning them into milk and meat, which we can digest.
Pollution Issues
Grain-fed animals also get sick more than grass-fed ones, so they have to be fed huge amounts of antibiotics to keep from falling ill. This is a big problem for humans who get sick because bacteria become quickly resistant to antibiotics they are exposed to more often. Over time, it’s more likely that harmful bacteria will mutate and get around the deadly action of the antibiotic. Soon, the antibiotics will have no effect in the hospital because of conventional livestock industry overuses them.
Grain-fed animals are also given large doses of hormones to get them to market-weight faster, and again, the overuse of these chemicals leads to a surplus of hormones in the waste products of the animals. Animal waste products also contain pathogens that are harmful to humans, like Coliform and Giardia. When excess fertilizers, hormones, and pathogens in animal manure escape in run-off, they contaminate local watersheds and endanger downstream users, including humans.
Speaking of waste, those cow-pies sitting there in the dung-lagoons sure smell bad. That’s because they’re emitting methane and nitrous oxide–stinky gases that are far more potent green-house insulators than carbon dioxide. Livestock activities contribute globally about a third of both methane and nitrous oxide emissions.
A neat way that the livestock industry has pushed back the dial on their rising emissions score is the production of bio-gas. Those off-gassing waste products are a nifty source of natural gas, which can be burned as fuel for electricity, to heat homes, and to cook food. All you need is an anaerobic digester and a natural gas power plant. However, that equipment is expensive (even without the power plant), and not many smaller pastures can afford to buy them. The EPA’s Methane to Markets program can help struggling herders make the most of a smelly situation. Check out the link at the bottom of the transcript for more information about how you can turn your cows into energy sources.
Ethical Issues
Raising livestock is also an ethical issue for some, and I’m not talking about PETA or animal rights. It takes a disproportionate amount of land to produce a calorie of meat compared to a calorie of grain. If we fed the soybeans, corn, and grains that we currently use to raise livestock to humans instead, we could feed an extra 800 million people. If you’ve ever worried about world hunger, foregoing meat is a quick and dirty way to start doing something about it.
Don’t Worry: Eat Happy
If all of these problems seem overwhelming, don’t be discouraged. I can’t emphasize enough that if you care about the environment, you don’t have to change overnight. Just like starting a new physical fitness habit, change comes slowly. Next time you are shopping in those grocery store aisles, just ask yourself if there some way you can avoid meat in the meal your preparing.
Choose your meats wisely, and slowly replace them with other food. You can either go the veggie-burger-route and try direct substitution of the food you love, or you can try and get creative with the plant-foods in your life. Get yourself a nice vegetarian cookbook — I got my favorite one from a discount reseller for five bucks. Also, check out the new Quick and Dirty Tips Podcast, The Nutrition Diva’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Eating Healthy and Feeling Fabulous for nutrition information and recipe ideas. Her episode “Getting More Nutrition From Vegetables” will help get you started, and that’s just the beginning. Subscribe to the Nutrition Diva on iTunes, and get fresh advice every week. Good luck, eco-warriors!
More Information
Food and Agriculture Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow – Environmental Issues and Options” fao
Jacobsen, Michael F. and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Six Arguments for a Greener Diet.
EPA’s Methane to Markets Program
Diamond, Jared, Collapse
Pollan, Michael, In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma