CHAPTER III
It’s in the Air
Depletion as it affects oxygen and the quality of the air that we breathe
“Don’t blow it; good planets are hard to find.”
—Unknown
THE AIR THAT WE BREATHE AND our atmosphere, in general, are fundamentally necessary for life on earth. It should not be taken for granted or abused, yet we currently are doing both. At any point in time during the day, are you aware of the air you are breathing or appreciative of the oxygen it supplies? Probably not. We breathe, on average, fifteen breaths per minute, 900 per hour, and 21,000 breaths each day. With every breath, we need fresh air and the right amount and ratio of oxygen. Our atmosphere serves many purposes, such as regulating temperature and carbon, nitrogen, oxygen cycles, and protecting us from injurious radiation. These processes are complex and fragile, and human activities affect these in negative ways, such as climate change and pollution.
Some human activities have a larger negative impact than others, with livestock clearly having one of the greatest roles. Nearly every step in raising the billions of animals for food each year creates some form of depletion or degradation of our air. There are three primary ways this occurs:
• Through greenhouse gas emissions
• By pollution
• By changing water cycle processes and oxygen-carbon respiration through vegetation loss
At least two separate studies of the Antarctic Dome Ice Core confirm that human activities have resulted in our escalating present-day concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane, and that they are the highest that these greenhouse gases have been in the last 650,000 years of earth history.18 Methane concentrations have increased by about 150 percent since 1800.19
The livestock sector is responsible for nearly 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, measured in CO2 equivalent.20 Global transportation, on the other hand, accounts for 13 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Put another way, what you currently decide to eat every day creates more global warming than all the cars, planes, trains, buses, and trucks in the world combined.21 The reason I say “currently decide to eat” is because through your food choices, you are ultimately responsible for the demand for meat and raising the 70 billion animals each year that causes this large part of the global warming issue and the much larger global depletion problem. If you simply stop the demand by choosing a plant-based diet, and the largest component of global warming and depletion will go away.
Animals raised for food emit large amounts of greenhouse gases in different ways. Directly, livestock emit carbon dioxide from the respiratory process, and we have 60 billion more animals on earth than humans, all of which breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Additionally, all livestock emit methane, nitrous oxide, ammonia, and carbon as part of their digestive process, in the form of flatulence, manure, and urine. In the United States alone, livestock produce 89,000 pounds of excrement every second—that’s 130 times as much as the entire human population of the country.22
The 2010 Agriculture and Air Quality Symposium, sponsored by the Institute for Livestock and the Environment, identified significant air pollutants caused by raising animals for food and called for establishing methods of control and reduction. In addition to greenhouse gases, other air pollutants that cause concern are volatile organic compounds that are precursors to ozone, hydrogen sulfide, many types of particulate matter, and ammonia and odor.
Indirectly, livestock adversely affect the carbon balance of the land used for feed crops and pasture, as well as with the massive amounts of fossil fuel used in the production process, including feed production, processing, multiple levels of transport, and marketing of livestock products. Looking at just the agriculture sector, livestock constitute 80 percent of all emissions.23 While this figure reflects a global issue, there is variation on the local level, with some countries such as Brazil contributing 60 percent of its total greenhouse gas emissions from livestock, due to the very large cattle operations and corresponding destruction of rainforest. Livestock emit 10 percent of all CO2 and 40 percent of all methane (twenty-three times the global warming potential of CO2), 65 percent of nitrous oxide (310 times the global warming potential of CO2) and two-thirds of all ammonia emissions, which cause acid rain and acidification of our ecosystems.24 This makes your choice to eat meat one of the largest sectors for CO2 emissions and the single largest contributor of methane and nitrous oxide and ammonia. Producing one calorie of animal protein requires more than ten times as much fossil fuel input and produces more than ten times as much CO2 as does one calorie of plant protein.25 And producing any meat from animals creates the production of methane, nitrous oxide, and ammonia, while producing food from plants creates none.
The enormous amount of land and forests cleared for livestock and our demand to eat meat creates other losses in numerous ways. When livestock destroy vegetation, either through clearing forests and land for feed-crop growth, or directly by the livestock themselves, it disrupts the normal water cycle processes in that area. This destruction of natural ecosystems creates a significant impact on climate change as follows:
• Carbon dioxide that has been stored by plants is actually released back into the air.
• Oxygen is no longer created and released by all the plants that have been destroyed.
• Carbon dioxide is no longer taken out of the air by the plants that have been destroyed.
• The newly deforested land becomes vulnerable to erosion and eventual desertification, both of which are occurring at an alarming rate.
All food comes from somewhere and requires some degree of effort to produce, process, and transport. With meat, dairy, or fish products, we affect vastly more resources than we would by consuming plant-based foods—resources such as our air and—although it’s not readily seen—the quality of the air and atmosphere around us is becoming depleted with each and every bite of food made from animal products.
It is quite clear that the ability of our planet to produce oxygen from our forests and oceans is being compromised, and the comprehensive aspect of our atmosphere is changing in an unhealthy manner. Both are not easily reversed—at least, perhaps, not in our lifetime.
CHAPTER IV
Rainforests
Depleting the lungs of our planet
“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
—John Muir
WHERE DO I START HERE? TALK about a comfortable state of being unaware. But why should you have any interest in or be concerned about some trees that grow somewhere else in the world? Because while you order your steak or burger for dinner, another acre of rainforest—and all the life it contains—is destroyed. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? After all, you are just ordering food in a restaurant because you are hungry, and you have other things to think about—your job, the economy, clothes, your car, your next vacation. Where does the rainforest come in?
Well, first of all, rainforests exist, even though you won’t drive past one on your way home, and you most likely have not invested in the rainforest in any of your retirement funds. Let’s go back to that burger you ate at lunch—or any other meat that you have eaten over the course of your lifetime. Where did it come from?
Over 70 percent of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed—lost forever—due to cattle ranching. The United States is the single largest consumer of Central and South American beef.26 A startling 95 percent of Brazil’s Atlantic coast rainforest has been slashed and burned, the vast majority of it to raise cattle.27 Although it is not commonly known, approximately 34 million acres of rainforest on earth are lost each year.28
Consider this: When fires occur in California, it is broadcast on the news. During October 2007, for example, when approximately 190,000 acres in California were lost, there was seemingly non-stop news coverage. That same year, over 30 million acres were lost in the rainforests, with no news coverage whatsoever. Is one circumstance reall
y less devastating than the other? In fact, over 30 million acres of rainforests per year have been lost every year since the 1970s. Although some of this rainforest land is logged, most is slashed and burned, then used to either raise cattle or to raise crops to feed to cattle. As much as 80 percent of all global rainforest loss is turned into grazing for cattle or crops for livestock, and the process is extremely land-intensive. It requires fifty-five square feet of rainforest to produce just one quarter-pound burger. The crops grown on cleared rainforest are used to feed not only cattle but also chickens, turkeys, and pigs. In one crop season alone, 2004–2005, more than 2.9 million acres of rainforest were destroyed, primarily to grow crops for chickens used by Kentucky Fried Chicken.29
Another crop that is grown is soy, but not for direct human use. Soy used directly for veggie burgers, tofu, and soy milk in America is almost exclusively grown in the United States, but 80 percent of the entire world’s soy crop is produced and fed to farmed animals. Most of this soy is now grown on rainforest-cleared land.30
You may say, “Big deal—what good are rainforests? They’re just some trees somewhere else in the world that I will never see. I would rather have my meat.” First and foremost, the rainforests produce more than 20 percent of the world’s oxygen supply. They provide an environmentally essential task of continuously recycling the air and pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, while putting O2 back into it. So with every acre of rainforest lost to support the meat industry, the earth loses part of its lungs and the ability to breathe and produce a fresh supply of oxygen—fourteen tons of oxygen per acre per year—while taking out tons of global-warming CO231
Fifty years ago, 15 percent of our planet was composed of rainforest; today, this has been reduced to less than 2 percent. Despite this loss, almost 50 percent of all types of living things (equaling five million species of plants, animals, and insects) reside in rainforests. Although numerous species have yet to be discovered, scientists estimate that at least one hundred species per day are lost when the forest is cut down. In Brazil’s Atlantic coast rainforest, of which less than 5 percent remains today, 70 percent of its plants and twenty primate species are endemic (they are found nowhere else in the world). The enormous biodiversity of the rainforest implores respect and the need to preserve it, not to destroy it. Less than 1 percent of its millions of species have ever been studied by scientists. One pond in Brazil can sustain a greater variety of fish than are found in all of Europe’s rivers. Just a two-acre area of rainforest may contain over 750 types of trees (more than the total tree diversity of North America) and 1,500 species of plants. The demand for meat and the subsequent loss of rainforests has been responsible for the disappearance of over ninety different Amazonian tribes.32
Descendants of the Amerindians have lived in the rainforest for some 20,000 years, with traditions that have allowed them to exist in harmony with the forest without destroying it.33 Today, with massive destruction due to our demand for meat, there are fewer than 250,000 native people living in the Amazon forests, where there were once more than six million.34 Many scientists believe there are as many as fifty different indigenous groups still living in the depths of the forests that have never had contact with the outside world. As these ancient forests are cleared to make room for cattle or feed crops for livestock, habitat is lost to tribes and their sustainable way of traditional life. Once the forests die, so do the Amazonian people. These tribes, with their medicine men, or shamans, have a wealth of knowledge, particularly the medicinal properties of the thousands of plants found in the rainforests—knowledge that will die with them. A single tribe may use more than two hundred species of plants for medicinal purposes alone.35 Because of our demand for meat, there has been needless destruction of ancient rainforests. With this, there has been the unfortunate loss of indigenous tribes and their shamans. And when a medicine man dies, the world loses thousands of years of knowledge that is irreplaceable … but at least you get a burger out of it.
Perhaps destroying living things and creating extinction of species still does not hit home, so let’s look at another aspect: over two thousand plants have been discovered in the rainforests that have anti-cancer properties. All botanists agree that not only are there many thousands more to be discovered but that many species are lost daily as the forests are destroyed to provide meat for the world. Medicines derived from the rainforest include:
• curare (muscle relaxant used in surgery)
• diosgenin (birth control, arthritis, asthma)
• ouabain (heart medicine)
• quinine (malaria, pneumonia)
• emetine (bronchitis, dysentery)
• vincristine (Hodgkin’s disease, leukemia, and other cancers)
Vincristine is extracted from the rainforest plant periwinkle and is one of the most powerful anti-cancer drugs. It dramatically increases the survival rate for acute childhood leukemia. One-fourth of all prescription drugs and over 70 percent of all cancer treatment medications originate from the rainforest.36 It makes no sense whatsoever to destroy rainforests and all the life they contain to raise cattle or grow crops to feed animals, when plants can be grown elsewhere for us to use directly as food.
Plants in general and rainforests in particular serve as natural sinks for atmospheric carbon dioxide, sequestering and storing it in vegetation and the soil. The destruction of vegetation leads to carbon release, loss of the ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and loss of the ability to create oxygen, which negatively impacts water cycles and reduces infiltration capacity and storage of the soil and increases runoff.
When millions of acres of forest, especially rainforests, are cut down, we lose in many ways:
• We lose the ability to filter harmful levels of carbon dioxide out of the air.
• We lose millions of tons of vital oxygen released into the air we breathe.
• We lose because of the millions of tons of carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere by the burning of trees.
• We lose by changing the soil from its absorbing moisture and detoxifying oxygen to its being deforested, erosive and, on average, allowing for only eight years of grazing and growing crops for cattle before it has become depleted.
• We lose entire ecosystems of plants and animals—one mature rainforest tree can support three hundred to five hundred different types of plants and hundreds of species of animals
Rainforests are cleared, slashed, and burned for the timber value and then for farming and ranching operations to support the meat requirements of the world. Although local operators and businesses have some responsibility, much of the rainforest loss to support the livestock industry is accomplished by world corporate giants, such as Texaco, Unocal, Georgia Pacific, Cargill, and Mitsubishi Corporation. Regardless, the real blame for the depletion of our vital rainforests lies with the consumer who creates the demand for animal products.
CHAPTER V
Whose Land Is It Anyway?
Global depletion of our land
“We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.”
—Native American proverb
RAISING ANIMALS FOR PEOPLE TO kill and eat requires massive amounts of land, water, food, and energy. With upwards of 70 billion animals raised each year in the livestock industry, enormous amounts of land are needed for their living space and grazing, and to grow crops to feed them. In the United States, nearly 80 percent of all land used for agriculture is used in some way to support the animals we eat.37 That is half the entire land mass of our country. More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared just to grow grain to feed livestock.38 Livestock occupy 30 percent of all land mass on earth, and another 33 percent of all agricultural land is used to produce genetically modified organism (GMO) crops to feed these animals.39 Hence, a solid portion of all the land mass on earth is used in some way to produce animals that we then kill and eat. It has been said that an alien ecologist observing earth might conclude that cattle is the dominant
animal species in our biosphere.
Let’s put it into perspective: on any given acre of land we can grow twelve to twenty times the amount in pounds of edible vegetables, fruit, and grain as in pounds of edible animal products.40 We are essentially using twenty times the amount of land and crops and hundreds of times the water, as well as polluting our waterways and air and destroying rainforests, to produce animals to kill and eat … which is unhealthier than eating the plant products we could have produced.
Using most of our land to support livestock is just one issue in the depletion of land caused by our choices in food. Other issues in this same category include land destroyed by overgrazing, biodiversity loss, and food depletion, all of which are related to livestock. Cattle and other livestock not only currently use a massive amount of our land, but destruction also occurs with overgrazing the land, which then causes erosion, loss of topsoil, and desertification—the land ultimately becomes a barren desert.
It is estimated that 700 million acres of U.S. rangeland have been degraded by overgrazing of livestock.41 What does this mean? We have lost seven billion tons, or one-third, of the topsoil in our country. What needs to be understood, though, is that six billion of the seven billion tons of eroded soil is directly attributed to grazing and unsustainable methods of producing crops for cattle and other livestock.42 This problem can also be seen in other countries, as approximately 20 percent of the pastures and rangelands in the world have been degraded as a result of livestock. Lost topsoil is particularly alarming in dry-area rangelands, where 73 percent has been eroded.43 Although some erosion of topsoil can occur by natural means, the vast majority of measured loss is because land is being changed from supporting an evolved plant and wildlife ecosystem to a quite unnatural decimation for and by livestock. Worldwide, there has been quite rapid converting of natural habitat to pastures and cropland to feed animals, with more land converted between 1950 and 1980 than in the previous 150 years.44 While expansion of pastures and cropland for animals is increasing in North Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, it is greatest in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, at the expense of forest cover.45
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