It must be understood that fresh drinking water from the ground is not infinite in quantity, and it is not renewable in our lifetime. Freshwater resources are scarce—just 2.5 percent of all water on earth, and 70 percent of that is locked in glaciers, snow, and the atmosphere. This leaves accessible fresh water at less than 1 percent.63 While some water is replenished through the natural evaporation/precipitation cycle, much is gathered from underground aquifers or surface water, such as rivers and streams. Depletion of our freshwater supply occurs globally, due to excessive withdrawals for agriculture, as well as poor water management. Whether using surface water or groundwater, agriculture accounts for 93 percent of water depletion worldwide, with the majority used for irrigated crops for livestock.64
We must also redefine which water resources are really “renewable” and which are clearly not. In the United States, there are common misconceptions:
• You do not have to worry about water; it’s just there for you whenever you want.
• Use of our surface water is mostly by industries.
• Underground water supplies are renewable.
Actually, depletion at all sources is occurring at a rate that simply cannot be sustained.
The mighty Colorado River—1,400 miles long, with up to 24 million acre feet of annual flow—is one of the largest and longest in the world.65 It has been such a force that, over time, it created the Grand Canyon on its way to the Sea of Cortez. Until 1936, when the Hoover Dam was constructed, this river continued its natural path to the ocean in Mexico, where it formed the two-million-acre Colorado River Delta. This delta was once one of the largest in the world, supporting a large population of plants, birds, fish, marine mammals, jaguars, and deer, as well as the descendants of Native Americans who had lived there for over one thousand years.66 Today, this great delta does not exist; freshwater flows no longer reach it. Unbelievable as it might seem, the mighty Colorado River ends in the desert, some two to three miles from the sea, and has only reached the ocean sporadically over the past eighty years.67
This happened because Americans needed water to fuel their activities in the very dry western states; most of these activities were related to raising cattle. In the process, the United States claimed—and now retains—95 percent of the river’s water and has built nine major dams and eighty diversions on the Colorado River that control the water to the point where only a trickle makes it to the point where it once roared mightily out to sea.68 The water that does eventually make its way to the Mexico desert is now heavily laden with chemicals, such as pesticides and fertilizers, which is runoff from all the alfalfa fields in California and Arizona—alfalfa fields that are producing feed for cattle operations. The Colorado River has had its water tapped, mostly for livestock, with the belief that it is renewable and will not run out.69
There are two common misconceptions regarding water use of the Colorado River and in the western United States in general. One is that water is renewable. To a point, it is not. The second misconception is that the rapidly growing urban areas (Las Vegas, Phoenix, and many others) are the primary users of this river’s water supply. They are not. Most of the water has been and is still being used for livestock. In the Upper Colorado River states, such as Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, 90 percent of the water use of the Colorado River is irrigation of crops, leaving only 10 percent for urban and other uses. Eighty-eight percent of this irrigated land is for crops fed to livestock.70,71 Similar percentages are found in the lower Colorado River Basin states, such as California, Arizona, and Nevada, with nearly 80 percent of all river water used for livestock. So while enormous public cost has resulted in the area’s massive water damming and diversion projects, the Colorado River Basin states and portions of the states just outside the basin are not receiving much of the river’s water, while the river itself is slowly drying up.
Studying the expansive eight-state High Plains area of the United States also provides an example of how our demand for eating animal products has affected drinking-water use and just how ridiculously it has been managed. A portion of this area has been termed the “Dust Bowl,” due to how dry it is and its susceptibility to repeated episodes of drought. But nearly half of the cattle in the United States are raised in the High Plains states and rely on one aquifer system. With average annual rainfall of less than twelve inches, it is not an area that could naturally support the growth of crops. Since the early 1960s, and with technological advancement related to pumping, farmers have irrigated the dry land, which dramatically increases crop productivity. Low-budget, small-scale local irrigation systems from an underground water supply just a few feet below the surface—an aquifer called the Ogallala—allow for more crop growth without regulation.
While different types of grain are produced in this area, the majority is corn. The difficulty is that 93 percent of the grain grown in this area and in America is used to feed cows, pigs, and chickens that are then killed for us to eat.72 And that is not where the inefficiency ends, as water from this aquifer is also used in the slaughtering and processing of the animals. This scenario is also found elsewhere in the world, with freshwater supplies used primarily for livestock. Although direct annual water use by livestock worldwide is estimated at 23 percent, there is a recognized inability to properly quantify the real global depletion impact of the livestock sector. This figure could very well be much higher, because most water loss is unreported or is difficult to measure, as it is used and depleted throughout the livestock chain. For instance, massive amounts of unreported water are lost due to evapotranspiration by feed crops, use in chemical application, and various washing areas, transportation, processing, and packaging.73
In California, 42 percent of irrigation water is used to produce feed grain or drinking water for cattle and other livestock, which has caused such a drop in water tables that some areas of land in the San Joaquin Valley have sunk by as much as twenty-nine feet. There, aquifers are pumped at rate that exceeds recharge by more than 500 billion gallons annually.74
At Iowa Beef Processors, just one of many slaughterhouses in that state, over four hundred gallons of water are used to kill and process one cow.75 That plant alone slaughters over five thousand cattle per day, or 1.5 million each year. This requires that one Iowa plant, which processes a fraction of the world’s livestock, to use 600 million gallons of water, which is pumped from the Ogallala aquifer in a single year.76 This is nonrenewable, pristine drinking water, formed from glaciers thousands of years ago. The Ogallala, which is one of the largest aquifers on earth, supplies water to eight states and is a striking example of the unnecessary depletion caused by the demand for animal products for food. By 1990, it was drawn down by three to ten feet per year, a rate many feel will deplete it entirely by the year 2020.77 Like many underground water supplies worldwide, and with recharge rates of less than a half-inch per year, the water of the Ogallala, which was formed in the ice ages, surely will be gone soon—unless there is drastic reduction in our dependence on it for raising livestock. Once it is gone, it is gone.
The solution to the declining freshwater supply does not lie in increasing demand and then simply supplying more, as we are currently doing. Rather, it is to understand where our water is going, to reduce this extraneous demand, and then to change to a more efficient use system. Knowing that the majority of our water supply is involved in the raising and processing animals for food, and knowing that it requires a mere fraction of water to provide a more nutritious food derived from plants, one of the solutions to global depletion of water is quite simple: Stop all consumption of animals for food. Pretty simple.
Part 2: Oceans
So let’s go back to that restaurant where you ordered a burger, steak, or another form of animal product. And let’s presume, in this new scenario, that you now feel enlightened in some capacity to think that some animal products eaten as food are less healthy for you than other animal products. Specifically, you have decided to cut back on red meat—whic
h is an interesting term, in that this form of animal tissue has a generous blood supply; hence, it appears red in color. Back at the restaurant, what do you order? Fish, of course, because you have heard that this form of animal product is healthier for you, with its good type of fat. Actually, fish of any type has both saturated fat and cholesterol, both of which are not necessarily that healthy for you to consume. An ongoing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study found that an alarming 100 percent of freshwater fish samples from the United States contain mercury, and a large percentage of certain fish caught from the ocean contain heavy metals and/or polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which are highly toxic, cancer-causing chemicals.78 Additionally, not one fish caught anywhere in the world has fiber, antioxidants, or phytonutrients, all of which make you a healthier person; these can only be found in plant foods. While there has been much hype about omega-3 fatty acids, no hype has been given to plants that can provide a more stable form of omega-3 fatty acids than is found in fish (and is broken down easier by your body). Plants such as flax or hemp contain omega-3 fatty acids in a quality and quantity whereby it is easy to obtain the needed daily amount. And unlike the baggage that comes with fish, these plants come to you with much needed fiber, no cholesterol, no saturated fat—and no loss to our oceans. Let’s examine one more very important issue: where did your fish come from? You may say, “It doesn’t matter”—you are simply eating lunch, so who cares? Unfortunately, the fish you are eating and the demand for fish by many other people have placed such a burden on our oceans that they may never recover.
Truthfully, our oceans are a mess. The rate of depletion, human-induced extinction, and environmental degradation in our oceans is most likely “greater than anything witnessed on land,” as described in a recent report by the United Nations Environment Programme.79 Coastal zones, as well as the high seas, are under great stress from unsustainable practices, including overharvesting of fishing grounds, bottom trawling, pollution and dead zones, and infestation of invasive species—all fueled by the massive desire to eat more fish. While global warming trends are measurably affecting our oceans, it is the indiscriminate, unregulated overfishing of our seas that will have the most profound and long-lasting effect on all of the complicated intertwining of fragile ecosystems. Our oceans are highly complex and dynamic systems, all interconnected to each other and vital to all living things on earth. The core of these vital systems and environmental mechanisms is living marine biodiversity itself.
The largest amount of marine life is associated with the seabed, especially on continental slopes and shelves of seamounts. Seamounts (mountains rising from the ocean floor that do not reach to the water’s surface) are home to corals, sponge beds, and numerous communities of species. They provide feeding, spawning, nursery grounds, and shelter for thousands of species of commercial fish, as well as migratory species such as whales.80 Many seamounts that are separated from each other behave like marine oases, with distinct species and communities found nowhere else on earth, such as the Tasman seamounts, with a 34 percent endemism rate (sea-life species that are found nowhere else on earth). With traditional fishing grounds now depleted, the fishing industry is targeting newer stocks, with more sophisticated locating equipment, farther offshore, including around and on seamounts. Large industrial vessels and fleets operate for weeks and months, targeting deep-water species on continental slopes and seamounts. Over 95 percent of the damage—and possible irreversible change—to seamount ecosystems is caused by unregulated and unreported bottom-fishing, with extremely destructive gear such as trawls, dredges, and traps. It is estimated that trawling alone is more damaging to seabed areas than all other fishing gear combined and is destroying deep-sea communities that will take decades and centuries to recover—if at all. These species and ecosystems are particularly at risk with additional stress, such as climate change and pollution.81
What happens, essentially, is that fishing vessels clear a seamount area of as much fish as possible, and once devastated and depleted, fishermen simply move on to the next seamount to start the process all over again. Many known seamounts are already overexploited to the point where extinction may well soon follow or recovery may take centuries.82 “Extinction” and “recovery” are terms that, in this context, need to be applied to a particular marine species that is dependent on seamounts, such as the right whale, and to various complex ecosystems—those with which exploited marine species are involved. We do not even fully understand many of these species and marine ecosystems, much less appreciate them.
There are four levels of what I consider classic human behavior with this demand for fish and subsequent overfishing situation:
1. The human population consumes a food item, but they do not have a clue to where it comes from, what it took to get it to their mouths, or what it is doing to our planet; or they do know but simply do not care. Either way, this behavior is irresponsible as well as unacceptable.
2. The fishing industry is oblivious or does not care and is blinded by the immediate, short-term economic gain, which is also not acceptable.
3. Those who are somewhat aware are not addressing the issue aggressively enough and are not solving the problem quickly enough. These are organizations and individuals, such as UN Special Report committee members and others who have studied this topic, as well as those in a position to make policy change. Again, this is not acceptable, as depletion continues to occur on a daily basis.
4. We are demanding, consuming, and ultimately irreversibly destroying living species and interconnected ecosystems, the complexity of which we, as humans, do not even fully understand. It is the essence of ignorance, the “me kill you” mentality that should have been left back in the Early Pleistocene era.
These fishing areas of exploitation are beyond national jurisdiction and have limited, if any, regulation, which makes them extremely vulnerable to further exploitation beyond recovery. Most deep-sea fish in these areas are slow to mature, produce only a few offspring in their lifetime and, therefore, will more easily be completely destroyed by heavy bottom-trawling and other gear now used.83 Of the seventeen primary fishing stocks worldwide, all are either overexploited or on the verge of collapse. Examples of commercially extinct areas are the Grand Banks near Newfoundland and the Georges Banks off New England, both once considered the most productive on earth. Until fifteen years ago, the fish you ordered for dinner would have most likely originated from one of these two very productive areas. At less than 1 percent their original numbers in these waters, now there simply are no fish.84
Across all our oceans, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that 70 percent of the world’s fish species are either fully exploited or depleted.85 The World Conservation Union lists 1,081 types of fish worldwide as threatened or endangered.86 There are currently four million fishing vessels that catch fish at a rate and amount that is almost three times that considered to be sustainable.87
Our most competent ocean scientists admit to understanding and comprehending only a very small amount about our seas, so it is interesting that someone had enough unilateral confidence in himself to come up with the figure of what is “sustainable” in any ecosystem in our oceans.
Although latest statistics reveal that a record 106 million tons of fish were caught in 2009, the report does not account for the millions of tons of total sea life caught in the process and discarded, either dead or dying.88 This “bykill” is most pronounced with shrimp fishing. Please think about this just for a moment when you next eat shrimp: for every one pound of shrimp sold and consumed, more than twenty pounds of other sea creatures are caught and killed in the process. Innocent victims include fish that has no commercial value, juvenile fish, turtles, seabirds, and marine mammals, such as the dolphin.89
Overfishing and the massive amounts of subsequent bykill have such detrimental global implications that the United Nations has adopted resolutions to help in the reduction of both. The real difficulty, ho
wever, lies in the adoption and actual enforcement of policies by the international community. For example, one such UN ruling (Item 150, Report of the Secretary-General, July 14, 2006) states: “Observers have collected data on fish discarded at sea by most vessels. Fishermen are required to properly release, to the extent practical, unharmed sharks, bill-fishes, rays, Dorado, and other non-targeted species, including sea turtles, and to receive some training in release methods.”90
So with this ruling, are we to understand that there will be “observers” of “most” vessels? That fisherman are required and “reminded” (but by whom?) that they are to “properly” release, “to the extent practical,” any “unharmed” species, and that they will receive “some training in release methods”? Might we assume, then, that the problem is now solved? Of course not. The policy itself is ludicrous, and there is no assurance whatsoever by our governing bodies that any part of the problem will be solved. While I am encouraged by the recognition that there is a significant overfishing and bykill difficulty, proper implementation and enforcement of appropriate laws quite clearly remains problematic, at best.
It is also very important to note that one-third of all fish caught worldwide are used as fishmeal—to feed the ever-growing numbers of livestock.91 That is correct: your desire to eat animal products (fish or livestock) fuels industries that are depleting our planet and destroying our oceans and environment. As executive director Achim Steiner stated in a recent report of the United Nations Environment Programme with regard to our oceans: “We are now observing … in the absence of policy change, a collapsing ecosystem [of our oceans] … with climate being the final coup d’grace.”
Depletion of our oceans is very real and, in many cases, is occurring at an irreversible rate. This catastrophic depletion is initiated and perpetuated by our demand for fish, the “healthy” alternative—but healthy for whom?
Comfortably Unaware Page 5
