June 2007

Eating less meat fights global warming

I really appreciate the previous issues of The Ventana including strategies for lessening our impact on the environment and global warming.

What I find missing in nearly all discussions of this subject is the impact of an animal-based diet. It seems like most people want to make a difference in this world but not when it comes to giving up hamburgers, barbecued chicken, cheese, and milk. Driving less, purchasing energy-efficient light bulbs, reducing waste, recycling, washing clothes in cold water, planting native plants in our landscapes, using a cloth bag at the grocery store, and curbing our consumer-spending habits are extremely important changes in our lives. But what if all of these were completely overshadowed by eating animal products?

A 400-page report recently released by the United Nations has identified livestock as the greatest environmental threat to our continued survival. Climatic changes, melting glaciers, deforestation, severe air pollution, acid rain, poisoning of rivers and drinking water, dead zones in the ocean, destruction of coral reefs, shrinking rain forests, and desertification are all by-products of our addiction to meat and dairy.

As activists for a better world, I strongly feel we should be discussing the environmental, moral and health consequences of continuing to eat animals. Do I even need to mention the hideously cruel practices of factory farming? Giving up animal products once or twice a week would be a great start.

Below is a link to the report:
www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=20772&Cr=global&Cr1=warming

—Phil Kaplan
Soquel, Ca.

Animal Agriculture is carbon intense

Many kudos to Kay Spenser and her family for their extraordinary efforts to reduce their carbon impact on our awesome, but fragile, eco-system.

I’d like to mention an often overlooked, but important element when we’re discussing solutions to global warming (and pollution control), and that’s our monumental dietary reliance on animal flesh and dairy products.

The United Nations recently released a report (Livestock’s Long Shadow) revealing that factory farming has a greater impact on global warming than all the world’s transportation combined. Did Al Gore mention this? Raising not only 1.5 billion cows worldwide, but also pigs, poultry, sheep and other species, is putting a tremendous strain on our atmosphere (via methane release), polluting finite potable water resources, and creating other significant environmental destruction. Animal agriculture is a very carbon-intense industry.

Although unwelcome, this is not new information. We are simply slow at mentally processing or even caring to react to what’s been known and written about for at least 30 years in many books such as Diet for a Small Planet.

Striving for a plant-based diet may be the most challenging change we could ever make toward healing our sick planet and ourselves. Dietary habits are culturally ingrained and reinforced through clever advertising and societal pressures to conform. Any significant dietary change, to be truly successful, needs to be preceded by sound nutritional information. Nevertheless, it’s encouraging to know that there’s a mountain of scientific evidence supporting the health benefits of a nutritious vegan diet, as well as ever-increasing selections of highly-nutritious, plant-based meat and dairy substitutes.

—Wandis Wilcoix
Santa Cruz

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