Eating Meat = Killing the Planet?

Although one of my fellow classmate is already a vegetarian and her blog is most likely about vegetarian too, but I’d like to explore the idea of vegetarian a bit myself. I watched a documentary called “Cowspiracy” this week and it has a lot of interesting facts.

Animal agriculture is what’s killing the planet. It not only takes up the 45% of the Earth’s land and resources within it but also pollutes water. People protests against things such as hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, because it uses one hundred billion gallons of water only in the United States yearly. However very few people know that raising animals in the United States alone yearly uses thirty four trillion gallons of water. And in total raising animals takes 30% of the world’s water consumption. It’s funny how during my first hours of research I couldn’t find much about animal agriculture on most of the big websites such as Greenpeace. Only later I learned that most of the environmental organizations are business that don’t want to lose their funding because they are telling people to live against what they held so dearly. 2009 Worldwatch reported that livestock causes 51% of all greenhouse gas emissions. How could the large environmental organizations not know about this? They just simply kept the facts hidden. Almost all my recent years I’ve heard that gas emissions such as fossil burning is the number one cause of global warming. People have claimed that cow farts are also a factor but because of all the “false” reports on the major environmental websites, I never thought animal agriculture would be the leading cause of damage to the planet. Dr. Richard Oppenlander, author of “Comfortably Unaware” calculated even without the use of “any gas, or oil, or fuel ever again from this day forward, that we would still exceed our maximum carbon-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions, not the five hundred sixty five tons, by the year 2050”(Oppenlander) because of animal agriculture.

Comparing the birth of human civilization relative to the existence of Earth, human civilization is only on a fraction of the timeline. However, in this fraction of the timeline, humans wiped out 46% of the trees in the world. More so, humans rose over seventy billion farm animals for humanity’s own consumption. Of which 55% of the water consumption made by humanity is put into producing beef. To produce one pound of beef it would cost twenty-five hundred gallons of water and if that number is too hard to depict, this is equivalent to producing the amount of beef in a hamburger using two months of showering water. It’s ironic how up to 80% of the world’s starving children live in countries where food is fed to animals in a livestock system that are killed and eaten by humans in first world countries such as the United States or Britain. The entire human population drinks 5.2 billion gallons per day and eats twenty-one billion pounds of food while the 1.5 billion cows alone drink forty-five billions of gallons per day and eat one hundred and thirty five billion pounds of food. If humanity were to go vegetarian, imagine how much more food humanity would be able to spare and feed those who desperately needs food just to survive.

This is what I found out this week. I’m not sure how I feel after see these statistics.