Cook plants, not planets

from www.aseed.net

Do flaming forests, famines, floods and other nasty scenarios brought forth by climate chaos worry you? Want to do something immediately?

                                                                                           

The least you can do is leave ham, cheese and milk in the supermarket and make space on your plate for beans and oat milk. Going veg(etari)an is not only about standing up against animal cruelty, it's one of the most efficient lifestyle changes an individual can make to tackle climate change and poverty. (It's good for your body, too, but I'm not really interested in health issues – for this, go here)

Agriculture is seriously disturbing the climate, mostly due to the keeping of livestock, that is, cattle, pigs, and poultry. Animal industry is responsible for at least 18% of greenhouse gas emissions - more than all of the car, air and boat traffic combined!

The gases come from burning fossil fuels in the production of artificial fertilizers, methane emissions from both the animals themselves ("cow burps") and from dealing with manure, and the use of fossil fuels in producing animal fodder. Methane especially is a very powerful greenhouse gas, 21 times more harmful than CO2.

Beef in Europe = desert in Brazil


The European consumer doesn't see how their consumption damages the ecosystem, because most of it takes place in the Global South. Europe is so small and densely populated that you can earn more money from land by other business than agriculture.

Companies prefer to produce and buy animal fodder from where it's cheap, such as South-American countries. Europe imports 70% of its protein for cattle feed. And even if Europeans wanted it, they could probably not free enough land to feed all the meat industry animals living in our meat factories.

"A plant-based diet requires just 20% of the land of that required by an omnivore."

Eating away biodiversity


Animal production obviously also changes the landscape and affects the climate through that. Take trees for example. Trees are great. They help to regulate our climate and store carbon dioxide. But 13 million hectares a year are being clearcut and burned  – a common reason is to provide grazing grounds and grow animal fodder.

The explosion of soy cultivation for the animal industry has caused the destruction of millions of hectares of forest and savannah with extremely high and valuable biodiversity. Burning down forests and the oxidation of carbon by soil loss causes massive emissions of CO2.

The loss of soil leads to local temperature rise and desertification. Not to mention the effects of transporting all the feed, manure, animals, and the end product – the meat, milk and eggs.

Save Planet Earth – it's the only place where you can buy chocolate


Veganism is increasingly popular, partly for health and environmental reasons, and also owing to the growing awareness of how the meat industry treats its raw material. Still, meat consumption has increased fourfold in the past 50 years. There are three times as much livestock as there are humans!

Tragically, countries such as India and China are copying the overconsuming western life-style. If meat-eating continues to increase, then by 2050 the world's livestock will be consuming as much grain as would feed four billion people. (1)  

You can check some carbon footprint calculators. They are by no means accurate, and fail to calculate effects such as social damage caused by agri-industrial monocultures and water and mineral resource depletion, but they can help you to estimate.

British calculator
American calculator

Unfortunately, even if you and me and everyone we know moved to local organic vegetables, the problem is still far from solved. If your fridge is already free of animal parts, and you'd rather do something outside the consumer setting, take a look at some action ideas

(1) Colin Tudge, zoologist, author of 'So Shall We Reap', Penguin 2003, p.145-146

According to the report 'Livestock's long shadow' (2006) from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the livestock sector is responsible for the following worldwide human influenced production of: CO (2.9%) methane (35-40%) nitrous oxides (65%) and ammonia (64%).