I am your mother and I care about how you treat me. Without me, you would not exist. If I'm unhealthy, you are as well. If you take care of me, you will be taking care of yourself. One of the simplest things you can do for me is to reduce your dependence on animals for food. Eating less meat is one of the most significant things you can do to take care of me.
You may be wondering how such an individual choice as what you eat has an effect on me, and ultimately, on you. According to the United Nations, livestock is "one of the ... most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." (...www.fao.org...)
So, I'm asking you to consider the consequences to my health of eating meat on a daily basis.
First, as you're already aware, I'm warming at an alarming rate. The UN scientists say that eating meat causes 40 percent more global warming than all forms of transportation combined. That means that it is worse than all of the cars, planes, trucks and trains combined. On top of that, raising animals for food is the largest cause of methane emissions, which is really a problem because methane emissions are about 20 times worse than carbon dioxide emissions! If that weren't enough, it also is the leading cause of nitrous oxide emissions, which are about 300 times worse than carbon dioxide emissions. Skipping one meal of chicken per week and substituting it for a vegetarian meal would save about as much carbon dioxide as removing a half-million automobiles from US highways.
Second, consider how much of my land is used in raising meat. Thirty percent of my land mass is used for raising animals for food. Over 260 millions acres of forest in the US alone has been cleared for raising animals. And the animals are causing soil erosion and the extinction of many plant species because of the land they use. If that weren't bad enough, modern fishing techniques are destroying coral reefs and harvesting many fish to extinction.
Then there's the water used in raising animals for food. I'll bet you didn't know that you'd save more water by not eating a pound of meat than you would by not taking a shower for six months! Or that it takes almost 2500 gallons of water to raise a pound of beef. That's because it takes a lot of water to grow the crops that animals eat, to give water to those animals to drink, and to clean out the farms, trucks, and slaughterhouses. Compare that to raising a pound of wheat, which only takes about 25 gallons of water. That's 100 times more water used to raise cattle for food! Think of all the water we could be using for other resources! Sure, some would have to go to growing more grains and vegetables but we would have enough left to go to those in need of water!
Looking at energy use, did you know that making one calorie from plant protein uses 11 times less fossil fuel than making a calorie of animal protein? That's because there are so many steps in raising animals for food: growing food to feed them, transporting the feed, running the factor farms, trucking the animals to the slaughterhouse, operating the slaughterhouse and then shipping the meat to grocery stores. Wow, that's a lot of energy compared to what it takes to just grow the grain or the bean and then harvest it and transport it to a grocery.
Finally, there's the issue of pollution. As you can imagine, raising the billions of animals used for food in the world generates a whole lot of waste. This waste gets into our waterways and, according to the EPA, it causes more pollution than all other industrial sources put together! You should care about nature and the environment because you are a part of the complex system that makes up the Earth. This is moral holism, according to Bell. You should care about what you do to me, your mother, because what you do to me affects you as well. If you harm the environment, you are harming yourself.
Ok, so you're probably asking, "meat tastes good, so what's in it for me to stop eating it or to eat less of it?" If you are coming from moral separatism, there is still a reason for you to be vegetarian. Moral separatism, according to Bell, is believing that humans are separate from nature. What happens to it doesn't affect us. Well, when you help me by eating less meat, you also happen to help your own health. According to the American Dietetic Association (as well as lots of scientific studies), reducing your meat consumption will lead to a significant lesser risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, stroke and obesity. Your risk of certain cancers can be reduced by 50-80 percent just by being vegetarian! So if you don't want to do it for the environment, do it for yourself.
Works Cited
http://www.alternet.org/story/74605/eating_as_if_the_climate_mattered
http://www.fao.org/agriculture/lead/lead-resources/newsletter2/newsletter-09/en/
http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/meat-wastes-natural-resources/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19562864
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YInwDw7DQ6U
Bell, Michael. An Invitation to Environmental
Sociology. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge, 1998. Print.
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