Earth Day is every day. We should be trying to reduce our carbon footprint and do our part to preserve the resources on our planet every day. The choices we make greatly contribute to the well being of this world OR help to destroy our environment every day.
Most people are unaware of the irreversible damage the factory farming industry has on our environment. On my journey to no longer partake in the unethical treatment of animals by becoming a vegetarian I am also choosing to help preserve the planet’s resources. Here are a few facts that you may find shocking:
Livestock farming is responsible for vast amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. A staggering 18-20% of these emissions come from the farming of animals. The world’s entire transportation system including planes, trains, and automobiles is responsible for 13%.
The #1 source of methane gas is agriculture. Methane is 23 times more powerful than greenhouse gas and animal agriculture produces more than 100 million tons of methane a year.
The release of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane are making our climate change and raising animals is the largest source of these emissions!
Over 30% of our land mass is used for grazing animals and almost half of our water supply goes to factory farming. Growing crops for these animals to be fattened and then killed requires nearly half of our water supply and 80% of our agricultural land. This puts a huge strain on our water supply!
One pound of potatoes takes 99.6% less water to produce than a pound of beef. It sickens me how much water is wasted to raise an animal only to kill it. Why wouldn’t we just eat the crops directly?! Wasting our resources to satisfy our palate just doesn’t seem right.
If you gave up eating beef you would save over 300,000 gallons of water a year which is way more than you would save if you didn’t shower for an entire year. Crazy but true.
Animals eat way more food than the meat that they can produce and doing this requires way more land than crops. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce a single pound of meat and they eat over 70% of all the grain we produce. They are like backwards food factories as well. It is such a waste to go through all that when we could use our land to grow vegetables that WE can eat directly and skip the whole over feeding and murdering process of the animal! Duh.
Oh and even if they are grass fed which many see as the healthier choice of meat, this takes even MORE land per unit of meat. Animal farming is a waste of land plain and simple. There are over one billion head of cattle on this planet weighing twice as much as the human population!
If the entire world ate like the meat obsessed U.S. people do our petroleum resources would be depleted in less than 11 years. If we switched to a mostly vegetarian country we could cut our oil imports by about 60%.
The demand for meat is so ridiculously out of control (it has tripled since 1960) that land is in great demand leading to the destruction of beautiful rainforests and wilderness. Over 70% of amazon rainforests is now used for grazing animals. The burning of these forests exudes millions of toxins and carbon dioxide into our air and is destroying our atmosphere! Not to mention the thousands of creatures that are becoming extinct due to the loss of their environment.
There is so much livestock in this country that they produce over 250,000 pounds of waste per SECOND. No shit. That’s 20 times as much a humans. This waste gets washed into our rivers and lakes because there are no sewage systems. This waste is filled with nitrates,bacteria, ammonia,etc. and kills plant and animal life continuously. The meat industry is responsible for three times as much harmful waste as all the other industries in the U.S. combined. WOW.
By choosing to no longer eat animals you will effectively reduce your carbon footprint, even more than if you drove a hybrid according to a recent study done at Chicago University.
Every conversation about about global warming should be based around switching to a vegetarian diet because there is nothing more harmful to our environment than eating animals.
Save lives. Save the planet. Choose to eat for a healthier world and keep our earth happy!
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