Environmentally-Friendly Vegetarian Lifestyle
While the Vegetarian Lifestyle is one of the best things you can do for your own health, it’s also one of the most important things you
can do for the health of the planet.
Eating a plant-based diet is a giant step toward improving our environment. It SAVES our drinking water, our food supply, our soil, and atmosphere.
Let me explain…
First we need to start by looking at the resources it takes to raise animals for food. The amount of food needed to raise livestock is staggering.
Here’s the shocking truth about what it takes to raise your burgers and chicken breasts!
• Livestock consume massive amounts of corn, soybeans, and grain.
• If these resources were fed directly to people, we could feed millions of people!
• Livestock also produces huge amounts of methane and other greenhouse gasses which may harm the environment.
Think of all the land we wouldn’t need to farm, water we wouldn’t have to use, fossil fuels for shipping livestock we wouldn’t need, and the pollution we wouldn’t create if we didn’t have to support over HALF A BILLION livestock a year.
That’s right, according to the government; in 1997 farms in the USA were home to…
• 403,000,000 chickens (That’s 403 MILLION chickens!)
• 99,500,000 cattle (Almost 100 million cows)
• 59,900,000 hogs (60 million piggys!)
• 7,600,000 sheep (And I wonder, did everyone fall asleep while counting sheep?)
By consuming less meat and more plants, we could save our soils from over-farming and reduce the loss of our nutrient rich top soil that is being depleted at a dramatic pace.
And it gets worse…
Contaminated Livestock Waste:
At those terrible factory farms that you’ve heard so much about, livestock manure is collected in enormous sewer systems. These “pools of poop” are several football fields in length and hold millions of gallons of livestock waste. Plus, these animals produce 100 times more manure than human waste each year!
And when these high concentrations of manure overflow, leak, and spill, it can CONTAMINATE our drinking water and cause deadly water borne disease outbreaks in humans. Plus, it’s just disgusting to think that livestock waste might be in our water.
High Consumption of Fresh Water:
In addition to sabotaging our water supplies, factory-farmed animals also are the biggest consumers of water. Millions of gallons of fresh water are used in the United States everyday to clean dairy operations, provide drinking water for livestock, to clean feedlots, and manage those awful manure tanks.
Overgrazing:
It doesn’t get much better when you look at how livestock production has changed the world.
Grazing and ranching has degraded at least 20 percent of the current open range of the earth. Around the world deserts have been created because of overgrazing (overgrazing means there is too high a concentration of livestock for a given area).
The large livestock population eats the vegetation to the ground killing the plants and without the plants to hold the soil down, wind and rain wash the precious top soil away. By this point, the ground is no longer fertile so nothing grows and a desert is created.
Soil Erosion:
Livestock also cause soil erosion near water banks destroying the ecology, polluting the rivers, and killing the fish. Huge tracts of the rainforest have been destroyed due to cattle grazing, causing an environmental emergency.
The rainforest produces oxygen and absorbs a majority of our carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – we need it to survive!
I hope this section has been an eye opener for you. Remember that knowledge is power. With knowledge you can make better, healthier and wiser choices and together we can make a difference in our lives and in the sustainability of the world.
Kardena Pauza
Author of, Easy Veggie Meal Plans