Diet and the Environment

I recently posted a piece on saving the whales after I learned of plans to dramatically increase whaling by Japan, Iceland, and Norway. I was particularly infuriated by Japan’s decision to start killing Humpback whales, which I spent some time admiring recently in Hawaii; they are highly sentient peaceful creatures whose songs are as complex as symphonies and pose no threats to humans. The fact that we still think it’s okay to slaughter them– regardless of whether it’s “sustainable”– to me is the height of human arrogance and immorality (ok, maybe not the height- what’s going on in Sudan is way worse, but still pretty bad, especially coming from advanced industrial nations).

In the comments there were a few exchanges in which someone assumed that I am a “silly” vegetarian (which I am, vegan in fact) and then went on to say what prompted this piece: that vegetarianism has nothing to do with the environment or economics.

I don’t want to get into a discussion (now) about the ethics of killing animals for food, but ONLY focus on the environment and economics piece. Diet is the single most influential aspect of human behavior with regards to environmental impacts. Please, no matter what your ethics consider the following:

1. Meat production is a highly inefficient system of producing food- growing plants to feed to animals to feed to humans wastes about 90% of the energy

2. The environmental impacts of animal agriculture are tremendous on every dimension- water use, sewage, energy, soil erosion, etc. In fact, here’s a link to a paper that estimates that if everyone turned to a plant-based diet we would cut CO2 emissions by 21% (remember, Kyoto is only 5% so that’s 4 times the magnitude).

3. Slaughterhouses have barely changed since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Even if you don’t care about the treatment of animals, check out the human conditions in these places.

4. It’s all about economics since the grain that is fed to animals is highly subsidized and one of the reasons meat is so cheap is because the environmental externalities are not included in the price (and they are huge, including other subsidizes such as water subsidies).

I don’t want to be preachy or come off as morally superior or anything like that, but diet has such a huge impact on the environment that it should be one of the first things people explore when thinking about their personal choices. I think the moral dimensions in terms of the treatment of animals only adds further weight to the argument against consuming large quantities of meat, but you don’t need to share my morals to absorb the basic facts about the environmental impacts and the underlying economics.

Here are some other websites to check out:

http://www.goveg.com/environment.asp

http://www.emagazine.com/view/?142

http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/reports/beyond.html

http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2001/2701.html

J.S.