One.
Single. Day.
 I've
noted in this venue before, with ever-increasing
determination and no small measure of vented spleen,
the proven ecological benefits of a meatless diet.
But wait'll you read
the super-duperly astonishing statistics that noted
health and wellness expert Kathy Freston has to say
on
the subject:
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the
U.S. would save:
• 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply
all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;
• 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock,
enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than
a year;
• 70 million gallons of gas--enough to fuel all the
cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to
spare;
• 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice
the size of Delaware;
• 33 tons of antibiotics.
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the
U.S. would prevent:
• Greenhouse
gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million
tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;
• 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million
in resulting economic damages;
• 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;
• Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air
pollutant.
My favorite statistic is this: According to Environmental
Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken
per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead,
the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking
more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads.
See how easy it is to make an impact?
Other points:
Globally, we feed 756 million tons of grain to farmed
animals. As Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer notes
in his new book, if we fed that grain to the 1.4
billion people who are living in abject poverty,
each of them would be provided more than half a ton
of grain, or about 3 pounds of grain/day--that's
twice the grain they would need to survive. And that
doesn't even include the 225 million tons of soy
that are produced every year, almost all of which
is fed to farmed animals. He writes, "The world
is not running out of food. The problem is that we--the
relatively affluent--have found a way to consume
four or five times as much food as would be possible,
if we were to eat the crops we grow directly."
A recent United
Nations report titled "Livestock's
Long Shadow" concluded that the meat industry causes
almost 40% more greenhouse gas emissions than all
the world's transportation systems--that's all the
cars, trucks, SUVs, planes and ships in the world
combined. The report also concluded that factory
farming is one of the biggest contributors to the
most serious environmental problems at every level--local
and global.
Researchers at the University of Chicago concluded
that switching from standard American diet to a vegan
diet is more effective in the fight against global
warming than switching from a standard American car
to a hybrid.
In its report, the U.N. found that the meat industry
causes local and global environmental problems even
beyond global warming. It said that the meat industry
should be a main focus in every discussion of land
degradation, climate change and air pollution, water
shortages and pollution, and loss of biodiversity.
(Unattributed statistics were calculated from scientific
reports by Noam Mohr, a physicist with the New York
University Polytechnic Institute.)
=Lefty=
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