IMPACT ON OUR ENVIRONMENTA growing number of people, particularly those involved in the environmental and green movements, are beginning to become aware of the connection of the food on their plate and the pollution and waste of resources caused by meat production. Meat is very wasteful in terms of land use and protein conversion as it takes around 10 kilos of vegetable protein to produce one kilo of meat. The UK alone uses 80% of its land to raise livestock. It could feed around 4 – 5 times its current population by adopting a vegetarian diet. In addition to the wastage of land, meat production also consumes over 150 billion liters of water in the UK alone, and, as many of us know, water is not the unlimited resource we once thought it to be. This is hardly surprising when it takes 25,000 liters of water for one Kilogram of meat as opposed to 29 liters for a Kilogram of wheat. The production of this meat also destroys tracts of rainforest, uses valuable energy and water in the process and creates an end product of pollution in the form of animal manure and methane, adding to the greenhouse effect.
The reduction of the rainforest and other plant life in this manner also contributes to global warming and the strange weather seasons that are occurring worldwide can be directly attributed to the unhealthy diet of humanity. Added to the Methane from animal excrement, the ammonia produced by the animals also contributes to acid rain, killing off the very trees that provide the oxygen required for us and other animal life to live and flourish. Clearing of the rainforest as well as adding to more general environmental problems also has a disastrous effect on the native animals, plants and human cultures who have previously existed in the habitat with minimal impact for often thousands of years, with around 50 species of flora and fauna a day becoming extinct. A tremendous price to pay for maintaining our eating habits! In the west, cattle and other slurry, together with pesticide run off, are destroying native streams and rivers and killing off the aquatic life. There are valiant attempts to reintroduce the otter and even the European Beaver but those attempts will fail if we do not clean up our act. Meat production also contributes to soil erosion adding another nail in the ecological coffin. Even those members of the population who are less concerned with animal welfare can be persuaded to adopt the vegetarian diet if they are concerned about their fellow humans. With 38% of the world’s grain squandered on the production of meat it is clear that many millions of people in the developing world are dying of hunger for no better reason than to pleasure the taste buds of the rich. This is a particularly important argument to use for those members of the public who claim to care more for humans than for animals. Even the ocean world is not safe, due primarily to excess fishing and also to pollution, the ecological balance of the oceans has been disrupted, numbers of fish are reducing drastically, together with sea mammals such as dolphins, seals and whales, and the number of unknown large scale death from disease incidents continues to increase. |
BE A VEGETARIAN▐ BE A VEGETARIAN
▐ SPIRITUAL REASONS ▐ HEALTH RELATED ISSUES ▐ IMPACT ON OUR ENVIRONMENT ▐ HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ▐ FAMOUS VEGETARIANS ▐ COMPASSIONATE DIET ▐ FINALLY EAT LIVE ▐ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS MORE ABOUTVEGETARIAN RALLY |