Can you have your environment - and eat it too? - environmental & economic effects of meat production - adapted from the book, "Diet for a New America"

Vibrant Life, May-June, 1992 by John Robbins

Quite a pile. Fifty years ago most of the manure from livestock returned to enrich the soil. But today, with huge numbers of animals concentrated in feedlots, confinement buildings, and other factory farm locations, there is no economically feasible way to return their wastes to the soil. As a result, there is a continuing decline in soil humus and fertility, an increasing dependence on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and an accelerating loss of topsoil.

Sadly, instead of being returned to the soil, the wastes from today's animals often end up in our water. This is extremely significant, because the quantity of waste is so immense.

The livestock of the United States produce 20 times as much excrement as the entire human population of the country ! Animal waste is high in nitrogen, which is one of the chief reasons it makes such good fertilizer if it's returned to the soil. But unreturned, much of the nitrogen converts to ammonia and nitrates. The dumping of livestock wastes into our water is one of the reasons more and more rural wells are encountering dangerously high nitrate levels. Even city water supplies are increasingly high in nitrates.

Energy crises. The production of meat, dairy products, and eggs account for one third of the total amount of all raw materials used for all purposes in the United States.

In contrast, growing grains, vegetables, and fruits is a model of efficiency, using less than 5 percent the raw material consumption as does the production of meat.

On a traditional farm, pigs and chickens kept warm in the winter by nestling in bedding. And in the summer they would cool off in shady, damp soil. In today's factory farms, however, there is no bedding and no shady, damp soil. in order to maximize the animals' weight gain under these conditions, temperatures must be artificially controlled, and that takes energy.

Further heat is needed because the young animals are separated from the warmth of their mothers' bodies.

Economists Fields and Hur report: "A nationwide switch to a diet emphasizing whole grains, fresh fruits, and vegetables-plus limits on export of nonessential fatty foods-would save enough money to cut our imported oil requirements by more than 60 percent. And the supply of renewable energy, such as wood and hydroelectric, would increase 120 to 150 percent."

All things connected. At the present time, when most of us sit down to eat, we aren't very aware of how our food choices affect the world. We don't realize that in every Big Mac there is a piece of the tropical rain forests, and with every billion burgers sold dozens of species become extinct. We don't realize that in the sizzle of our steaks there is the suffering of animals, the mining of our topsoil, the slashing of our forests, the harming of our economy, and the eroding of our health.

We don't see the toxic poisons accumulating in the food chains, poisoning our children and our earth for generations to come.

But the earth itself will remind us, as will our children and the animals and the forests and the sky and the rivers, that we are part of this earth and it is part of us. All things are deeply connected, and so the choices we make in our daily lives have enormous influence, not only on our own health and vitality, but also on the lives of other beings, and indeed on the destiny of life on earth.