Need Motivation to Eat Less Meat and More Plants? Part 12 of 12
Today, why you’re contributing to environmental damage if you eat high on the food chain:
Gallons of oil spilled by the Exxon-Valdez: 12 million
Gallons of putrefying hog urine and feces spilled in North Carolina in 1995 when a hog excrement dam broke: 25 million
Fish killed as an immediate result: 10-14 million
Fish whose breeding area was decimated by this disaster: half of all mid-East Coast fish species
Farmed fish the answer to avoid overfishing? Farmed fish contains much higher levels of pollutants and pesticides, including 10 times more PCBs (2001 study)
Concentration of pathogens in hog waste (a biohazard) compared to human sewage: 10 to 100 times greater
For every household in the country, 20 tons of livestock manure are produced annually.
The single largest source of water pollution, which cauterizes waterways and kills fish: dairy farms
Rainforest beef destroys: 20-30 plant species, 100 insect species, and dozens of bird, mammal, and reptile species
When will Indonesian forests (280 million acres) be gone if cleared to produce enough beef for Indonesians to eat as much as the U.S. does, per capita: 3.5 years
When will Costa Rican rainforests be gone if cleared to produce enough beef for Costa Ricans to eat as much as the U.S. does, per capita: 1 year
What a hamburger would cost (produced by clearing forests in India, which is common practice) if the REAL costs were included and no subsidies were involved: $200
Tell me: what does this mean to you? Do you think we are overconsuming meat?
Posted in: Eco Friendly Living, Lifestyle, Whole Food
I think it’s disgusting, glutenous, selfish and irresponsible. I also think most people don’t realize this, or they don’t want to. This makes me think of the WoW posts you did, my son’s scout leader told him he needed to read the WoW when my son said he was a vegetarian, he was given all kinds of crap for it…
This isn’t why we have animals on our Earth, or an Earth to begin with, animals are not ours to exploit and abuse, neither is the Earth.