Why Veganism Makes Sense pt. 1

I am a Future Environmental Defender and if you’re reading this, I assume you too share an interest at the least or passion at the most in the environment and social issues. You must be well aware of the fact that our planet is growing warmer, that pollution is on the rise, ecosystems are dying and of the constant tug of war played between social activists and people wanting positive change with politicians, government and big business that want to keep the old oppressive resource-draining system churning. But what isn’t necessarily common knowledge is that our diet is a massive factor that influences the environment, our health and the social world. Animal agriculture is the elephant in the room that people generally don’t talk about. However that’s why it’s so important, as it’s through our lifestyle that we can affect the biggest change. We blame society but forget that we are society, if we change our own habits then over time we can change the world.

Cutting animal products such as meat, dairy, eggs and seafood out of your diet, effectively going vegan, can drastically reduce your carbon footprint. One study1 compared 5 different diets: High, medium, low, fish, vegetarian and vegan diets and measured their dietary GHG emission levels. Not surprisingly, it was found that high, medium and low meat eaters had carbon footprints twice as big as vegans. So simply by going vegan one can slash their carbon footprint in half, our diet is the one thing most people have complete control over changing and it’s through our diet we have the most impact on the environment. Also given the fact that we feed enormous amounts of grain and water to the 150 billion animals slaughtered each year for food, plenty of methane gas is being pumped into our atmosphere as a result. Methane is 25-100 times more damaging than carbon dioxide in a 20 year timeframe. The business of raising animals is responsible at least for 18% of global warming. Animal agriculture uses 30-40% of the earth’s land surface. It takes 10 times as much fossil fuel to make one calorie of animal protein vs one calorie of plant protein. Animal agriculture is the leading cause of resource consumption and environmental degradation. Raising livestock JUST IN THE US uses 34 TRILLION gallons of water. This is because the animals we eat, need to eat water intensive grains.

One McDonald’s quarter pounder needs over 660 gallons of water to be produced; this is two months’ worth of showers. If overfishing doesn’t stop, we will see fishless oceans by 2048. I could go on and on, but it’s clear the steaks on our plates have far reaching consequences, so much so that one cannot consider themselves an environmentalist and also consume meat or dairy.

Still iffy about the environmental consequences of what you eat? Take a look at this; maybe guess at what it is.

Seen anything like it before? That, is one giant lagoon on cow faeces. Those small black dots speckled in the rows of squares are groups of cows in feedlots. How often do people spare thought that what they ate for lunch, ate lunch and took dumps too? With massive demand for meat, intensive factory farms simply cannot process the waste of all the animals so what happens instead is the faeces get washed away into a pit where it sits, and if the pit starts to overflow, the faecal matter gets sprayed onto the surrounding fields instead. The health of communities living nearby can be at risk due to this. Yep, this mass of raw excrement is left to break down in the open sun where toxic bacteria thrive and algae blooms, providing that reddish colour (no it’s not blood). The two white bands you see are salt deposits for the faeces. You can see how big a threat this poses to our environment. The thousands of faecal lagoons of the world pose an imminent threat to our health if it seeps into ground water or enters any streams or rivers causing hypoxic dead zones in our oceans. It’s estimated that livestock produce 3-20 times more waste than all the people in the USA.

Just think how ridiculous this system of food production is. Like you could grow some almonds, blend them, put them through a sieve and make almond milk to add to your cereal. Or you could raise a cow for a year, waste thousands of litres of water and many kilos of food, plus land for the cow. Then impregnate her, remove and possibly slaughter her calf, then drain the cow’s body of milk throughout the day while fighting chances of infection and drinking that milk. Like no wonder our world’s environment is in such disarray, all our systems are backwards from the ground up. By going vegan, we won’t be contributing to these horrors anymore; we’d be living with a lighter impact on the world. Not only that but we shall be making a statement or a vote for the kind of world we want to live in. Because this old destructive system is obsolete and it’s time to let it die, and as a Future Environmental Defender, I’ll see to that, because if we don’t change our habits now, there may not be a future to defend.

#Veganism