Why Vegetarianism will not save the world

[S.A.M.]

The truth is that agriculture is the most destructive thing humans have done to the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. The truth is that agriculture requires the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems. The truth is also that life isn’t possible without death, that no matter what you eat, someone has to die to feed you. -Lierre Keith in “The Vegetarian Myth”


Interview:

Agriculture is, in fact, the most destructive thing that people have done to the planet. Yet the people who should care the most — environmentalists — don’t even identify agriculture as a problem.

And it gets even more bizarre in that it’s those very agricultural foods that are promoted as the way to save the planet. So I wanted to reach the people most impassioned about the state of our planet and try to explain that we have gotten this wrong for a generation. It’s not the values that are wrong, it’s purely informational.

The second reason is that I didn’t want a whole new group of idealistic young people to destroy their health. A vegetarian diet — and especially a vegan diet — does not provide for the long-term maintenance and repair of the human body. So vegetarians are on drawdown of their biological reserves.

Eventually, the rubber hits the road. There is a whole generation of us here who believed in it and tried it until we did permanent damage to our bodies. It was all for nothing. It’s pointless suffering. And I want to stop the young ones from doing the same thing.

...Specifically, agriculture is biotic cleansing. It requires taking over entire living communities and clearing them away, then planting the land for just humans. All of that is a long way of saying “extinction.” None of us can live without a place to live, without habitat. An activity that has destroyed 98% of most animals’ habitat can hardly be claimed to be animal-friendly.

You take a piece of land and you clear every living thing off it–and I mean down to the bacteria. That’s what agriculture is. Richard Manning has this great line, “A wheat field is a clear-cut of the grass forest.” He’s right.

Besides the mass extinction, it’s inherently unsustainable. When you remove the perennial polyculture–the grassland or the the forest–the soil is exposed and it dies. It turns to desert ultimately.

Northern Africa once fed the Roman Empire. Iraq was forests so thick that sunlight never touched the ground–no one in their right mind would call it the “Fertile Crescent” now. The dust storms in China are so bad that the soil is literally blowing across the Pacific Ocean and over the continent until it hits the Rocky Mountains, where it’s causing asthma in children in Denver.

The planet has been skinned alive. And the only reason we have not hit complete collapse is because we’ve been eating fossil fuel since 1950. This is not a plan with a future as peak oil is probably behind us and we are on the downside of Hubbert’s curve.


http://matadornetwork.com/bnt/why-vegetarianism-will-not-save-the-world/

Link to her book - you can read the first few pages here:

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability

 

[wynn]

So the solution is to not eat at all, or to eat humans!!

 

[Enmos]

You need agriculture to feed the cattle.

 

[S.A.M.]

There are a lot of inherent problems with her hypothesis - for example, what will the animals eat and will humans eat more agricultural produce than the animals they feed on - but she has brought the subject into focus and opened this conversation - its an important conversation.

You need agriculture to feed the cattle.

Yes that is correct - I don't have her book yet but in the excerpt she addresses this issue somewhat:

You can feed grain to animals, but it is not the diet for which they were designed. Grain didn’t exist until humans domesticated annual grasses, at most 12,000 years ago, while aurochs, the wild progenitors of the domestic cow, were around for two million years before that. For most of human history, browsers and grazers haven’t been in competition with humans. They ate what we couldn’t eat—cellulose—and turned it into what we could—protein and fat. Grain will dramatically increase the growth rate of beef cattle (there’s a reason for the expression “cornfed”) and the milk production of dairy cows. It will also kill them. The delicate bacterial balance of a cow’s rumen will go acid and turn septic. Chickens get fatty liver disease if fed grain exclusively, and they don’t need any grain to survive. Sheep and goats, also ruminants, should really never touch the stuff.

 

[Enmos]

There are a lot of inherent problems with her hypothesis - for example, what will the animals eat and will humans eat more agricultural produce than the animals they feed on - but she has brought the subject into focus and opened this conversation - its an important conversation.

Yes that is correct - I don't have her book yet but in the excerpt she addresses this issue somewhat:

I guess with the current world-wide demand for meat we can't just feed them the scraps, there will never be enough of it. We'll probably be 'stuck' with agriculture.

 

[Trippy]

Here's the thing that annoys me about the arguments around grain fed beef.

It's not universally available.

Not everybody who eats beef, eats grainfed beef.

All beef (to my knowledge, acquiring grain fed beef requires importing it from Europe) currently on the market in NZ is grass fed, not grain fed.

I can go down to the supermarket and by Halal beef, if I desired it, but I can't find any grain fed beef.

 

[superstring01]

Eat More Meat!!! (especially cow)

~String

 

[Enmos]

If agriculture proves unsustainable we are all pretty much fucked. Can you spell natural die-off?

 

[chimpkin]

 

[S.A.M.]

Time To Eat The Dog: The Real Guide To Sustainable Living.WANT to save the planet. Kill a dog. And eat it. A new book says so. The Anorak Book Club says PuppyBeef agrees.

The eco-pawprint of a pet dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year, researchers have found.

Victoria University professors Brenda and Robert Vale, architects who specialise in sustainable living, say pet owners should swap cats and dogs for creatures they can eat, such as chickens or rabbits, in their provocative new book Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living.

http://www.anorak.co.uk/228428/news...guide-to-sustainable-living.html/#more-228428

 

[Enmos]

http://www.anorak.co.uk/228428/news...guide-to-sustainable-living.html/#more-228428

lol How is that sustainable?
Besides, what would be the footprint of a human if that of a dog is already "twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year"?

 

[chimpkin]

Time To Eat The Dog: The Real Guide To Sustainable Living.WANT to save the planet. Kill a dog. And eat it. A new book says so. The Anorak Book Club says PuppyBeef agrees.

The eco-pawprint of a pet dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year, researchers have found.

Victoria University professors Brenda and Robert Vale, architects who specialise in sustainable living, say pet owners should swap cats and dogs for creatures they can eat, such as chickens or rabbits, in their provocative new book Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living.

Ah, they're just trying to beef up their market share:
http://www.puppybeef.com/products.php

Welcome to Puppy Beef, your online Premium Dog Meat Supermarket, where you can order your meat, and have it delivered in vacuum sealed freshness directly to your door. We provide top quality meat and stand by all our products.

For the last 9 years Puppy Beef has been the world's leading dog meat distributor. We have established a reputation for having only the highest quality dog meat products and dedicated customer service representatives.

Just remember:

Avoid overmixing ground dog meat because excessive handling can make it tough. Grill PuppyBeef burgers over medium heat . And resist the temptation to press on the burgers while they're grilling, as this squeezes out the juices and makes them dry.

 

[James R]

The truth is that agriculture is the most destructive thing humans have done to the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. The truth is that agriculture requires the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems. The truth is also that life isn’t possible without death, that no matter what you eat, someone has to die to feed you. -Lierre Keith in “The Vegetarian Myth”

The fact that something has to die to feed you is discussed in more detail in the following thread, which examines some of the moral questions around meat-eating and vegetarianism:

[thread=109589]Vegetarian's guide to talking to carnivores[/thread]

If humans want to give up agriculture, then we'll need to drastically reduce the number of humans on the planet. Maybe kill off 5/6th of the world's population, say. I wonder if Lierre Kieth advocates that.

 

[S.A.M.]

If humans want to give up agriculture, then we'll need to drastically reduce the number of humans on the planet. Maybe kill off 5/6th of the world's population, say. I wonder if Lierre Kieth advocates that.

I just got her book - hurrah for ebooks - and started reading it. She's not advocating genocide vs extinction, she's presenting evidence to show why agriculture is unsustainable in the long term. We're not used to thinking in terms of "sustainable food production" and "alternatives to agriculture" because our lifestyles are geared for consumption without accountability. But as Trippy said, much of the world has not yet graduated to factory farming which means that organic farming or free range farming is still the status quo. And we produce enough food now to feed everyone in the world, yet we still have lopsided societies, dying of chronic overnutrition on the one hand and chronic undernutrition on the other.

However, as we "advance" we have the choice to continue to propagate the systems which will fail all or seek alternatives that will sustain the world. Her book is more of a philosophical approach to life than a promotion of non-vegetarian eating habits. We need to seek out a better indice of quality of life than the bottom line and the profit margin.

 

[James R]

I can't fault any of that, SAM.

However, I've quickly looked up and read three reviews of her book, and the reviewers seem to think that her main motivation in writing it was to justify her own move back to eating meat, which she says was prompted by serious health problems she was having.

Anyway, let us know what you think once you've read the whole book.

 

[Enmos]

If humans want to give up agriculture, then we'll need to drastically reduce the number of humans on the planet. Maybe kill off 5/6th of the world's population, say. I wonder if Lierre Kieth advocates that.

No one needs to be killed off. There are other ways.

 

[Asguard]

Sam, there is no point debating james and enmos, they are MOM or the Michael from religion. None of there attitudeds has any science behind them, james "ethics" arguments have no logic (fertilised vs unfertilised eggs) and they ignore arguments showing where they are wrong.

I dont know how many times trippy, Bells and I have pointed out to James especially (but also Enmos) that the farm animals we eat are not feed on grain, they are fed on grass or salt bush. I dont know how many times we have pointed out to them that the destruction of the water ways and saltification of the land in Australia isnt caused by animal production, its caused by growing grain

I dont know how many times we have pointed out that the surposed disparity in energy useage becomes alot less when you look at maxium usage of the animal including its waste being used as organic fertilisers.

Im a surporter of 3 field type farming where you rotate between 2 types of vegitables\grain (2 years) and 1 year animals. This stops the distruction of the land, reduces fertiliser usage, lessens water usage and stops the destruction of the land

 

[Dywyddyr]

No one needs to be killed off.

Spoilsport.
I was working on my list before I read that.

 

[James R]

Like what, Enmos? Birth control? One-child policies? Better education and empowerment of women (which has proven links to smaller families)? Are those the kinds of things you're thinking of?

 

[James R]

Sam, there is no point debating james and enmos, they are MOM or the Michael from religion. None of there attitudeds has any science behind them, james "ethics" arguments have no logic (fertilised vs unfertilised eggs) and they ignore arguments showing where they are wrong.

What a pity you can't support any of the assertions you've made in this quoted snippet. Never mind. Somebody might believe you anyway.

I dont know how many times trippy, Bells and I have pointed out to James especially (but also Enmos) that the farm animals we eat are not feed on grain, they are fed on grass or salt bush. I dont know how many times we have pointed out to them that the destruction of the water ways and saltification of the land in Australia isnt caused by animal production, its caused by growing grain

Clearing forests to make fields for farm animals is also destructive to the environment.

I dont know how many times we have pointed out that the surposed disparity in energy useage becomes alot less when you look at maxium usage of the animal including its waste being used as organic fertilisers.

It will never be more energy efficient to produce meat for human consumption as compared to producing vegetables.