Save the planet by cutting down on meat?

Anna Lappé’s book, Diet for a Hot Planet, discusses the impact that meat consumption has on the planet and our environment. It discusses how the global food system is a major contributor to climate change, producing as much as one-third of greenhouse gas emissions. She writes about how the way we farm, what we eat, and how our food gets to our tables all

Agriculture contributes to global greenhouse gas emissions. The “agriculture connection” is any direct impacts agriculture has on climatic change. “Carbon dioxide is the

After learning about the statistics of how much agriculture consumes our planet, I was appalled to see how destructive it is. Jonathan Foley put into perspective the increase and rapid demand for food. Agriculture alone consumes 40% of our land surface, 70% of our irrigation system, and

In the science article, “Beef and Climate Change Collide”, Los Angeles Times argues that beef is unhealthy for planet Earth due to the released gases that contribute to climate change. They claim that the U.S. beef production uses twenty eight times for land and eleven times more water than any other types of meets. Beef production pumps up five times more planet warming gases into our atmosphere than chicken, or pork. Furthermore, developing nations raising cattle have significantly increased the amounts of gases they produce. These developing countries have increased fifty one percent from 1961-2010. Although gases from cattle have been increasing, U.S. beef industry claims that the U.S. create the least amount of greenhouse gases being

One of the biggest controversies with livestock production is that the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that get released into the atmosphere. Its assumed that cars produce most if not all the greenhouse gas emissions however livestock has a big say in air pollution. According to Cassandra Brooks, writer for the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, 18 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions are due to livestock production. This is nearly 20% and can be greatly reduced if people reduced their demand for meat. The Environmental Working Group used a tangible variable for Americans stating “if everyone in the U.S. ate no meat or cheese just one day a week, it would be like not driving 91 billion miles – or taking 7.6 million

In my first year of college I have been introduced to copious amounts of new information and topics that had never crossed my mind. Becoming familiar with new ideas, food production and it’s impacts of the environment both locally and globally became of interest to me. I have been a vegetarian for about four years and as I have attended college I have learned more about the state of the issue with food production and sustainability. When presented with the list of books for our independent project Omnivore 's Dilemma immediately jumped at me. When Pollan stated in the introduction, “Farming and food industry produces even more greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation put together; the way you eat affects the world more than anything else you do,” I was hooked.

Brought up in the southern of China, I often heard about that people from there “eat anything with four limbs except tables, anything that flies except aero planes, and anything that swims except ships”. Nevertheless, I eat more fruit, vegetables, nuts, and whole grains but less meat to make careful choices for environmental protection. Similarly, Kathy Freston argues that animal agriculture is one of the top contributors to global warming. In her Huffington Post selection “Vegetarian Is the New Prius,” Freston lists how many emissions of greenhouse gases people make when they eat meat and illustrates the consumption of tree in animal agriculture. She effectively convinces her audiences that the livestock results in the most serious environmental problems and encourages people to lead a greener diet to protect our environment. However, ardent craving, poor health, and perpetual hassle and cost prevent all Americans from being vegetarian.

The article describes the difference in green house emissions from changing two individuals diet from a high meat content to a vegetarian diet would be the equivalent of running a 10-year-old car 6,000 miles or for one person return flight from London to New York.

Climate change is a rising issue of importance in our day and age, and one that is threatening our global society on many levels. In the past few decades, scientists have discovered that our planet’s climate has been changing at an alarming rate. The way in which we have changed the land to

As we can now observe, vegetarianism has become something fashionable, and the number of people who reject eating meat is constantly increasing. In Britain, for instance, over 5 million people have done it so far. It is obviously connected with the recent animal diseases, but this tendency is likely to spread on the other regions of the world. However, it is not only a fashion or fear of illnesses. I myself became a vegetarian about 2 years ago, and I can see a number of reasons why people should stop eating meat. They are mainly of ethic, economic and health type. Those who think in an ecological way should also be aware of how this meat consumption ruins our environment. I don’t have an intention

These are two extremes, but people who live in the developed world on average still eat twice as much meat compared to people living in developing countries. And while people in developing countries might consume less meat and dairy now, growing populations and wealth will strongly increase their consumption. This will have negative impacts on the environment - and on ourselves. More than 25% of climate gases that contribute to climate change are associated with our food. This is also expected to increase over the next decades. But our diets are not only unsustainable, they are also unhealthy leading to malnourishment and obesity.

About a year ago, I asked myself a question why am I not a vegetarian? After all, I am who cares about the environment. I grew up with my vegetarian dad in a small town. I even joined a club called “Tree Huggers”. I knew that eating a mere hamburger a day could increase my risk of dying by a third. I knew that the 10 billion animals we raise each year for meat are raised in factory farmed conditions that we hypocritically wouldn’t even consider for our own cats, dogs and other pets (Bittman). Environmentally, animal farming causes more emissions than all the means of transportation combined, and beef production uses a hundred times the water that most vegetables do (Bittman). We as a society are eating twice as much meat as we did in the 50s. So, the special little side treat is now the main course. What if I told you, that we can change our world through our food choices. Animal agriculture has grown to become one of the most damaging industries on our planet. Going greener with your diet could be one of the most powerful and transformative decisions you will ever make in your life for three significant reasons. Plant-Based diet has tremendous benefits for your health, it is good for the sustainability of our planet, and it will widen your circle of compassion.

Consumption of meat by humans creates several problems. First and foremost, raising animals for food compromises the environment. For example, it takes a large amount of natural resources to sustain the meat industry. The use of water, land, and food to raise animals for human consumption is not an efficient use of our limited resources. In contrast, it is more efficient to feed humans directly than to use land, food, and water to feed animals to be used as food. There are shortages of fertile land, clean water, and food in several third world countries. Many of these countries’ resources are allocated to produce feed for animals in developed countries around the world. As a result, the citizens of these countries are stricken with water and food shortages, while their crops are feeding cattle from across the globe. However, this problem can be solved by adopting a vegan diet. The vegan diet will allow a more efficient use of resources that in turn can be used to feed starving men, women, and children throughout the world. Consequently, more people in the world could be fed if the land used to grow feed for animals was used to grow food for humans.

Over the last thousands of years, many factors have contributed to the significant changes that have and continue to take place within our atmosphere. Climate change has become universally recognized, based on scientific results backed by historically observed data, and also acknowledged by public perception in the last decades (Valverde et al 2015). While global warming is a highly debatable topic for the masses, the current climate changes occurring that have been identified are quit worrisome. Even more alarming, NASA reports that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities. Meaning that a lot of what people do in a general sense has a negative affect on our atmosphere. As valuable time continues to pass, it seems clear that more negative effects will arise and current related climate changing issues will intensify. With climate changes being an ongoing problem and many elements being affected, one system in particular that climate change is having an impact on is our agricultural system or rather agriculture is having an impact on climate change.

Land-use patterns have changed over millennia, but the most dramatic transformations have taken place over the last 300 years. The modification of the earth by human action mainly involved impacts on the soils and biotic resources central to the agricultural base. Land transformation did not abate, but rather accelerated and diversified with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the globalisation of the world economy, and the expansion of population and technological capacity. From 1700 to 1980, globally about 1.2 billion ha forest were converted to arable land. Large regional variations exist in the relationship between population growth and expansion of arable land due to the specific of Asian, European, and new continental system of agriculture and their respective paths of agricultural productivity increases.