The Environment, Meat, and You by Brent Robinson

In 2006 the UN released a major report on the environmental impact of the world's penchant for eating nonhuman animals. For those of us who have never thought of food as an environmental issue, the report's conclusions are striking. The report found that the animal agriculture is:

• "one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serous environmental problems" facing the world


• a "key factor in deforestation"


• "responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions"


• "accounting for over 8 percent of global human water use"


• "responsible [in the US] for 55 percent of erosion and sediment, 37 percent of pesticide use, 50 percent of antibiotic use, and a third of the loads of nitrogen and phosphorus in freshwater resources"


• and "should rank as one of the leading focuses for environmental policy"

As might be expected with all the Inconvenient Truths making the news these days, this report has caused mainstream media to sit up and take note.

Generally, the media has tended to focus on the more sensational environmental impacts of meat, like how switching to a vegan diet reduces your environmental impact by more than switching from a regular car to a hybrid. However, the wider body of evidence on the environmental impact of personal dietary choices is much more compelling. For example, consider that the standard-American carnivore's diet requires 4000 gallons of water per day, compared with 300 gallons of water per day for a vegan; or that it takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of flesh; or that the quantity of food we feed to our livestock would otherwise meet the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people.

Of course, what all this means for the environmentally and socially conscious is that eating less meat (or none at all) is perhaps the single most effective change any and every one of us can make to fight global warming and save the world.

For those interested in learning more about the environmental impacts of eating meat, GoVeg.com has an excellent article on why there's no such thing as a meat-eating environmentalist. For those who have decided they want to make the change to a vegetarian or vegan diet, GoVeg.com also as tons of information about how to go about making that change, including a database of great recipes, a helpful grocery-shopping guide, a sizeable list of amazing veggie cookbooks, and the short and to-the-point "Vegetarianism in a Nutshell"--a synopsis of why vegetarianism is the best thing not only for the environment, but also for your health, for the rest of humanity, and of course for nonhuman animals.

Brent Robinson is a vegan of 2 years and an animal advocate for nearly as long. He currently studies English literature at UC Santa Barbara and helps run an vegan advocacy group there. Questions or comments should be sent to brent_robinson@umail.ucsb.edu