Green is the New Black: Celebrating “Earth Day” Every Day

While we still have a long way to go before we adhere to the environmental mantra, “Make every day Earth Day,” most people now realize that their individual choices impact the entire planet. They are more aware of their consumer habits—and are trying to change them for the better. Green is the new black. “Green living” tips are “trendy” in most women’s, health, and social magazines and global warming has become a hot topic (no pun intended) among politicians, scientists, journalists, and even the general public. But while many people have embraced energy-efficient light-bulbs, recycling, cloth bags, short showers, public transportation, hybrid cars, and other eco-friendly actions and products, relatively few people have sworn off meat, eggs, and dairy products. Until everyone goes vegetarian, Earth Day will be just be a day in April.

More than 10 billion cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and other farmed animals are confined to factory farms every year in the United States alone. The process of turning these animals into “beef,” “pork,” and “poultry” is taking a terrible toll on the Earth.

The 414-page United Nations report Livestock’s Long Shadow concluded that the livestock sector is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” The report suggested that the livestock industry should be “a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.”

Meat Is the Number One Cause of Global Warming

According to the U.N. report, raising animals for food generates more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, trains, ships, and planes in the world combined. The livestock sector is one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide and the single largest source of both methane and nitrous oxide emissions. Nitrous oxide is about 300 times more potent as a global warming gas than carbon dioxide. According to the U.N., the meat, egg, and dairy industries account for a staggering 65 percent of worldwide nitrous oxide emissions.

Environmental experts are encouraging people to eat a vegetarian diet or at least cut back on the amount of meat and other animal products that they consume. On its Web site, Environmental Defense estimates, “If every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetables and grains … the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads. … If every American had one meat-free meal per week, it would be the same as taking more than 5 million cars off our roads. Having one meat-free day per week would be the same as taking 8 million cars off American roads.”

Imagine what kind of difference you’d be making if you never ate meat. Researchers at the University of Chicago determined that switching to a vegan (pure vegetarian) diet is more effective in countering global warming than switching from a standard American car to a Toyota Prius. The researchers, Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin, compared the amount of fossil fuel needed to cultivate and process various foods, including running machinery, providing food for animals, and irrigating crops. They found that the typical U.S. meat-eater generates nearly 1.5 tons more carbon dioxide per person per year than a vegan does. By comparison, if you traded a gas-guzzling vehicle for a state-of the-art hybrid, the CO2 savings would only be slightly more than 1 ton.

The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook: 77 Essential Skills To Stop Climate Change by David de Rothschild— the official companion volume to the worldwide Live Earth concerts—states that “refusing meat” is “the single most effective thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint.”

Of course, your carbon footprint is not the only thing you reduce when you stop eating meat. There’s your waistline for one, but I’m referring to your impact on the environment as a whole. Meat, egg, and dairy production is detrimental to the environment in many ways. When you consider all the manure produced by billions of animals and all the extra energy needed to grow food for the animals; operate the feed mills, factory farms, slaughterhouses, and meat-processing plants; and transport the feed, animals, and meat to their various destinations, you can see why animal agriculture is much less sanitary and more energy-intensive than plant agriculture. Vegetarians tread lighter on the Earth—in terms of helping to conserve resources and improve air and water quality and fighting world hunger and deforestation.

Food for Thought: A Comparison Between Meat-Based and Plant-Based Diets

Nearly half of the water used in the U.S. is squandered on animal agriculture. Between watering the crops grown to feed farmed animals, providing drinking water for billions of animals each year, and cleaning up the filth in factory farms, transport trucks, and slaughterhouses, the farmed-animal industry places a serious strain on our water supply.

It takes approximately 2,500 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat but only 25 gallons to produce 1 pound of wheat. More than 4,000 gallons of water per day are required to produce a meat-based diet, but only 300 gallons of water a day are needed to produce a totally vegetarian diet.

John Robbins, the heir to the Baskin-Robbins ice cream empire and famed author of Diet for a New America and The Food Revolution, contends that you can save more water by not eating a pound of beef than by not showering for an entire year.

On the subject of water, the Environmental Protection Agency has reported that factory farms pollute our waterways more than all other industrial sources combined. Animals raised for food produce approximately 130 times as much excrement as the entire human population—87,000 pounds per second. A Scripps Howard synopsis of a Senate Agricultural Committee report on farm pollution issued this warning about animal waste: “[I]t’s untreated and unsanitary, bubbling with chemicals and diseased. … It goes onto the soil and into the water that many people will, ultimately, bathe in and wash their clothes with and drink. It is poisoning rivers and killing fish and making people sick. … Catastrophic cases of pollution, sickness, and death are occurring in areas where livestock operations are concentrated. … Every place where the animal factories have located, neighbors have complained of falling sick.”

A study by Duke University Medical Center showed that people living downwind of pig farms are more likely to suffer from tension, depression, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, headaches, shallow breathing, coughing, sleep disturbances, and loss of appetite.

Not only does meat production pollute our water and air, it also desecrates our land. It takes 3 1/4 acres of land to produce food for a meat-eater, compared to only 1/6 of an acre of land to produce food for a vegan. According to the U.N., livestock production accounts for 70 percent of all agricultural land and 30 percent of the land surface of the planet. The aforementioned U.N. report states that the “[e]xpansion of livestock production is a key factor in deforestation, especially in Latin America, where the greatest amount of deforestation is occurring—70 percent of previous forested land in the Amazon is occupied by pastures, and feedcrops cover a large part of the remainder.”

Approximately 55 square feet of tropical rain forests may be razed to produce just one quarter-pound hamburger. Greenpeace has criticized KFC and other companies that sell chicken for growing feed in the Amazon. More than 2.9 million acres of the Amazon rain forest were destroyed in the 2004-2005 crop season in order to grow food for chickens and other farmed animals. Deforestation is a problem in the U.S. too. More than 260 million acres of U.S. forests have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals. Around 1.4 billion people could be fed with the grain and soybeans fed to U.S. cattle alone.

Instead of funneling food through farmed animals, we could feed it directly to hungry, malnourished people. It would take just 40 million tons of food to eliminate the most extreme cases of world hunger, yet farmed animals in Western countries are fed 540 million tons of food every year. Cows, pigs, chickens, and other farmed animals eat more than 70 percent of the corn, wheat, and other grains grown in the U.S. The world’s cattle alone consume an amount of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people—more than the entire human population.

According to the WorldWatch Institute, “[M]eat consumption is an inefficient use of grain—the grain is used more efficiently when consumed by humans. Continued growth in meat output is dependent on feeding grain to animals, creating competition for grain between affluent meat-eaters and the world’s poor.”

It takes about 700 calories worth of feed to produce just one 100-calorie piece of beef.

A 2002 E Magazine article estimated that the feed cost of an 8-ounce steak would fill 45 to 50 bowls with cooked cereal grains.

Ending the Energy Crisis One Bite at a Time

And when you think about all the energy-intensive stages that are required to get animals from the farm to the supermarket, you’ll understand why going vegetarian makes sense. More than one-third of all fossil fuels produced in the U.S. are used to raise animals for food. Each stage of meat, egg, and dairy production involves heavy pollution, generates greenhouse gases, and requires massive amounts of energy:

1. Grow massive amounts of grains and soybeans (including tilling, irrigation, crop dusters, and so on) for feed

2. Transport the grain and soybeans—in gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing 18-wheelers—

to feed manufacturers

3. Operate the feed mills

4. Transport the feed to the factory farms

5. Operate the factory farms

6. Truck the animals many miles to slaughter

7. Operate the slaughterhouses

8. Transport the meat (in refrigerated trucks) to processing plants

9. Operate the meat-processing plants

10. Transport the meat to grocery stores

11. Keep the meat refrigerated or frozen in the stores until it’s sold

While some of these stages are needed for plant foods, a vegan diet eliminates the need for factory farms, slaughterhouses, and multiple tractor-trailer trips. The giant trawlers used by the fishing industry also require a lot of fossil fuels. Fish farms aren’t any better. In fact, they’re worse—farmed fish eat fish caught by commercial trawlers. It takes about 4 pounds of wild-caught fish to produce just 1 pound of farmed fish.

Overall, it takes 11 times as much fossil fuel to produce a gram of animal protein as it does to produce a gram of plant protein.

Eating to Save the Earth

Nothing good comes from meat production. Tasty and nutritious mock meats, nondairy milks, and egg alternatives can be produced without any animals. By going vegan, you can help save the Earth and all its inhabitants; each vegetarian saves more than 100 animals every year. For more information (and a free copy of PETA’s “Vegetarian Starter Kit”), see the "Meat and the Environment" section of GoVeg.com.