Scientific Power of the Vegetarian Diet

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.

—Edgar D. Mitchell, astronaut who walked on the moon

and saw the earth from God’s POV.

 

My guides are not the first to suggest that the Earth is herself a living being. Our planet is composed of complex systems of living things gloriously interlaced in a fantastic tapestry (cue soundtrack from The Lion King…) and most people are deeply aware that the earth is a living organism. Some philosophers believe that the awe we all experience when confronting the vast glory of nature is indeed “God.” Things of late have not been going well (ßunderstatement) with sever weather: hurricanes, tornadoes, extreme droughts and flooding, the tragic and catastrophic symptoms of climate change. (My guides said the Earth will do what she must to protect herself.) Point it our most urgent call to action is to protect and preserve Earth and her ecosystems. The most effective means of effecting change is to adopt a plant based diet.

​

Here’s the harsh reality: the number one environmental threat to our planet is not the burning of fossil fuels, the accumulated nuclear waste stockpiles, much less overpopulation. Meat production is the largest and most pernicious source of environmental destruction on our planet. Read that sentence again.

​

Now, let’s look at facts that prove it:

 

“A reduction in beef and other meat consumption is the most potent single act you can take to halt the destruction of our environment and preserve our natural resources. Our choices do matter. What’s healthiest for each of us personally is also healthiest for the life support system of our precious, but wounded planet.”

—John Robbins, author, Diet for a New America,

and President, EarthSave Foundation

 

From One to Billions:

​

One cow consumes about twenty-seven pounds (twelve kg) of food a day. Daily water intake varies from three to sixty gallons (227 liters) per day depending on age, body size or weight and the temperature, but for most cows it is closer to sixty. (Double this for dairy cows.) This cow produces 3.5 gal. (13.2 liters) of urine each day and sixty-five pounds (29.5 kg) of manure—that’s twelve tons (908 kg) a year.

There are one and a half billion cows on earth.

​

One pig consumes five pounds (2.5 kg) of food every day and drinks three to six gallons (23 liters) of water a day. This pig excretes about thirteen pounds (6 kg) of manure a day.

​

There are more than one billion pigs on earth.

​

One sheep consumes about four pounds (1.8 kg) of food a day and consumes two gallons (7.5 liters) of water. This animal excretes four pounds of manure a day.

​

There are over a billion sheep on earth.

​

One chicken consumes one-quarter of a pound of food (.1 kg) and drinks a liter of water every day. Grouping these creatures into groups of 125, each group produces 15 tons (13607.8 l) of manure per year.

​

There are over twenty billion chickens on earth.

​

These animals create a humungous environmental disaster.

​

The disaster begins with the growing of the animals’ food, a process that consumes vast quantities of both land and water resources. It is estimated that eighty percent of the total agricultural land goes to support livestock. 3.4 billion hectares are used for grazing and one-third of the global arable land is used to grow feed crops, accounting for more than forty percent of world cereal production. The statistics are staggering.

​

Next, this plant food is transported to the animals, transportation that comes with a sky-high price tag in the form of fuel consumption. Third, the animals, raised on factory farms, often many hundreds of thousands of animals packed into a mercilessly small space, consume both food and fresh water, producing waste products. Finally, the animals have to be transported to the slaughterhouse, packaged, and transported again to the supermarket.

Anyone can see the problem. And this problem starts with waste.

 

“One friend reports, having a flash of understanding when he stood by a fence that separated grazed and ungraded portions of the same creek bed. One side was lush and verdant. The other side looked like the face of the moon.”

—Donald M. Peters, in the Arizona Republic

 

Mountains of Manure

​

According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, 1.5 billion cattle, nearly 1 billion pigs, 1.8 billion sheep and goats, and over twenty billion chickens are raised for food every year, and each one of these animals produces waste. Animal waste is the number one source of water pollution in the world; it is responsible for well over half of it. Read that sentence again!

​

Based on accepted manure rates per animal supplied by the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s livestock manure handling overview, the worldwide amount of wastes from cattle is...45 trillion pounds of manure per year, a number that begins to sound like the calculation of the distance between stars, rather than piles of cow manure.

​

Worldwide waste from pigs per year is...6 trillion pounds per year and rising fast with China’s insatiable demand for pork and pork products.

​

Worldwide waste from sheep and goats is another 6 trillion pounds per year.

​

Worldwide waste from chickens reaches 1.5 trillion pounds per year.

​

In the U.S. alone, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that around 500 million tons of manure are produced annually by operations that confine livestock and poultry.

​

A very small portion of these mountains of manure is used as fertilizer.

​

The rest? Pollution.

​

And you thought Mount Everest was big!

​

Factory farms, which go by the innocuous acronym “CAFO” (concentrated animal feeding operation), are environmental Death Stars, releasing incalculable destruction on our precious land, air, and water resources. There are many ways scientists and environmentalists have tried to convey the enormity of the problem arising from factory farms:

​

A 1,000-cow dairy farm produces approximately 120,000 pounds of waste per day. This is the functional equivalent of the amount of sanitary waste produced by a city of 20,000 people, but, as I will point out numerous times in this book, this waste skips the treatment plants and heads right into our waterways.

​

Or, even bigger: Animal waste in the U.S. is 130 times the amount of waste produced by the entire human population of the country.

​

Or, a 20,000-chicken factory produces about 2.4 million pounds of manure a year. Poultry factories are one of the fastest growing industries throughout Asia; the numbers of chickens needed to keep up with the world’s chicken and egg market is mind-boggling. None of their waste is treated either; like all animal wastes, it just piles up and up, until eventually it finds its way into the world’s water systems.

​

The worldwide trend is to increase the size of factory farms to answer the demand. For instance, hog farms in excess of 150,000 animals are becoming commonplace. During the past fifteen years, the number of hog farms in the United States dropped from 600,000 to 157,000, yet the number of hogs has increased dramatically. The same trend towards fewer livestock farms with larger numbers of animals and much larger waste disposal problems is seen throughout Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China.

​

Keep in mind, each factory farm is a breeding ground for potentially dangerous viruses. Think of it like this: in every body there are trillions of viruses, most all utterly benign, but by packing billions of animals in close quarters, we increase the risk of a creating another type of death star. Each of the twenty billion chickens and pigs acts as an incubator not just for antibiotic-resistant bacteria but equally troubling bird flu viruses; each microscopic organism multiplies and evolves until somewhere, someday, a deadly, contagious virus will leap from chickens to people or from pigs to people and spread like wildfire throughout the population. Aware of this threatening global catastrophe, China has developed hog farms that house over two hundred thousand creatures, and mechanized the feeding of these beings, so that no pig ever encounters a human caretaker. This is the future of meat production. We have taken living beings, their bodies weary and battered, and turned them into machines. And worse?—we had to do it to save ourselves.

 

Where Does All the Waste Go?

​

Right into the world’s waterways, streams, lakes, rivers, and oceans. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the waste generated by hogs, chicken, and cattle has polluted over half of all water and waterways. Other scientists put the figure much higher; in one comprehensive survey factory farms caused up to seventy percent of all water quality problems identified in rivers and streams. These mountains of manure pose a much larger threat to our waterways than urban runoff and industrial waste combined and multiplied many times.

​

Pig farms reveal the scope of the problem. Manure and urine from pig farms go into large, foul-smelling lagoons, and even a modest amount of rain sends the sludge directly into our precious water tables and waterways, spilling into streams and heading for the ocean. Add to this picture the increased severity of storms due to climate change, and the waterways surrounding pig farms have become mega-sewers rushing into our oceans.

​

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of this water pollution shows up in the world’s groundwater. Every factory farm contaminates nearby groundwater and the problem is getting worse. A New York Times investigation of water pollution in our country recently reported this problem is now widespread in all fifty states. Even areas known for their clean water are starting to show problems directly related to factory farm pollution.

​

The high-polluting nitrogen and phosphorus runoff reaching public drinking supply watersheds are bad enough, but this runoff is laced with heavy metals as well. In addition to pesticides, hormones, and other chemicals; heavy metals, like cadmium, arsenic, copper, and zinc are found in animal feed, and are released in manure. Once in the environment, heavy metals are difficult to impossible to get rid of; they do not decompose. Few plants will grow there and these pollutants have a calamitous effect on fish and wildlife reproduction as well. This problem is acute, especially for rice. Rice is one of the few plants that draw metals up from the soil and recently scientists have discovered much of the world’s precious rice is chock full of metals, the worst kind, including lead. In many parts of the world, rice has become a health hazard. The soil damage is permanent.

​

It is a growing international problem. Scientists investigating this pollution found that groundwater in every one of the Chinese provinces of Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, and Shandong was unfit for drinking due to livestock wastes. In Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and other South and Central American countries as well as the United States more than half of groundwater sampled contained nitrate at levels well above the safe limit. Anywhere there are factory farms, water pollution shows up and chronic diseases follow. Nearly everywhere scientists look they find factory farm pollution infiltrating the world’s precious freshwater lakes, rivers, and groundwater.

​

This nitrogen pollution is also the primary source of damage to coastal waters all over the world, triggering harmful algae blooms (HAB) which choke aquatic life, contaminate drinking water and, in some cases, release algal toxins that can cause gastroenteritis, other ailments, and even death. (Again, stomach flu anyone?) These oxygen-depleted dead zones, commonly known as “red or brown tides,” appear more frequently, last longer and cover an ever-widening area. One such zone in the Gulf of Mexico now covers a 20,000 square-kilometer section of water, water so polluted nothing lives in it anymore. Fisheries the world over are destroyed. Indeed, the price tag for HABs are astronomical: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) conservatively estimated that HABs cost the United States one billion dollars a year and this is just for our ocean fisheries. Similar costs accrue from fresh water sources around the world as well: freshwater algal blooms, occurring where fresh water and meat production mix, are becoming ever more costly as well.

 

Five tons of poop apiece is just the residue of eating 100 million cattle, 103 million hogs, 300 million turkeys, and nearly nine billion chickens per year, virtually all of whom live and die in conditions that would be prosecutable cruelty if inflicted on a cat, a dog, a horse, or a parrot. Whether you care about animals or just about poop, appropriate action begins with giving up meat.

—Merritt Clifton, animal rights activist and writer.