Eating meat is destroying the planet
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Posted on January 27, 2008
Filed Under Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Okay, that’s a sensational headline, but, unfortunately, there is great truth in the sensation. Rising meat consumption, our inordinate desire to eat meat products way beyond health needs, even beyond what is actually healthy, is contributing to a mode of cattle, pig and poultry production that is contributing a lion’s share to our global warming/climate change crisis, to our destruction of ecosystems around the planet, to the toxic pollution of water sources and soils.
Add to that the rapidly acclerating rate of meat consumption in the developing world, and this amounts to an ecological crisis that ought to be at the top of our list of very urgent issues that need to be addressed — now.
The problem? The growing industrial model of meat-production. For a good background piece on what that is, what it means for the planet and our health, check out this article in today’s NY Times: Rethinking the meat guzzler.
Besides this threat to the natural ecosystems that hold our living world together, I am appalled by the cavalier way in which we use living creatures in these horrific and appalling ways — creating life in environments of mind-numbing misery — for our eating pleasures, not our needs — for all those unhealthy hamburgers and chicken nuggets at fast food restaurants all across the country, as just one example.
If you have seen an industrial farm, you know what I mean.
There is something really alarming about the extent to which we have cut ourselves off from the relationships we have with other life forms, from sensitivity to our fellow creatures. I am not a vegetarian, though I am approaching that more and more and eat almost no red meat. Killing animals for our nutritional needs is one thing — all living beings feed on one another. But doing it with respect and within the balance of nature, without excess, that is something else and represents a very different attitude and approach to nature.
Raising animals in misery, fattening them in tiny prisons, and slaughtering them for our pleasure-eating — that, my friends, is also a moral and ethical issue, as much as protecting forests and oceans, slowing climate change, and reducing population growth.
We are what we eat, they say. We are also how we eat, and the character of the human is reflected in that ‘how’ as much as by anything we put in our bodies.
Besides, as this article shows, our meat-eating is destroying the planet, the very ecosystems needed for us to live at all.
Now ask the presidential and congressional candidates in farm states what they have to say about this. Ask them if they get money from the industrial farm industry. Ask them what they will do to address this crisis. See what they say.
Technorati Tags: industrial farming, agribusiness practices, industrial model of meat consumption, rethinking the meat guzzler
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5 Responses to “Eating meat is destroying the planet”
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Regarding these two sentences:
“Killing animals for our nutritional needs is one thing — all living beings feed on one another.”
“Raising animals in misery, fattening them in tiny prisons, and slaughtering them for our pleasure-eating — that, my friends, is also a moral and ethical issue, as much as protecting forests and oceans, slowing climate change, and reducing population growth.”
Though I agree with the gist of your post, I think the moral and ethical issues are more basic. Other living beings who feed on one another are biologically constructed that way. A wolf can’t decide to live on conifer needles instead of deer. Humans can live without eating other animals and therefore must choose whether or not to eat them. I think that is very much a moral and ethical issue.
I agree with you to a point. But I also know from my solidarity work when director of the Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico, the three decades addressing human rights issues and structural injustice in Latin America, that for many poor people of our world, their main or only source of protein is animal-based. Impoverished Chileans in the slums of Santiago raised rabbits for protein. In Nicargua, US economic sanctions and free trade agreemens destroyed efforts to create a domestice chicken industry for eggs and poultry among the poor of that country.
We in the affluent countries do not need to eat meat as we do, or at all. I agree with that. We and the planet would be healthier if we stopped eating beef especially.
Eating plant protein instead of animal protein will require a complete reorganization of agricultural production. We’re not there yet. Until we get there, minimizing our meat-eating, making sure that the meat we eat comes from humane and healthy farm practices, would make a big contribution.
Removing subsidies for industrial farming and livestock production while adding into the price we pay the cost of controlling waste and ecological damage is another way to reduce meat consumption by making it way too costly to buy and consume much of the stuff.
Margaret
I certainly don’t expect anyone in nonindustrial countries to starve to death rather than eat an animal, but that’s not what your original post was about, and encouraging poor countries to follow us down the path of treating animals as a commodity to be produced is not something I would support.
The US diet is in part a reflection of the US lifestyle of never having enough, and I would gladly support mandatory reductions in that lifestyle. For instance, I think we need a maximum wage every bit as much as a minimum one, but I don’t believe people are going to voluntarily solve the problems we’ve created.
There is a immesurable difference between a poor guy in Nicaragua raising a few rabbits for his family to eat and the industrialized factory farming habits of the USA.
We Americans can choose not to eat meat because we do not need it to survive. Some nations to not have this choice, but we do.
If you’re not ready to become vegetarian/vegan, then at least look into local farms where you can take a personal role in choosing the food you consume.
Taking a step back, though, from the standard American diet, it’s easy to see the problems inherent in our system here.
The US diet is excessive, unhealthy, and ecologically damaging. No argument there. Actually, no argument at all. I agree that animals should not be treated as commodities, along with forests, rivers and oceans, and the basic ecosytems that support life. I also believe that there need to be laws and regulations that end exploitation of life and living systems for human profit and pleasure.
We are a long way from this and it will require a wholesale reorientation of our identities back to our roots WITHIN nature. Unfortunately, since this human species is now so out of balance and spiritually and ethically numb regarding the living webs of Nature of which we are a part, I believe things will get far worse in terms of our planetary crisis before we realize what we have done.