Boycotting consumption of animal products can make a huge difference, but everytime I suggest it in an answer, I seem to get many "thumbs down." Do you not realize what a vegan diet can do for the environment or is just too much trouble for you?
http://www.goveg.com/environment.asp|||it's an inconvenient truth. when people are presented with facts showing the devastating global effects animal farming has, they either deny it, say we have to focus on other "green"-friendly tasks, or they get very defensive.
scientists will recommend switching to energy-efficient lightbulbs and driving hybrid vehicles, but they won't mention vegetarianism or veganism. it is not the accepted lifestyle in our nation. veggies are considered radical, even extreme and are often accused of caring only about the animals and not the people. those very scientists who conducted research are most likely meat-eaters themselves! and those who want to mention the benefits of a veggie diet are probably too afraid to mention it because they'll probably get sued by the beef industries! (just think oprah)
if more people would be more open-minded and not be so quick to assume that all vegans are sickly, i think we would be well on our way to restoring our planet's vitality. until that day comes, then this planet will slowly continue its deteriorating cycle.|||first off it would cut the profits of the huge factory farm companies ,the govt won`t allow this .and second it would take land away from the bio fuels program .the govt won`t allow this .big corporations run the usa and won`t allow this.point in case.|||I don't think all-out veganism is part and parcel of being an environmentalist. I'm happy to note, though, that I gave up beef about six years ago, largely (though not entirely) for environmental reasons|||A vegan most certainly makes a large difference, on a personal level, towards the environment. The amount of fuel required to grow corn is a lot less than the amount of fuel required to feed cows corn. By fuel I mean resources like water, chemicals, waste and such. By eating vegan one is reducing the steps to the table. This is good. Ignore the thumbs down. Who cares what some pud on YA clicks. Your point about vegans is well taken.|||Because being green isn't a black and white issue. Most people, while they aren't opposed to small changes for the good of the planet, will look at you sideways if you suggest they change something that has been central to their way of life for their whole life.
This is why people from cities are quicker to give up driving, it's not as integrally ingrained into the fabric of their being. Humans, by nature, fear change. And when you have a society and a media that is as invasive as ours is, reminding everyone of what is "normal", most people chose to go with the flow.
People brush of the idea of vegetarianism and veganism, because there is a risk to it. It makes you stand out from the dominant culture, which is beat into us from birth. People are much quicker to do something easy, like change a light bulb, or something that is culturally acceptable like recycling, but we have a long way to go before going veg becomes mainstream.|||My reasons for going vegan had nothing to do with the environment. After reading this article I realized the overwhelming harm to our planet all this intensive farming is causing. Can you read this and not feel the same?
It is a Rolling Stone article - and although they aren't known as science experts, they are not a biased vegan group either.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/sto鈥?/a>
*It is incorrect to say a vegan diet is unhealthy. I recently had blood work done and my calcium, protein and every other level they check for is all 'normal' and my cholesterol is low with a good ratio. It is not a science to eat a plant based diet just read up on it and give it a try - it is not as hard as you might think.|||First, I am not an environmentalist, I am a conservationist. Secondly, vegan diets are boring, I like meat.|||clearly, a diet that includes meat, and animal products is more destructive to the environment.
also, we've evolved to be omnivores.
but, i'm really sorry, i like a steak.
i don't berate those who are vegetarian.
i'm not at all sure that, for myself, i'd have a good vegetarian diet.
cooking is not my favorite activity.
i do know that meat, vegetables, and starch seem to produce an acceptable diet.
when a vegetarian diet comes along that is as nutritious, and easy, i'll be happy to participate.
when meat becomes so expensive that it's worth my time to research how to become a vegetarian, i'll consider it.
as to all the "thumbs down" you must know how many idiots there are here.
do you really let it bother you?
i think i've read some of your other responses, which are generally very good, i'd think you'd be past that stage.|||I'm not opposed to anyone adopting a vegan diet. As the saying goes, "Some of my best friends...."
I do disagree that this is anything but a minor difference to the environment. I place as much faith in "goveg.com" as I do in "junkscience.com". Both are clearly operating from bias, rather than objectivity. They may have "facts" but the spin machine is in full operation.
We need to maintain a focus on the really important things, cars, electric power plants, heating, cooling, and lighting.
The world is full of people who have THE ANSWER. I trust scientists, who, while not perfect, I believe are more objective. Going vegan is not a priority in their plan to reduce global warming:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/worl鈥?/a>
http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM040507.pdf
Most acknowledge that farming practices could use some work, though. For example, grazing beef (which I don't eat, by the way) on open ground is far less of a problem than large feedlots.
Bottom line. Be vegan. Try to convince others. Great. But stop the aggrieved accusations and strawman arguments. You dissed Patrick, from what I've seen lately from you it's pots and kettles.|||There is no problem with a vegan diet as long as you do it correctly. You still need a form of protein which comes mainly from animals. We need everything in the right form. I have a hard time thinking that enviromentally educated people oppose it. Although you need to realize that there are things in our world that need to go on as they have. Animals are important food sources for many people in the world that do not have access to vegan protein sources. There are many vegans that take it to the extreme. One case that I can think of was a vegan couple that starved their child to death because the milk for the baby came from an animal. they only gave him soy milk and apple juice which did not provide the correct nutrients for him to grow as he should of. The baby was only 6 weeks old at the time of his death. there are extremists that make every kind of group look bad.
Animals do not have the big effect on "global warming" that the enviromentalists think they do. We need them and they need us. That is how the world works. The cyclr of life on our planet requires all the creatures that we have here.|||You have a point there.. not a huge point, but a point nevertheless. Raising animals do create a lot of environmental pollution.. all the manure and the methane as well as flies.. plus there's that mad cow disease..
I decided never to eat beef again after I learned how they handle the meat.|||ya know, i used to be all for vegan diets. i have been a vegetarian for years, never went vegan-too poor. anyway, as a college student i eat on the go. i often dont eat healthy and i recently started experiencing fatigue and weakness. i started taking vitamins and eventually had to start eating meat due to anemia (lack of iron in blood, mine is genetic). anyway, after being sick of feeling like poop all the time i decided to create my own diet. i call it the 'monkey diet'. ha. after taking an evolution class i learned all about the diets of our ape-like ancestors and realized that our bodies are adapted to eat certain things. we digest some foods better while others (like dairy and meats) are harder for our bodies to digest. so i try to eat lots of nuts, raw veggies, fruits, seeds and few whole grains here and there. every few weeks i eat meat. i have never had more energy or felt better AND my diet is good for the environment.
asking people to completely eliminate a food from their diet is likely to send them screaming (ie "Crazy vegans, im too manly to not eat meat! grrrr") but informing them of the health benefits of reducing intake of meats for example is likely to get more converts and thus, be overall more beneficial for the environment.
ps- i was told all humans eventually develop lactose intolerance. but it was SOOOO hard for me to give up cheese.|||I am not opposed to YOUR adopting a vegan diet - in fact, I'm grateful. I am, however, opposed to self-righteous, pompous individuals that think the answers that fit for them "should" be universally adopted. To answer your other two main questions, yes, a vegan diet would be too much trouble for me, and I don't think any one person can truly grasp all of the socio-environmental implications and ramifications of any life-style choice you can name.|||I'm not opposed to a vegan diet - I applaud people who can manage it. The problem is that as omnivores it's difficult for humans to get sufficient nutrients from a vegan diet. Certainly not impossible, it just takes a significant effort. If you're willing to make that effort, then good for you.
Unfortunately I personally don't have a taste for many vegetables, so it's not practical for me to adopt a vegan diet. However, it's a good way to reduce your environmental impact, so I applaud those who are willing to make the effort.|||I am not totally vegatarian or vegan, but it is extremely rare for me to eat beef....and on those extremely rare occasions, the beef has to be organic. I never touch pork anymore either. I have alway been against eating veal or lamb, just on general principal. I will eat wild salmon, free range chicken and turkey, and white fish. Occasionally I will eat organic eggs, and organic raw cheese and organic milk. *sm*|||I think it is a very good point but I must admit I would rather make many other sacrifices before totally giving up meat, dairy products and fish. These are not the trappings of modern civilisation, man evolved eating them. Supposedly, just from a health perspective, here in the UK, we are being bombarded with the message "eat more fruit and vegetables". A good message for the environment too.|||First, I am NOT an environmentalist...God forbid anyone should think that I am!
We (my husband %26amp; I) do however firmly believe in living as earth friendly a life as possible. Hubby works on the commercial wind turbines...a very green energy.
We also live on a farm, where I raise (gasp!) meat goats, and meat rabbits. We are by the way, your "average" white Americans, living in Idaho, and hubby is a strapping 6'3" man, I'm only 5'2".
I picked goats and rabbits, because they are MUCH more eath friendly, in terms of meat production. Both goats and rabbits can produce more meat, on less food, in a faster time than cattle.
I also milk a couple of dairy does to provide dairy products for our family. I do NOT take the babies away. I share the milk the doe (goat) produces. Her babies remain with her for the first 6 months of their life. Just to let you know most people wean baby goats at 8-12 weeks of age. I have found this to be too stressful for the babies, so leave them with their mothers. The mothers have usually weaned them all by the time they are 5 months old.
I also do not breed my rabbits during the hottest part of the summer, when it would be most stressful for them. Their cages are 3 to 4 times larger than is "reccomended" by commercial rabbit breeders. Right now their cages are sitting in the shade of a tree, on the lawn, where they can also eat the grass. Yes my rabbits ARE raised in cages. We have foxes, feral dogs, skunks and raccoons....all of these predators can cause major loss to small stock like rabbits, so I keep them as safe as possible.
I care deeply about all of my animals, and know the personality of each one. I also do not ship my animals. Customers come right here to my farm, and butcher under my watchful eye.
Yes, my husband and I butcher our own animals, and consume their flesh. No hormones, no antiboiotics, no shipping stress, lived happy lives with their herd or group, until just minutes before death....the meat we consume has been treated as humanely as possible.
Our farm is a permaculture. This is a way of farming that many vegans would like to ignore, yet it is the kindest method of farming for the earth.
Our rabbits and goats produce manure. The manure is spread on the feilds to fertilize the crops, and garden area. No chemicals, no pesticides (all oil based petrolium products) go on our feilds...just the "real" stuff.
We grow alfalfa to feed the animals. We grow rape seed to produce oil, to make biofuel to power the trucks and tractors for harvesting crops. The squeezings from the rape seed is fed to the goats, since it's very healthy.
If we switched over to a vegan life, the animals would all be sold off. Then we wouldn't have any manure to put on the feilds. So we would go to the Co-Op and buy some petrolium based chemicals to spread on the feild. Eventually the chemicals are going to filter down into the ground water (as they have done all over the Snake River basin) and make the water toxic, so we would have to buy our drinking and cooking water in plastic jugs, instead of running the tap.
The chemicals based fertilizers actually make the plants more suceptable to insect attacks, so we would have to have arial spraying (sprayed by crop duster airplane) of our crops. The chickens would also of course be gone, so they wouldn't be helping to keep insects down naturally.
Now that the crops are sprayed with insecticides I can no longer go outside, nor touch them, since it would set my asthma off big time.
Harvest of course would be done by machine. Instead of people coming to my farm, my crops would now be shipped out by truck. In my area of Idaho, I could grow potatoes, wheat or sugar beets for a food crop. The sugar beets are shipped to California, to sugar plants, since all the local ones shut down. The wheat is shipped to local mills, made into flour, and shipped all over the U.S. (pentalton mills). The potatoes grown in just my county provide 70% of the potatoes eaten in the U.S., and 30% of the potatoes eaten worldwide, so of course they would be shipped EVERYWHERE. Suddenly the crops my farm is producing are using a LOT more petrolium to grow, and ship!!
There are too many potatoes being grown in Idaho....last year they dumped 6 million pounds of them (no they did not go to food banks, nor were they distributed to the poor, this would have cost the farmers money for shipping) to keep the price of potatoes up.
Wheat is a break even crop (meaning no money was earned) if the farmer is lucky. Wheat is heavly subsidized by the Government.
Sugar beats do not make much money, but they do make some....although I'm not certain it's good to produce more sugar for the American diet.....
The squeezings from the rape seed would now lay rotting in a stinking pile, useless to all, since there are no more animals to eat it.
My own private garden would now be producing the same bland, tasteless food that I can buy in the grocery store. I'd also be having many more insect problems since the chickens are no longer here to eat the grasshoppers, so someone would have to spray more chemicals on my garden for me, I cannot do it, because of my asthma.
Weeds would also very suddenly become a big deal here. Before the goats would rush to eat all the weeds, but now they are gone. That means the use of a lot more Round-up, which will eventually filter into our ground water.
I would also be missing the interaction of talking to customers from all over the world. Most of my customers are students at the local University. With goat meat being the most eaten meat in the world, my customers are VERY diverse. It's like National Geographic comes to visit my farm. All of that would be gone now though.
The songbirds would also be much fewer in number on my farm, since I would no longer have a friendly environment for them. The living insects would all be toxic from the poisons we'd be spraying. There would be no more water in water troughs for them to get drinks. The weed seeds some of the songbirds love would all be sprayed with poison too. Butterflies, and songbirds would suffer in my suddenly sterile, and actually toxic farm.
Vegans need to realize that it take a tremendous amount of water to grow crops. Cattle here in the west are turned out to graze on rangeland....land which is watered entirely by nature. The cattle graze on what nature is growing. Cattle are taking the place of the Buffalo which use to roam the West. It's not until these cattle are rounded up and sent to feed lots to be fattend that they become a serrious problem to the environment. If customers would DEMAND more grass fed beef, and stop supporting the grain (corn) overfed beef industry, everything would be much healthier.
There would be much less chance of getting Ecoli from the beef, the fat that the cattle did have would actually be a healthy kind, and not artery clogging.
Best of all, we as a Nation would stop supporting the Government subsidized corn industry. That means our taxes might actually go down!
If everyone suddenly switched to being a vegan, the amount of perto chemical fertilizers and pesticides that would be dumped on our land, water and air would be simply staggering.
With no animal manure, the chemicals would be the only way to grow the crops for the masses...the ONLY way!!
Eventually however those petrolium based products ALWAYS leave the ground sterile, and too full of salt to grow ANYTHING. It would take 10 or 20 years, but the Dust Bowl that would happen would be STAGGERING. People in the U.S. would actually be starving to death. The U.S. does not know famine...many of our homeless people are fat! Forget the U.S. being able to help feed other countries...we wouldn't even be able to feed ourselves. People would die by the millions. Songbird and other wildlife populations (including fish) would have dropped sharply. Insect and rodent populations would have adapted to the toxins, since they breed so quickly, and would have risen sharply. Along with the famine, we would have rodent and insect spread disease.
No matter what, this is not a problem that can easily be solved. The human population has already overgrown the earth. There are just plain too many people on earth.
I do not have a problem with people being vegans...but I hope they realize what it would actually mean to the world if all domestic animals were eliminated from farms. Life/nature is a circle. Without those domestic animals, the circle is suddenly broken. The chemical fill in messure for the animals is NOT healthy.
Vegans today are eating those healthy vegtable, thanks to the livestock. Without the livestock, our world becomes toxic.
Please suport the small farmer, especially those who farm with permaculture methods.
~Garnet
Homesteading/Farming over 20 years|||I cut beef,because of Family farming. I guess Environment has something to do with it as well, but I wouldn't go Vegan. I agree that our current method of farming does waste alot of fuel and pollutes alot. THe number one polluter in California are cows. It's hard to get a balance diet while being Vegan. The Vegan's I know tell me they have to becareful what they eat, because it's hard to get a particular amino acid on a pure vegetable diet. THey never told me how they get that particular Amino acid though. I'm not for forcing people to go veg, especially since I won't but I like to see a huge increase in meat prices. We Americans consume to much meat, and forcing us to eat less meat would be good for us.
I hang around he food section like, you, but you probably do not notice, that Peta comes around and harass the rest of us there. SOme people are a little touchy because of that. Especially since the food section is meant for the exchange of recipes, not to be preached on the morality of meat. That should be more of a political discussion though.|||Every vegan I know is sickly. They don't seem to get enough nutrition. Perhaps buying only local organic could be an option, but only for the rich. For the less fortunate, hunting remains a viable eco-friendly option as well. Cutting back on the types of meat you eat is also beneficial. The beef industry levels rain forest for grazing land and emits megatons of CH4, a far more potent greenhouse gas than co2.
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thats wonderful, i just said all the vegans I know are, (which is two) and of course they claim they are not sickly. It is possible to live healthy on a vegan diet, but you really have to focus on it and watch what you eat. So many things contain animal products that it is often difficult to find enough nutrition at a local supermarket.|||That site is a little extreme. There aren't really farms that are cutting down trees in the rain forest. Also it is complaining about the waste from the animals, but most of the waste is used as fertilizer for the crops, and helps the topsoil instead of ruining it like your article tries to convince you people. Most farmers have their own wells which are replenished by the rain water, and therefor they are not depleting anyone's water supply. Also plants are supposed to be good for the environment so the plants that are grown to feed the animals serve the purpose of diminishing the CO2 in the environment. So basically your whole argument is based on getting people emotional and causing people not to think which is really what the environmental movement is all about anyway.|||I couldn't go vegetarian nevermind vegan! I like the taste of meat too much. I'm guessing the other "environmentalists" here feel the same way I do.|||Being vegan is good for the environment. That being said, I don't think it should be a priority right now. Neither do most folks. That is probably why you get so many thumbs down for suggesting it. There are so many more productive ways that people can reduce their carbon footprint. The most important point is that you will alienate the majority of people who would normally support making changes to save the environment, but if you ask them to do something radical like asking everyone to be vegan, would probably not listen to the message so many scientists are trying to get to the masses of people. So it would hurt the cause more than help. I personally like meat far too much to give it up. I got some wonderful pork ribs on my plate right now. . To each his own. Bon appetite!|||I defianlty agree that it is not sustainable to eat/use animal products at the rate we do. I also realize that industrialized farming of anything is terrible for the environment and society. I believe the solution is not simply veganism though, but a localism of food supplies and a better ways of farming including Permaculture. Livestock can be an indispensible part of Permaculture and still be sustainable. However, consumption of animal products per person has to drop tremendously for it to be sustainable. I believe the best bet for people who care about the environment, animal welfare, and their communities should adobt a diet that contains mostly foods from local family farms. Eat animal products that you know the history of (organic, raised in humane conditions) and eat them in moderation.|||I think it's great if you can fill your needs as a vegan and I would love to do that too. However, these are some reasons that stop me from doing that:
1. I have two kids and they are not particularly fond of vegetables. It can sometimes be tricky to find varying food that suits their needs even with meat and fish as ingredients.
2. When eating completely vegetarian food I never feel satisfied. No matter how much I eat it feels like I can't fill my stomach. (I am probably missing something important but don't know what it is.)
3. I don't know how to cook even one vegetarian meal, how could I "go vegetarian"?
I would like to rely more on vegetarian food though, but unfortunately I don't know how or where to start. If I post a question in the vegetarian section, maybe you can help me and others?|||Meat tastes good, bacon tastes good. I could never cut out meat completely. I have cut down on meat consumption, but sometimes I get hungry for some good old fashioned animal protein/fat. My lil' brother won't eat meat and he is 11 lbs. under weight. at 17 yrs.|||Because meat is good for you.
Meat production is not harmful to the environment--to any degree greater than growing vegetables is anyway.
That being said, I'm not opposed to YOU adopting a vegan diet.
I would adopt a vegan diet for personal health reasons if I thought that was in my best interest, but not because I think it might be less harmful to the environment or because I have a problem with killing animals for food.
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