Ecology:

"We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet - for the sake of hamburgers." - Peter Singer

Alan Durning, a researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental think tank based in Washington, DC, has calculated that 1 pound of steak from steers raised in a feedlot costs five pounds of grain, 2500 gallons of water, the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline, and about 35 lbs of eroded topsoil. More than 1/3 of North America is taken up with grazing, more than 1/2 of US croplands are planted with livestock feed, and more than 1/2 of all water consumed in the United States goes to livestock.(1)

• Newsweek created a fantastic visual when they described the amount of water used on animal farms: "The water that goes into a 1000 pound steer would float a destroyer."
• Statistics from the British Water Authorities Association show that there were more than 3,500 incidents of water pollution from farms in one year.(2)
• Many have treated the Ogallala (aquifer extended from South Dakota to Texas) as if they were draining the last keg at a fraternity party: most of Ogallala will be lost to farmers within 40 years, Says Erik Marus, author of Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating.
• Livestock production uses more than half of all water used in the US.(3) -It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat; 2500 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat.(4)
• Regular hamburger meat would cost $35 per pound if water used by the meat industry wasn't subsidized by the US taxpayer. It would cost $89 for a pound of protein from beefsteak, if water was not subsidized.(5)

Corn grown in Mexico produces 83 calories of food for each calorie of fossil fuel energy input (agriculture in developed countries, however, relies on a much larger input of fossil fuel). The most energy-efficient form of food production in the United States (oats)produces 2.5 food calories per calorie of fossil fuel energy input. Animal production, however, costs more energy than it yields: range-land beef (the most efficient in terms of meat production) costs more than 3 calories of fossil fuel for every 1 food calorie it yields. While, worst still, feedlot beef (the most inefficient in terms of meat production) costs 33 fuel calories for every food calorie it yields.(6)

• Growing crops is generally at least 5 times more energy-efficient than grazing cattle, about 20 times more energy-efficient than producing chickens, and more than 50 times as energy-efficient as feedlot cattle production.(7)
• "Petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides are the main reason that the earth’s eroding soils are still producing high yields. And on the most productive farmlands, diesel-powered machinery has taken over tilling, plowing, and even harvesting. It takes about 140 gallons of oil equivalent to raise just one acre of corn” - David Pimentel (Cornell University Professor)(8)
• In his book “Food, Energy, and Society”, Pimentel found that a year’s worth of food for one person in the US requires 400 gallons of oil equivalents.(9)
• The primary cause of the greenhouse effect is the carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels (followed, of course by deforestation):



• 50 times more fossil fuels are needed to produce a meat-centered diet vs. a meat-free die.
• If every human ate a meat-centered die, the world's known oil reserves would only last 13 years. If every human being no longer ate meat, the worlds known oil reserves would last 260 years.
• 6.8 million barrels of oil are imported into the US daily.(10)

The desire to graze animals is a strong motivation for clearing forests. We cannot criticize financially poorer nations for the clear cutting of their rainforests when WE are voting with our dollar for the continuation of the practice through our purchase of meat.

• Over the past 25 years, nearly 1/2 of Central America's tropical rainforests have been destroyed, largely to provide beef to North America. Perhaps 90 percent of the plant and animal species on this planet live in the tropics, many of them still unrecorded by science. (11)
• Clearing the land causes erosion, the increased runoff leads to flooding, local inhabitants no longer have wood for fuel, and rainfall may be reduced.(12)

• forests store immense amounts of carbon - destroying a forest releases the carbon into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. Conversely, a new, growing forest absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locks it up as living matter.(13)
• 260 million acres of US forest has been cleared for crop-land to produce a meat-centered diet.
-200,000,000 lbs of meat is imported by the US annually from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama, while the average per capita meat consumption of these countries is less than that eaten by the average US house cat.(14)
• 55 sq.ft. of tropical rainforest consumed for every quarter pound hamburger.
• The current rate of species extinction due to destruction of tropical rainforests for meat grazing and other uses is 1,000 per year.(15)

• Topsoil levels on much of the earth’s farmland are currently in decline - being eroded at rates 16 to 300 times faster than it can regenerate.(16)
• 75%of US topsoil has been lost to date and of that 85% is directly related to raising livestock.(17)

• While fish do not eat from feedlots; fishing is not without its environmental hazards. Several once-abundant species of fish, such as the herring of Northern Europe, the California sardines, and the new England haddock,are now so scarce as to be, for commercial purposes, extinct.(18)
• Modern fishing fleets trawl the fishing grounds systematically with fine-gauge nets that catch everything in their way and the non target species - known in the industry as "trash" - may make up as much as half the catch (their bodies are thrown overboard).(19)
• Because trawling involves dragging a huge net along the previously undisturbed bottom of the ocean, it damages the fragile ecology of the seabed. It is also wasteful of fossil fuels, consuming more energy than it produces. There are, as well, bad consequences for humans too: small coastal villages that live by fishing are finding their traditional source of food and income drying up.(20)

• In the US, farm animals produce 2 billion tons of manure a year - about 10 times that of the human population - and 1/2 of it comes from factory-reared animals, where the waste does not return naturally to the land, because, as one pig farmer put it: "Until fertilizer gets more expensive than labour, the waste has very little value to me". So the manure that should restore the fertility of our soil ends up polluting our streams and rivers.(21)
• A tank at a pig unit burst, sending a quarter of a million liters of pig excrement into the River Perry and killing 110,000 fish. More than half of the prosecutions by water authorities for serious pollution of rivers are now against farmers. A modest 60,000 bird egg factory produces 82 tons of manure every week, and in the same period two thousand pigs will excrete 27 tons of manure and 32 tons of urine.(22)
• Dutch farms produce 94 million tons of manure a year, but only 50 million can safely be absorbed by the land. The excess, it has been calculated, would fill a freight train stretching 16,000 kilometres from Amsterdam to the farthest shores of Canada.(23)

"We are behaving like parasites, blindly consuming and ravaging our host with little thought for ourselves, our future, and the future of the planet" - Eric Marcus