While most environmentalists recognize the havoc that animal agriculture wreaks on the planet, they fail to recognize that the only viable solution is to embrace a vegetarian diet. In the United States alone, 72 million animals are killed for food each day. These animals suffer miserably, of course, but they also require staggering amounts of grain, beans, and water and produce billions of gallons of what is basically toxic waste. Consider this:
Pollution
The meat industry causes more water pollution in the United States than all other industries combined because the animals raised for food in the U.S. produce 130 times more excrement than the human population. Every year, factory farms dump 220 billion gallons of animal waste onto farmland and into our waterways.
Land
Twenty times more land is required to feed a meat-eater than to feed a pure vegetarian.
Water
Raising animals for food consumes more than half of all the water used in the United States. It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat, but only 25 gallons to produce a pound of wheat.
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"The water that goes into a 1,000-pound steer would float a destroyer." -Newsweek
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Deforestation
The primary cause for deforestation in America is not urban development. For each acre of American forest that is cleared to make room for parking lots, roads, houses, and shopping malls, 7 acres of forest are converted into land for grazing livestock and/or growing livestock feed. Two-thirds of the rain forests of Central America have been cleared, in part to raise cattle whose meat is exported to profit the U.S. food industry.
Energy
Raising animals for food requires more than one-third of all raw materials and fossil fuels used in the United States.
Animals
You can't be concerned about our environment without caring about our fellow inhabitants, the animals. They're made of flesh and blood, have complex social and psychological lives, and feel pain just as humans do. More than 25 billion are killed by the meat industry each year, and they're killed in ways that would horrify any compassionate person.
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed." -Mohandas K. Gandhi quoted in E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful.
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