how does eating less meat save the environment?

L

Lynne Lovegood

New member
i'm currently 14 and i want to save the planet! i just realized that i want to live in this world for longer, and if i don't save the planet from global warming, i wouldn't be able to have children D: or even if i have children, my children would suffer...

anyway, i'm now going to be greener than ever and i'm just wondering, how does eating less meat affect the environment?
 
No. The meat you consume is actually from animals bred excessively to make food. They don't go into the wild and kill animals in their habitats or anything. So I mean in some aspects yeah it might help.. but those aspects are small so probably not.

If you want to go green focus more on using other methods of energy instead of burning fuels.
 
With all the answers, some of which nibbled around the edge, I'm surprised that nobody mentioned Starling, the physiologist best known for his law of the heart. Starling figured that, for every step up the food pyramid, there is about a 90% loss of energy. For example, 1000 lb of grass can support 100 lb of grasshoppers. They, in turn, can support 10 lb of insect-eating birds, which are enough to feed 1 lb of hawk.

Looked at it another way, a certain acreage can grow wheat for you but it would take about 10 times as much to grow enough to make the equivalent amount of an animal protein for you to eat. Therefore, vegans generally require 1/10 the land that pure carnivores do.

Don't worry about getting your protein from plants. If you mix both grains and legumes, you will get the amino acids you need.
 
This is a very good question, and I will do my best to give you some good arguements and compelling reasons.

1. It takes 2500 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. This figure takes into account the water used to grow the cattle feed, the water directly consumed by the cattle, and the water necessary for processing the cattle into meat for our tables. In contrast, it takes only 25 gallons of water to produce one pound of wheat.

2. Many restaurants, such as McDonald's, buy most, if not all, of their beef from South American suppliers. For each pound of beef that makes it into a hamburger or steak, over 200 square feet of rain forest was destroyed. Since these massive herds of cattle graze the land to death,more and more rain forest must be cut down to provide them with food. Overgrazing by cattle strips all vegetation from the soil, which leaves the land barren. When it rains, there is nothing to hold the topsoil (the layer that is rich enough to grow grass) in place, and it washes away. Once all the topsoil is eroded, nothing will grow. And that topsoil must go somewhere, right? It does. It goes into the waterways, where it chokes out native fishes.
Even in the US, livestock farming is responsible for 85% of all topsoil erosion.

3.While cattle DO produce a lot of methane, which is one of the so called "greenhouse gasses", farmers burn a lot of fossil fuels heating and cooling the enormous structures that factory cattle are raised in. It also takes a lot of fossil fuels to produce the electricity that runs the lights 20 hours a day on egg farms (so the hens will lay mass amounts of eggs), not to mention the heating and cooling of their massive egg barns.

4. Because cattle, chickens, and pigs raised on factory farms are kept so tightly crammed together, farmers feed them over 15 million pounds of antibiotics per year, just so that they don' get sick. Herbicides, chemical fertilizers and pesticides are used in massive amounts to grow the food the animals eat, and all of these things make their way into the soil, water and air as pollution.

5. A person following a vegetarian diet needs less than 1/2 acre to produce all of his food for one year. A person who regularly eats meat needs over 2 acres of land to produce all of his food for a year.

If you need more reasons or just want to research this topic further, there are any number of good books at your local library, and scientific papers that can be found online. Please be careful when accepting a statistic as fact from any source that may be biased, though. It's easy to twist numbers into "facts" to support only one side of an arguement. Consider your source, and think with a critical mind before you make any decisions.

I hope this has helped enlighten you, and I wish you the best in trying to go "greener".
 
u can continue eating meat
the waste produced by the meat is bio degradable and can be easily degraded by natural process.
to keep your surroundings clean and our earth green, eat packed foodstuffs at a lesser amount or just avoid them as they are not good to health.

and pollution in environment does not affect personal life so much if vaccines and hygiene is maintained properly.

don't think more and enjoy your teenage!!!!
 
you shouldn't stop eating all meat because you still need some source of protein although you could cut down on certain meats like beef. Since cows are being reared intensively and in large numbers due to large demand, it means that more cows are farting and releasing carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere(weird but true), cows farting contributes a surprisingly large amount of the pollutions in the air.
 
Hi :)
I'm pretty sure it is because the resources used to produce the animals could be used to do so much more! Like the people above me said, people don't go out and hunt animals, they breed them. They are born to be eaten :( Anyway, those resources, or more so the land, could be used to produce crops and resources that could feed the hungry and go to better causes.

Peace :)
 
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