Study Confirms If You Call Yourself an Environmentalist, You Need to be Vegan
A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but land use and water use. It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car.
ESTELLE RAYBURN: ‘According to a recent study published in the journal Science, staying away from meat and dairy products is the single most effective way to help the planet. Scientists arrived at this conclusion after an analysis of how farming affects the Earth revealed some eye-opening statistics. According to the research, if people stopped consuming meat and dairy products, we could reduce global farmland use by over 75 percent — that’s an area that could fit all of the U.S., China, the European Union, AND Australia — while still feeding the world’s growing population successfully.
The analysis also uncovered that meat and dairy provide just 18 percent of the calories and 37 percent of the protein consumed globally, yet they take up a whopping 83 percent of the world’s total farmland and account for 60 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted in the agriculture sector. Moreover, growing any type of vegetable or cereal takes far less land and is far more sustainable than producing even the lowest impact meat and dairy, according to the study… As University of Oxford researcher and study leader Joseph Poore reportedly put it, “Converting grass into [meat] is like converting coal to energy. It comes with an immense cost in emissions”…
Poore also described the tremendous good ditching meat and dairy can do beyond just cutting greenhouse gas emissions: “A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use.” He went on, “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” as these actions merely decrease greenhouse gas emissions without helping out significantly in the other areas. Not to mention that going vegan can also help reverse the current mass extinction of wildlife, which is largely driven by wild areas being taken over for livestock production’. SOURCE…
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