This is something that often escapes attention though recently has hit the mainstream media e.g yesterday's Times and it's footprint articles ( still had a mention of Climate Care the offset idiots ).

We are also talking about intensive farming ( as well as animal feeds which, as we know in the case of certain burger joints, the feed itself is produced through intensive soya farming devastating the rain forest.)

Do we have any comparisons with imported veggie and organic products e.g rice ( growing and transporting ) and say wild animal meat. e.g rabbit ( and deer ) a foodstuff in this country for well into 'prehistory'.

I wonder with the changing climate and of our 65 million acres ( in total and 'not ours' ) how much veggie food we can supply to feed the population. there are other factors e.g vitamin deficiencies found in anglo-asians used to a veggie diet from a place with a different sunshine quota ( yes we might get that here ) as well as studies ( China ) claiming that rising Co2 levels could hammer rice and wheat proteimn levels ( though growing faster perhaps ). we already have promlems due to intensive farming and our less nutrious non-organic grub
( plants not affixing minerals as well ).

The bourgoisie seem content though to import their organic grub. I am curious how some parts of our diet would be replaced in a strict vegan diet ( pharmaceutical additives )

We also have wastage through the global market system from catering with its added packaging, supermarkets ( inc big veggie supermarket chains in the case of the US ( eat as much as you like and stuff everybody else? ) ), etc. As for the insane ( ly rich ) GM lobby who have had some massive cockups ( eg. Argentina ) and wish to play roulette in our fields...

On another level would you ( wou;d I?) eat protein raised in a petri dish ( no idea of how much energy it would take to raise those steaks...)? The thought of those technofixes sends a shiver. I'd rather eat a politician, hmm..maybe not

I doubt, though, that we could survive with a capitalist marketplace with it's neccisity for food miles, takeaway shite, property in the hands of the few and expansion - but many don't get it. ( like climate fucking care ).

Anyway - take it easy - your burgers are the best

We need to do some more research taking in all the factors that we can. e.g. location, affects of climate on growing food, affects of pollution, acreage, getting the land back, human energy levels, ( and ethics ).

good luck with the campaign.

get a life you idiots. do you know how alienating this crap is to the ordinary person

Yes the environmental aspects of veganism often seem to be ignored. Though i have to say that one shipment of rice from say Asia for a meal, compared with a heck of a lot of shipments from Brazil for a great number of meals for say a pig, so that they can be fattened up to feed those people with such taste fetishes, just doesn't meaningfully compare. The animal industry is just more mouths to feed, more pressure on the environment and pushing us further toward ecological collapse.

What are people going to eat if not animals? Perhaps the food that is given to animals to fatten them up? Or something different grown on the same land.

It is a good thing to point this out to the flesh eating/vegetarian environmentalists especially who tend to get their heads out their arses for just a few minutes to speak utter shite.. like saying that 'vegans are responsible for kumquats from New Zealand'

My biggest moan is with people who think that animals should be wild and free, but have an irrational hatred for factory farmed animals (because they're not wild and free) and then eat them thus supporting the industry. When you have that sort of thinking, you know you're fucked.

Veganism isn't necessarily a 'solution' but it would have an ameliorative effect. That and there being a heck of a lot less humans on this planet.

> get a life you idiots. do you know how alienating this crap is to the ordinary person

Says a lot about the 'ordinary person' eh cj? bet they will thank you for basically calling them a bunch of ignorant wankers! Well done dickhead.

Whilst the European Parliament makes meaningless proposals regarding the harmful livestock industry, the European Vegetarian Union seems to have a better approach.

Following a debate about the problem of global hunger, it is declared that vegetarianism offers the possibility of considerably alleviating the growing threat.

Feeding large percentages of available human food crops to farm animals is unethical and represents a blatant lack of solidarity with the hungry.

The existing water shortage is aggravated by ever-larger quantities of water being used for animal husbandry, leaving less for crops.

The production of meat is uneconomical and can only be maintained with huge financial subsidies, leading to harsh social injustice.

The FAO report "Livestock's long shadow" states that livestock farming already generates almost a fifth of greenhouse gases, which are expected to raise the average temperature. Global warming leads to droughts, failing harvests and even more hardship for the poor.

The artificial extension of the food chain due to the transformation of grain into meat causes a huge waste of resources.

The European Vegetarian Union demands that:

--national and international decision makers stop subsidizing the production of meat and invest instead in sustainable aid programmes;

--meat packages carry warnings informing about the hazard which animal husbandry represents to the environment and food security;

--international organizations and agencies incorporate the benefits of a vegetarian lifestyle into future strategies for the fight against global hunger.

A healthy life without meat is possible, beneficial for the environment and allows a fairer distribution of natural riches.

Any policy pretending that the consumption of meat has to be the social norm is rejected.

------------------------------

The European Vegetarian Union ( http://www.euroveg.eu) invites you to endorse this statement by sending the name of the responsible person, name of the organisation and website and/or e-mail to  president@euroveg.eu until 9 May. On 10 May they want to forward the statement to the United Nations with copies to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and World Health Organisation (WHO).

'A Very Inconvenient Truth

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

The meat industry is one of the most destructive ecological industries on the planet. The raising and slaughtering of pigs, cows, sheep, turkeys and chickens not only utilizes vast areas of land and vast quantities of water, but it is a greater contributor to greenhouse gas emissions than the automobile industry.

The seafood industry is literally plundering the ocean of life and some fifty percent of fish caught from the oceans is fed to cows, pigs, sheep, chickens etc in the form of fish meal. It also takes about fifty fish caught from the sea to raise one farm raised salmon.

We have turned the domestic cow into the largest marine predator on the planet. The hundreds of millions of cows grazing the land and farting methane consume more tonnage of fish than all the world’s sharks, dolphins and seals combined. Domestic housecats consume more fish, especially tuna, than all the world’s seals.

So why is it that all the world’s large environmental and conservation groups are not campaigning against the meat industry? Why did Al Gore’s film Inconvenient Truth not mention the inconvenient truth that the slaughter industry creates more greenhouse gases than the automobile industry?

The Greenpeace ships serve meat and fish to their crews everyday. The World Wildlife Fund does not say a word about the threat that meat eating poses for the survival of wildlife, the habitat destroyed, the wild competitors for land eliminated, or the predators destroyed to save their precious livestock.
.
When I was a Sierra Club director for three years, everyone looked amused when I brought up the issue of vegetarianism. At each of our Board meeting dinners, the Directors were served meat and only after much prodding and complaining did the couple of vegetarian directors manage to get a vegetarian option. At our meeting in Montana we were served Buffalo and antelope, lobsters in Boston, crabs in Charleston, steak in Albuquerque etc. But what else can we expect from a “conservation” group that endorses trophy hunting.

As far as I know and I may be wrong, but my organization, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is the only conservation organization in the world that endorses and practises vegetarianism. My ships do not serve meat or fish ever, nor do we serve dairy products. We’ve had a strictly vegan menu for years and no one has died of scurvy or malnutrition.

The price we pay for this is to be accused by other conservation organizations of being “animal rights.” Like it’s a bad word. They say it with the same disdain that Americans used to utter the word communist in the Fifties.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is not an animal rights organization. We are exclusively involved in interventions against illegal activities that threaten and exploit marine wildlife and habitat. We are involved in ocean wildlife conservation activities.

Yet because we operate our ships as vegan vessels, other groups, and now the media dismiss us as an animal rights organization.

Now first of all I don’t see being accused of as an animal rights organization to be an insult. PETA was co-founded by one of my crew-members and many of my volunteers come from the animal rights movement. But it is not accurate to refer to Sea Shepherd as animal rights when our organization pushes a strict conservation enforcement policy.

And secondly we do not promote veganism on our ships because of animal rights. We promote veganism as a means of practising what we preach which is ocean conservation.

There is not enough fish in the world’s oceans to feed 6.6 billion human beings and another 10 billion domestic animals. That is why all the world’s commercial fisheries are collapsing. That is why whales, seals, dolphins and seabirds are starving. The sand eel for example, the primary source of food for the comical and beautiful puffin is being wiped out by Danish fishermen solely to provide fish meal to Danish factory farmed chickens.

This is a solid conservation connection between eating meat and the destruction of life in our oceans.

In a world fast losing resources of fresh water, it is sheer lunacy to have hundreds of millions of cows consuming over 1,000 gallons of water for every pound of beef produced.

And the pig farms in North Carolina produce so much waste that it has contaminated the entire ground water reserves of the entire state. North Carolinians drink pig shit with their water but its okay they say, they just neutralize it with chemicals like chlorine.

Most people don’t want to see where their meat comes from. They also don’t want to know what the impact of their meat has on the ecology. They would rather just deny the whole thing and pretend that meat is something that comes in packages from the store.

But because there is this underlying guilt always present, it manifests itself as anger and ridicule towards people who live the most environmentally positive life styles on the planet – the vegans and the vegetarians.

This is demonstrated through constant marginalization especially in the media. Any organization, like Sea Shepherd for example, that points out the ecological contradictions of eating meat is immediately dismissed as some wacko animal rights organization.

I did not set the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society up as an animal rights organization and we have never promoted animal rights in the organization. What we have promoted and what we do is oceanic wildlife and habitat conservation work.

And the truth is that you can’t practise solid and constructive conservation work without promoting veganism and/or vegetarianism as something that promotes the conservation of resources.

A few years ago I attended a dinner meeting of the American Oceans Campaign hosted by Ted Danson. He opened the dinner by saying that the choice he had to make was between fish and chicken for the dinner, and what was the point of saving fish if you can’t eat them?

Guest speaker, Oceanographer Sylvia Earle put Ted in his place by saying she did not think that he was being very funny. She said that she considered fish to be her friends and she did not believe in eating her friends. So neither Sylvia nor I ate dinner that night.

I met Sylvia again at another meeting, this time of Conservation International held at some ritzy resort in the Dominican Republic. Harrison Ford was there and the buzz was what could be done to save the oceans. I was invited as an advisor. I sat on a barstool in an open beachfront dining plaza as the “conservationists” approached tables literally bending from the weight of fish and exotic seafood including caviar. I looked at Sylvia Earle and she just shook her head and rolled her eyes.

The problem is that people like Carl Pope, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club, or the heads of Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International and many other big groups just refuse to accept that their eating habits may be just as much a part of the problem as all those things they are trying to oppose.

I remember one Greenpeacer defending his meat eating by saying that he was a carnivore and that “predators” have their place and he was proud to be one.

Now the word predator in relationship to human beings has a rather scary connotation having nothing to do with eating habits, but for any human being to describe themselves as a carnivore is just plain ridiculous.

Humans are not and have never been carnivores. A lion is a carnivore as is a wolf, as is a tiger, or a shark. Carnivores eat live animals. They stalk them, they run them down, they pounce, they kill, and they eat, blood dripping, meat at body temperature. Nature, brutal red in tooth and claw.

I’ve never met a human that can do that. Yes we found ways to run down animals and kill them. In fact we’ve come to be rather efficient at the killing part. But we can’t eat the prey until we cut it up and cook it and that usually involves some time between kill and eating. It could be an hour or it could be years.

You see our meat eating habits are more closely related to the vulture, the jackal or other carrion eaters. This means that we can’t be described as carnivores. We are better described as necrovores or eaters of rotting flesh.

Consider that some of the beef that people eat has been dead for months and in some cases for years. Dead and hanging in freezers, full of uritic acid and bacteria. It’s a corpse in a state of decomposition. Not much that can be said to be noble about eating a cadaver.

But a little dose of denial allows us to bite into that Big Mac or cut into that prime rib.

But that one 16 ounce cut of prime rib is equal to a thousand gallons of fresh water, a few acres of grass, a few fish, a quarter acre of corn etc. What’s the point of taking a shorter shower to conserve water as Greenpeace is preaching if you can sit down and consume a 1000 gallons of water at a single meal?

And that single cut of meat would have cost as much in vegetable resources equivalent to what could be fed to an entire African village for a week.

The problem is that we choose to see our contradictions when it is convenient for us to see them and when it is not we simply go into a state of suspended disbelief and we eat that steak anyway because, hey we like the taste of rotting flesh in the evening.

Have you ever thought why it is that with a person, it’s an abortion but when it comes to a chicken, it’s an omelette?

Does anyone really know what’s in a hot dog? We do know that the government health department allows for an acceptable percentage of bug parts, rodent droppings and other assorted filth to go into the mix.

And now tuna fish comes with a health warming saying it should not be eaten by pregnant women or small children because of high levels of mercury. Does that mean mercury is good for adults and non-pregnant women? What are they telling us here?

Eating meat and fish is not only bad for the environment it’s also unhealthy. Yet even when it comes to our own health we slip into denial mode and order the whopper.

The bottom line is that to be a conservationist and an environmentalist, you must practise and promote vegetarianism or better yet veganism.

It is the lifestyle that leaves the shallowest ecological footprint, uses fewer resources and produces less greenhouse gas emissions, it’s healthier and it means you’re not a hypocrite.

In fact a vegan driving a hummer would be contributing less greenhouse gas carbon emissions than a meat eater riding a bicycle.

May be freely distributed, reproduced and published with permission of the writer.
 Paulwatson@earthlink.net'

re: 'vegetarian and vegan diets...'

Just say 'vegan, or mostly vegan'.

Many vegetarians eat a lot of cheese, and I reckon dairy products are about the most environmentally destructive aspect of animal farming.

It really baffles me how many Earth First! activists are not mostly vegan. Makes it very hard for me to take them seriously.

There's a lot of posers in the environmental movement, we need to get our house in order before it is too late...