Subject: Re: Until we meat again
Contrary to what has been recently stated in this thread, I want to suggest that the problem IS agricultural practice, and NOT the number of the people.
I live in Australia. Yesterday, I was driving across rural Victoria for about six hours. We drove through mile after mile of pasture land - land that has been stripped of most of its tree cover, and on which very light densities of cattle graze. The land cannot support more. Now and again, there were clumps of buildings - a feed lot, a grain store, pig sheds, etc. It isn't nature we're looking at when we see land in that condition. It has been levelled and turned into a factory.
If that was happening to only a small percentage of the land, it would not be an ecological problem, but in Australia, and I presume in most countries who place a high value on animal products for food, MOST of the land is used in this fashion. Of all the land used by humans on this planet, over half is used either to raise animals, or to grow their food.
There have been various calculations done of the different efficiencies of vegetable and meat production. They usually arrive at a difference in scale of 10 to 20 - i.e. that for every pound of meat you produce, you could use the same resources (including land, water, etc.) to produce 10 - 20 times as much vegetables or fruit.
You could therefore support larger populations using a vegetable-based system of agriculture than you can using a meat-based system. Consider the population densities of Asia that are sustained on mainly (but not exclusively) vegetable and grain-based diets, which they have been doing for thousands of years, while in the U.S. and Australia, both countries have, in a few hundred years (two hundred in the case of Australia), used animal-based agiculture to turn their land into monoculture deserts with chronic topsoil loss and other land degredation problems.
As population pressures rise, as they surely will until the crisis point is reached, I think that the following will happen...
- People in the meat-eating economies such as Europe, the U.S. and Australia will, as a rule, fail to see the facts and will insist on wanting their beef and pork, their milk, etc.
- The increasing taste in the "developing" countries for meat and dairy products will provide the western world with new export markets. (In Australia, the export of dairy products to Asia is a high-growth industry. And the meat exporters value highly the exporting of live animals to Iran.)
- This will lead to more pressure being placed on the land. Bye bye to topsoil, water quality and ecosystems. As for wildlife, bad luck.
- It will also lead to more pressure being placed on the animals. As an animal liberationist, this fills me with some dread on behalf of the animals. Intensive farming practices - battery hen cages, pig stalls, cattle feed lots - will become more common and the animals will suffer more as producers try to squeeze every last dollar they can out of the animals. I was in a piggery the night before last (that was the reason for the drive...), and I can tell you that they are hideous, disgusting places. Anyone who argues that intensive farming has got any place in a sane future is not talking about the same kind of farming that I see when we do raids and investigations.
Bottom line: Large-scale meat-eating, as is practised in the developed countries and increasingly in the rest of the world, weighs more heavily on the environment than does the production of fruit or vegetables. You could feed the world's population easily by using a small portion of the land that is presently used to grow animals, and growing fruit and veg on it. The rest of the land could be returned to nature.
That's not going to happen, I know. I'm a long-term optimist, but a short-term pessimist. The human race has never shown much capacity for seeing things how they really are, and I can't see why they should start now. The food production companies will continue raping the land as long as they can. In the meantime, countless animals will suffer horribly, and the chances of real (voluntary) change will become more and more remote.
...to anyone who has concocted a vision of the future in which they can chew on their pork chops or their steak while contemplating the beauty of a world which has been repaired by a suddenly caring humanity ... I'm sorry ... you need a reality check, it's not really like that...