Image: NASA satellite image of the 2018 Camp Fire, currently the most destructive wildfire in California history. Image from https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144225/camp-fire-rages-in-california

If you are usually critical of veganism or feel apathetically hopeless regarding climate change, this is for you. I only ask that you hear me out and give me the benefit of the doubt and read through this piece. I know it is long, but I promise you that it will be worth it and that it could change your perspective on the environmental crisis, the next 30 years, and what you can do.

We are currently on a collision course with an unrecoverable environmental catastrophe and unless we make a dire change, this planet will quickly become uninhabitable. We are already feeling the effects of human-caused climate change and the problems won’t get better; they will only get exponentially worse if we do not take action. We can not afford to wait. If it isn’t too late already, it will likely be “too late” even a few years from now, and scientists predict that at this rate we may have fishless oceans by 2050 [1], as well as rising tides and a series of other environmental disasters: prevalent worldwide urban smog so thick you can barely see the sun, up to 20 times as many severe weather storms, frequent power outages, loss of large portions of the world’s rainforests and rivers, and far more of those devastating wildfires we have come to expect every year.

I believe that adopting a plant-based diet is the easiest and single most impactful thing you personally can do to save the planet from the impending environmental catastrophe and to combat worldwide food and freshwater scarcity. This writing piece serves to defend that claim.

Dietary choices may not be what first comes to mind in terms of environmental impact, but what would otherwise be inefficient and environmentally insignificant on small scales becomes environmentally devastating when on the global stage of billions of individual human decisions. Animal agriculture can be shown as one of the primary factors causing the current sixth mass extinction known as the Holocene extinction, due to its large, often understated, role in environmental destruction and climate change. [2] [3] The industry is a major emitter of greenhouse gases, and consumes an incredible amount of water, land, and food due to the inherent inefficiencies of raising animals for slaughter. I argue that these inefficiencies are inextricably tied not with incompetence in the industry but with inherent problems of animal agriculture.

Inherent inefficiencies? One might ask, what are those?

Secondary Consumerism

The simple reason is — because you are a secondary consumer. It will always be far more efficient for you to simply eat plants directly, as opposed to feeding those same plants to an animal and then killing and eating that animal. 

There will inherently be a lot of energy lost in that transfer, due to the vast amount of energy necessary in simply keeping that cow alive. Everyday as humans we eat ~2000+ maintenance calories just to stay alive, and that 2000 calories doesn’t really go towards making us any “bigger” or more yield to a potential consumer, so in the eyes of a consumer that would be analogously viewed as wasted energy.

The difference between eating the animal and eating the prerequisite plants directly is akin to the difference between someone eating you right now and someone eating everything you have ever eaten in your life.

Stop and think about that for a second, and about the disparity between those two amounts. 

If you are 20, that is the difference between the roughly 10,000,000 calories you have eaten in your life (say ~1400 calories/day for 20 years to compensate for less calories as a kid) and the  roughly 120,000 [4] calories your flesh amounts to. Think about the vast disparity between those two numbers and about how incredibly inefficient that is in terms of delivering calories to the consumer. It’s hard to visualize the difference between 120,000 and 10,000,000. But let me put it this way: 120,000 seconds is a little over 33 hours. 10,000,000 seconds is almost 4 months. 120,000 grains of sand is ~1 pound of sand. 10,000,000 grains of sand is ~100 pounds of sand. These are both big numbers, but one is multiple orders of magnitude larger than the other. This tremendous differential hopefully illustrates the inherent inefficiencies of being a secondary consumer. For a cow, it is likely to be a little more efficient (some estimates say ~3x more efficient) as that cow is killed as soon as it is large enough for consumption and not let to live to the human age of 20, but this is still bound to be incredibly inefficient by orders of magnitude, as it follows the exact same guiding principles of secondary consumerism.

Think about the sheer amount of food and water you have to feed that 2000 pound cow over the course of its lifetime. All that immense amount of food requires a lot of land, water, and that process is bound to release a lot of emissions. Now, instead of just one person doing this, imagine how many animals are killed every year to feed the entire planet in this way, and how much food, water, land, and energy is wasted in this process.

It is through this examination of secondary consumerism that we really see the depth of the problem. At a glance, it may seem that plant based agriculture is the bigger “drain” on the environment. You may hear people say things such as: “the cows don’t take up THAT much water? It’s all the crops!” or “the rainforests are being destroyed to grow SOY PLANTS” or “top-soil erosion is due to FARMING not ANIMALS!” but what is often overlooked is why we are growing those crops in the first place. Those crops are largely being grown to feed livestock, which is an inherently incredibly inefficient process. It is only through looking at the roots of the issue that we see the depth and the true cause of the problem: animal agriculture. Scientists estimate that if we switched to a plant-based diet, global farmland usage could be reduced by more than 75%. [5] I repeat: if you eat meat, you are still eating those “bad crops”, you are just doing it in a really inefficient method. 

Along these same lines, others may point out: isn’t all agriculture damaging to the environment? Yes it is, but animal agriculture is especially devastating. This underlines to me an important point in veganism: you are not perfect and it is not “environment neutral”. It will still create a negative environmental impact, it’s foolish to say otherwise especially given how many humans we have on this planet. However, that plant-based dietary impact will be far less damaging in magnitude than a meat-eating diet. Veganism is about minimizing environmental impact, not eliminating it. 

Aforementioned researchers have gone on to say that:

“In particular, the impacts of animal products can markedly exceed those of vegetable substitutes (Fig. 1), to such a degree that meat, aquaculture, eggs, and dairy use ~83% of the world’s farmland and contribute 56 to 58% of food’s different emissions, despite providing only 37% of our protein and 18% of our calories. Can animal products be produced with sufficiently low impacts to redress this vast imbalance? Or will reducing animal product consumption deliver greater environmental benefits? We find that the impacts of the lowest-impact animal products exceed average impacts of substitute vegetable proteins across GHG emissions, eutrophication, acidification (excluding nuts), and frequently land use (Fig. 1 and data S2). These stark differences are not apparent in any product groups except protein-rich products and milk.” – Poore and Nemecek, 2018 [5]

This energy transfer relation will always be doomed to be incredibly inefficient in comparison to directly eating plants. Now, the obvious question is: “don’t we have to eat meat? Isn’t this inefficiency just something we have to deal with? Lions are secondary consumers but they get along fine?”

Now, these are good questions. The simple answer to this is — no, we don’t have to eat meat. “But our ancestors did! It’s natural!”

Yes, but our ancestors also usually had a life expectancy of 25-30; not everything they did is worth imitating. Let us not forget that plague, disease, and death are all ‘natural’ too, and yet we attempt to fight them back at all costs. We are not obligate carnivores like lions, meaning unlike other animals who can only obtain their food through eating other animals, we do not need to eat meat to survive. In fact, we can live a perfectly healthy and happy life without it.

Nutritionists from the American Dietetic Association have stated that “appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.“ [6] Other dietetic associations worldwide have echoed this statement.

Why Efficiency Matters

And why does being “efficient” matter?

Efficiency matters because what is simply inefficient on small scales is not extremely damaging, but when those scales reach the size of 8 billion people those small inefficiencies are multiplied a billion times over and create large-scale problems. Dietary inefficiency on a global stage is unsustainable and subsequent environmental devastation, worldwide freshwater scarcity, and worldwide food scarcity will run rampant until that inefficiency is removed.

Animal agriculture is the primary cause for deforestation of the Amazon deforestation, being directly responsible for 80% [7] to 91% [8] of the deforestation in the form of cattle ranching and indirectly responsible for more when you take into account Amazon soy farming, which is mainly (80% [9]) grown as feed for livestock.

In 2006, a report released by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated that animal agriculture contributed nearly 80% of the total greenhouse gas emissions from the agriculture industry. [10] The agriculture industry as a whole at that time contributed roughly 18% of total human greenhouse gas emissions. This number will continue to rise as meat consumption per capita continues to rise throughout the world, with some experts projecting that by the year 2050 that number may reach 52%. [11]  I repeat: it is going to get far worse with time, not better, unless we make a change. I cannot even begin to imagine how bad our emissions will be by 2050. Switching from a meat-eating diet to a vegan diet would cut your dietary greenhouse gas emissions by over half, reducing your overall carbon footprint significantly. [12]

Freshwater scarcity is only scheduled to get worse, not better. Currently, roughly “3.6 billion people (nearly half the global population) live in areas that are potentially water-scarce at least one month per year, and this population could increase to some 4.8–5.7 billion by 2050.” [13] 5 billion will be roughly half of the entire world population in 2050. More than 2 billion people currently lack access to clean drinking water. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Researchers have shown that agriculture, as a whole, accounts for 92% of human freshwater use and animal agriculture accounts for 29%. [14] This incredibly inefficient use of water could be eliminated, which would help significantly to combat the growing water crisis. These issues are not far off in the future, these issues are today. We must act now.

Speaking of water, the majority (>75%) of the world’s fisheries are depleted and copious amounts of plastic cover our oceans. However, slogans such as “stop using plastic drinking straws to save the fish!” neglect to acknowledge that if you really wanted to save the fish, stopping killing and eating them (at rates of trillions of fish per year) is a way more effective method. Estimates for how many marine animals die every year from plastic range from the order of 100 thousand [15] to 1 million.[16] However, for purposes of food consumption we kill about 112 million wild fish from those same oceans every HOUR. [17] This is beyond an order of magnitude bigger. We will kill far more fish in a single hour with fishing than we will in a decade with plastic. We are willing to stop using straws to save the fish, but aren’t willing to stop eating the fish to save the fish. It is ridiculous. We can’t end the death of marine animals if the main reason they are dying is our consumption of them. We must: Stop. Eating. The. Fish.

Additionally, a lot of that plastic we hate is plastic fishing nets. Fishing nets compromise about 46% of the Pacific Garbage Patch by weight. [18] Straws comprise only 4 percent of the ocean plastic by piece and about 0.02% by weight. [19] Although a successful PR tool for inspiring individuals to cut down on direct plastic consumption as a means of saving the fish, the straw campaign fails to address our indirect plastic consumption of fishing nets which is more damaging and fails to address the most damaging factor of all when it comes to fish populations: our consumption of them as a food product.

Sometimes our perception of what is reality and what is societal perception, as well as what is truly effective conservation and what is simply a marketing initiative, needs to be re-examined. If you want there to be fish in the oceans, the time for small measures is yesterday. The time for large societal change is now. 

A common concern of many is “how will we produce enough crops to feed the planet, once we stop producing livestock? Won’t this take up an immense amount of land?” However, once one really stops and thinks about it, one will realize that in order to feed the tens of millions of cows, hundreds of millions of pigs, and billions of chickens we raise for slaughter in the US every year in an inefficient method of calorie delivery, we inherently already have plenty of food to feed everyone. It is just being used inefficiently. If those crops went directly to humans, we could easily feed every person in the U.S. In 1997, a Cornell ecologist estimated that the grain livestock in the U.S. eat could feed 800 million people. [20] We now consume roughly 1.32 times that many animals per year (due to a raise in per capita meat consumption [21] and in population [22]), and thus we could be feeding >1 billion people with the grain that livestock in this country eat. 

Some of you may point out that part of that livestock feed is inedible by humans. That is true and is a fair criticism, but we can surely use the immense amounts of land and water required to grow that portion of livestock feed that is inedible, combined with the immense amounts of land and water used for housing those livestock, to grow crops that are edible by humans. These changes will take money to enact, but at present we funnel immense government subsidies to the meat and dairy industries at $38 billion / year keep them afloat and dominant despite being inherently inefficient (so THATS why big macs are cheaper than salads…)., versus 0.04% of that amount for the fruit and vegetable industries at $17 million / year.[23] A shift in societal dietary habits will necessitate a shift in subsidy distribution. With the newly available land and water and even a small fraction of these meat and dairy subsidies shifted away towards a plant-based diet economy, we will have no problem growing enough edible crops.
Worldwide food scarcity, or what we call “world hunger”, is another major crisis that will worsen over the next 30 years. 2 billion people worldwide, “or 25.9 percent of the global population, experienced hunger or did not have regular access to nutritious and sufficient food,” in 2019. [24] Roughly 700 million of those people are chronically undernourished. Out of these,144 million are children under 5 years of age who were estimated to be stunted (significantly impaired in growth and development due to poor nutrition, infections, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation [25]). These 144 million children represent 21.3 percent of all children under 5 years of age in the world.

Western Influence and Factory Farming

When discussing world hunger, the disparity between Western and non-Western nations becomes apparent. Rates of undernourishment are far higher in Africa (avg 18.6%) than anywhere else in the world, and far lower in Northern America and Europe (avg <2.5%) than anywhere else.[24] The majority of starving children (roughly 82%) live in countries where food is fed to animals who are then eaten by Western countries.[26] This fact is not particularly surprising given the prevalence of meat in the Western diet compared to other diets, the fact that roughly 50 percent of all grain produced in the world is fed directly to livestock, [27] and the exploitative relationship Western countries often have with developing nations. One should not jump to the conclusion that the only reason we have starving children in developing nations is an inefficient use of food; western imperialism and unfettered capitalism, resulting in the concept we know today as the Global South, clearly created this disparity and continue to actively uphold its existence, but our current waste of vast amounts of food via animal agriculture certainly exacerbates and perpetuates the situation and is unacceptable when world hunger could be significantly alleviated by a global plant-based diet.

Americans are unsurprisingly one of the highest consumers of meat per capita in the world, but a lot of other western countries are not far behind. In 2017, Americans came in at 124.1 kg per person per year[28], Australia at 121.6, New Zealand Spain and Brazil all hovering around 100, Portugal and Israel all around 95; this is not uniquely an American problem. It is something we must tackle in all Western countries. One can even clearly see the influence of the Western meat-consuming diet on non-Western countries that typically historically rarely ate meat and even today are perceived this way, such as China. In 1961, China ate roughly 3 kg/person and America ate roughly 88 kg/person. In 2017, these numbers had ballooned from 3 to 60 and from 88 to 124. There are two things worth noting here: one — the large absolute growth (both numbers have grown a lot (+36 in America and +57 in China) and two — how much China’s relative meat consumption has grown (Chinese citizens now eat 20x the meat they did in 1961). In 1961, China was eating roughly 5% of the meat per capita that Americans did, in 2017 that number had risen to roughly 48%. Western meat consumption appears to have been a companion to the other Western influence China has received in the last 50 years. Other countries such as India, however, have resisted such Western influence for a variety of reasons as India still consumes roughly the same amount of meat as they did in 1961 (3-4 kg/person). 

And how do we create all of this meat? Factory farming! 

Factory farming is “a farm on which large numbers of livestock are raised indoors in conditions intended to maximize production at minimal cost” [29], meaning that all those cows, chickens, pigs, and more that are raised for slaughter are kept as confined as possible, often past the point of broken bones (often legally because the animal agriculture industries exert influence to write laws making it legal), resulting in a series of horribly unethical living conditions for these animals and creating an enormous amount of waste, as these machines churn through life killing billions of marine animals per day and hundreds of millions of land animals per day. I will discuss factory farming and the inherent ethical conundrums at another time, but for now I will simply tell you: it’s bad. And if you don’t know where your meat and dairy comes from, it almost certainly comes from a factory farm.

It is important to note that factory farming, the natural result of a capitalistic and exploitative meat industry that cares more about profit than animal ethics and environmental impact, was not created in a vacuum. It was a necessary way of producing enough meat to feed an increasingly large population that wanted increasingly more meat per person on a daily basis. It’s literally not possible to feed this many people this much meat without factory farming. Other “more sustainable” and “more ethical” animal agriculture methods simply do not work on these scales.

41% of the entire land of the contiguous U.S. is used to grow food for livestock and to raise livestock. [30] If we were to give these animals better conditions (getting rid of factory farming), the already inefficient process would be even more inefficient in terms of land use, and we simply would not have enough room for all the animals. We barely do as is. The solution then is not merely to focus on an elimination of factory farming, but to attack the underlying cause that necessitates the existence of those factory farms: our consumption of animal products period, as they are environmentally inefficient and thus environmentally destructive.

And more importantly, I do not think anyone who looks at our world population of almost 8 billion people would think the demands of such a society would be at all comparable to the original societies of meat consumption: hunter-gatherers societies. Even in the last 200 years we have experienced a shift from 10 million people to feed in America to over 350 million, and from roughly 1 billion worldwide to roughly 8 billion. At this scale, we are dealing with an entirely different ballgame and what would have once been “inefficient” now becomes extremely dangerous to the planet and unsustainable. When we have come so far from what we would classically view as “nature” and “food cycles” and we are faced with a decision of pursuing a more efficient or less efficient eating style, I argue that we should choose the more efficient option. When this decision is raised to the global scale of billions of people and the outcome will allow or prevent an extreme environmental catastrophe, I argue that we must.

Magnitude of Individual Choices

Something else I would like to discuss when it comes to environmental impact that I think is incredibly important is the overall magnitude of your individual choices. Say you are super concerned about the environment. You always unplug your lights, take short showers, save water where you can, etc. Although all of these are wonderful steps, I think something that is important to take into account is the overall magnitude of various environmental actions and how they relate to each other.

For example — let’s talk about water consumption. And I don’t mean seawater. When I talk about water, I mean fresh water. Not water from the ocean, not contaminated wastewater, freshwater. That same freshwater that causes water scarcity in half of the world’s population. Typically when it comes to water consumption, you are told by society that major ways you can consume less water are by cutting back on your everyday direct water use, i.e. taking shorter showers and turning the faucet off while you brush your teeth, getting a water-efficient toilet if you are really trying to go the extra mile, things of that ilk. However, I make the argument that meat consumption VASTLY outweighs these methods in terms of water consumption. I know — a crazy claim. Here are some numbers.

Say you cut your shower time down by 5 minutes. At a rate of 5 gallons per minute, you would save about 25 gallons of water per shower.[31] 

Say you turn the water off while brushing your teeth. At a rate of 2 gallons per minute, you would save about 2 to 4 gallons of water per toothbrushing.[32]

Now — say you decide to eat one small hamburger from McDonalds. Not one of those big burgers you would make at home, one of the little ones — a quarter pounder. The amount of water used in making that ¼ lb of beef is about 450 gallons.[33] It’s not just double your shower savings, it’s an entire order of magnitude bigger. Some of you may be wondering “Doesn’t all food take a lot of water??” No. The bun of said burger is ~22 gallons. The lettuce and tomato, ~1 gallon. [34]

In terms of land usage — said burger patty takes about 400 square feet of land. The burger bun takes about 2 square feet of land. [35] Veggie burger substitutes will likely be a little more than a burger bun, but I can guarantee you they will not be anywhere near the same magnitude of land and water cost. You can examine these disparities in other metrics, i.e. in terms of land usage per calorie, per gram protein, etc. and I promise you that meat is extraordinarily high in comparison with plant-based alternatives consistently across the board.

Now, why do I talk about the magnitude of these individual choices? Because although turning the tap water off while you brush your teeth is great, it’s statistically insignificant when compared with meat consumption. If you really care about the environment and about using less water, leaving the water on or not really doesn’t matter in comparison to your dietary choice. Minimizing your tooth-brushing water usage while eating meat is like trying to stop your ramen from boiling over while your house is burning down. It’s a nice way of trying to cut down consumption, but you are missing the bigger picture.

Influence of the Meat and Dairy Industries

Now you may be asking “Why didn’t I know about this? Why isn’t this being talked about by environmental agencies? In fact, why is it completely absent from most rigorous discourse in all areas of society?” The simple reason is because the animal agriculture industry holds immense legal, legislative, financial, political, and societal power, and threats to the animal agriculture industry will be treated as such.

Ag-gag laws make it illegal for anyone (workers included) to film working conditions in slaughterhouses and illegal to speak out against the actual activities on these farms, regardless of how unethical the treatment of the animals or the treatment of the workers is. What footage does exist paints a grim picture. Given these laws, the continued societal norm of a meat-eating diet combined with the societal support of a behemoth industry who wants you to keep eating meat to fund it, it is no surprise that veganism is absent from a lot of public discourse, particularly those areas where it is most important such as environmentalism and public health. 

This absence is not a coincidence. It is because most people don’t care and those that do and attempt to speak out are mocked and marginalized at best and threatened and forcibly silenced by the animal agriculture industry at worst. I repeat: their absence is not a coincidence. It is because those who speak out against the meat and dairy industry are silenced, forcibly removed from the conversation, and laughed out of the room. This void of public discourse is filled with scientific papers, newspaper articles, and opinion pieces all arguing the contrary, attempting to refute veganism. These scientists, however, are often funded either directly or indirectly by the meat and dairy industries. [36] [37] [38] See the citations listed for a few examples. A comparison between the unethical medical corruption connected with the aggressive advertising strategies of the tobacco industry in the mid to late 20th century and that of the advertising strategies and associated medical studies of the animal agriculture industry in the early 21st century would not be unfounded.

Every year, over a hundred environmental activists are murdered for their radical views. [39] While not all these are animal rights activists, some certainly are. Regan Russell. Paola Quartini. Elvio Fichera. Dorothy Stang. Jane Tipson. Jill Phipps. Anita Krajnc. Google them. The only reason it’s not Joaquin Phoenix’s name on that list (he is a vegan activist) is because most people know who he is. And these industries do not dare touch someone who most people know, only sweep under the rug activists whose names are unknown by most. All activists were killed during, and as a direct consequence of, their activism against goliath industries. Wayne Hsiung, a vegan activist, was arrested after asking Whole Foods where their meat came from, and is now facing up to 60 years in prison for publishing footage of unethical working conditions in factory farms. His story is not uncommon, the majority of vegan activists with any sort of publicity who display footage of slaughterhouses or ask questions to retailers are sued by these industries for revealing the truth or for simply asking a question. Ag-gag laws and extrajudicial action, which we have seen this year is completely okay with the government as long as it goes along with the agenda they are pushing, are powerful things.

And if you think the world isn’t feeding you false info to make veganism seem extreme, let me point out a few examples you may or may not be aware of. The food pyramid we grew up learning is a lie; any real approach at nutrition will put vegetables at the bottom for their incredible nutrient density, not grains, and the daily portions of milk and meat suggested have been shown to be unnecessary at best and potentially harmful at worst. Canines aren’t only for tearing meat; lots of herbivores have them to tear through difficult foods: gorillas, hippos, the sabre-toothed deer (yes, those exist), and even camels. Although we all saw “got milk?” ads in school believing it was some government-spoken-truth that milk was a necessary part of our diets, it’s not. You can get calcium from anywhere, you do not have to drink another the growth hormones of another species to get it. 

Some of you may be wondering: “If these are not true statements, why did we learn them?” We learned them as truisms to mask what all these things really are: government-sponsored myths and advertising by the animal agriculture industry to keep you following a meat-eating-diet which will continue to funnel more of your consumer dollars and your tax-paying dollars in the form of subsidies into their pockets. It’s nothing more and nothing less. 

These are just a few examples. There are more out there. Yet despite these influences, consideration of a plant-based diet, although not prominent, has slowly begun to appear in sections of public discourse. For example, all of the studies I have cited throughout this. Additionally, the UN has made several statements in support of a plant-based diet as a primary means of combating climate change, starting with their 2006 report [10], again in their 2010 report [40], and again in 2020 [41], and doubtless plenty of times in between. Feel free to research more on your own. Just don’t discard the idea because it is seen as “crazy” in society. Society lies to you all the time.

For one example of a more in-depth look at the environmental impacts of livestock production and at the deep ties the environmentally-devastating animal agricultural industry has with the environmental industry and the control of dissemination of information the industry has on the subject, I would highly recommend the documentary Cowspiracy on Netflix.

I must address first and foremost, though, one of the primacy criticisms of Cowspiracy. There has been a large debate over some of the statistics in the film, particularly around the exact statistics of the greenhouse gas emissions of the animal agriculture industry. I will not attempt to dispute these criticisms or to agree with them, what I will say is that this focus on greenhouse gases that many critiques of environmental veganism have fails to acknowledge the fact that greenhouse gases, while important, do not account for the entirety of the crisis. Deforestation of the Amazon, overfishing to the point of soon-to-be fishless oceans, worldwide freshwater scarcity, and worldwide food scarcity are a few of the many environmental problems that exist directly because of animal agriculture that are not reflected in the debate over greenhouse gas emission numbers. An argument over a couple percent on the greenhouse gas numbers simply distracts from the totality of the environmental problem.

This statement issued by the makers of Cowspiracy echoes this sentiment:

“No one has challenged the validity of any of the other facts in the film. The focus and debate around animal agriculture’s GHG emissions is a distractive tool used to try and create an atmosphere of doubt. The water use, land use, water pollution, deforestation, habitat loss, species extinction, etc. all stand unchallenged and are undeniable. The criticism the film has received has largely been from individuals and organizations who have an invested interest in the livestock industry. They are trying to create doubt in the same way that the fossil fuel industry tries to create doubt around human induced climate change.” [42]

To sum it up: we are currently facing worldwide freshwater scarcity, worldwide food scarcity, and intense widespread environmental devastation. This is largely in part due to animal agriculture, an inherently inefficient process. We can largely resolve these issues and avert future crises through an elimination of animal products from our diet. If we do not, these issues will all get far worse in the next 30 years.

What on earth do we do now?

If not for yourself, I urge you to please consider making the switch to veganism, vegetarianism, (vegetarian is a lot better than meat eating, and vegan is a lot better than vegetarian) or to simply eat less quantity of animal products in your diet, for your children and grandchildren. If you want them (and their subsequent children / grandchildren) to be able to experience all of the pieces of life that you have experienced, be it first steps or first love, there has to be an inhabitable planet for them to live on to have those experiences.

Now, I understand that for a lot of people this impossibly large impending environmental catastrophe can result in a sort of paralysis. “Why do anything, if we are screwed anyways? Won’t my individual decision be insignificant?” The magnitude of the global change necessary to avert this crisis can feel completely overwhelming and hopeless, and so the individual can end up paralyzed by the magnitude of that decision. This paralysis then leads to no change and to the exact preventable outcome the individual sought to avoid.

I can certainly relate, for a long time I felt this way too. And these are valid concerns. But I am telling you that there is a way out. And it is by taking a step, today. You can make a difference. Global change starts at the individual level, and the most powerful, immediate, and easy individual change you can make today is to reduce your personal consumption of animal products. And I promise you — it’s not as hard as you think. You can still eat pizza, it’ll just be vegan pizza now.

I will not lie to you and say that the entirety of the environmental problem can be fixed via veganism; we still need to stop the massive fossil fuel industries that are destroying the planet. But in terms of what you personally can do in your everyday life to impact change, this is arguably the single biggest environmental action you can take.

If 100 readers made the change to plant-based, we could save every year: roughly 22 million gallons of freshwater [43], at least 100,000 kg of carbon-dioxide-equivalents of greenhouse gas emissions [12], vast amounts of farmland, and the lives of 10,000 animals [44]. Do you want to be a part of that change?

In 30 years if we have fishless oceans, can barely see the sun through thick smog in all major cities, have up to 20 times as many severe weather storms, have lost over half the world’s rainforests as well as a third of the world’s rivers, frequently be losing power due to higher ocean water levels and severe weather, and be contending with even more massive wildfires raging, how will you look back on your actions today? Will you look back and say “I did what I could” or will you look back wishing that you had done things differently? Wishing you had, at the very least, not played an active hand in continuing this environmental destruction?

What story will you tell your children about how you acted and how true will that story be?

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Resources Cited

[1] AFP. 2011. “Oceans’ Fish Could Disappear in 40 Years: UN.” The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media. September 17. https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/oceans-fish-could-disappear-in-40-years-un-5541451.html.

[2] Morell, Virginia. 2015. “Meat-Eaters May Speed Worldwide Species Extinction, Study Warns.” Science, August. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad1607.

[3] Smithers, Rebecca. 2017. “Vast Animal-Feed Crops to Satisfy Our Meat Needs Are Destroying Planet.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. October 5. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/05/vast-animal-feed-crops-meat-needs-destroying-planet.

[4] Foley, Katherine Ellen. 2017. “A Scientist Calculated the Nutritional Value of a Human Being.” Quartz. April 20. https://qz.com/951238/a-scientist-calculated-the-nutritional-value-of-a-human-being/.

[5] Poore, J., and T. Nemecek. 2018. “Reducing Food’s Environmental Impacts through Producers and Consumers.” Science 360 (6392): 987–92. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaq0216.

[6] “Position of the American Dietetic Association: Vegetarian Diets.” 2009. Journal of the American Dietetic Association 109 (7): 1266–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jada.2009.05.027.

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[8] Margulis Sérgio. 2003. Causes of Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon. Washington (D.C.): World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/15060

[9] Yale University. 2020. “Soy Agriculture in the Amazon Basin”. Accessed July 31. https://globalforestatlas.yale.edu/amazon/land-use/soy

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[12] Scarborough, Peter, Paul N. Appleby, Anja Mizdrak, Adam D. M. Briggs, Ruth C. Travis, Kathryn E. Bradbury, and Timothy J. Key. 2014. “Dietary Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Meat-Eaters, Fish-Eaters, Vegetarians and Vegans in the UK.” Climatic Change 125 (2): 179–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1169-1.

[13] UNESCO World Water Assessment Programme. 2018. Nature-Based Solutions for Water. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000261424.

[14] Hoekstra, A. Y., and M. M. Mekonnen. 2012. “The Water Footprint of Humanity.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (9): 3232–37. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1109936109.

[15] “Plastic Statistics.” 2018. Ocean Crusaders. November 12. http://oceancrusaders.org/plastic-crusades/plastic-statistics/.

[16] “Information About Sea Turtles: Threats from Marine Debris.” 2020. Sea Turtle Conservancy. Accessed July 27. https://conserveturtles.org/information-sea-turtles-threats-marine-debris/.

[17] Zampa, Matt. 2020. “How Many Animals Are Killed for Food Every Day?” Reporting on Animals, Animal Rights, and Human Choices. June 18. https://sentientmedia.org/how-many-animals-are-killed-for-food-every-day/.

[18] Lebreton, L., B. Slat, F. Ferrari, B. Sainte-Rose, J. Aitken, R. Marthouse, S. Hajbane, et al. 2018. “Evidence That the Great Pacific Garbage Patch Is Rapidly Accumulating Plastic.” Scientific Reports 8 (1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-22939-w.

[19] Borenstein, Seth. 2018. “Science Says: Amount of Straws, Plastic Pollution Is Huge.” Phys.org. Phys.org. April 21. https://phys.org/news/2018-04-science-amount-straws-plastic-pollution.html.

[20] “U.S. Could Feed 800 Million People with Grain That Livestock Eat, Cornell Ecologist Advises Animal Scientists.” 1997. Cornell Chronicle. August 7. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat.

[21] “Per Capita Consumption of Poultry and Livestock, 1960 to Forecast 2021, in Pounds.” 2020. The National Chicken Council. Accessed July 25. https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/statistics/per-capita-consumption-of-poultry-and-livestock-1965-to-estimated-2012-in-pounds/. (statistics are from USDA)

[22] “Population in the U.S.” 2020. Google. Google. April 3. https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_. (statistics from U.S. Census Bureau)

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[24] The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020. 2020. FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO. https://doi.org/10.4060/ca9692en.

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[27] Sansoucy, R. 2020. “Livestock – a Driving Force for Food Security and Sustainable Development.” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Accessed July 25. http://www.fao.org/3/v8180t/v8180T07.htm.

[28] FAO 2013, Current Worldwide Annual Meat Consumption per capita, Livestock and Fish Primary Equivalent, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, viewed 31st March, 2013, http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/?#data/CL (also available graphically at https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production)

[29] Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “factory farm,” accessed July 31, 2020, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factory%20farm.

[30] Merrill, Dave, and Lauren Leatherby. 2018. “Here’s How America Uses Its Land.” Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/.

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[34] Mekonnen, M.M. and Hoekstra, A.Y. 2010. “The green, blue and grey water footprint of crops and derived crop products”, Value of Water Research Report Series No.47, UNESCO-IHE.

[35] I calculated these numbers myself with a 4oz burger and a 1.6oz burger bun using the numbers provided in [5] via the website https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food.

[36] Parker-Pope, Tara, and Anahad O’Connor. 2019. “Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties.” The New York Times. The New York Times. October 4. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/well/eat/scientist-who-discredited-meat-guidelines-didnt-report-past-food-industry-ties.html.

[37] Levin, Susan. 2016. “How Big Meat and Dairy Fund Misleading Health Research to Fatten Their Wallets.” One Green Planet. One Green Planet. February 3. https://www.onegreenplanet.org/natural-health/how-big-meat-and-dairy-fund-misleading-health-research-to-fatten-their-wallets/.

[38] Landsverk, Gabby. 2020. “Author of ‘Dietary Guidelines’ Encouraging People to Keep Eating Red Meat Received Industry Funding.” Insider. Insider. January 7. https://www.insider.com/is-red-meat-processed-meat-bad-for-you-guidelines-2019-9.

[39] Holmes, Oliver. 2016. “Environmental Activist Murders Set Record as 2015 Became Deadliest Year.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. June 20. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/20/environmental-activist-murders-global-witness-report.

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[41] IPCC, 2019: Summary for Policymakers.In: Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems [P.R. Shukla, J. Skea, E. Calvo Buendia, V. Masson-Delmotte, H.- O. Pörtner, D. C. Roberts, P. Zhai, R. Slade, S. Connors, R. van Diemen, M. Ferrat, E. Haughey, S. Luz, S. Neogi, M. Pathak, J. Petzold, J. Portugal Pereira, P. Vyas, E. Huntley, K. Kissick, M. Belkacemi, J. Malley, (eds.)]. In press. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/ 

[42] Kuhn, Keegan. 2015. “Response to Criticism of Cowspiracy Facts.” Cowspiracy. Cowspiracy. November 23. https://www.cowspiracy.com/blog/2015/11/23/response-to-criticism-of-cowspiracy-facts.

[43] Kretzer., Michelle. 2016. “What Can You Do to Save 219,000 Gallons of Water a Year?” PETA. PETA. March 22. https://www.peta.org/blog/how-to-save-219000-gallons-water-year/.

[44] “How Many Animals Will You Save by Going Vegan in 2016?” 2016. PETA Australia. PETA Australia. January 3. https://www.peta.org.au/news/how-many-animals-saved-vegan-2016/.