Meat-Eating Environmentalist: A Contradiction in Terms?

So, you’re an ardent environmentalist. You wear organic clothing, live in a small energy-efficient home, ride your bike to work and always remember your reusable bags when shopping. But for all of your efforts, your carbon footprint is still huge – thanks to your diet, which is full of hamburgers, steaks and ham sandwiches.

Nobody’s perfect – we’ve all got our little slip-ups and areas in our lives where we know we could improve. For some people it’s taking long hot showers in winter, or using paper towels. But, meat eating is a biggie. It has a much greater impact on the environment than using a little more energy than you should every now and then or occasionally wasting paper. Then there are the impacts on human health and animal welfare.

Consider these facts:

* The livestock sector is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Cows emit vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere – and the impact of these emissions is greater than that of CO2 from cars.
* Animals raised for food in the U.S. produce 130 times more excrement than the human population.
* Each and every year, factory farms dump 220 billion gallons of hormone-, antibiotic- and bacteria-laden animal waste onto farmland and into waterways.

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