Environment

CLIMATE CHANGE

Believe it or not, climate change is a HUGE issue in our world right now, and we need to start doing something about it. Most people are concerned about the emissions from cars, planes, boats and trains but I’ve learned that, surprisingly, the meat and dairy industry pollutes MORE than the entire transportation system combined!!

When people think of the things we should do everyday to help the planet, they think of taking quicker showers, turning off lights, and biking more instead of driving. Yes, these are very adequate and important steps to help keep the earth healthy. But what about something that pollutes more, by far, than the entire transportation sector combined? The very industry that provides the food on our plate every single day…. THE MEAT AND DAIRY INDUSTRY.

You would be surprised to hear that a single hamburger patty takes up to 660 gallons of water to produce. That is the equivalent of showering for for 2 months! Why? To feed the cows, you need grain, and to grow the grain you need water…. LOTS of water. An average cow eats 140-150 pounds of feed a day! Of course, the cow needs to drink water, 30-40 gallons of water per day to be specific.

Imagine for a minute: an Olympic sized swimming pool. It holds a little over 660,000 gallons of water. That is the equivalent water usage to 1,000 quarter pound hamburger patties. You may think that isn’t a lot, but when you put it next to the fact that around 75 burgers are sold per second…. it is an absolutely insane amount of water!

Animal agriculture uses 27% of the world’s fresh water and consumes around 34 trillion gallons of water each year! The livestock industry pollutes more than 50 times the amount of water than the human population does! It is just so hard to believe, but the facts (scientifically proven of course) are too important to ignore. Just one day of being vegan can save up to 1,100 gallons of water in a single day!

SAVING THE RAINFORESTS

Enough with the water consumption, let’s talk about nature. Did you know an acre of rain forest is destroyed every. single. second?! Think of a football field of beautiful trees and animals killed every time you blink. The leading cause of this happens to be…you guessed it… the livestock industry. If you can wrap your mind around this, this industry occupies 45% of earth’s land. Like WOW. So far, animal agriculture has destroyed more than 136 million acres of rain forest and caused more than 500 nitrogen floods in our oceans.

To feed a person on a full plant based diet for one year, you need 1/6 acre of land. For a person that eats everything, like most Americans, you need 18 times more land per person (around 3 acres), because of how much space raising cattle takes up. So, basically multiply 7.8 billion, the current population, by 3. That comes out to 23.4 billion acres, which is actually MORE land than the entire earth!! Meaning, if every single person was an omnivore, like most Americans, we would have absolutely no land to live on.

Now, you’re probably wondering how the livestock industry pollutes the air. Believe it or not, the amount of emission that comes from the meat and dairy industry is about the same as all the modes of transportation ever… combined! Imagine that! Everyone is worried about the pollution cars give, and while it is a huge contributor to climate change, the animal industry is even a bigger factor, but no one knows. Being vegan saves 1.9 tons of CO2 in just a year!

LET’S TALK POOP.

I know. It’s gross. But everyone does it. Everyone poops.

So let’s talk about the facts. Did you know 116,000 pounds of poop/animal waste is created in one single second in the United States alone??!! It is sooooo hard to believe but the facts are here and it is insane how much waste is really being put into our own oceans and cities. Have you ever thought about how much waste humans produce, like when we flush the toilet for what seems like thousands of times a year? Well, I will inform you that the agriculture industry produces 130 times more waste than the entire human population. Think about that. 130 TIMES.

SO….

Reading this, I hope you have learned a lot regarding how the livestock industry affects the environment. Some of those facts are probably hard to believe, because I know I had some trouble believing them too. It is devastating how naive we are about what this industry has been doing to our health, our homes, and our environment. You can learn more about this topic with the documentary Cowspiracy, where I learned most of my facts. I hope you are now more informed about what a single serving of these products can do to our only home, Planet Earth.

Have a wonderful rest of your day! Thank you for reading, it means a lot!