Promoting a smarter human race, and a healthier planet Earth.

rainforest

Deforestation, Desertification, Disease, and that bacon double cheeseburger.

Is anything less "green" (i.e., less environmentally responsible) than driving a six-mile-per-gallon monster truck? Yes, but you probably haven't been hearing a great deal about it (not because it hasn't be articulated, but because it hasn't been heard). It is the animal-based dietary practice of consumers under the spell of the Western dietary lie. All things considered, nothing drives the destruction of rainforest as does the proliferation and support of the animal-based diet. Nearly 70% of the relentless deforestation of Brazil's Amazon Basin is conducted for the expansion of the livestock industry. Today logging, itself often vilified (sometimes rightly, sometimes not), is closely associated with the replanting of trees, but cattle ranching and hog farming never are, nor can they be. Meat = Deforestation. Nothing drives the contamination and rapid depletion of water resources, and the loss of soil nutrients and integrity, than does the animal-based diet. Meat = Desertification. Because more than 80% of agricultural land is dedicated to livestock and livestock feed, and because it takes 10-20+* units (pounds, tons, liters, however one wishes to measure) of vegetable protein to produce but 1 unit of animal protein, the production of animal foods is more than embarrassingly wasteful, it inherently perpetuates hunger, malnutrition, disease, and death in our world's poorer countries. Think about it — 16 units of vegetable protein sacrificed to produce one (1) unit of animal protein, to sate the appetite of the relatively wealthy Western consumer, and generate short-term profits for immediate profit centered industry! Meat = Disease + Hunger + Death. Think about it. Per acre (or other unit of land area), 450 times as many people can be fed tree products than can be fed slaughterhouse products.

There's still more to this true story. Most scientists agree that methane is a far more potent and problematic "greenhouse gas" than carbon dioxide. Livestock animals naturally produce methane as part of their digestive process (belching, flatulence, excrement). No other single industry contributes more methane to Earth's atmosphere than does the meat industry. Meat production thus presents a two-front attack on the our atmosphere: (1) spewing out a staggering volume of greenhouse gasses, and compounding this by (2) progressively reducing the planet's oxygen producing vegetation. Meat = Climate Change (perhaps less accurately, "global warming").

Simply stated, Meat Kills. It kills people, it kills or threatens entire species, it kills vast ecosystems. And for what?

For fat-clogged arteries (what cardiologists call plaque), for cancers, for heart attacks, for strokes, for osteoporosis and for a host of other maladies. For unnecessary diversions of healthcare resources. For the industry driven lie that humans need to eat meat (when all things are considered, vegetable protein is more nutritionally well-suited to the human digestive system than is animal protein, as evidenced by the fact that vegetarians, as shown in several studies published in major scientific journals, generally live longer than non-vegetarians).

* The broad variation here is due to the varying 'input' requirements of different animal-based foods. The variation is one between animal-based foods that are extremely wasteful and animals-based foods that are indecently, even murderously, wasteful.

"To consider yourself an environmentalist and still eat meat is like saying you're a philanthropist who doesn't give to charity."
— Howard F. Lyman, author and former cattle baron

"Many things made me become a vegetarian, among them, the higher food yield as a solution to world hunger."
— John Denver, singer/songwriter