Comfortably Unaware (3 page)

So what exactly did Al Gore fail to mention about global warming? That carbon dioxide is not the cause of global warming. It is, however, one component, and the most convenient to talk about, and the easiest topic for which to draw up a list to help solve it. While it's important to be aware of and to minimize CO
₂
emissions from cars and industry, the single most devastating factor that affects global warming and our environment is caused by what you eat.

Another profound example of failure to adequately mention or address the effects of food choice and climate change can be seen with the management of the Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997 by numerous countries. Although the intent to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to be applauded, proper attention was not given to the effects of food choice, specifically from the meat, dairy, and fishing industries. The Kyoto Protocol developed from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was initially an international treaty joined by a number of countries to begin considerations regarding global warming—or at least to mitigate the human influencing factors. The Protocol ensued and was approved by many nations and now has legally binding and stronger measures. This
Protocol sets forth targets for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, and plans for “emissions trading” and “joint implementation” as incentives for participating countries. In its Methods and Science section, the Protocol does address deforestation and land use issues but never directly mentions that the largest contributing force for combined deforestation and land use concerns are the meat, dairy, and fishing industries, which are driven by our collective choice of foods to eat. This obviously is shocking when you think about their blatant omission of any suggested action to combat one of the largest causes of global warming. While a global community of governments and scientists have begun a more concerted effort to reduce our impact on climate change through treaties such as Kyoto, it is clear that much more of their focus should be toward solving our problem of food choices and production methods. Otherwise, any effort to make a positive impact on climate change will be futile.

Both methane and nitrous oxide are much more powerful than carbon dioxide as greenhouse gases. Methane has
twenty-three times
the global warming effect potential as carbon dioxide. Approximately 40 percent of all methane produced by human activities is from livestock and their flatulence and manure, to the point where atmospheric concentrations have risen 145 percent in just the last fifteen years. Nitrous oxide is
310 times
more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Our livestock industry generates 65 percent of all human-related nitrous oxide.
³

These statistics should provide insight into a more complete picture of greenhouse gases and global warming, but it is not what we should most be concerned with. First, we must be healthy, and our planet needs to be healthy in order for us to survive. For our planet to be healthy, we need to be concerned about
our water, land, air, and living ecosystems. Greenhouse gases and their effect on global warming is only one aspect of the complete picture, and CO
₂
is only one greenhouse gas. It is what we eat and the choices we make in our diet,
not
the car we drive, that affects our supply of water, land, and air and will affect our success or failure on our planet.

Why is this the first time you have heard any of this? Many times we hear only what others want us to hear. This is particularly true when facts have been discovered regarding a sensitive topic that is being sheltered for one reason or another by large business or our government. For instance, there are a number of documented instances where, during the Vietnam War, our government and the media only allowed certain stories and images to make their way to the public. This was in order to minimize an already unfavorable public opinion toward the war. To a lesser extent but similarly, this has been the case with the war in Iraq. Occasionally, there will be an aviation report surfacing from NASA or the FAA that begins to divulge the reality of how congested our airways really are, providing numbers per day of near collisions. These reports quickly disappear from the headlines, as it is decided that they are most likely too much information for a newly concerned public. However, the most profound example of withholding or obscuring the truth is with the food we eat—the truth of what it really is, the reality of where it comes from, and what it does to us and to our environment.

You may be aware of global warming and consider yourself part of the “green” or “sustainable” movement. Those terms, however, are now almost overused and, at times, misused. For many, it is becoming the “cool” or socially or even politically correct thing to do—and in one sense, that is a good thing. However,
it not so cool to think of yourself as “green” or sustainable because you recycle or you change to energy-efficient light bulbs when you still eat animal products that have a much more profoundly negative impact on our environment than all the bulbs you just switched out. Consider going one step further and actually
becoming
environmentally conscious. Instead of just
saying
you are “sustainable,” do the right thing for yourself and for the planet and eat only plant-based foods. Then you really will be sustainable.

Pertinent facts and figures

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.”
—Confucius

IT IS DIFFICULT TO DEVELOP A BET
ter understanding of a particular topic when there is pre-existing confusion and imprecise use of certain words regarding that topic. With food choices, improper connotations abound. With this in mind, let's begin by correctly defining some terms and concepts.

Food: that which is consumed to support life
.

Plants and animals are not “food” unless you choose to eat them. Plants are living structures with chlorophyll-containing cells, capable of taking carbon dioxide out of the air in exchange
for producing oxygen. Plants have no blood, organs, brains, or nervous systems. Animals are living organisms that have saturated fat and cholesterol associated with all their cells and tissue. All animals have blood, organs, brains, and nervous systems, feelings, and emotions.

Animals are, in fact, animals—not meat. “Meat” is a term contrived and used by humans to obscure the reality of what they choose to put in their mouths. Animals (cows, pigs, sheep, fish, birds such as chickens and turkeys, etc.) are also not protein. Again, animals are
animals
. Protein, on the other hand, is a nutrient and can be found in many living things, including plants, and can even be found in lettuce. Fats and carbohydrates are also nutrients. Some animal parts that are eaten have more fat content than protein, and yet I never hear people say as they eat meat, “I need to get my
fat
today.” Not all types or forms of protein, fat, and carbohydrates are needed by the body, nor are they healthy for us. All essential protein (and amino acids), fats, and carbohydrates (“essential” meaning those that are needed to sustain life and that we cannot produce ourselves) can be derived from plants. All animals and animal products, if eaten, contain many non-essential and, in fact, unhealthy substances, such as cholesterol, saturated fats, high levels of methionine-containing (sulfur-type) proteins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), heterocyclic amines, hormones, and some pesticides, herbicides, and heavy metals.
⁴
Additionally, animals and animal products that are eaten contain no fiber, no appreciable vitamin value, and phytonutrients, which boost our immune response and other systems. Plants, on the other hand, contain hundreds of these very important substances. Although some researchers have known much of this information for at least the past fifty years, organizations
such as the American Dietetic Association, the American Cancer Society, and others finally support these facts.

How does this relate to global depletion? In the United States, as well as in other developed countries, there is an unnecessary and unhealthy dietary dependence on animals and animal products. We collectively raise, feed, water, kill, and eat over 70 billion animals each year for food.
⁵
That number again:
70 billion
, which is ten times as many people as we have on the entire earth. In doing so, these animals use and deplete our renewable and nonrenewable resources—they use food, water, land, air, and fossil fuels or other energy sources that could or should be used for us. We have developed a complex system of producing more and more animals that use more and more of our resources, while leaving a massive amount of waste, pollution, and adverse climate change in their wake. And it repeats itself, year after year, in alarmingly increasing volume and intensity—meat and dairy production is expected to double in the next ten years, and fishing production even more so. This system also has become complicated in that it is now heavily intertwined with our culture, politics, economics, and the suppression of the reality of its effect on our planet. The following are just some of many facts and figures with regard to global depletion:

•  Global warming (“climate change”) is caused by the production of methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide, not by carbon dioxide alone.

•  Global warming is also caused by destroying trees and vegetation that regulate carbon dioxide and oxygen.

•  Global warming is just one small component of global depletion.

•  Methane is 23 times as powerful as carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide is 310 times as powerful as carbon dioxide for their global warming potential.

•  Forty percent of methane and 65 percent of nitrous oxide produced by all human activities are from livestock.

•  Rainforests are the lungs of our planet, producing over 20 percent of the earth's oxygen.
⁶

•  Rainforests take millions of tons of CO
₂
out of our atmosphere and store it in soil.

•  Seventy percent of our rainforests have been slashed and burned in order to raise livestock.
⁷

•  Fifty-five percent of our fresh water is being given to livestock.
⁸

•  Over 70 percent of the grain in the United States is fed to livestock.
⁹

•  It takes 10 to 20 gallons water to produce one pound of vegetables, fruit, soybeans, or grain.
¹⁰

•  It takes over 5,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of meat.
¹¹

•  One pound of vegetables, fruit, soybeans, or grain is healthier for you to eat than one pound of meat.

•  During every one second of time, just in the United States alone, 89,000 pounds of excrement is produced by the chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep, goats, and cows raised and killed for us to eat.
¹²

•  One acre of land, if used for vegetables, grain, and/or legumes, produces ten to fifteen times more protein than if devoted to meat production.
¹³

•  Over 30 percent of all usable total land mass on earth is used by livestock.
¹⁴

•  Over 80 percent of all arable (agricultural) land in the United States is used for or by livestock.
¹⁵

•  Six million children in the world will die from starvation this year.
¹⁶

•  1.1 billion people in the world are considered malnourished or suffering from hunger.
¹⁷

Although this information may seem rather stark, it is only because, for a number of reasons, we have been “comfortably unaware.”

Depletion as it affects oxygen and the quality of the air that we breathe

“Don't blow it; good planets are hard to find.”
—Unknown

THE AIR THAT WE BREATHE AND
our atmosphere, in general, are fundamentally necessary for life on earth. It should not be taken for granted or abused, yet we currently are doing both. At any point in time during the day, are you aware of the air you are breathing or appreciative of the oxygen it supplies? Probably not. We breathe, on average, fifteen breaths per minute, 900 per hour, and 21,000 breaths each day. With every breath, we need fresh air and the right amount and ratio of oxygen. Our atmosphere serves many purposes, such as
regulating temperature and carbon, nitrogen, oxygen cycles, and protecting us from injurious radiation. These processes are complex and fragile, and human activities affect these in negative ways, such as climate change and pollution.

Some human activities have a larger negative impact than others, with livestock clearly having one of the greatest roles. Nearly every step in raising the billions of animals for food each year creates some form of depletion or degradation of our air. There are three primary ways this occurs:

•  Through greenhouse gas emissions

•  By pollution

•  By changing water cycle processes and oxygen-carbon respiration through vegetation loss

At least two separate studies of the Antarctic Dome Ice Core confirm that human activities have resulted in our escalating present-day concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane, and that they are the highest that these greenhouse gases have been in the last 650,000 years of earth history.
¹⁸
Methane concentrations have increased by about 150 percent since 1800.
¹⁹

The livestock sector is responsible for nearly 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, measured in CO
₂
equivalent.
²⁰
Global transportation, on the other hand, accounts for 13 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Put another way, what you currently decide to eat every day creates more global warming than all the cars, planes, trains, buses, and trucks in the world combined.
²¹
The reason I say “currently decide to eat” is because through your food choices, you are ultimately responsible for the demand for meat and raising the 70 billion animals each year that
causes this large part of the global warming issue and the much larger global depletion problem. If you simply stop the demand by choosing a plant-based diet, and the largest component of global warming and depletion will go away.