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I'd prefer when seeing these articles that the author talks about which land mass or eco system they are talking about.
Australia has hundreds of thousands of acres of land where the animals roam in self sustainable set ups.
Ripping up these ecosystems to grow nuts and beans would be "worse" for the environment.
No, you could reforest/rewild those lands and stop droughts and and biodiversity loss and repair microclima and soil health etc. etc.
And by growing nuts it would be worse for the environment? Growing nut trees is co2 positive. How could forests with nut trees be worse than pastures with dried out grass?
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free up an area as big as Africa for rewilding / reforesting)
The higher-order requirements of 'Four Pest' policies are incompatible with human rights. There's ways to attain equilibrium with the planet without using thumb screws.
Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...
Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agricultu...
Safe and just Earth system boundaries
Because the nut trees would need massive amounts of irrigation.
If you have a place with pastures of dried-out grass, what makes you think there's enough rainfall there to sustain a forest of nut trees?
(2015) https://theecologist.org/2015/mar/02/without-its-rainforest-...
Mainstream climatologists predict a 15% fall in rainfall over the Amazon if it is stripped of its rainforest. But the 'biotic pump' theory, rooted in conventional physics and recently confirmed by experiment, shows that the interior of a forest-free Amazon will be as dry as the Negev desert
(2019) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/23/amazon-r...
Soaring deforestation coupled with the destructive policies of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, could push the Amazon rainforest dangerously to an irreversible “tipping point” ... After this point the rainforest would stop producing enough rain to sustain itself and start slowly degrading into a drier savannah, releasing billions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, which would exacerbate global heating and disrupt weather across South America.
(2023) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/magazine/amazon-tipping-p...
The consensus used to be that ecosystems are merely a product of prevailing weather patterns. But in the 1970s, the Brazilian researcher Eneas Salati proved that the Amazon, with its roughly 400 billion trees, also creates its own weather. On an average day, a single large tree releases more than 100 gallons of water as vapor. This not only lowers the air temperature through evaporative cooling; as Salati discovered by tracking oxygen isotopes in rainwater samples, it also gives rise to “flying rivers” — rain clouds that recycle the forest’s own moisture five or six times, ultimately generating as much as 45 percent of its total precipitation. By creating the conditions for a continental swath of evergreens, this process is crucial to the Amazon’s role as a global “sink” for carbon.
Many scientists now fear, however, that this virtuous cycle is breaking down.
While I certainly agree that chopping down the Amazon is terrible, I think you're vastly oversimplifying things with this theory. Some things just don't grow well in some places, and soil is important too. You can't just plant a bunch of trees in the desert: there's no soil there, just sand. Sure, you could start small at the coast and move inland as the ecosystem changes and soil quality is improved, but this is something that would probably take many centuries or longer.
Grasslands, savannas, etc. have been around for far, far longer than human civilization; they're not something we created with deforestation, and ruminants like cows(' ancestors) have been around far longer than us, grazing in these places. Chopping down forests to make more places for cows obviously is a bad idea, but I'm not convinced that it's feasible to take places that have been grazed by animals for millennia and somehow turn them all into nut tree forests.
I'm aware. There are methods like enhancing the sand with soil sludge (nutrients & microbiome), for example.
> something that would probably take many centuries or longer.
Destruction is fast, regeneration slow. Those deserts might as well be a product of previous civilizations overgrazing.
Environmental Implications of Livestock: Goats
https://epar.evans.uw.edu/research/environmental-implication...
Blame it on the goats? Desertification in the Near East during the Holocene
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09596836166704...
> Grasslands, savannas ... they're not something we created with deforestation
Mongolia for example was much more forested in the past. Apx. 50% of current age grasslands and savannas were previously forests. Also, natural grazers prefer different plants than cows, so the compositions and storage capacity of pastures and grasslands differ extremely.
> I'm not convinced that it's feasible to take places that have been grazed by animals for millennia and somehow turn them all into nut tree forests
We don't have to. Just afforest those pastures and rewild the rest. It would protect the biodiversity for future generations.
It also shows only two types of meat (lamb and beer herds) with the largest land use but ignores chicken and others.
It's not the same and easily comparable.
https://www.seaspiracy.org/facts
Today only 3% of pacific bluefin tuna remain.
For the first time sharks are going extinct because of us.
Sharks kill 10 people per year, comparatively, people kill 11,000-30,000 sharks per hour.
Approx. 50 mil. sharks are killed every year as bycatch.
Seabird populations have declined by 70% since 1950's.
Studies estimate that up to 40% of all marine life caught is thrown overboard is bycatch.
There are 4,600,000 commercial fishing vessels in the world.
Over 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises are killed as bycatch every year.
46% of the pacific garbage patch is fishing nets.
There is enough long line set every day to wrap around the planet 500x.
Six out of seven species of sea turtles are either threatened or endangered due to fishing.
The fishing industry kills more animals in a day than the deep water horizon oil spill did in months.
Fishing has become a major threat to coral reefs from the Middle East to the Caribbean, where 90% of large fish have disappeared.
In the 1830's a typical fishing boat caught 1-2 tons of halibut per day, but today the entire fishing fleet catches 1-2 tons across the entire year.
Fish populations are in decline to near extinction. Virtually empty oceans by 2048.
Fish carbon stabilizes our climate.
> It also shows only two types of meat (lamb and beer herds) with the largest land use but ignores chicken and others.
If does not, read the original study https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325532198_Reducing_... or see here https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
The problem is overpopulation
Not at all.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares
> The problem is overpopulation
A little math might help.
environmental_impact = number_of_individuals * mean_individual_consumption
We can either lower individual_consumption, or wait for the nature to reduce number_of_individuals
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/14/reforest...
Offsetting agricultural emissions through reforestation would cost 15pc of farm profits
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2021-11-28/carbon-reforest...
https://ecologi.com/projects/wildlife-corridors-koalas-austr...
https://landlifecompany.com/news/the-critical-state-of-austr...
How to combat desertification with reforestation
https://www.groasis.com/en/planting/can-you-plant-trees-and-...
Australia is an outliner. Factory farming in The West is an entirely different - and much uglier - story.
And they even spread the pig manure all over fields here. The smell tells everything.
There's a reason they want to make "meat" in a lab. Hint: It's not because of traditional pastures.
there is about 1B cows, there is about 8B humans. Fart composition matters as well, if we're counting methane as worse, more plant ingestion means higher fraction of methane.
humans produce around 0.5g methane per day average beef cow of 500kg produces around 0.265g methane per day, average beef cow weighs ~1000kg, so lets say we're around on par for methane.
So, if we get rid of cows and instead ingest plant matter directly, we would need to see a increase of methane production of no more than 11.11% to break even.
however, if top google hits continue to be (if they ever were) reliable, we will see an increase of about 7 farts per day, from a 13-21 average for a male. This is an increase of about 33-54% so if in all the error that will exist arising from my franken-data and all the assumptions made along the way don't significant impact general accuracy, then we're not even close to breaking even.