For anyone interested in the numbers behind how bad beef and deforestation are for the environment, see Hannah Ritchie’s great new book Not the End of the World.
Our property was farmland for 150 years before it basically ran out of nutrients in the 1970s. After one year of a pretty good harvest (not great) in 2019, we couldn't grow anything. One home testing kit later, and we found that there were virtually no minerals in the soil.
Fast forward five years and between heavy composting and generating a very healthy amount of bird waste, we're just starting to restore the nutrient balance in the soil. The next step (in progress) is planting some native grasses and low lying shrubs to try and break up the practically impenetrable clay pan that exists below the soil.
Many people dislike meat eating, and I understand that, but developing a healthy relationship with the land practically requires some form of livestock. We are turning "dead" land into highly productive pasture literally in one growing cycle.
We aren't doing anything intensive, and we don't have chickens or pigs. I did the math, and it doesn't really seem like you can have chickens or pigs just range, you have to supplement their diet in some way. Geese on the other hand are like...the best animals for regenerative ag, maybe next to sheep.
We will probably get chickens at some point (unless we miraculously can range enough ducks for eggs), but we will have to buy in their feed.
They'll also ignore any imports into the system from conventional sources. SO, they'll feed conventionally grown feed, but not include that in their numbers.
In the end, even if regenerative farming was any good, the amount of meat we could afford to produce (aka without using too much land, water or other resources) is so tiny that 90% of our food would end up being vegan anyway.
We tend to stop at the symptoms instead of going after the root cause.
Wasting crops feeding cattle is inherently worse than the alternative, feeding directly on the crops and avoiding the wasting of calories when going up one trophic level.
To reduce quality of life (because it's not limited to meat, it's comprehensive restrictions) simply to accomodate ever more humans on the planet is madness and unsustainable, anyway.
PS: Let's also remember, for example, that 50-60 million bisons roamed North America before European settlement, whereas there are about 28 million beef cows in the US today (according to Google).
I.e.: if the true impact of turning crops into meat were reflected in the price of a hamburger, demand elasticity would eventually result in much less production. Or: growing meat consumption is mostly a result of implicit subsidies to maintain status quo, ignore climate change,etc.
You're not doing a whole lot to explain why there is nothing wrong with eating meat and breeding cattle. I can think of a whole host of reasons why it is wrong in matters of ethics and mercy. Who is there to advocate for the cow? We know cows feel a gamut of emotions just as we do. They are not insensate. Most humans, when given a knife or a captive bolt gun and told to go kill that cow on yonder would not. So we externalize the death-making to slaughterhouse workers who coincidentally also suffer:
> ...SHWs had significantly higher levels of depression compared with office workers, but not butchers. The difference in depression rates differed from study to study, ranging from 10% to 50% [1]
There's really no good, ethical argument to be made for the killing of animals for food or pleasure. Did we need to do it once to survive as a species? Yes. Are we largely living in a post-scarcity world where those practices should now be challenged? Yes.
If you do not wish to eat meat for personal reasons you are free to do so of course but I object to the current trend of minority groups trying to impose their views to the whole of society and to paint those who disagree as 'wrong'.
One could argue that meat eating is necessary for taking part on some people’s culture, which is true, but also shifting. And spreading the idea of vegetarianism is helpful in making that shift happen.
I'm curious what you mean by "impose their views" with respect to meat-eating. Has a vegan ever tried to stop you from eating meat for example through physical force, threatening your livelihood, making meat illegal in their state, etc?
Don't get me wrong, I also dislike when strangers impose their moral, ethical, racial, political, or religious views on me.
But of all the groups that concern me, vegans are low on my list as their weapons mostly seem to be uncomfortably strong arguments on the internet and the occasional preachy Netflix documentary.
Why should explain why something is NOT bad ? It's up to you to convince him (or others) that it is bad, and the reasoning "according to MY ethics it is bad" is not a good argument.
There is a good argument to be made that in the West we should eat less meat, but that doesn't mean removing it completely: it is harder to make a balanced vegan diet, so for most people that would mean a less healthy outcome that just eating a moderate amount of meat.
You're making something of a jump there - not eating meat equates to a vegetarian diet, not a vegan diet. One can argue about the merits of a vegan diet over a vegetarian one, but a vegetarian, non-vegan diet is already a big step up over a meat-heavy one, and a vegetarian diet including eggs and dairy doesn't really have any challenges in being balanced/healthy compared to a moderate-meat diet.
Because they're the one who made the claim without evidence or argument.
> It's up to you to convince him (or others) that it is bad
Yes, that's what I did.
> the reasoning "according to MY ethics it is bad" is not a good argument.
That wasn't my argument.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01650...
Obviously we are all people. The question is do we keep chasing an ever increasing population or do we accept that it cannot keep growing and should in fact probably decrease?
Most developed countries have birth rates below replacement rate so this is already happening. We need to accept it and adapt.
WE should consider that in the equation of "overpopulation", the other variable, "resource consumption", is far easier and more ethical to reduce.
The issue, of course, is that option 1 hurts others that aren't us, while option 2 will require changes from US, like not eating meat, reducing personal cars, reducing consumption and infinite growth in general.
We aren't.
Every bit of evidence is that Human population is on the path to stabilizing. Developing countries plateau, and all that "India and china are going to outreproduce us!" rhetoric was stupidity; people extrapolating an S curve as if it were an infinite exponential curve.
All you have to do is give women an education and legal access to birth control and it turns out most humans do not want 50 kids. Women happily manage population control, with no moral problems.
I have yet to see a government declare that they will let population decrease and initiate programs to adapt. Perhaps Japan comes close but we'll see.
Grain finishing is another matter. But it's not a 1 grain : 1/10th beef type situation.
Now chopping and burning down the amazon to create grazing land for cattle? yeah that's going to probably kill us all.
How?
I mean, I'm not a fan of destroying forests, etc, but around here, there is no unmanaged land so presumably all the forests were already burnt etc for farmers... But we're all around, right? I don't get how burning the Amazon for food people want will actually kill us.
You are living in a post destruction area, with new forests planted to supplement the destruction that was there before. Most of these forests aren't more than 70 years old, that's about when we finally made an effort to fix how badly we totally fucked up and why people needed clean air to not die from lung cancer (among other things). The loss of biodiversity, air quality, etc. already occurred. You are a survivor. What's more, your survival was in part supported by the air quality of other virgin forests further away from you that weren't yet cut down. But now that they are being cut down, there's less left to support you.
In short, you're asking yourself why you shouldn't shoot yourself in the foot again, because you managed to survive the first shot and it looks to you like it healed just fine (it didn't).
Someone around here did clear the forests for farmland... and people are doing ok.
Its not that everyone died, as the comment I responded to said.
https://woodlandsteward.squarespace.com/storage/past-issues/...
We are still alive. I wish we had the forests, but we have survived and the environment has adjusted.
https://www.wri.org/insights/tracking-global-tree-cover-gain
And, the Amazon is pretty damn big. The potential effects of its loss are detailed here:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-the-amazon...
Finally, tropical forests (/jungles) are a lot more productive in terms of growth (and carbon capture) than temperate forests.
https://news.mongabay.com/2011/06/tropical-forests-more-effe...
Like it's obvious the people who own and control that land don't care about it anywhere near as much as you do so if you want them to stop chopping it down essentially you're gonna need to start paying them not to. Just seems naive to think stopping specifically poor people from eating meat is the solution to this.
> Poor people from eating meat
Yeah and a carbon tax will stop poor people from using as much gas, etc. - if we want to solve climate change we cannot just insulate all poor people from externality pricing.
Solving the environmental crisis means reducing our consumption of resources. Solving global poverty means a significant increase in consumption of resources.
So the only way forward is to let the global population decrease ASAP so that we can both live well and preserve the planet.
We are already wreacking havoc on the planet and marginal decrease in resource intensity is not going to make a difference because our total impact needs to be slashed.
I never understand the insistence of some of ignoring population in the equation, which is the key parameter.
We're seeing more than simply marginal decreases - if we can successfully transition our power. The gap in per capita CO2 emissions between developing, middle-income, developed is not nearly as great as what you are suggesting [0] and will decrease even further in the time that it takes to raise people in poverty now to developed-world standards.
> I never understand the insistence of some of ignoring population in the equation, which is the key parameter.
A few reasons: 1. Population is projected to peak in the coming decades. 2. "Slashing" population counts requires a global deployment of force that is both not practically feasible right now and incredibly unpopular. There is no practical path to "slashing" population. This is the primary reason, imo. 3. People in the West always imagine that it would be other people/nations slashing their population count when the biggest marginal impact (especially given climate lags) would be slashing their own population. These solutions are eugenicist in nature.
Also - taking a step back for a moment, I am confused as to how this in any way justifies beef. Beef contributes to the gap between rich and poor in CO2. If we reduce reliance on beef, it means we can support a larger population sustainably?
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
And so we are screwed.
Now the West is already slashing its own population, birth rates have crashed. The issue is that it's refusing to let it go because it's not the easy option, and at global scale this is a taboo subject.
And so we are doubly screwed.
Don’t understand why people want to play whack a mole to get to the end goal all while making everyone’s lives worse, esp on the lower income levels who can’t afford organic meat.
When if you want the trees saved then pay them to keep them and hold them to it. Like that’s the actual goal no? And easier than completely retooling society as a backwards way to cause that change.
I mean this is about the trees right?
REDD+ programs (which is what you are describing) are massive failures at preventing deforestation or carbon decreases.
> There’s limitless profitable reasons to chop it down.
No, there are costs and profits and if you decrease the profits and increase the costs it changes peoples behavior at the margin. The Amazon rainforest isn't the one thing that is exempt from basic economics.
The world wide land area for farming would reduce from 4 to 1 billion hectares if we didn't use livestock to feed humans. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
So the answer to "what would we do with all that land we can't put crops on" is "whatever we want". For example, we could just leave it be nature, since we don't need it for farming.
> China’s outsized contribution to the global greening trend comes in large part (42%) from programs to conserve and expand forests. These were developed in an effort to reduce the effects of soil erosion, air pollution and climate change. Another 32% there – and 82% of the greening seen in India – comes from intensive cultivation of food crops.
If the green of pristine forests is replaced by the green desert of a monocultural eucalyptus planted forest, or the green of grass pastures, it's still a big ecological net loss.
The entire planet is greener. Everywhere. The planting did little.
> Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect
One of those Inconvenient Truths.
Brazilian beef is frankly way less deforested than anything from the U.S. or Europe.
The three most forested countries in the world are Russia, Canada and Brazil in that order.
In all honesty I’m perfectly fine with the bans / boycotts it keeps farmers here poor and beef cheap.
Europe is greener than 20 years ago.
Asia is greener than 20 years ago.
Africa is greener than 20 years ago.
The entire planet is greener than 20 years ago.
It has nothing to do with people planting trees and everything to do with Co2 being what plants eat.
This is mostly due to the fact after WW2 lot of people stopped farming in the hills and mountains, and moved to urban areas. There are plenty of ghost towns in the Italian mountains.
[1] (link in Italian) https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/in-italia-mai-cosi-tante-for...
Finland, Sweden and Japan are the top 3 fully industiralized nations for forested land as a percentage of land mass.
https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/AG.LND.FRST.ZS/r...
Russia 49.78%
Canada 38.70%
Brazil 59.42%
US 33.87%But it's not at all an """Incovenient""" truth. The fact that plants use CO2 to grow, and that more CO2 can result in more ruffage growing is uncontroversial.
It also does nothing to offset the actual problems with increasing CO2 levels!
"Forest" is a 3-D bulk tonnage of captured (for now at least) carbon dioxide.
This increase in the colour green that you tout hasn't made a dent in reducing the ever increasing amount of insulating CO2 in the atmosphere.
Otherwise yellow grasses being greener due to increased CO2 is of some small interest, but it's not the same as a similar area X height of large trees in terms of capture.
Just pragmnatic facts, not a "convenient" or "inconvenient" "truth".
Nice attempt at a tangent, pity it fell flat.
More to your implied point, deforestation can happen one place and afforestation/reforestation another at the same time. Even a net increase in forest worldwide doesn’t make the loss of Brazilian rainforests are any better