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Running Roughshod

“The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”

—Franklin D. Roosevelt

During my high school years in semirural Tennessee, I had the opportunity to experience firsthand raising livestock. My father oversaw several farms in the area, including one dairy farm and another that raised broiler chickens, and I spent a lot of time on each.

When it was my day to handle the early-morning milking of our herd of thirty-five Holsteins, I would rise at 4:00 AM before going to school, drive out to the farm, and begin herding all the cows into the holding area next to the milking barn. While congregated in this area and at times while in the milking barn, the cows would relieve themselves as they pleased. This fresh manure would be hand-shoveled into a spreader parked next to the holding area. Every few weeks, whenever the spreader was filled to overflowing, we would use the tractor to haul it through either the pasture or croplands right there on the farm, enriching the soil in the age-old farmer’s cycle.

A similar process took place at the chicken farm. After the growth period for the 5,000 birds ended and they were shipped off to market, we would haul a manure spreader into the barn, where we would scoop up the dried manure that was piled about six inches high throughout the barn. With two of us shoveling, filling the spreader would take about thirty minutes, and then it would be hauled by tractor through the fields.

Looking back, I would call both farms a model of “green” livestock farming. The entire process served to protect the soil, the water supply, and our climate. Our little farms were among thousands of similar farms around the country at that time. The situation has changed dramatically since those days. For the most part, small family farms have been replaced by mega factory farms. These agribusiness holdings have steadily taken over growing the animals required as the world has increasingly adopted the typical meat-heavy Western diet. According to the USDA, in the United States alone, yearly chicken consumption per person has risen from ten pounds in the late 1940s to almost sixty pounds in 2000—a 600 percent increase in just fifty years.[113]

These changes are happening on a global basis as well. The New York Times reported in 2008:

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.[114]

The article goes on to report that the world’s total meat production had risen 400 percent since 1961—from 71 million tons to 284 million tons in 2007. Personal consumption doubled during that period and is expected to double again by 2050.

Currently, the United States grows and kills about 10 billion animals per year, a little over 15 percent of the global total of 60 billion, a number that is expected to double to 120 billion by 2050.[115] Where does the proliferation end? As Jonathan Foer points out in his book Eating Animals, “If the world followed America’s lead, we would consume over 165 billion chickens annually (even if the population didn’t increase).”[116]

A handful of those little farms of my youth still exist, but they are declining in number every year. The domination of agribusiness giants extends across the spectrum of animals grown for human consumption, including cattle. Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation remarks on the gap between pioneer lore and reality:

Ranchers and cowboys have long been the central icons of the American West. Traditionalists have revered them as symbols of freedom and self-reliance . . . [Yet] American ranchers . . . are rapidly disappearing. Over the last twenty years, about half a million ranchers sold off their cattle and quit the business. Many of the nation’s remaining eight hundred thousand ranchers are faring poorly . . . The sort of hard-working ranchers long idealized in cowboy myths are the ones most likely to go broke today.[117]

Anna Lappé in Diet for a Hot Planet relates how only a handful of giants have come to control vast proportions of food-animal production: “By 2007, Tyson, Cargill, Swift & Co. (now owned by Brazilian company, JBS) and National Packing Co. controlled 84.5 percent of beef packing operations. In the business of broilers (non–egg laying poultry), Pilgrim’s Pride, Tyson, Perdue, and Sanderson Farms controlled 58.5 percent of the market.”[118] While factory farms have been very good for the pocketbook of consumers, they have not been so kind to the health of those consumers—or to the health of the global environment.

What Is a Factory Farm?

Actually, agribusinesses hate the term “factory farm,” because it too accurately describes how their animals are treated. The official name is a CAFO (pronounced KAY-foe)—a contained animal feeding operation. CAFOs account for the vast majority of the production of beef, pork, eggs, milk, turkey, and chicken—and most of them are owned by huge corporations. To be able to compete at the supermarket register, these farms must simply be too large to be managed by a single family. Since the vast majority of our meat, dairy, and egg appetites are being fed by these types of farms, with few exceptions, the small family-managed farm that I remember has gone the way of the manual typewriter.

As Jonathan Foer reports, “For each food animal species, animal agriculture is now dominated by the factory farm—99.9 percent of the chickens raised for meat, 96 percent of laying hens, 99 percent of turkeys, 95 percent of pigs, and 78 percent of cattle.”[119] You do have the choice of buying free-range chickens or grass-fed beef, but they’re both essentially novelty items today. Thanks to the highly engineered factory farm, the people of the Western world are now able to afford animal-based foods three meals a day.

So what happened to those millions of bucolic farms of yore? They were the victim of two developments: a free market system and a never-ending process of continuous improvement—delivering more product for less money. The free market system will always work to deliver what consumers want, and companies compete for market share by becoming more efficient. The capitalist system works very well in most product categories but not so well in the world of the factory farm. That’s because the unit of production is a living, breathing animal or the eggs or milk that are taken from an animal. In their continual quest for lower prices and more profits, factory farms have “engineered” every element of the process—beginning with genetically designing the perfect broiler, the perfect laying hen, the perfect pig, or the perfect cow. Perfect in this case doesn’t mean healthy; it just means that it has the desired taste, it grows fast, and it is produced with ever increasing efficiency. The producers hope that these “perfect” animals will stay alive long enough to be slaughtered and sold as food for people. But because of the many hazards of their short, unhealthy lives, many of them die in the process. Those unfortunates become a part of the reusable waste that will eventually be fed to other farm animals.

The problems associated with mass-producing these “perfect” animals are widespread. To maximize production, each farm raises thousands of animals in very small spaces where many of them never see the light of day. They are given growth hormones and antibiotics to make them grow quickly and keep them alive within these cramped environments that are prone to contagion. The amount of excrement that these animals produce is a monumental environmental concern. As Foer reports, “Today a typical pig factory farm will produce 7.2 million pounds of manure annually, a typical broiler facility will produce 6.6 million pounds, and a typical cattle feedlot 344 million pounds. All told, farmed animals in the United States produce 130 times as much waste as the human population—roughly 87,000 pounds of [solid waste] per second.”[120] These numbers are very difficult to fully comprehend, so let’s think of them in another way. If we do a little math, that converts to a staggering 1.37 billion tons of animal waste each year. That works out to almost 9,000 pounds for every human being in the United States. Want a visualization of that amount? How would you like to see your share pull into your driveway? That would be nine pickup trucks filled to overflowing. Got a family of four? You better have a big driveway, because you’re going to need thirty-six trucks to hold your family’s share of this mess. And this incredible environmental problem is getting worse all the time.

So what else goes on at the typical factory farm? Well, that’s some dirt the entire industry would like to keep secret, and we’ll talk more about the treatment of the animals in Chapter 7. But from an environmental standpoint, the factory farm’s efficiency is anything but a bargain. It causes alarming degradation of the world’s arable land (land that can be used for growing crops), recklessly uses and pollutes our water supply, and negatively affects the climate and biodiversity. The factory farm does indeed produce cheap food—that is, until you factor in the damage to our environment.

Livestock’s impact on the world’s environmental health became the focus of a major study by the United Nations, which released its findings in a report titled Livestock’s Long Shadow in November 2006. The report advocates a major policy focus on a host of problems. “Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale and its potential contribution to their solution is equally large. The impact is so significant that it needs to be addressed with urgency.”[121] The report focuses on four categories of environmental damage that stems from the raising of livestock for our dinner tables: land degradation and deforestation, atmosphere and climate, water shortage and pollution, and biodiversity and the loss of species.

Land Degradation and Deforestation

Land is critical in any conversation about the environment. After all, whether we are eating sirloin or spinach, we need land to produce our food. The problem is that we need a lot more of it to produce the sirloin. Whether we are burning precious rain forests in Brazil to make room for grazing cattle or destroying our topsoil to create feed for beef, we’re devastating land at record speed, and this is clearly a serious problem. The following are some major points of the UN report.

We have been hearing about these problems for over thirty years, but the situation continues to worsen—all over the world. Back in 1987, John Robbins reported a host of facts on this topic in Diet for a New America. Back then, the U.S. Soil Conservation Service reported that over 4 million acres (an area about the size of Connecticut) of cropland were being lost to erosion in this country each year, equating to an annual topsoil loss of 7 billion tons. Of this staggering loss, 85 percent was associated with the raising of livestock.[125] How so? According to a 2010 University of Michigan Global Change Program document, the top three causes of soil degradation are overgrazing, agricultural activities (lack of sustainable organic practices), and deforestation.[126] The lion’s share is related to the world’s appetite for meat.

Dr. David Pimentel of Cornell University comments on the severity of the problem as well:

The United States is losing soil 10 times faster—and China and India are losing soil 30 to 40 times faster—than the natural replenishment rate. As a result of erosion over the past 40 years, 30 percent of the world’s arable land has become unproductive. About 60 percent of soil that is washed away ends up in rivers, streams and lakes, making waterways more prone to flooding and to contamination from soil’s fertilizers and pesticides.[127]

It would be nice if the problem were confined to the poor beasts raised on factory farms. Grass-fed cattle roam free, right? Yes, and while they enjoy a much better life than the CAFO animal, their grazing is still environmentally destructive. Although we don’t have to devote vast amounts of land to raising their food, grass-fed cattle have been taking their toll on the Earth’s surface for over two millennia. In his 1998 book, former cattle rancher Howard F. Lyman sums up the global overgrazing situation: “By introducing cattle in unnatural numbers onto marginal land where they do not belong in the first place, we are tampering dangerously with complex ecosystems.”[128]

Lyman further points out that the Earth’s surface was not originally designed for cattle grazing, and the land out West that is marginal for growing crops has been deteriorating ever since the first cowboys:

[M]ore than half of western topsoil has been lost since livestock began overtaking the western plains 140 years ago. Topsoil is the most precious commodity a farmer has. It takes Nature anywhere between one hundred and eight hundred years to produce one inch of topsoil. Since the founding of the United States, Nature would have provided us with, at most, about two inches more of topsoil, but due to our chemical farming practices and our essential forfeiture of sovereignty over the land to cattle, we’ve lost about six inches. We are squandering a resource whose preciousness we don’t even begin to understand, and floods are just part of our collective comeuppance.[129]

As noted previously, the problem isn’t confined to the United States. The greatest destruction by far has occurred in Brazil, where a priceless resource is being lost. According to estimates, roughly a fifth of the Amazon rain forest, an area the size of California, has been lost since the 1970s. That has helped make Brazil’s agribusiness corporation JBS become the largest meat supplier in the world.

What can be done to slow down or stop this environmental devastation? Cornell researchers estimate that for every person who eliminates animal foods from his or her diet, an acre of trees is spared every year.[130] Right now, there are roughly 10 million Americans (3.2 percent) who consider themselves vegetarian. With growing awareness, that number could easily double or triple in the next few years. When 20 million more Americans switch to a primarily plant-based diet, it will save close to 20 million acres of trees, an area about the size of Indiana.

Atmosphere and Climate

In the summer of 2006, just before the release of the UN report previously mentioned, former vice president Al Gore starred in the movie An Inconvenient Truth, which sounded a clarion call about the looming disaster the world may face if it cannot halt human-made global warming. Though the movie was effective in sounding the alarm, it is curious that Gore failed to mention that the raising of livestock is one of the leading causes of greenhouse gases—having a larger impact than all transportation combined. That’s right; the livestock sector accounts for roughly a third more gases than all those highway exhaust fumes.

As it relates to atmosphere and climate, the UN report points out several problems with raising livestock. The livestock sector is responsible for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, measured in carbon dioxide equivalents, which includes not only CO2 but also methane and nitrous oxide. In contrast, transportation (mainly automobiles) accounts for only 13.5 percent of the total. Livestock create 9 percent of the CO2; 37 percent of all methane, a deadly gas with 23 times the global warming potential of CO2; and 65 percent of all nitrous oxide, which has a global warming potential 296 times that of CO2 and also contributes to acid rain.[131] Most of this nitrous oxide comes from manure. A recent study published in Science magazine found that this gas is the single most important ozone-depleting substance (ODS) and is expected to remain the most abundant throughout the twenty-first century.[132] Livestock are also responsible for almost two-thirds of anthropogenic (human-caused) methane emissions, mainly through belching and releases of intestinal gas, which contribute significantly to acid rain and acidification of ecosystems. According to Howard Lyman, every cow emits up to 400 quarts of methane gas per day.[133]

In addition to these greenhouse gases, the livestock sector leads all human-produced sources in ammonia emissions (accounting for 64 percent of the world’s total). Ammonia also contributes significantly to acid rain and acidification of ecosystems. According to the UN report, the largest source of atmospheric ammonia is from the decay of organic matter in soils—an estimated 50 million tons per year. An estimated 23 million of those tons are produced by domesticated animals. This compares to only 3 million tons from all the wild animals of the world.[134]

Beyond all the big numbers, the crisis boils down to a single problem. Too many animals are populating the world, an offshoot of the problem of human overpopulation. But while the upward curve of the human population is expected to level off, the curve of animals raised for food is poised to shoot exponentially higher. We could all switch to electric vehicles—every one of us—and still the world would grow hotter because of those bites at the end of our forks.

Water Shortage and Pollution

Our water supply is one of the favorite topics of environmentalists around the world—and it should be. The UN report projects that 64 percent of the world’s population will live in water-stressed basins by 2025. According to a 2008 UNEP Report, “Agricultural water use accounts for about 75% of total global consumption (mainly for crop irrigation), while industrial use accounts for about 20%, and the remaining 5% is used for domestic purposes.”[135] Some striking numbers from When the Rivers Run Dry: “It takes 3,000 gallons to grow the feed for enough cow to make a quarter-pound hamburger, and between 500 and 1,000 gallons for that cow to fill its udders with a quart of milk. Cheese? That takes about 650 gallons for a pound of cheddar or brie or camembert.”[136]

An estimated 70 percent of all of the water used in the eleven western states of the United States is dedicated to the raising of animals for food. Much of that water comes from the largest underground lake in the world, the Ogallala Aquifer, which reaches from Texas to South Dakota and from Missouri to Colorado. About half the grain-fed cattle in America depend on water from this great aquifer to irrigate their feed crops, which contributes mightily to the three cubic miles of water that have been drained annually from this reserve for the past forty years. It took millions of years to create the lake, but at the current rate of consumption, this great natural resource will be mostly exhausted by 2050.[137]

The depletion of underground aquifers is a rapidly growing problem across the globe. Fred Pearce visited a small dairy farmer in India, where wells are increasingly coming up dry. Pearce says, “He has a small pump that brings to the surface 3,200 gallons of water an hour . . . mostly to grow alfalfa to feed his cows. His farm’s main output is 6.5 gallons of milk a day. I did the math. He uses 4.8 million gallons of water a year to grow the fodder to produce just over 2,400 gallons of milk. That’s 2,000 gallons of water for every gallon of milk.”[138] This same inefficiency is replicated at countless dairies worldwide, and the problem is the same. Water that is pumped out of the ground will run out someday—and in most places in the world, sooner rather than later.

Water.org reports that nearly 1 billion people lack access to safe water, and 2.5 billion do not have improved sanitation. The health and economic impacts are staggering. More people in the world own cell phones than have access to a toilet. And as cities and slums grow at increasing rates, the situation worsens. Every day, lack of access to clean water and sanitation kills thousands and leaves others with a poor quality of life.

How can we save our water? Soil and water specialists at the University of California Agricultural Extension in 1978 found that to produce one pound of California beef, it takes 5,214 gallons of water[139]—the amount of water required for one full year of seven-minute showers. Howard Lyman makes a telling point in Mad Cowboy:

We often hear about water shortages in areas such as Southern California, where citizens are recurrently requested not to wash their cars, not to overwater their lawns, and to use the low-flow showers and toilets. Good ideas, all. But you never hear city, county, or state governments combating drought by urging their citizens to cut down on meat consumption, even though the water required to produce just ten pounds of steak equals the water consumption of the average household for a year.[140]

John Robbins offers a simple solution in line with Lyman’s ideas: “You see people who are environmentalists trying to conserve water washing their cars less often, installing low flow sinks and toilets, drought resistant landscaping, and legislation passing requiring low flow shower heads and so forth. These are all prudent and helpful measures, but all combined they don’t even compare to what you save by eating one less hamburger.”[141]

In the great 2009 movie HOME, produced in France by PPR, Glenn Close told us some pretty scary numbers relative to the water use efficiency of producing meat. “To produce one kilo of potatoes requires 100 litres of water; to produce the same amount of beef requires 13,000 litres of water. Converting those numbers to water comsumption per calorie, we find that it takes over 75 times as much water to produce a calorie of beef compared to the potato. John Robbins provides similar data in The Food Revolution for a wide array of fruits, vegetables, and meats. From those numbers, we determined that while beef is the least efficient of the meats; on average it takes more than twenty times more water (per calorie) to produce meat compared to whole, plant-based foods.

Not only are livestock using huge quantities of water; they’re also polluting it. On the traditional farm, a cow patty represents a means of returning nutrients to the soil. But the numbers of animals confined on factory farms defecate in quantities that far surpass the farm’s ability to dispose of them. This problem has led some farms to use wholly inadequate systems of removal, which have led to environmental disasters all across the country.

In Eating Animals, Jonathan Foer summarizes the crux of the problem. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) reports that individual CAFOs can generate more waste than the populations of some U.S. cities. Amazingly, the polluting strength of the CAFO waste is 160 times greater than that of raw municipal sewage. “And yet there is almost no waste-treatment infrastructure for farmed animals—no toilets, obviously, but also no sewage pipes, no one hauling it away for treatment, and almost no federal guidelines regulating what happens to it.”[142]

The implications for human health are obvious. As David Kirby relates in Animal Factory, “While human sewage is treated to kill pathogens, animal waste is not. Hog manure has ten to one hundred times more concentrated pathogens than human waste, yet the law would never permit untreated human waste to be kept in vast ‘lagoons,’ or sprayed onto fields, as is the case with manure.”[143]

Remember that 1.37 billion tons of animal excrement produced annually in just the United States? What happens to this massive amount of dangerous animal waste? The short answer is that it ends up in our water supply. The EPA estimates that chicken, hog, and cattle excrement has already polluted thousands of miles of rivers. These assaults on the water supply have not gone unnoticed. In 1995, a malfunctioning manure lagoon at SNB Farms in Webster City, Iowa, spilled 1.5 million gallons of manure into the South Fork of the Iowa River. Within one week in 1998, two dairies in Washington State had separate spills that dumped 2 million gallons of manure into the Yakima River. In 2005, Oklahoma’s attorney general sued thirteen poultry companies, claiming they had damaged one of the state’s most important watersheds. A report of the Natural Resources Defense Council cites multiple abuses in thirty states.[144] The list goes on and on.

The largest spill occurred in North Carolina, a state that since the 1990s has been overrun by industrial hog farms, dominated by Smithfield, the largest hog agribusiness in the country. In his Rolling Stone article “Boss Hog” Jeff Tietz describes the terrible disaster:

The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by a Smithfield competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of effluvium into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina. It was the biggest environmental spill in United States history, more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years earlier. The sludge was so toxic it burned your skin if you touched it, and so dense it took almost two months to make its way sixteen miles downstream to the ocean. From the headwaters to the sea, every creature living in the river was killed. Fish died by the millions.[145]

A September 2009 article in the New York Times reports, “Agricultural runoff is the single largest source of water pollution in the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the E.P.A. An estimated 19.5 million Americans fall ill each year from waterborne parasites, viruses or bacteria, including those stemming from human and animal waste.”[146]

Sometimes large figures like these are hard to wrap our mind around. Let’s look at a fairly run-of-the-mill spill in Morrison, Wisconsin, a state famous for its dairy farms. In the same Times article, one neighbor told what happened to her. “[M]ore than 100 wells were polluted by agricultural runoff within a few months, according to local officials. As parasites and bacteria seeped into drinking water, residents suffered from chronic diarrhea, stomach illnesses and severe ear infections. ‘Sometimes it smells like a barn coming out of the faucet,’ said Lisa Barnard, who lives a few towns over.”[147]

Although millions of farmers have been displaced by the growth of CAFOs during the last fifty years, some of them are still running smaller niche market farms that specialize in the ethical treatment of animals. Jonathan Foer tells the story of one such pork farmer and how he and his wife had planned to retire at a small farm nearby one day. After years of preparing their “dream farm” for that retirement, they learned that a CAFO hog farm (holding 6,000 hogs) would soon be built on the land adjacent to their planned home.

Next to their dream, now, loomed a nightmare: thousands of suffering, sick hogs surrounded by, and themselves suffering within, a thick, nausea-inducing stench. Not only will the nearby factory farm decimate Paul’s land’s value (estimates suggest land degradation from industrial farming has cost Americans $26 billion) and destroy the land itself, not only will the smell make cohabitation incredibly unpleasant at best and more likely dangerous to Paul’s family’s health, but it stands in opposition to everything Paul has spent his life working for.[148]

The United States is not the only place where agricultural abuses occur. Smithfield, the hog king, has moved into eastern Europe in a big way. A May 2009 New York Times article explains the effect: “With almost 40 farms in western Romania, Smithfield has built enormous metal manure containers to inject waste into the soil. ‘We go crazy with the daily smell,’ said Aura Danielescu, the principal of a school in Masloc, who closes her windows tight. Smithfield farms in Romania’s Timis County are among the top sources of air and soil pollution, according to a local government report, which ranked the company’s individual farms No. 13 through No. 40. The report also indicates that methane gases in the air rose 65 percent between 2002 and 2007.”[149]

Disturbing reports like these continue to mount. What will it take for governments to step in and impose regulations to safeguard our health? What will it take for people to demand safety over cheap bacon? The probable truth is that only a disaster that kills humans rather than fish will wake us up to the industrial-food time bombs tucked away in our pastoral countryside.

Biodiversity and the Loss of Species

Why is biodiversity so important? An environment’s biodiversity is determined by the number of different animal and plant species that live in it. Rich biodiversity is crucial to the structure of the ecosystems and habitats that support all living things—including wildlife, fish, and forests. The greater the number of different species of plants and animals, the healthier the ecosystem and the better able to withstand disaster it is. Biodiversity helps provide for our basic human needs such as food, shelter, and medicine, all of which are derived (directly or indirectly) from biological sources, and it fosters ecosystems that maintain oxygen in the air, enrich the soil, and purify the water. Strong ecosystems help to protect against flood and storm damage and regulate climate. In a nutshell, biodiversity makes sustained living on planet Earth possible for all living creatures.

What is happening to our biodiversity and why? Our rapid consumption of resources and growing populations have led to a loss of other forms of life, which has disrupted ecosystems across the world. This loss has eroded the capacity of Earth’s natural systems to provide essential elements that humans depend on. Human activities have raised the rate of extinction to 1,000 times its usual rate. If we continue on this path, Earth will experience the sixth great wave of extinctions in billions of years of history.[150]

We’re seeing dramatic evidence of problems that the human race has created in the past century. According to the previously mentioned UN report, we are in an era of unprecedented threats to biodiversity. The rate at which we’re losing species is estimated to be fifty to five hundred times higher than historical rates found in the fossil record. Fifteen out of twenty-four important ecosystem services are assessed to be in decline. The livestock sector may well be the leading player in the reduction of biodiversity, since it is a major driver of deforestation, land degradation, pollution, climate change, overfishing, sedimentation of coastal areas, and facilitation of invasions by alien species.[151] Conservation International has identified thirty-five global hot spots for biodiversity, characterized by exceptional levels of plant endemism and serious levels of habitat loss. Of these, twenty-three are reported to be affected by livestock production. An analysis of the authoritative International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species shows that most of the world’s threatened species are suffering habitat loss where livestock are a factor.[152]

An estimated two of every three bird species in the world are in decline; one in every eight plant species is endangered or threatened; and one-quarter of mammals, one-quarter of amphibians, and one-fifth of reptiles are endangered or vulnerable.[153] Also in crisis are forests and fisheries, which are essential biological resources and integral parts of the Earth’s ecosystems. Forests are home to 50 to 90 percent of terrestrial species. They also provide services such as carbon storage and flood prevention, and they are critical resources for many culturally diverse societies and millions of indigenous people. The World Resources Institute estimates that only one-fifth of the Earth’s original forest cover has survived, and still deforestation continues, with 445 million acres in developing countries deforested between 1980 and 1995.[154]

John Robbins comments on the extent of this loss of habitat: “[The n]umber of species of birds in one square mile of Amazon rainforest [is] more than exists in all of North America . . . The number one factor in elimination of Latin America’s tropical rain forests is cattle grazing . . . Every second, an area the size of a football field is destroyed forever.”[155] How much species extinction is normal? Biologists estimate that the normal rate of extinctions is about ten to twenty-five species per year. We are, however, now losing at least several thousand species a year, and possibly tens of thousands.[156]

Our forests aren’t the only habitats in trouble; marine ecosystems are in danger as well. Overfishing, destructive fishing techniques, and other human activities have severely jeopardized the health of many of the world’s fish stocks along with associated marine species and ecosystems. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that more than half of ocean fish stocks are exploited at or beyond capacity.[157] At the same time, our agricultural practices on land are beginning to foul the oceans as well.

Dr. Bruce Monger, who teaches oceanography at Cornell University, has uncovered some alarming facts on this pollution. After plotting the explosive growth of human population, the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, the escalation of deforestation, and the increase in the use of industrial nitrogen fertilizer from 1980 to 2009—all on the same graph—he was “blown away” by what he saw. In a 2009 online lecture, he exclaimed, “Boy, I’ve got to get interested in what’s going on with nitrogen, because it’s by far the most rapidly increasing item of this group.”[158] Some estimate that we’ve put more nitrogen-based fertilizer in the ground in the last twenty years than we’ve put in the ground since fertilizer was invented. This unprecedented increase in the use of chemical fertilizer has been driven in large part by the crops grown to feed the billions of CAFO animals. Just as their manure pollutes our rivers and streams, the fertilizer used to grow their feed is beginning to do a number on our oceans. As Dr. Monger explains:

When you have heavy agriculture and you pour large amounts of fertilizer on the land . . . a large fraction washes off the land into streams and is eventually brought to the coastal ocean, where it’s dumped . . . That nitrogen in turn stimulates exceptionally strong growth by algae, which creates an exceptionally large biomass of algae in the surface water. This algae eventually dies and usually sinks into coastal waters, typically near river outflows. Bacteria consume that dead algae for food, and they consume the oxygen in the water along with it. The more nutrients you dump in the ocean from land, the more algae, and the more bacteria consume oxygen until the oxygen in the water falls to near zero.[159]

After a few more steps, this process leads to what oceanographers call dead zones, areas of very low or zero oxygen where nothing that uses oxygen for growth can live. Dr. Monger goes on to explain that this is a problem not only for the Mississippi River or for the United States but for the entire world. The same blights we see along the Gulf and East Coast of the United States we see in Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia.

Fish farming is another industry that has enjoyed unprecedented growth in recent years, which contributes to the problem globally. As we discuss in Chapter 7, these floating CAFOs are no picnic for the poor fish, and they’re equally bad for the environment—primarily because of the nitrogen used for these farms. As Dr. Monger says, “Farmed fish need to be fed something. If you’re growing salmon in a pen off the coast, you have to dump fish food in there, and that fish food is full of nitrogen, and a lot of the food won’t be consumed, and the fish will excrete it.”[160] So the problem of nitrogen pollution is compounded, and unlike the nitrogen from fertilizer, the nitrogen from the fish farms doesn’t have to travel down streams and rivers first. It bleeds directly into the ocean.

Everything Is Connected

When humankind discovered centuries ago that we live on a spherical planet, we started down the road of becoming aware that the Earth is a whole system in which all parts are connected. The plethora of global environmental issues we are experiencing today is constantly driving home that point. To summarize our dilemma, the world already has too many people, yet we continue to grow at a rapid rate. On top of that, the developing world is rapidly adopting the highly inefficient and environmentally destructive Western diet. The land available to feed the world is decreasing every year, which drives us to continue to run roughshod over the planet in the search of more land. With the desertification of former farmlands continuing at a frightening rate around the world, the prognosis for our sustained ability to feed the world is downright scary (we discuss this further in Chapter 6). And let’s not forget the problems associated with our water supply, the loss of species, and the looming issue of global warming.

The sum total of our dilemma is mind-boggling. But a large part of the solution is refreshingly simple. John Robbins sums it up well:

We undermine our own survival if we pollute our air and water, if we destroy the rainforests and deplete our natural resources . . . Increasing numbers of people today are aware of the need to honor the Earth and . . . to reduce . . . our “ecological footprint.” . . . [Yet f]ew of us realize there is something we all could do that would have a tremendous impact on reducing pollution, conserving resources, and protecting our precious planet and the life it holds. There is indeed one action, within the grasp of each and every one of us, that could help to turn the tide. And yet most of us don’t know what it is. I am talking about what you eat.[161]

Collectively, we have created a global crisis in the past century, and collectively, we need to fix it. For that we need leadership, but unfortunately, most of our leaders, even those few who might understand the devastating environmental impact of our Western diet, have apparently concluded that a planned, deliberate move away from it is unrealistic. I hear it all the time. Lots of people have heard that eating meat causes much of global warming and other environmental problems, but they think it would be too extreme, too radical or unrealistic, to try to adopt a plant-based diet.

Fortunately, that feeling is beginning to change, and the grassroots movement that is driving the change received a shot in the arm in September 2010 when Bill Clinton announced that he had starting eating a plant-based diet. Although he didn’t do it for environmental reasons, the fact that he switched over will convince millions of people worldwide that his new diet could possibly be realistic after all. With a few more high-profile endorsements like this one, the widespread return to the natural diet for our species will gather momentum.

Approximately 1 million additional Americans are shifting to a primarily plant-based diet each year. Many of them are college students, who are six times more likely to be vegetarian than all other adults in the country. As we know, college students love to get behind what they consider positive change. Just as they helped to elect Barack Obama president, these educated young people will be major players in this critical process of inevitable change. Humans must ultimately become more environmentally responsible citizens of the world. We have already reached the breaking point for the cost of health-care in much of the world; likewise, we’ll soon reach a breaking point for many environmental issues. To continue down our current path is simply no longer an option. It is overwhelmingly unsustainable.

“We do not inherit the land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”

—Native American proverb