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 CO2 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.
Animals raised for food emit large amounts of greenhouse gases in different ways. Directly, livestock emit carbon dioxide from the respiratory process, and we have 60 billion more animals on earth than humans, all of which breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Additionally, all livestock emit methane, nitrous oxide, ammonia, and carbon as part of their digestive process, in the form of flatulence, manure, and urine. In the United States alone, livestock produce 89,000 pounds of excrement every second—that’s 130 times as much as the entire human population of the country.22
The 2010 Agriculture and Air Quality Symposium, sponsored by the Institute for Livestock and the Environment, identified significant air pollutants caused by raising animals for food and called for establishing methods of control and reduction. In addition to greenhouse gases, other air pollutants that cause concern are volatile organic compounds that are precursors to ozone, hydrogen sulfide, many types of particulate matter, and ammonia and odor.
Indirectly, livestock adversely affect the carbon balance of the land used for feed crops and pasture, as well as with the massive amounts of fossil fuel used in the production process, including feed production, processing, multiple levels of transport, and marketing of livestock products. Looking at just the agriculture sector, livestock constitute 80 percent of all emissions.23 While this figure reflects a global issue, there is variation on the local level, with some countries such as Brazil contributing 60 percent of its total greenhouse gas emissions from livestock, due to the very large cattle operations and corresponding destruction of rainforest. Livestock emit 10 percent of all CO2 and 40 percent of all methane (twenty-three times the global warming potential of CO2), 65 percent of nitrous oxide (310 times the global warming potential of CO2) and two-thirds of all ammonia emissions, which cause acid rain and acidification of our ecosystems.24 This makes your choice to eat meat one of the largest sectors for CO2 emissions and the single largest contributor of methane and nitrous oxide and ammonia. Producing one calorie of animal protein requires more than ten times as much fossil fuel input and produces more than ten times as much CO2 as does one calorie of plant protein.25 And producing any meat from animals creates the production of methane, nitrous oxide, and ammonia, while producing food from plants creates none.
The enormous amount of land and forests cleared for livestock and our demand to eat meat creates other losses in numerous ways. When livestock destroy vegetation, either through clearing forests and land for feed-crop growth, or directly by the livestock themselves, it disrupts the normal water cycle processes in that area. This destruction of natural ecosystems creates a significant impact on climate change as follows:
• Carbon dioxide that has been stored by plants is actually released back into the air.
• Oxygen is no longer created and released by all the plants that have been destroyed.
• Carbon dioxide is no longer taken out of the air by the plants that have been destroyed.
• The newly deforested land becomes vulnerable to erosion and eventual desertification, both of which are occurring at an alarming rate.
All food comes from somewhere and requires some degree of effort to produce, process, and transport. With meat, dairy, or fish products, we affect vastly more resources than we would by consuming plant-based foods—resources such as our air and—although it’s not readily seen—the quality of the air and atmosphere around us is becoming depleted with each and every bite of food made from animal products.
It is quite clear that the ability of our planet to produce oxygen from our forests and oceans is being compromised, and the comprehensive aspect of our atmosphere is changing in an unhealthy manner. Both are not easily reversed—at least, perhaps, not in our lifetime.