“The activist is not the person who says the river is dirty.
The activist is the person who cleans up the river.”
—Ross Perot
EVERY SECOND OF EVERY DAY, THERE is depletion in the form of pollution. Pollution of any kind depletes the environment of clean healthy soil, waterways, ground-water, and the air we breathe. Some of the largest contributing sectors to this pollution are the meat, dairy, and fishing industries—and those who choose to eat things that these industries produce. “How can that be?” you say. “I simply eat it; I am not polluting.” Well, yes, you are. And here is how it all works: Your contribution to pollution begins with what you decide to purchase to consume. It’s not just with the occasional purchase; it’s with every food item you eat, every day. With meat and animal products, the pollution associated with your choice is massive. In order to raise that animal for you to eat, there is baggage that silently comes along with it—silent to you, that is, although it speaks loudly elsewhere. In the United States alone, chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows in factory farms produce over five million pounds of excrement per minute. These are the animals raised each year so that people can continue eating meat, and they produce 130 times more excrement than the entire human population in our country. This manure sewage is responsible for global warming, water and soil pollution, air pollution, and use of our resources. The waste produced by the animals raised for food includes with it all the antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, hormones, and other chemicals used during the raising and growing process. Accompanying this is methane released by the animals themselves, as well as the carbon, nitrous oxide, and additional methane emissions produced during the whole raising, feeding, and killing process.
Regarding pollution of our global water supply, livestock are responsible for 37 percent of pesticide use, 55 percent of erosion, and 50 percent of the volume of antibiotics consumed.92 This ultimately ends up in our waterways, either directly or through runoff, creating water contamination. Livestock are responsible for 33 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus loads found in freshwater resources.93 While there is no current assessment of the effective load into freshwater resources of sediments of heavy metals or biological contaminants, it can be reasonably assumed that livestock have a major role in these processes of pollution as well. In the United States, recent EPA studies have shown that 35,000 miles of rivers in twenty-two states and groundwater in seventeen states has been permanently contaminated by industrial farm waste.94 Raising animals for us to eat pollutes our waterways more than all other industries combined.95
Pollution from animal factories is destroying our oceans as well. Streams and rivers carry vast amounts of excrement and chemical waste from livestock farms, which finds its way to the ocean. Deposits of animal feces, fertilizers, and toxic waste cause death of plants and sea life, as it causes massive algae populations that leave inadequate oxygen for other forms of life. One of the world’s largest “dead zones” can be found in the Gulf of Mexico off the U.S. coast. This is an area about half the size of the state of Maryland, in which nearly all the sea animals and plants have died. A 2006 report by Princeton University concluded that a shift away from meat production would dramatically reduce the amount of nitrogen carried into the Gulf, to levels that would render this dead zone “non-existent.”96 The UN now reports there are 150 dead zones in the world’s oceans, caused by an excess of nitrogen from farm fertilizers and sewage. Another example is the serious loss of marine life and ecosystems in the South China Sea due to nitrogen and phosphorus runoff, where it is now known that livestock are the primary inland source of contamination.97
Knowing that many fishing areas are becoming devoid of fish, the development of fish farms has exploded in the past few years. Because stocks of most of the top ten fish species are depleted and overexploited, businesses and governments have turned to other ways to produce fish. Aquaculture, the growing of fish in a farmed area, increased by more than three million tons from 2006 to 2007 and is expected to grow faster than all other animal food sectors.98 This growth in aquaculture is driving an increase in global fishing, due to the need for fishmeal and fish oil, which is used in fish farms. It is a bizarre, ecologically unhealthy circle, where the demand to eat fish has taxed the oceans so there has been a proliferation of controlled fish-farm production, which places further stress on the oceans because of the need for fish-meal and oil in the production process.
These fish farms now greatly contribute to water pollution on two levels. The first is by further concentrating toxin levels and creating a higher potential for our exposure to them. When fishmeal and fish oil are used in aquaculture, the process concentrates carcinogens such as dioxins. This occurs because various contaminants and chemicals are found in many types of fish, which are then passed on, in more condensed forms, as they work up the food chain. Farmed salmon, for instance, consistently have much higher levels of dioxin than their wild counterparts. This is because they are fed a constant diet of fishmeal, which now has concentrated amounts of the many pollutants to which all the fish comprising the meal were exposed during their lifetime. Farm-raised salmon and other fish now dominate certain markets, such as on the West Coast of the United States.99
The second level of pollution for which fish farms are responsible is the massive amount of waste they produce, which further depletes our oceans. Farmers confine thousands of fish into tiny enclosures in the ocean, with enormous amounts of feces and other waste being created and deposited into our waterways. Farms typically grow up to 90,000 fish in a pen that is 100 feet by 100 feet. In one area with adjoining pens, as many as one million fish can be grown at one time.100 Organic and chemical wastes from these farms occur from all of the following sources:
• Fish feces and bodily waste products
• Fish mortalities that sink to the seabed
• Fish blood from farms that kill and bleed fish on site prior to sale
• Uneaten food
• Eight types of antibiotics
• Feed additives and coloring agents to make their white flesh appear pink
• Zinc and copper
• Paints and disinfectants
All of these produce increased nitrogen levels and toxins that cover seafloors beneath these farms, creating large dead zones.101 One study in 2001 revealed that the farmed salmon just in British Columbia for one year produced as much nitrogen as the untreated annual sewage from 682,000 people.102 A professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia has noted: “They [fish farms] are like floating pig farms.”103 Antibiotic use is common, as well as pesticides and copper sulfate, an algaecide. This is because diseases and parasites run rampant in the cramped, overcrowded fish-farm conditions. Swarms of sea lice actually end up being inadvertently incubated on the captive farmed fish and then attach themselves on wild salmon and other fish as they swim past the farms in the ocean.
While fish-farm pollution has been studied and documented in North America, accurate reports have not been available for other areas of the world, such as China, where the industry has exploded. China produces over 70 percent of the global supply of farmed fish.104 It can be safely assumed that along with that is the production of massive amounts of ocean depletion of marine life and pollution. Fish farms exist because we have depleted our oceans of numerous species of marine life.
The solution to loss of marine life is to eliminate the demand for fish, not to create new aquaculture industries that create an even greater level of depletion from additional fishing and pollution.
Whether discussing land, water, or the air we breathe, our food choices heavily affect the level of pollution and ecological sustainability. The more you choose to eat animal products, the more you contribute to the worldwide pollution. It really does not matter whether it is in the form of livestock or fish; there still will be an excessive and unnecessary amount of depletion and pollution.