Seeing as it's world vegan day, I thought it apt to share a piece from George Monbiot 'Regenesis'
Regarding our relationship with food and how it's furling the climate crisis. Here's a summary of what I've been reading.....
‘People say we have a population crisis, but it’s not us, it’s farmed animals. Farm animals are now increasing in number about as twice as fast as human beings. 70 % of birds on earth, by weight are chickens, turkeys and farmed ducks. And while livestock are booming, wildlife is collapsing. Here in Britain, half (51%) our total land use is given over to livestock grazing. Worldwide 28% land use is also devoted to it. What do we get in return? We get 1% of our total protein. Growing protein in the form of cows releases almost 200 times as much greenhouse gases than growing the same amount of protein in nuts. The 75 billion farm animals we kill for food every year cause more climate breakdown than all our planes, trains, trucks, cars and ships put together.
The extreme climate events of the past few years ie the heat dome over North America, which cooked the fruit on the trees, and roasted the shellfish on the rocks, the wildfires in California and Australia, and the great heatwaves in Artic and Antarctic, the floods in Europe, China, South Africa, these are the flickering of faults in our earth systems. I say flickering, because this is only the beginning. We could be about to flip our earths systems. This flip would be out of its current stable state. The state which is suited to the flourishing of life and into a different one altogether.
Unless we change the way we eat, I think this will happen within my lifetime.
There is a way to stop this. It’s simple.
Stop farming animals.
The alternative? Plant based diet. In Helsinki Finland, scientists are brewing up an entirely different kind of food. Protein can be produced from bacteria these protein can produce an almost identical generic white protein that we obtain from farmed animals, without the breeding, feeding and slaughtering. We wouldn’t have the added heart disease or food poisoning and now, pandemics.
This would in turn mean, we can return three quarters of the worlds farmland, back to nature. Nature as we know, is our only way to sequester co2.
Yes it’s a big deal to end animal farming and I expect to get no end of abuse for even saying it. We all cling to warm and comforting beliefs with which we are raised, the fairy tale stories of farms. 'That is probably why we are just used to this ‘just being how it is’ but truth is seldom beauty and beauty is seldom truth.
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