Here’s an interesting article from EarthFirst.com titled “Meat-Eating Environmentalist: A Contradiction in Terms?“ This is one that you meat-eaters should pay attention to, especially if you feel that your carbon footprint is small. An excerpt:
Consider these facts:
- The livestock sector is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Cows emit vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere – and the impact of these emissions is greater than that of CO2 from cars.
- Animals raised for food in the U.S. produce 130 times more excrement than the human population.
- Each and every year, factory farms dump 220 billion gallons of hormone-, antibiotic- and bacteria-laden animal waste onto farmland and into waterways.
- Pfiesteria, a microscopic organism that feeds off the phosphorus and nitrogen found in manure, is a lethal toxin harmful to both humans and fish. In 1991 alone, 1,000,000,000,000 (one billion) fish were killed by pfiesteria in the Neuse River in North Carolina.
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