Reply #34: The depravity of the human race never ceases to astound! [View All]

[govegan]

Can there be anything more useless? more depraved? more perverted?

At least the environmental impact of growing flesh to torture and masticate is mentioned, but only in a tongue in cheek, incidental sort of way.

Folks who like to call themselves civilized have long been in denial of the huge environmental impact their little mouthfulls of flesh have on the planetary ecosystems. It is so much easier to wring hands and fret and moan about those infernal combustion engines. That can so ease the mind and once again make one feel good about one's bad habits. After all, a cow is a cow is a burger or a steak.

Our society is very skilled at engineering dependence on the medical/pharmaceutical/industrial/military complex. Just think of the new drugs that could be designed to stave off the decaying of the human flesh after a little lab flesh.

Or . . . .

Human Health and Planet Health—Same Solution

An amazingly simple win-win opportunity stares us in the face: a global
switch to a plant-food-based diet will solve the diseases of overnutrition
and put a big dent in global warming with one U-turn—since the up-to-now
insatiable appetite for foodstuffs made from livestock (cows, sheep, pigs,
and chickens) are at the root of both disasters.

The human health crisis is pandemic with more than 1.1 billion people overweight
and 312 million obese, 197 million have diabetes, and 1 billion have
hypertension. One final and fatal result of these three chronic diseases is
18 million people die of heart disease annually. You would think by now
world leaders would have launched serious measures to reverse all this human
suffering by attacking the primary cause—eating meat and dairy products. from Dr. John McDougall's January newsletter

Don't take my word for it, read the report. It can be found at: http://www.virtualcentre.org/en/frame.htm

Read commentary here: http://www.harmonyearth.net/id110.htm

In Al Gore's 2006 Inconvenient Truth, there was not a single mention of the vast amount of environmental destruction that is being caused by the raising of the world's livestock. Yet, in November, just a few months after his movie was winning rave reviews for being so environmentally sound, the Food & Agricultural Organization of the United Nations released a report entitled Livestock's Long Shadow. After reading the Executive Summary of this 400-page report, this is how I summarized its findings as it relates to global warming, only one of the categories of environmental damage being caused by the livestock industry worldwide:

The worldwide raising of agriculture causes considerably more global warming, and other environmental problems, than all of the cars, trucks, buses, trains, ships and airplanes in the world.

Now, why do you suppose that this little tidbit was never mentioned on a single network's evening news? The report went on to say, and I quote verbatim:

"The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.
The findings of this report suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.
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.
Major reductions in impact could be achieved at reasonable cost."


:think: