There is a saying that a meat-eating environmentalist is a walking oxymoron. For thousands of years, humans have practiced methods of pastoralism and animal husbandry which worked more or less with the balance of nature. "Modern" animal agribusiness, however, is a far cry from these traditional methods. If the actual cost of industrialized meat production were not subsidized and externalized -- particularly if the environmental tolls were calculated and added in -- the true price of meat would cause consumers some severe sticker shock.
Waste and water
While the Earth's surface is approximately 75% water, humans and most other terrestrial beings count on fresh water for survival. Only about 3% of the world's water supply is fresh, and approximately two-thirds of that is locked away in the ice that covers circumpolar regions. We are using up water faster than it can be replaced by fresh rains. Our finite fresh water supplies are being harnessed and exploited at clearly unsustainable levels, and while there are several factors which contribute to this depletion, agriculture is one of the main causes. Bear in mind once again the overwhelming majority of food crops go to feed livestock, not human beings. Many scientists blame the American West's water crisis on livestock production, and a similar phenomenon is being seen all throughout the world, particularly in developing countries. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, growing crops for farm animals constitutes nearly half of U.S. water use. The production of one pound of beef -- including feed and processing -- requires an estimate of anywhere from 5,000 to 12,000 gallons of water. (For comparison, the production of one pound of soybeans requires about 240 gallons.)
While laws governing disposal of human waste are very strict, regulations for animal waste are lax or in some cases even nonexistent. Factory farms, feedlots, and slaughterhouses produce extraordinary amounts of manure (the typical hog farm, for example, produces about as much waste as a city of 12,000 people) which often find their way into waterways, and pollute lakes, rivers, wetlands, and human drinking supplies. Also, the few lax laws on the use of pesticides for crops grown for human consumption do not apply to crops destined to become livestock feed. This means that far more pesticides can be used, dramatically increasing the rate at which synthetic pesticide residues leach into ground water and the rest of the environment. (It also increases the amount of pesticide residue left in the flesh, milk, and eggs; see also health concerns.)
Soil erosion and habitat destruction
To be sure, modern industrialized agribusiness and monoculture depletes soil and contributes to the accidental introduction of commercial pesticides into ecosystems. However, again, when one considers that approximately three-quarters of U.S. crops go to feed livestock rather than directly feeding humans, it is clear that animal agribusiness greatly multiplies these effects. Cattle and sheep frequently overgraze the land and contribute to soil erosion and desert formation. Dust storms and desert expansion in Africa, China, the Middle East, Australia, and the western United States have been linked to livestock grazing. Almost paradoxically, soil erosion also contributes to severe flooding during the rainy seasons. Soil, like fresh water, is not a renewable resource, at least not at the current rate of erosion versus soil formation. In the time since non-natives settled the American West, nature could have created an additional two inches of fertile topsoil. Instead, cattle culture has stripped the land of a full six inches worth. Loss of topsoil spells disaster for both humans and nonhumans alike. (It should be noted that rotational grazing and some methods of organic animal agriculture avoid many of these problems.)
When ranchers waste valuable fresh water for livestock use, they do not stop at tapping into precious aquifers. They also drain ponds, streams, and wetlands, destroying these habitats and threatening the species therein. In the American West, cattle have displaced native populations of bison, elk, deer, antelope, bighorn sheep, and moose; species such as these have been reduced to as little as 1 to 3 percent of their primeval populations. Studies in Oregon have also shown that wild fish and bird populations are also adversely affected in grazing areas. Cattle and sheep also spread disease and parasites to wildlife through manure and infected water. These are the inadvertent affects; other actions are quite intentional. The U.S. government Animal Damage Control kills an estimated 250,000 wild animals every year, ostensibly to "protect" ranchers' livestock.
The Rainforest Action Network estimates that fifty-five square feet of tropical rainforest are destroyed for the production of every hamburger made from rainforest beef -- the kind of cheap meat typically found in fast food hamburgers or processed beef products. Typically, the land is cleared primarily by burning. The burning of plant life is like a one-two punch to the environment. Burning biomass (living organisms) produces carbon dioxide, and also kill the plants so that they are no longer to serve as "Nature's air filter," making air breathable for animals (including humans) by converting carbon dioxide into oxygen during the photosynthetic process. What's more, the habitat of countless species is destroyed in the process. The world's tropical rainforests are rich havens of biodiversity; a great portion of the species therein have yet to even be "discovered" by scientists. This is not just an aesthetic concern; mass extinctions upset natural ecosystems and kill off animal and plant species which are potentially useful to scientific research, including cures for life-threatening diseases.
Emissions, energy, and global warming
In industrialized meat production, animal-derived foods require an input of anywhere from 10 to 90 kilocalories of energy to yield just one kilocalorie of edible food. Producing and processing meat requires burning about forty times more fossil fuels than producing protein-yielding crops such as soybeans. Jeremy Rifkin, prominent U.S. economist and author of several books including Beyond Beef, has estimated that it now takes the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of grain-fed beef in the United States. Chicken, turkey, pork, and farmed fish are only slightly more efficient, relatively speaking. This wanton waste of energy and burning of fossil fuels is not only impractical due to the nonrenewability of these resources; it also threatens our planet and every living being on it with contributions to global warming.
While the proliferation of the automobile and coal-burning power plants have unquestionably wreaked havoc on the Earth's atmosphere, the effects of cattle ranching and other "modern" means of contemporary agribusiness have launched an equally formidable assault. As previously shown, when rainforest habitat is destroyed, it lessens the planet's ability to "recycle" carbon dioxide into oxygen, and greatly increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which contributes to global warming. Livestock also produce waste high in nitrous oxide and methane, two more greenhouse gases which play a significant role in global warming. The 1.3 billion cattle of the world produce about twenty percent of the methane that emitted into the atmosphere. According to the United States Academy of Sciences, livestock production is also the single largest contributor of ammonia gas release in the U.S. Factory farms and intensive feeding operations also emit dangerous quantities of fine dust particles and hydrogen sulfide, both of which are linked to respiratory illness.
Plundering the seas
Paul Wilson, cofounder of Greenpeace, has deemed seafood "a socially acceptable form of bush meat," pointing out that many of the species sought by commercial fishers are threatened and exploited. The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that over 70% of the world’s fish species are either fully exploited or depleted. Since one in six people in the world relies on sea life as a primary source of protein, killing off our own food supply is neither wise nor economical. Many commercial shrimping practices destroy coral reefs and other marine environments; for every pound of shrimp caught, seven pounds of other sea life are killed, and even in supposedly more "efficient" practices, a pound of "bycatch" is thrown back overboard -- dead or dying -- for every three or four pounds of intended catch. Commercial fishers often inadvertently net whales, dolphins, turtles, sharks, and other "unwanted" sea life along with their intended catches in practices such as trawling and with long-line fishing. All in all, our seas have been drastically over-fished, upsetting the balance of oceanic ecosystems.
Aquaculture techniques aren't much better. Marine aquafarming when has a detrimental effect on the world's oceans, especially when antibiotics, hormones, and the fish themselves escape into the surrounding waters. When aquaculture operates in coastal estuaries, the chemicals and waste products it generates pollute and destroy vast expanses of valuable and increasingly rare estuaries every year. Mariculture has been linked to lowered oxygen levels in surrounding waters and reduction of wild species. Farmed fish species are usually not native to the regions where they are bred, and when they escape, they compete with native species and upset the balance of the local ecosystems. The diseases and parasites which often plague the confined fish are also easily spread to wild populations. Furthermore, carnivorous species such as salmon require other fish species such as herring as food; commonly, this feed is obtained from the trawling practices noted above. Thus farmed fishing does not alleviate pressure on wild fish stocks, but rather increases it.
