July 2008
“Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.”
A peta newsletter? No — that’s from the New York Times. At the start of this year, in a long article entitled “Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler,” Mark Bittman, a leading food writer for the paper, laid out the environmental case against meat production.
It’s no secret there’s a greenrush going on — a re-evaluation of the way our civilization works in light of certain inconvenient environmental truths. While real change has only just begun, this new perspective is circling us back to the wisdom of some of the oldest concepts around. I’m particularly encouraged to see environmental arguments for vegetarianism becoming part of mainstream conversation, because they are the very reasons I gave up meat nearly ten years ago.
