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That graphic at the end is a great way to explain how much area is used for our meat eating habit. Think of all the land which is not being used for... anything else. We are truly ecologically privileged to be able to create such a huge impact in order to eat meat. Incredible.
I'll also add to that, look how much of the rocky mountains was listed as 'pasture / range'
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The whole forest doesn't die at once, the dead trees' biomass doesn't all break down at once, and said biomass largely gets incorporated into new seedlings that spring up in the now-open space.
Yeah, but they continually die in a cycle such that the overall CO2 levels never really get stored long term as it is all temporarily stored in the trees.
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A lot less impressive when you recognize most grazing land isn't much good for anything else.
Is it not good for housing?
Wow, it's almost 50% increase in just 10 years.
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A lot less impressive when you recognize most grazing land isn't much good for anything else.
It is a pretty significant diversion of land from a natural state though. Cattle grazing, thought it isn’t an ecological disaster like dam building, is quite different than leaving the land untouched. Plus, a good portion of the country’s good farmland is diverted to growing feed for those animals. Think of it like: how many acres have been changed from a natural ecosystem to an artificial one for meat eating.
> More than one-third of U.S. land is used for pasture ... There’s a single, major occupant on all this land: cows. Not here. I live on cow range land, but the cattle are outnumbered by elk. The elk hunting industry here is larger than the cattle industry. Every third local seems to be a hunting guide, and many of those are cow growers too. This seems to me to be a very positive thing that should be encouraged. Inste…
Even given that hunting provides some kind of spiritual value (which I must admit I'm very skeptical of), it's a value only available to those who are by any reasonable standard quite wealthy (excepting rural people). It takes a lot of time, costs more, and is hard work that a lot of people aren't capable of. A marked increase in demand would make this even more of a problem.
>It forces you to own responsibility for killing your dinner.
I wonder if, faced with this choice, most people would not simply become vegetarians.
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It would be great for sequestering carbon dioxide (in the form of trees), which is really what most of it probably should be used for. Instead we're depleting the topsoil, using up all our non-renewable water, and poisoning the oceans. All for basically no reason.
Most grazing land was not cleared by people. It's just land that people graze their cattle on. Most of it is plains, and was never heavily forested. Also, when grass is eaten it absorbs much more carbon dioxide, so the grazing of the cattle is beneficial. Are you suggesting a better use of the land is for humans to plant a bunch of trees on it?
> More than one-third of U.S. land is used for pasture ... There’s a single, major occupant on all this land: cows. Not here. I live on cow range land, but the cattle are outnumbered by elk. The elk hunting industry here is larger than the cattle industry. Every third local seems to be a hunting guide, and many of those are cow growers too. This seems to me to be a very positive thing that should be encouraged. Inste…
That's fine as a hobby, but it would create poverty and rapid depletion of wildlife if the majority of people were forced to depend on hunting and game meat for daily meals.
> If we can arrange for more people to harvest their own meat rather than accepting an industrial commodity.
This is a false dilemma. If we want to return to a nation of small farmers rather than a handful of industrial farms, all we need to do is increase property taxes on land ownership, as declining property tax rates are associated with increased rural inequality and a worsening gini coefficient for land ownership, where a greater fraction of land is owned by fewer people. Development of large numbers of intensive and efficient small farms can also be aided by marginal cost public irrigation infrastructure funded out of land tax revenues, which is how California developed its agricultural sector in the early 1900s using its public irrigation districts. Requiring households to devote large fraction of their labor towards traveling to hunting areas is not a realistic alternative.
> According to The Land Report magazine, since 2008 the amount of land owned by the 100 largest private landowners has grown from 28 million acres to 40 million, an area larger than the state of Florida. Wow, it's almost 50% increase in just 10 years.
> More than one-third of U.S. land is used for pasture ... There’s a single, major occupant on all this land: cows. Not here. I live on cow range land, but the cattle are outnumbered by elk. The elk hunting industry here is larger than the cattle industry. Every third local seems to be a hunting guide, and many of those are cow growers too. This seems to me to be a very positive thing that should be encouraged. Inste…
Having people travel to hunt the meat they eat doesn't scale, though, at all. It's quite simply not possible to use it as a way to improve land use and reduce climate change. Suggestions like yours can be good, but they don't recognize the scale of the changes that are needed. It's the equivalent of trying to get people to buy hybrids to stop climate change - even if everyone could do it, it wouldn't make a dent in t…
Probably not if they had to forage all their foods at current densities.