probably not a popular opinion but I think the best way to reduce your carbon foot print is not to have children
Yes, I think this should truly be part of the conversation. For some reason, people avoid it.
If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer
21–30 of 114 posts
Re: If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer
#22In lots of parts of the world, livestock farming is feasible in ways that arable farming isn't: sloping, rocky terrain and so on. It's not going to go away entirely.
"Artificial" livestock rearing where the animals are treated as boxes into which feed can be put that emits meat does achieve a higher capital intensity, but it's reliant on cheap imported feed.
This is the kind of thing that is very hard to solve by individual market action.
Re: If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer
#23It’s worth reading the “Guardian Pick” comment from George Monbiot, another Guardian journalist, for an interesting response/analysis of the articles proposals:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/vegani...
Re: If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer
#24This article could be written by a small scale vegetable farm as well. I could write something similar about the herb box on my window sill. Look how great my herb box is. I don’t even use pesticides.
But the question is how to reverse out of high impact industrial meat farming. That a tiny farm is having some success doesn’t move the needle. Veganism and buying from small farms works today on an individual basis, but how could you roll them out to an entire population. It’s also why demonizing veganism in the title is cheap clickbait.
The choices people make every day in the supermarket aren’t veganism vs buying from this person’s tiny farm. Seems tacky to compare the fringe groups while ignoring the elephant in the room. Especially when wresting the status quo would entail monumental cultural level transformation in any direction.
Re: If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer
#25probably not a popular opinion but I think the best way to reduce your carbon foot print is not to have children
[deleted]
Re: If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer
#26More humane and sustainable forms of animal agriculture would certainly be a step in the right direction from the horrors of the concentrated feeding operations that supply most of the world's meat supply right now. But those techniques were developed for a reason. There's no way to meet the current and rapidly growing demand for meat without completely setting aside the welfare of the animals and the environment. The idea that we can just return to the idyllic farms of hundreds of years ago and still feed steak to billions of people every day is a pipe dream.
The real solution is to reduce the global population but in the meantime switching to a vegan diet will dramatically lower your carbon footprint and help reduce the horrific suffering we inflict on animals every day because we like the way they taste. You might think you understand what it takes to put that bacon on your plate but chances are you have no idea:
http://watch.dominionmovement.com
There's also a growing body of evidence that a well-planned vegan diet is not only perfectly healthy but healthier than diets rich in animal fats & proteins.
Re: If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer
#27If one where to simply list behavior and action from having a positive effect on the environment, neutral, or negative, it would not be that hard to see that general farming is on the negative side. It can be promoted as a better alternative to even worse things but to even cross the line into neutral one has to go elsewhere than just cutting out meat of ones diet.
A common thread in environment positive food is that it moves the environment towards a better balance and away from mono-organisms. Open fields with pasture raised livestock has this effect when used proportionally in countries where single-crop and forest has started to reduce the bio diversity, such as in Sweden. Fishing in overpopulated lakes helps so that less common species don't get out competed or eaten. Honey from bees has positive side effects that sugar canes do not. A bit less studied but possible areas is also seaweed or mussel farms since those filter water and can reduce eutrophication (through the health aspects makes this a difficult balance).
Veganism isn't the answer simply because that diet alone does not have a net positive effect on the environment, and the reduction compared to even worse diets isn't impactful enough. We have to start actually looking for actions that have a positive effect, rather than simply going from bad to slightly bad diet.
Re: If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer
#28They make 75 tonnes of meat per year on 3500 acre. Unless I am missing something, this is really not helping the world. This would amount to something like 0.05 million calories/acre/year. If I compare that to others ( http://www.waldeneffect.org/blog/Calories_per_acre_for_vario... ) this doesn't seem like a realistic way to feed the global population.
George Monbiot's comment on the article [0] basically makes the same point.
If all meat farming was done this way, optimised for environmental impact and animal welfare, there simply wouldn't be space for it. We'd all have no choice but to eat a lot less meat.
The resulting diet would be something a lot closer to veganism / vegetarianism than most people's idea of a "normal" meat-eating diet.
We are only able to eat the quantities of meat that are currently considered normal by treating animals like shit and harming the environment in the process.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/vegani...
Re: If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer
#29This article reads more like an ad for their farm, which granted as far as farms that produce meat from livestock goes, seems really nice.
But their approach is not gonna work at scale, because you cannot have enough farms that operate this way to supply meat to a whole population. They also only compare their approach to what is basically the strip mining approach to crop growth. They don't look at things like crop rotation, or plenty of other farming techniques that prevent your land from becoming an arid desert. The title is clickbait, and the actual content of the article is way off. If this had been an article about how they tried to treat their animals better than our current factory farming conditions, this article would have been a great look at a way to raise livestock that doesn't make me think I'm looking at some sort of dystopian Bond-Villain's greatest evil contraption. But instead they tried to make it about veganism vs. eating meat, and failed to provide any actually compelling reasoning.
Re: If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer
#30they begin the article by saying pasture raised, organic meat is better for the environment than single-crop, fertilizer grown crops, through a reduction in emissions and and increase in biodiversity and health of the soil. It does not compare it to the obvious alternative of more sustainably grown crops, using crop rotation, cleaner sources of energy for farm equipment, etcetera.
It's a common argument I've heard against vegan/vegetarian diets to compare the best possible scenario of meat production, no matter how uncommon, to the average case of plant production.
I see it as equivalent to trying to discredit the value of college by pointing out Bill Gates.