Animal Agriculture: The Leading Cause of Climate Change Food by means of animal agriculture is – and probably always will be – an extension of our lives. Even before recorded time, humans have been raising livestock for means of survival and personal use and have only embraced this process as time progressed because it is our main source of food. We’ve adopted methods of artificial selection and gene manipulation to raise a more desirable superpopulation of livestock that environmental assessment experts from the Food and Agriculture Organization claim exceeds the human population by over 800% (Lehmkuhl). How has something so simple and pure as raising livestock transformed into a multibillion-dollar industrial revolution? Furthermore, how
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Sadly, for the sake of taste and increasingly demanding consumers, the animal agriculture industry has placed profit over planet. That needs to change. The human population has an overwhelming reliance on animal products and we need to take action by changing our diets to one that doesn’t rely on animal products, starting meaningful discussion about the issue at hand, and implore policy makers to enact sweeping legislation and regulation designed to dramatically curtail patently unsustainable livestock populations. Climate change. Dead zones. Extinction. Deforestation. Heart Disease. Diabetes. At the heart of all these problems plaguing us around the globe, there is one issue that has been far too overlooked – our reliance and overwhelming demand for animal products. Just by reducing, or even completely eliminating, our reliance on animal production, we would be …show more content…
However, you’d be severely misguided to expect an event of that magnitude and grandeur to actually happen, for the odds of that happening is infinitesimally small and would ultimately lead to the unemployment of well over 6 million people in the U.S. meat industry alone (NAMI). Luckily, there are easier and less detrimental ways to make a difference; the first step is getting involved. Although it sounds broad, getting involved can be as simple as supporting your local environmentalists and activists, introducing people to and increasing their familiarity with the issue at hand, and normalizing vegan diets. There are even several clubs at Cal Poly that deal in environmental activism that serve as a way for young people to help push the cause forward. On top of that, some people tend to doubt that calling congress is the most effective way to petition the government, but it could not be more true. The only thing between you and a phone conversation with representative Jim Costa is a quick google search. Animal cruelty issues present extremely compelling reasons to oppose factory farming, but livestock’s contribution to climate change likely represents the most
Sadly, for the sake of taste and increasingly demanding consumers, the animal agriculture industry has placed profit over planet. That needs to change. The human population has an overwhelming reliance on animal products and we need to take action by changing our diets to one that doesn’t rely on animal products, starting meaningful discussion about the issue at hand, and implore policy makers to enact sweeping legislation and regulation designed to dramatically curtail patently unsustainable livestock populations. Climate change. Dead zones. Extinction. Deforestation. Heart Disease. Diabetes. At the heart of all these problems plaguing us around the globe, there is one issue that has been far too overlooked – our reliance and overwhelming demand for animal products. Just by reducing, or even completely eliminating, our reliance on animal production, we would be …show more content…
However, you’d be severely misguided to expect an event of that magnitude and grandeur to actually happen, for the odds of that happening is infinitesimally small and would ultimately lead to the unemployment of well over 6 million people in the U.S. meat industry alone (NAMI). Luckily, there are easier and less detrimental ways to make a difference; the first step is getting involved. Although it sounds broad, getting involved can be as simple as supporting your local environmentalists and activists, introducing people to and increasing their familiarity with the issue at hand, and normalizing vegan diets. There are even several clubs at Cal Poly that deal in environmental activism that serve as a way for young people to help push the cause forward. On top of that, some people tend to doubt that calling congress is the most effective way to petition the government, but it could not be more true. The only thing between you and a phone conversation with representative Jim Costa is a quick google search. Animal cruelty issues present extremely compelling reasons to oppose factory farming, but livestock’s contribution to climate change likely represents the most