Environmental activists can be considered notorious for initiating some of the most dangerous movements. While activists are focused on industrialization (examples: chaining themselves to trees, sabotaging bulldozers, and in insane measures choosing not to procreate, believing the Earth would be better off without humans), they are blind to the damage caused by animal agriculture, also known as the agribusiness. While facing the majority of the world whose action are expanding agribusiness, the collective corporation that supplies meat are capable of corrupting politics. Animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of environmental degradation over any domestic use. This essay explores the question: “How does animal agriculture affect environmental
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America has a high demand for meat- cheap meat, to be specific. Access to cheap meat is central to American life. As David Zinczenko points out in his essay “Don’t Blame the Eater,” we should know better than to eat two meals a day in a fast food restaurant but fast food happens to be more convenient to consumers— particularly teenagers – when you can find a McDonalds on almost every block compared to the access to healthy food. Food culture in America has made healthier eating inconvenient and evasive. Industries that go hand-and-hand with animal agriculture are infecting our food culture and causing harm to the health of consumers and the Earth. The agribusiness has also caused a giant shift in our food culture. As Michael Pollan states in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,”
“So violent a change in a culture’s eating habits is surely the sign of a national eating disorder. Certainly it would never have happened in a culture in possession of deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and eating. But then, such a culture would not feel the need for its most august legislative body to ever deliberate the nation 's ‘dietary goals’—or, for the matter, to wage political battle every few years over the precise design of an official government graphic called the ‘food pyramid.’ …show more content…
For example, agribusiness tears down forests to graze livestock. “Livestock covers 45% of the earth’s total land.” The agribusiness is depleting the Earth of its land. As stated by Scott Sanders in A Conservationist Manifesto “...Farmers laid clay tiles and dug ditches and straightened creaks to drain the land. The great swamp vanished, and with it nearly all the plants and animals that once thrived there.” Livestock is also a main contributor to the harmful effects made to the climate change which affects land. “Livestock is responsible for 65% of all human-related emissions of nitrous oxide – a greenhouse gas with 296 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, and which stays in the atmosphere for 150 years.” Livestock will force itself into the leading cause of global warming. We begin to underestimate the power that we possess over the Earth and slowly begin to deplete it of its resources. As Bill McKibben states in American Earth: The End of Nature, “In the past, we spoiled and polluted parts of that nature, inflicted environmental ‘damage.’ But that was like stabbing a man with a toothpicks: though it hurt, annoyed, degraded, it did not touch vital organs, block the path of the lymph or blood. We never thought that we had wrecked nature. Deep down, we never really thought we could: it was too big and too old; its forces--the wind, the rain, the sun--were too strong, too elemental. (719)” We unconsciously
America has a high demand for meat- cheap meat, to be specific. Access to cheap meat is central to American life. As David Zinczenko points out in his essay “Don’t Blame the Eater,” we should know better than to eat two meals a day in a fast food restaurant but fast food happens to be more convenient to consumers— particularly teenagers – when you can find a McDonalds on almost every block compared to the access to healthy food. Food culture in America has made healthier eating inconvenient and evasive. Industries that go hand-and-hand with animal agriculture are infecting our food culture and causing harm to the health of consumers and the Earth. The agribusiness has also caused a giant shift in our food culture. As Michael Pollan states in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,”
“So violent a change in a culture’s eating habits is surely the sign of a national eating disorder. Certainly it would never have happened in a culture in possession of deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and eating. But then, such a culture would not feel the need for its most august legislative body to ever deliberate the nation 's ‘dietary goals’—or, for the matter, to wage political battle every few years over the precise design of an official government graphic called the ‘food pyramid.’ …show more content…
For example, agribusiness tears down forests to graze livestock. “Livestock covers 45% of the earth’s total land.” The agribusiness is depleting the Earth of its land. As stated by Scott Sanders in A Conservationist Manifesto “...Farmers laid clay tiles and dug ditches and straightened creaks to drain the land. The great swamp vanished, and with it nearly all the plants and animals that once thrived there.” Livestock is also a main contributor to the harmful effects made to the climate change which affects land. “Livestock is responsible for 65% of all human-related emissions of nitrous oxide – a greenhouse gas with 296 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, and which stays in the atmosphere for 150 years.” Livestock will force itself into the leading cause of global warming. We begin to underestimate the power that we possess over the Earth and slowly begin to deplete it of its resources. As Bill McKibben states in American Earth: The End of Nature, “In the past, we spoiled and polluted parts of that nature, inflicted environmental ‘damage.’ But that was like stabbing a man with a toothpicks: though it hurt, annoyed, degraded, it did not touch vital organs, block the path of the lymph or blood. We never thought that we had wrecked nature. Deep down, we never really thought we could: it was too big and too old; its forces--the wind, the rain, the sun--were too strong, too elemental. (719)” We unconsciously