Our Planet is in a crises.  According to Stephen Hawking: "The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can." 

Numerous studies show that the most effective thing that we, as individuals, can do to slow global warming is follow a vegan diet:

Rather than accepting that the current trend towards a high-meat diet is inescapable, an alternative approach is essential. Unless we begin to rely less upon animal products in the human diet, we will place an intolerable strain upon the earth's resource with potentially disastrous consequences for human health and hunger, the natural environment and animals' needs.

Jewish Vegetarian Association
A SACRED DUTY
Key climate scientists, including James Hansen of NASA, warn that we may reach a tipping point within a decade after which global warming could spiral out of control. Recent reports, including the "Livestock's Long Shadow report by the UN, highlight the disastrous contributions of modern, intensive animal-based agriculture to this crisis. A Sacred Duty is a Jewish response to these issues. It offers simple, practical measures for reducing our impact on the planet.

PeTA GoVeg.com - Bruce Friedrich
Why Vegetarianism Is the Best Way to Help the Environment
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A vegan diet is the only reasonable diet for people in the developed world who care about the environment or global poverty. Over the past 20 years, the environmental argument against growing crops to be fed to animals — so that humans can eat the animals — has grown substantially. Just this past November (2006), the environmental problems associated with eating chickens, pigs, and other animals were the subject of a 408-page United Nations scientific report titled Livestock’s Long Shadow.

The U.N. report found that the meat industry contributes to "problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity." The report concludes that the meat industry is "one of the … most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."

:: Eating Meat is the no 1 consumer Cause of Global Warming
:: Eating Meat Wastes Resources
:: Eating Meat Wastes and Pollutes Water
:: Eating Meat Destroys the Rain Forest
:: What About Eating Fish?
:: Eating Meat Supports Cruelty
:: What About Eating Meat That Isn’t From Factory-Farmed Animals?
:: Conclusion
 

:: Eating Meat is the no 1 consumer Cause of Global Warming
Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, and others have brought the possibility of global cataclysm into sharp relief. What they have not been talking about, however, is the fact that all cars, trucks, planes, and other types of transportation combined account for about 13 percent of global warming emissions, whereas raising chickens, pigs, cattle, and other animals contributes to 18 percent, according to U.N. scientists. Yes, eating animal products contributes to global warming 40 percent more than all SUVs, 18-wheelers, jumbo jets, and other types of travel combined.

Al and Leo might not be talking about the connection between meat and global warming, but the Live Earth concert that Al inspired is: The recently published Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook recommends, "Don’t be a chicken. Stop being a pig. And don’t have a cow. Be the first on your block to cut back on meat." The Handbook further explains that "refusing meat" is "the single most effective thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint"

And Environmental Defense, on its website, notes, "If every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetables and grains … the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads."

Imagine if we stopped eating animal products altogether.

– Grow more than 10 times as much corn, grain, and soy (with all the required tilling, irrigation, crop dusters, and so on), as would be required if we ate the plants directly.
– Transport - in gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing 18-wheelers - all that grain and soy to feed manufacturers.
– Operate the feed mill (again, using massive amounts of resources).
– Truck the feed to the factory farms.
– Operate the factory farms.
– Truck the animals many miles to slaughterhouses.
– Operate the slaughterhouses.
– Truck the meat to processing plants.
– Operate the meat processing plants.
– Truck the meat to grocery stores (in refrigerated trucks).
– Keep the meat in refrigerators or freezers at the stores.

With every stage comes massive amounts of extra energy usage — and with that comes heavy pollution and massive amounts of greenhouse gases, of course.

Obviously, vegan foods require some of these stages, too, but vegan foods cut out the factory farms, the slaughterhouses, and multiple stages of heavily polluting tractor trailer trucks, as well as all the resources (and pollution) involved in each of those stages. And as was already noted, vegan foods require less than one-tenth as many calories from crops, since they are turned directly into food rather than funneled through animals first.

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:: Eating Meat Destroys the Rain Forest
The World Bank recently reported that 90 percent of all Amazon rainforest land cleared since 1970 is used for meat production. It’s not just that we’re destroying the rainforest to make grazing land for cows — we’re also destroying it to grow feed for them and other animals. Last year, Greenpeace targeted KFC for the destruction of rainforests because the Amazon is being razed to grow feed for chickens that end up in KFC’s buckets. Of course, the rainforest is being used to grow feed for other chickens, pigs, and cows, too (ie KFC isn’t the only culprit).

Then there is aquaculture (fish farming), which is increasing at a rate of more than 10 percent annually. Aquaculture is even worse than commercial fishing because, for starters, it takes about four pounds of wild-caught fish to reap just one pound of farmed fish, which eat fish caught by commercial trawlers. Farmed fish are often raised in the same water that wild fish swim in, but fish farmers dump antibiotics into the water and use genetic breeding to create “Frankenstein fish.” The antibiotics contaminate the oceans and seas, and the genetically engineered fish sometimes escape and breed with wild fish, throwing delicate aquatic balances off-kilter.

Researchers at the University of Stockholm demonstrated that the horrible environmental impact of fish farms can extend to an area 50,000 times larger than the farm itself.

Yet these animals suffer extreme pain and deprivation in today’s factory farms. Chickens have their sensitive beaks cut off with a hot blade, pigs have their tails chopped off and their teeth removed with pliers, and cattle and pigs are castrated — all without any pain relief. The animals are crowded together and given steady doses of hormones and antibiotics in order to make them grow so quickly that their hearts and limbs often cannot keep up, causing crippling and heart attacks. At the slaughterhouse, they are hung upside-down and bled to death, often while they are still conscious.

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:: What About Eating Meat That Isn’t From Factory-Farmed Animals?
Is meat better if it doesn’t come from factory-farmed animals? Of course, but its production still wastes resources and pollutes the environment. Shouldn’t we environmentalists challenge ourselves to do the best we can, not just to make choices that are a bit less bad?

The UN report looks at meat at a global level and indicts the inefficiency and waste that are inherent in meat production. No matter where meat comes from, raising animals for food will require that exponentially more calories be fed to animals than they can produce in their flesh, and it will require all those extra stages of CO2- intensive production as well. Only grass-fed cows eat food from land that could not otherwise be used to grow food for human beings, and even grass-fed cows require much more water and create much more pollution than vegan foods do.

Go Vegan
it is the single most important thing
YOU as an individual
can do to save our environment
free farm animals and heal your health