Meat Eating As Environmental Activism?

I admit it. I am an ex-vegetarian. For 8 years i was a vegetarian, 3 of those years I was vegan. Now i eat meat. Some folks think this is because i gave up on my politics or sold out. the truth is that meat makes sense to me. in my attempt to eat local food i began to realize how stupid it was to be eating highly processed soy from Asia, when i could be eating sustainably, ethically raised meat from nearby farms. here are some of the arguments for vegetarianism as an ecologically friendly choice and my rebuttals. these are taken from goveg.com a PETA site. these are similar arguments to the ones i used to make as a vegetarian.

We feed more than 70 percent of the grains and cereals we grow to farmed animals, and almost all of those calories go into simply keeping the animals alive, not making them grow. Only a small fraction of the calories consumed by farmed animals are actually converted into the meat that people eat.

this is in industrial factory farming where cows are fed grain they aren't naturally supposed to eat, because it is cheaper and faster to fatten cows in feedlots on corn than to allow them to roam free and be fed by the pasture. in sustainably raised beef cows eat only grass and hay, something humans can't eat given that we don't have 4 stomachs. sustainably raised meat maximized land use, not takes away from it, because it stores energy grown in grass, in meat so humans can benefit from said stored energy.

Farmed animals produce about 130 times as much excrement as the entire human population of the United States, and since factory farms don't have sewage treatment systems as our cities and towns do, this concentrated slop ends up polluting our water, destroying our topsoil, and contaminating our air

again, this is a problem with industrial factory farming. on small scale, environmentally mindful farms, waste is not waste, its part of the system. often chickens are pastured along side the cows. the chickens eat the pathogens in the manure and essentially make it clean and help turn it into compost. the compost then goes into the pasture and fertilizes the grass that the cows will eat. the manure is also composted to go on farmers fields.

Vast tracts of land are needed to grow crops to feed the billions of animals we raise for food each year. According to scientists at the Smithsonian Institute, the equivalent of seven football fields of land is bulldozed every minute, much of it to create more room for farmed animals.

if everyone was a vegetarian we would have to start trucking in vegetables from all over the world (not that we don't already but in a perfect food system we wouldn't have to). massive areas of land are inhospitable to vegetables because they are too hilly or arid or have poor soil etc, are prefect for raising livestock. why do you think certain cultures have high meat diets? because their climate is suited to raising livestock and not produce. if these areas were used exclusively for livestock it wouldn't be wasting land, it would be putting it to its best advantage instead of throwing chemical fertilizers/herbicides/pesticides on it to force vegetable production.

i agree with this critique of industrial farming but there is another way. there are farms that aren't evil, there are farmers that truly care for their livestock and provide the best life possible for them. there are farms that are virtually entire ecosystems, not monocultures. i believe eating free range, pasture fed animals in moderation is a great act and I'm proud of my decision to eat this way.

i don't mean to knock vegetarians. i know what a sacrifice it is and applaud those who are trying to make the world a better place. i just urge people to think critically. westerns eat far too much factory farmed meat and maybe, because of vegetarians, we aren't in a total crisis because they balance out the equation.

xo,
the compassionate carnivore