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Your footprint. Your personal footprint. How
you, as an individual, can increase or
decrease global warming through your
footprint.
To reduce global warming there has been lots
of discussion of our 'carbon footprint' -
how the energy we use and waste is
increasing the earth's temperature. That
increase will ultimately result in
devastating changes to global patterns
leading to droughts, melting of the polar
caps leading to an increase in the sea level
which if high enough means goodbye to New
York, Shanghai, and Bangladesh, etc, etc.,
etc.
But it turns out there is one single thing
you can do that will probably be more
beneficial to the earth than any other
thing, and greater than many things
combined.
Though psychologically hard to make the
change, it is extremely simple to do.
Become a vegetarian.
The news media sort of took it all as a joke
when PETA asked Al Gore to do just that. But
if you really look at the issue, PETA is
right.
And you do not even have to be a
full-fledged no milk and eggs kind of vegan.
Giving up just beef alone - even if nothing
else - will be the single greatest thing you
can do.
To get an understanding of footprints - and
'food footprints' in particular - check out
the website and its links below. Here are
some simple examples of what you will find.
Meat production is extremely
resource-intensive - livestock currently
consume 70 percent of America's grain
production. Their grazing accounts for 800
million acres (40 percent) of U.S. land, and
18 percent of all water consumption is
devoted to producing feed for livestock.
Feedlot beef is particularly wasteful.
Producing one pound of feedlot beef in
California, for example, requires five
pounds of grain and over 2,400 gallons of
water. It also results in the erosion of
five pounds of topsoil. To make matters
worse, poultry, hog, and beef factory farms
also lead to agricultural waste runoff - a
major source of water pollution.
A plant-based diet generally requires less land, energy, and other resources. Crop-based food requires an average of 0.78 global hectares per ton of food, compared to 2.1 global hectares required to produce one ton of animal-based food.
http://www.rprogress.org/newprojects/ecolFoot/faq/#accuracy1
