meatless monday!

I thought I'd share some important info for meatless monday... I've been vegetarian for 15 years, but even 1 day a week can make a huge impact.  Environmental info below.  I won't even get started on the treatment of the animals in this post....

Make it a meatless monday! 

Amount of U.S. grain fed to farm animals: 70%

Pounds of corn and soy required to produce just one pound of pork: nearly 7

Water needed to produce a pound of wheat: 14 gallons

Water needed to produce a pound of meat: 441 gallons Threatened and endangered species imperiled by livestock grazing: 161

Of all water used for all purposes in the United States, more than half goes to:livestock production

According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, animal protein demands tremendous expenditures of fossil-fuel energy—about eight times as much for a comparable amount of plant protein.

The meat industry is a major cause of fresh water depletion. According to Ed Ayres, of the World Watch Institute, "Around the world, as more water is diverted to raising pigs and chickens instead of producing crops for direct consumption, millions of wells are going dry. India, China, North Africa and the U.S. are all running freshwater deficits, pumping more from their aquifers than rain can replenish."

According to Ayres, "Pass up one hamburger, and you'll save as much water as you save by taking 40 showers with a low-flow nozzle." 

want to learn more?

CHOOSE VEG

“We are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.”

here is some reality for ya... (and a really excellent article)

None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use

By David Roberts

The notion of “externalities” has become familiar in environmental circles. It refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. For instance, industrial processes can put pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab. In this way, businesses privatize profits and publicize costs.

Of the top 20 region-sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment. None of the world’s top industrial sectors would be profitable if they were paying their full freight. None!

Here’s how those costs break down:

The majority of unpriced natural capital costs are from greenhouse gas emissions (38%), followed by water use (25%), land use (24%), air pollution (7%), land and water pollution (5%), and waste (1%).

So how much is that costing us? Trucost’s headline results are fairly stunning.

First, the total unpriced natural capital consumed by the more than 1,000 “global primary production and primary processing region-sectors” amounts to $7.3 trillion dollars a year — 13 percent of 2009 global GDP.

(A “region-sector” is a particular industry in a particular region — say, wheat farming in East Asia.)

Second, surprising no one, coal is the enemy of the human race. Trucost compiled rankings, both of the top environmental impacts and of the top industrial culprits.

That amounts to an entire global industrial system built on sleight of hand. As legendary environmentalist Paul Hawken put it, “We are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.”

But the UNEP report makes clear that what’s going on today is more than a few accounting oversights here and there. The distance between today’s industrial systems and truly sustainable industrial systems — systems that do not spend down stored natural capital but instead integrate into current energy and material flows — is not one of degree, but one of kind. What we need is not just better accounting, it is a new global industrial system, a new way of providing for human wellbeing, a new way of relating to our planet. We need a revolution.

the rest  <--click to continue reading