I've always loved the idea of saving the environment,but sadly im 15 and my parents think its silly so they dont recycle and stuff like that.But i have been a vegetarian for a year now and i was wondering it it helped the environment? NO but the cult leaders continue to tell their followers that it does so that they will stay with the program and keep sending money to peta yes yes it is good for the enviorment in many diffrent ways yet if everybody in the world became vegitarian we would definatly be overpopulated with animals :? It does help the environment. Just as was said above, the forests are often cleared for the raising of cattle. Cows are also the top producer of methane, or natural gas. There is a lot of waste leftover as well. Usually a lot of antibiotics or other growth hormones are used. The slaughterhouses also use tons of electricity, from the actual act of killing, to the refrigerated shipping of meats. To be fair, vegetable growers also use some resources to plant and harvest crops, but not nearly as much. Also, by not eating meat, you aren't killing animals, which can be considered helping the environment. If you want to take it the next step forward, consider organic products and shopping from local producers. This negates the need for pesticides and other unnatural products that you then eat, and often end up in the water supply from runoff. It also eliminates the extra pollution and use of resources to ship it to the area you live in. Also you should try to convince your parents the importance of recycling. Check out some websites for more information. Best of luck. Vegetarians use more processed foods? I really doubt that we use more, it's probably an equal amount at most. Most vegetarians/vegans I know, including myself, use fresh fruits and vegetables in what they eat. Anyone really for the environment would go vegan.
I'm vegan and here's a long list of how vegans help the environment. It can also apply to vegetarians.
-Half of the water used in the U.S. is used for animal agriculture.
-Every year in the US an area the size of Connecticut is lost to topsoil erosion--85% of this erosion is associated with livestock production.
-Livestock already consume half the world's grain, and their numbers are still growing almost exponentially.
-Every kilogram of beef we consume, according to research by the agronomists David Pimental and Robert Goodland, requires around 100,000 litres of water.
-Approximately 1.3 billion cattle populate the earth at any one time. They exist artificially in these vast numbers to satisfy the excessive human demand for the meat and by-products they provide. Their combined weight exceeds that of the entire human population. By sheer numbers, their consequent appetite for the world's resources, have made them a primary cause for the destruction of the environment.
-In the US, feedlot cattle yield one pound of meat for every 16 pounds of feed. It takes an average of 2,500 gallons of water to produce a single pound of meat. According to Newsweek, "The water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer could float a destroyer." In contrast, it takes only 25 gallons of water to produce one pound of wheat. Feeding the average meat-eating American requires 3-1/4 acres of land per year.
-Feeding a person who eats no food derived from animals requires only 1/6 acre per year. - Studies by North Carolina State University estimate that half of the some 2,500 open hog manure cesspools (euphemistically termed "lagoons"), now needed as part of hog productions there, are leaking contaminants such as nitrate--a chemical linked to blue-baby syndrome--into the ground water.
-Worldwide demand for fish, along with advances in fishing methods--sonar, driftnets, floating refrigerated fish packing factories--is bringing ocean species, one after another, to the brink of extinction. In the Nov., '95 edition of Scientific American, Carl Safina writes, "For the past two decades, the fishing industry has had increasingly to face the result of extracting [fish] faster than fish populations [can] reproduce." Research reveals that the intended cure--aquaculture (fish farming)--actually hastens the trend toward fish extinction, while disrupting delicate coastal ecosystems at the same time.
-A scientist, reporting in the industry publication Confinement, calculated in 1976 that the planet's entire petroleum reserves would be exhausted in 13 years if the whole world were to take on the diet and technological methods of farming used in the US.
-If tomorrow people in the US made a radical change away from their meat-centered diets, an area of land the size of all of Texas and most of Oklahoma could be returned to forest.
-It is estimated that livestock production accounts for twice the amount of pollution in the US as that produced by industrial sources.
-Livestock in the US produce 130 times the excrement of the entire US population. Since farm animals today spend much or all of their lives in factory sheds or feedlots, their waste no longer serves to fertilize pastures a little at a time. One poultry researcher, according to United Poultry Concerns literature, explains: "A one-million-hen complex will produce 125 tons of wet manure a day." To responsibly store, disperse, or degrade this amount of animal waste is simply not possible. Much of the waste inevitably is flushed into rivers and streams.
-Methane is one of the four greenhouse gasses that contributes to the environmental trend known as global warming. The 1.3 billion cattle in the world produce one fifth of all the methane emitted into the atmosphere.
-.Agricultural engineers have compared the energy costs of producing poultry, pork and other meats with the energy costs of producing a number of plant foods. It was found that even the least efficient plant food was nearly 10 times as efficient in returning food energy as the most energy efficient animal food.
-Since so much fossil fuel is needed to produce it, beef could be considered a petroleum product. With factory housing, irrigation, trucking, and refrigeration, as well as petrochemical fertilizer production requiring vast amounts of energy, approximately one gallon of gasoline goes into every pound of grain-fed beef.
-The direct and hidden costs of soil erosion and runoff in the US, mostly attributable to cattle and feed crop production, is estimated at $44 billion a year.
- Each pound of feedlot beef can be equated with 35 pounds of eroded topsoil.
-A nationwide switch to a pure vegetarian diet would allow us to cut our oil imports by 60%.
-Compared to a vegan diet, three days of a typical American diet requires as much water as you use for showering all year (assuming you shower every day).
-An acre of land can produce 20,000 pounds of potatoes, but only 165 pounds of beef.
-In the U.S., 260 million acres of forest have been destroyed for use as agricultural land to support our meat diet (over 1 acre per person).
-Since 1967, the rate of deforestation has been one acre every five seconds.
-Trees are being cut down at an alarming rate in the US, as well as around the world, for meat production. For every one acre cleared for urban development, seven acres are cleared to graze animals or grow feed for them. It certainly does! It takes 10 pounds of vegetable matter (soybeans or corn) to make one pound of beef. By just eating the soybeans we could save a lot of money, and a lot of land.
Right now the rainforest in the Amazon Basin in South America is being cleared at a frightening rate, just to grow cows for McDonalds. After the trees are cleared away the land only lasts for three or four years, then the soil gets hard and it's no good. So they clear more trees! No.
Vegetarians in the US don't help anything. They eat processed foods more frequently than omnivores!
If you shopped only at farmers' markets, made any juices directly from the fruit, etc. then you could be credited with doing a tiny bit.
Otherwise, you're just fooling yourself. It hurts the environment. No.
Vegetarians in the US don't help anything. They eat processed foods more frequently than omnivores! as you go up the food chain, the energy required to produce whatever you are eating goes up. so in the sense of energy and the amount it takes to produce vegan foods, this lifestyle helps. Although, a farm in the sense of the way we used to run things decades ago was much closer to an environmentally-friendly system. technically yes,because you save 96 animals a year if you dont eat meat.
Cool Huh? YES becoming a vegetarian saves 100's of animals every year. i was 13 when i became a vegetarian and my parents didnt like that...but i didnt care and continued with it...they didnt recycle either but i finally talked them into...what im getting at is that even thoug you are just 15 it dosent mean that you cant save the enviornment...i did it when i was around your age and i think it is 100% possible that you do the same. Good luck and stick to what you believe is right! It sure does help the environment. I know a few people who are veg for environmental reasons alone. See these sites for more info:
http://www.emagazine.com/view/?142
http://goveg.com/environment.asp
-About one-third of the raw materials used in America each year is consumed by the farmed animal industry
-Farmed animals produce about 130 times as much excrement as the entire human population of the United States
-Nearly half of the water and 80 percent of the agricultural land in the United States are used to raise animals for food.
-More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals.
-According to scientists at the Smithsonian Institute, the equivalent of seven football fields of land is bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals.
-In a groundbreaking 2006 report, the United Nations (U.N.) said that raising animals for food generates more greenhouse gases than all the cars and trucks in the world combined. Senior U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization official Henning Steinfeld reported that the meat industry is 鈥渙ne of the most significant contributors to today鈥檚 most serious environmental problems. Yes...it does help the environment actually.
Many trees in the rainforests are cut down each year for slaughterhouses. That harms the environment and all the animals that live there.
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/2062... Vegetarianism is Environmentalism! You are doing more than a lot of people. Keep it up!!! :-) not really, but perhaps, if every one became one, then there would be no need to graze cows and their farts would not deplete the ozone! not really...the cows polluting the environment with their farts or burps need to be eaten which is up to us people to do Nope. Being vegetarian doesn't help the environment.
If you want to help the environment, recycle. If your parents think it's silly, recycle anyway.
Make recycling bins at home and take them to the recycling centre yourself.
Nag your parents (like they do you when you don't do your homework) and tell them how much they're hurting the environment for future generations. |
