Veg for the Environment

Animal agriculture is more devastating to our natural environment than all other human activities combined. This devastation impacts land, water, air, and wildlife.

Land

Animal agriculture has been turning lush forests and prairies into barren deserts since the dawn of human history. The process begins with clear-cutting of forests to create pastures for cattle and other ruminants. This is a major loss, because trees provide wildlife habitats, keep topsoil in place, replenish groundwater aquifers, absorb carbon dioxide, and stabilize climate.

As the pastures become overgrazed, they are plowed under and turned into animal feed croplands. With little or no plant growth to hold it in place, topsoil is carried by rain and melting snow into streams and lakes, and its productive capacity is lost forever. This process is accelerated by the use of marginal sloping lands to meet the insatiable demand for animal feed.

Water

Animal agriculture's insatiable demand for land presses into service arid lands that require irrigation. Irrigation now accounts for more than 80% of all water available for use in the US and leads to critical water shortages, particularly in the Western states. The rain and melting snow that run off animal feed croplands and factory farms dump more pollution into our lakes, streams, and estuaries than all other human activities combined.

The cropland runoff contains soil particles, salts, organic debris, fertilizer, and pesticides. Soil particles smother fish eggs and bottom dwelling organisms and block stream flow. Salts, primarily sodium and potassium chloride, raise the salinity of the water, rendering it unsuitable for certain organisms. Organic debris feeds microorganisms that deplete the water's oxygen supply and kill the fish. Fertilizers spur algal blooms that smother or actually attack aquatic organisms. Pesticides kill all living organisms.

Animals raised for food in the US produce 130 times the amount of waste that people do. This waste, containing pathogens and hormones, is stored in huge open cesspools, euphemistically called "lagoons." Eventually, this waste winds up in the nearest waterway, killing aquatic organisms directly or through formation of algal blooms. Waste from mid-Atlantic pig and poultry factory farms has destroyed fisheries along the Eastern seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the waste leaks into the ground, poisoning vital groundwater supplies.

The dangers posed by these practices have manifested in the Gulf of Mexico in an area known as the Dead Zone. The Sierra Club, an environmental protection organization, describes the extent to which animal agriculture destroys aquatic habitats:

Every summer in the Gulf of Mexico an area, sometimes as large as Massachusetts, becomes void of life due to severely depleted levels of oxygen in the Gulf's water, a state known as hypoxia. This condition kills every oxygen-dependent sea creature within its 8,500 square mile zone. The Dead Zone varies in size, but it has been growing steadily since 1993.
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A major, rapidly growing, source of sewage in America's waterways comes from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). These corporate hog, chicken and cattle farms concentrate massive amounts of manure in small areas, often leading to egregious manure spills into rivers and streams or soils over-saturated with manure.... [O]ver-saturated soils are not capable of absorbing the manure and, after a rain or irrigation, it runs off the land into rivers and streams.

Air

Wind erosion from animal croplands is the largest source of airborne particles, which irritate respiratory passages and make them more susceptible to respiratory infections. Factory farms produce a stench that poses a major nuisance (and possibly hazard) to neighbors for miles around. Methane emitted by cattle and carbon dioxide generated by the power plants that operate factory farms are major contributors to global warming.

Oceans

Commercial fishing, aquaculture, and angling are environmentally catastrophic. Commercial fishing is wiping out biodiversity, as miles of nets sweep up all the fish in their path—and take coral habitats with them. Commercial fishers have devastated the ocean’s ecosystem to the extent that large fish populations are only 10 percent of what they were in the 1950s.   

Commercial fishing boats leave their ports in pursuit of specific species of fish, but their hooks and nets bring up thousands of pounds of other marine animals as well. Sharks, sea turtles, birds, seals, whales, and other nontarget fish who get tangled in nets and hooked by long-lines are termed “bycatch” and are thrown overboard. They fall victim to swarming birds or slowly bleed to death in the water. Scientists recently found that nearly 1,000 marine mammals—dolphins, whales, and porpoises—die each day after they are caught in fishing nets. By some estimates, shrimp trawlers discard as much as 85 percent of their catch, making shrimp arguably the most environmentally destructive fish flesh a person can consume.