Joel Hollingsworth wrote:
Her basic premise is that a vegan diet is very closely tied to strictly-controlled, topsoil-burning, fossil-dependent farming; that producing enough food for a vegan population means excluding (exterminating?) a forestful or prarieful of creatures from every kingdom and maintaining a monoculture where the only survivable niche for an animal is shaped like an operator of heavy machinery.
That premise is true...if you assume the food is produced in an industrial monoculture. If you don't note this assumption, you read this and draw the conclusion that veganism leads to huge ecological destruction, instead of the truth which is that industrial monoculture leads to huge ecological destruction. Read that premise again, but this time when you come to the word 'vegan', replace it with 'meat-eating'. Holds every bit just as true.
I've heard it argued as an argument against veganism that more creatures are killed growing vegetables per acre than when raising animals for meat. Of course they assume industrial monoculture. I mean, all the insects killed by pesticide, and animals killed by heavy machinery during harvesting of cultivated land must exceed in number the animals raised and slaughtered for meat, right? Until you remember that all those animals slaughtered for meat were fed grain produced by industrial monoculture. Comparing creatures killed growing vegetables and orchard in a permaculture setting versus raising animals for meat in a permaculture setting would be silly, as nothing is killed growing vegetables besides insects and microbes in the simple acts of walking, occasional digging, etc. That's random, unavoidable, just life.
Yeah we have to 'manage' wildlife now because we have 'too many' of them. Yeah that's what happens when you essentially wipe out all natural predators. We killed off all the predators because we were afraid that they would eat the animals we wanted to eat and also that they might eat us. We don't have a deer plague, we have a wolf/cougar deficiency.
As far as grass vs. grain-fed beef, cows are fed grain because corn is cheap (through subsidies it is cheaper than the real cost of production) and this allows them to be temporarily held much closer together and centralized than nature would ever allow. But cows not designed to eat grain, they are designed for grass and herbage. Besides messing with the cow's stomach and health, grain makes them gain weight (product). Beef from grain-fed cows is several times higher in saturated fat than beef from grass-fed cows. Saturated fat is known to be a big player in heart disease, which is leading cause of death in the United States, not to mention obesity. So whether it's about caring for the health and quality of life of the cows or about your own health, grass-fed > grain-fed.
As much as vegan/vegetarian may be morally commendable or superior to many people, a simple change of diet composition cannot save the planet. Permaculture could though.
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