That factor, of course, is meat and dairy production.

Last fall, scientists from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations compiled an extensively documented report with a startlingly decisive statistic: Worldwide livestock production produces 18 percent of humans’ greenhouse gas – more than our cars, trucks, motorcycles, motorboats, jetliners and cruise ships – all forms of travel, the locus of our “addiction to fossil fuels.”

One might imagine an immediate reaction from journalists looking into how this could be. One might imagine the environmental movement publicizing this fact as part of needed solutions to the crisis. One might dream on.

The report garnered a smattering of science-page or “oddly enough” coverage and disappeared from mainstream discourse almost instantly, a distant memory by the end of the year.

Over and over we hear, instead, from mainstream media stories how crucial and urgent it is to do something about the energy efficiency of our cars and trucks, and how much CO2 results from jet airplane travel. What we don’t hear is how our global-warming contribution through those factors pales against our continuing to eat animal products.

Why should the media and environmental organizations be talking up the livestock angle? Simply put, if we’re already in a race against time to save the planet – remember that the Live Earth campaign has the Morse code for “S.O.S.” as its logo – we need to consider all possible actions and which ones can and should be implemented sooner rather than later. So out of two of the very top problems, how can we decide to ignore the bigger one entirely while beating the drums for the urgency of the second-place one?

More importantly, who decided to ignore it?

One all-too-obvious answer is Al Gore. The man who brought global-warming science to you in an easy-to-swallow, comprehensive presentation never saw fit to mention in his movie that forgoing meat was a simple and direct way to reduce your carbon footprint (a fact already well-known before the UN report, but lacking the “bigger than cars” numbers)

And certainly Gore, who still may be running for president in 2008, has played the issue like a politician, crafting his selection of facts so that only the most marginalized demographic will notice or be offended.

Pamela Rice, whose Viva Vegie Society (NYC) did a demonstration outside a Gore book-signing on Union Square, notes the political angle and how it complicates the dialogue: At that event, “a lot of the people,” she told me, “were just clueless. And I thought…If you [Gore] were talking about this everybody would be abuzz about it. And I got resistance from vegetarians also; they said don’t pick on Al Gore, he’s all we got, and he has a chance of getting picked for the nomination and he could win – again, and get in.”

Kyle Vincent, a popular vegan singer-songwriter who trained with Gore to be a presenter of the Inconvenient Truth slide show, also noted the former vice president’s deafening silence on the livestock connection: “It drives me nuts, it does. I had second thoughts about doing this [training] because of that. Because I watched the movie about five times in a row before going so I could be prepped and I thought you know, there’s a glaring omission here.”

Granted, Gore throwing his weight behind the issue would make a big difference, and it could still happen. But the public ignorance of this can’t all be laid at Gore’s feet.

Global warming is now a known, recognized, major news issue independent of Gore’s projects and promotions. The “counter-intuitive” finding from this authoritative UN scientific body makes a hell of a story to follow up on: Something every one of us does can be modified without pain or hardship to affect global warming more than all the efforts to modify our nation’s planes, trains and automobiles.

There are all kinds of good angles for those sick and tired of writing the “can the US reach 35 MPG by 2010?” story yet again. Best of all, it’s right there in a thoroughly documented international scientific report. It’s not as though one has to go digging through wastebaskets or tapping phone lines to nail this down.

So why don’t we see more in-depth reporting on this – or, frankly, any mention of it at all in the press?

Danielle Nierenberg, senior researcher on livestock production at the Worldwatch Institute, believes that “one of the reasons that the press doesn’t pick up on climate change and food yet is that people like myself haven’t found a way to communicate the issue effectively enough.” This is a pretty tall order, though, given how long it took Gore to come up with his successful “effective communication” strategy. “I just don’t think people get,” adds Nierenberg, “that fertilizer production, grain production, making meat, transporting vegetables, meat, milk, etc. has an impact on the climate.”
While it’s a given that those of us who are concerned about that impact should work on engaging ways of promoting it, it’s still fair to expect that journalists looking at the global warming issue in general should unearth and discuss this.

Rolling Stone’s recent “Special Report” issue (June 28, 2007) on climate change, Al Gore and the Live Earth concerts was the first to be printed on carbon-neutral paper. On those carbon-neutral pages are spotlights on the artists performing, an overview essay, an interview with Gore, a compendium of the Bush administration’s efforts to deny and stall on the issue, and a policy paper from Robert Kennedy. Jr., “What Must Be Done?”

And carbon-neutral full-page ads for McDonalds and for Beef (It’s What’s For Dinner), two consumer products that are integral to the one of the biggest threats to the earth’s climate.

Coincidence? Well… yes and no, actually. The idea that meat gets pushed, and vegetarianism dissed, within the mainstream media because of big bucks coming in from the livestock industry is pretty much a myth. The causal relationship is much more subtle than that:

Then why aren’t the stories about livestock and climate change showing up?

From my last decade or so working in newsrooms, I think it stems from a flaw in the way journalism is practiced here: “Objectivity” is unspokenly tied to conventional wisdom. Journalism that defies conventional wisdom is, by default, “not objective” until it “proves” itself. It proves itself with data, but also with story – that is, real-world experiences of people that speak directly to the reader’s emotional center. There needs to be a critical mass of a given “story” to allow it to be put up against a conventional wisdom story that it’s contradicting.

Unfortunately, there’s already a conventional wisdom about vegetarianism as a frivolous hobby for misguided rich kids and earnest kooks that blocks this one from getting into the journalistic noggin. In a rare case of similitude, the reporter’s interest in not researching the story, “Is Vegetarianism Imperative?” is perfectly in sync with the public’s interest in not knowing the answer.

Worldwatch’s Nierenberg notes that food has a special attachment: “People are very reluctant to change their personal food consumption habits. They’re happy to drive Priuses or install compact fluorescents because those things don’t really change their habits…they’re just more efficient. Food is a different matter because it forces people to think about something they don’t want to think about or have been accustomed to thinking about the last 50 years – where their food comes from. Reducing the climate impacts of food will necessarily mean that people will eat less meat, eggs and milk that are produced in factory farms and I am not sure if people will be willing to give those things up.”

So it’s not all Al Gore or the meat-funded media, but our national mentality, too. In addition to the expected denial and cognitive dissonance, we tend toward fair-weather activism: Distracted by surface and sloganeering, we’ll loudly and proudly jump on the bandwagon and then, after a short ride, slide quietly off.

Live Earth, after all, is named after Live Aid (an extension of Band Aid), which was all about ending hunger in Africa. More than two decades later, it’s not surprising that the problem is still flourishing there, but it is notable that our 1985 high-decibel passion for “doing something” about it didn’t seem to even make it out of the 1980s.

Similarly, that ubiquitous spiral fluorescent light bulb is a symbol (employed as such on the July 2 New Yorker’s cover) of taking action and doing something “thoughtful” about climate change. The problem is that for most Americans, if not most Westerners, it looks like the thoughtful action will end there. After all, as Pamela Rice so trenchantly noted, all Gore could come up with when pressed on camera for a real-world, everyday action ordinary people could take was “change your light bulbs.”

Still, there is some evidence that Gore is wrestling with the concept of getting out in front of the livestock issue. Kyle Vincent tells how he worked to bring it up in the Inconvenient Truth training: “I thought rather than just writing Gore off and saying, well, he’s not mentioning it so let’s forget about him, let me try to work from the inside. So I spoke to his right-hand men and women and I brought it up slyly on the side [at] first, and said you know I’m looking at all this literature, you guys have given us, binders and binders – literally probably two feet of materials here – and I don’t see a word about diet.”

Vincent reports that the Gore people were “really positive and did not discourage me at all. They said they agree and that they don’t understand why it isn’t being brought up, and go ahead and ask [Gore about] it. Well, the first or second Q&A with Mr. Gore I had my hand up…”

Kyle Vincent had found the perfect lead-in to the question, and screwed up his courage to broach the topic, when Gore beat him to the punch: “Maybe he was tipped off, but he said, ‘Now, let me talk about something for a second,’ and I’m going to paraphrase – something like, ‘I should probably be a vegetarian. To be consistent I should probably be a vegetarian but it’s not for me, at this moment, but if that’s something that you feel is furthering your moral conviction in discussing the global warming crisis, and you feel you should do that, you want to talk about that, all power to you.’ He made some joke that he doesn’t think that he could not eat meat again and most of the place erupted in laughter.”

It’s probably not a stretch to append “nervous” to that laughter, as one can imagine the tension in the many sincere trainees wondering if they had committed themselves to some ‘radical’ lifestyle while explaining about this planetary emergency. Some will think about it further, though, and some will find their way to the facts.

Those of us who are looking at the big picture need to do our best to help that process, to break through the irrationality of clinging to a certain taste sensation at the cost of destruction of a livable planet. But PR is important in changing public perception, and that won’t happen simply by ridiculing what is, in all honesty, a ridiculous position – or by couching important messages in extremely negative, off-putting packages (see sidebar).

Still, I believe the breakthrough in general consciousness of this connection could happen. The reality of this livestock-climate change connection is immutable – just as global warming was already an immutable reality before “Inconvenient Truth” tipped the scales of public perception – but the news coverage of this issue is at the point now that the news coverage of global warming was 10 years ago. The news media will start covering and exploring the new angles when there is a critical mass of obvious “story” that pushes these documented facts toward the “conventional wisdom” column.

Following Pamela Rice’s example, activists can seize more opportunities to get facts into people’s hands at high-profile events. Recalling the admonishments from political-minded vegetarians, Rice noted that “I got flack from various places – on the other hand, there were people who came out for this who wouldn’t come out for other things.”

Another solution would be a veggie version of “An Inconvenient Truth” that would sweep through popular culture and galvanize the debate as that movie did – or even better, for Gore himself to start pushing the message.

But in a way, he already is – if unwittingly…

In his Rolling Stone interview, Gore addresses the resistance based in a sense of injustice in having to give something palpable up for this invisible cause – in other words, sacrifice: “Most of the changes we need to make,” he tells the interviewer, “don’t involve sacrifice in the way you are using the word – instead, they require us to overcome inertia and eliminate absurdly wasteful practices.”

Put another way, it will help to accentuate the “pluses” of our argument, since as Gore says a little further on in that piece, “most of the changes that have to be made to sharply reduce CO2 actually have a plus sign instead of a minus sign – they represent improvements to our quality of life.”

In a New York Times op-ed a week before Live Earth, Gore offered some of the most succinct arguments yet for dietary change to fight climate change: “Individuals must be a part of the solution. In the words of Buckminster Fuller, ‘If the success or failure of this planet, and of human beings, depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?'”

Americans are indeed in this situation, having helped – with our excesses – bring the crisis to the point where it is already, with habits still being aspired to and emulated by developing countries. That’s why we need to be willing to severely curtail meat and dairy consumption irrespective of what policies are implemented in any other country.

Gore gets at this in the same op-ed: “But individual action will also have to shape and drive government action…Once again, Americans must come together and direct our government to take on a global challenge. American leadership is a precondition for success.

It is, after all, a planetary emergency.”

Editor’s Note: Some of the quotes in this article are from Vegcast (podcast) interviews. The full interviews are available at www.vegcast.com.

The post Cow, Cars and Global Warming – Why Haven’t We Heard About the Bigger Threat? appeared first on North American Vegetarian Society.

Unfortunately, assessing the real price of a hamburger is difficult because much of the overhead is hidden from view or simply ignored. Most people do not see the pain of the animals as they are branded, castrated, and slaughtered. Nor are most people fully aware of the multiple hormones and chemicals dumped into feed or directly injected into the animals. Nor have they considered how these high rates of hormone and chemical use may pose risks for humans through the creation of resistance germs and bacteria. While there is a growing awareness of the health costs – including high rates of heart attack, colon cancer, and high blood pressure, resulting from a heavy meat diet – even the best assessments of the health risks are far from complete.

But these costs, while real and significant, pale by comparison to the ecological cost of livestock production. There is no other single human activity that has degraded and destroyed more of the American landscape and perhaps the global landscape as well as our love affair with the cow and the meat-dominated diet. Welfare Ranching – the Subsidized Destruction of the American West, a book I edited along with Mollie Matteson and published by Island Press, attempts to innumerate these costs.

If the real cost of a hamburger could even be minimally assessed, I am certain that every Big Mac is really priceless. How do you put on a price on degraded watersheds? How do you value endangered species that are driven to extinction? How do you account for the real value of top soil washed to the sea? These costs are nearly impossible to calculate but they are a very real cost of livestock production. And I am certain that if the price we paid for a hamburger genuinely reflected its costs, the raising of livestock for food would be seen as foolish as trying to raise oranges in Alaska.

This Land Is Your Land,

This Land is Our Land…

Nowhere is the cost and foolhardiness of livestock production more apparent than on the public lands of the West. The American West is a grand landscape. It is also an arid, rugged, and unproductive landscape. Aridity is important to ponder. The West’s public lands are dominated by North America’s four or five major desert regions – the Sonoran, Mojave, Chihuahuan, Great Basin, and some include the Colorado Plateau as a fifth. Deserts are defined as regions with minimum precipitation and high evaporation – in other words, they are characterized by siring heat, cloud-less cerulean skies, minimum precipitation, and sparse vegetation. Now add in the fact that moisture roughly correlates with forage production – the less wetness a region receives, the more land it takes to support a single cow or sheep.

In the West, it takes a lot of land to raise one cow – and it takes even more of the public lands to provide enough forage to sustain a livestock operation. For instance, you can reasonably expect to raise a cow year round on a couple of acres of land in someplace wet and relatively flat, like Georgia, but in the arid and mountainous West you may need 200-300 acres to sustain a cow. Unfortunately if you are removing enough forage to economically sustain a ranching business, you are not leaving enough to sustain the land’s native wildlife or ecological processes, nor to provide protection for the fragile soils and plant communities. And therein is the problem. It’s ecologically impossible to economically sustain a livestock operation in most of the West if you consider the full ecological costs – statements by livestock advocates to the contrary.

Ecologically Unsustainable = Economically Unreliable

Some may ask how ranching has survived for multiple generations if it has been destroying the West? The answer is complex. First, ranching isn’t surviving – it has been in decline for decades. There are fewer ranchers today than any time since the West was first settled. The land simply can’t sustain as many livestock operations, in part because overall productivity of western landscapes has declined due to the long term degradation by livestock. And many of the ranchers that have remained in business have succeeded by taking on outside employment. The majority of small and medium size livestock operations today can more accurately be characterized as “hobby ranching” since the real income for most livestock operators comes from a job in town.

Still, the reason ranching survives at all is because of huge subsidies – both economical and ecological. A western rancher can only really stand a chance of competing in the global market by transferring most of the costs of production on to the land, its wildlife, and the taxpayer. Taxpayers pay for things like predator control, weed control, disease control (in rancher’s livestock), drought relief, and costly reservoir and irrigation systems that benefit livestock producers.

There are other subsidies that are more subtle and less visible, such as the great cost of providing services to thinly populated and widely dispersed ranches. Taxpayers subsidize ranchers by providing power, mail, school buses, road maintenance, and other public services that frequently exceed the tax contributions of these land owners – in a large part because agricultural lands are often taxed at greatly reduced rates compared to other land ownership – representing yet another subsidy to this small group of business men and women.

Other taxpayer subsidies are difficult to estimate since many financial assistance programs are hidden in multiple ways – for instance, when a federal agency like the U.S. Forest Service fences a campground to keep out the cows, the cost is charged to the “recreation” budget even though there would be no need for fencing in the absence of cows. Or take all of those miles of fencing along western highway right of ways designed to keep cows off the highway – who do you think pays for this? Not the rancher. Granting even these accounting difficulties, conservative estimates put the annual subsidy to just public lands welfare ranchers – who make up less than 1% of all livestock producers – at a minimum of $500 million. If we were to include all livestock producers the costs would be far higher.

One subsidy that some western ranchers possess is access to public land – OUR LAND – and in many instances the most fragile and ecologically diverse lands in the nation.

Wholesale Subsidized Destruction

Despite its unproductive nature, virtually every acre of land that can be grazed by domestic livestock is leased by the federal government to a relative handful of ranchers known as permittees (about 1% of all livestock producers). These men (and a few women) are permitted to graze their animals on these lands for a pittance of the real cost, especially when ecological impacts are considered.

Livestock hooves pound and compact soils, decreasing water infiltration in a land already deficient in moisture. Livestock transmit disease to wild animals, leading to local extirpation as with the demise of many bighorn sheep herds after contraction of disease from domestic animals. Livestock consume stream side vegetation and break down creek-banks with their hooves, destroying aquatic habitat for fish and many other creatures. Indeed, livestock are the prime factor in the destruction of these thin-green lines of water-dependent vegetation known as riparian habitat.

And since more than 70-75% of the West’s wildlife species are dependent to some degree on riparian habitat, the effect of livestock induced riparian habitat losses can not be understated. And this is no small impact. Some 300 million acres of public lands are leased for livestock production – that’s an area as large as the combined acreage of the eastern seaboard states from Maine to Florida with Missouri thrown in.

The Desert Ranch Land Oxymoron

Livestock are also one of the major consumers of water in the West. How, you may ask? Because nearly all of the West’s limited water is shuttled into irrigation ditches and sprinklers to produce livestock forage like hay or irrigated pasture. Even in California, where the vast majority of the nation’s vegetables and fruits are grown, irrigated livestock forage is the single largest crop by acreage.

The vast majority of water development (storage reservoirs), particularly in the West, is for irrigated agriculture – primarily livestock forage production. Indeed, in the 17 Western states, irrigation accounts for 82% of all water withdrawals from a high of 96% in Montana to 21% in North Dakota. Storage reservoirs for irrigation fragment watersheds; and withdrawals from streams reduce flows and change water quality – all of which are known to contribute to the decline in aquatic species from snails to trout.

Therefore, at least some percentage of water development species endangerment should be considered part of agriculture’s contribution to species losses.

But the economic subsidies pale by comparison to the ecological subsidies. Livestock production may well be the biggest single land use in the United States. Besides the 300 million acres of public lands grazed by domestic animals, there are another 400 million acres of private rangelands throughout the country utilized for livestock grazing. In addition, there are hundreds of millions of acres of agricultural lands that are used for livestock forage production. Last year, for instance, we planted more than 80 million acres to feeder corn – with the majority of this corn going to feed cattle. Similarly, large acreage of soybean, hay, alfalfa, and other crops were grown for livestock forage. In reality, most of our farmland is devoted not to the growing of crops fed directly to humans, but for grain and other crops devoted to livestock forage. This means there are hundreds of millions of acres of land that are drenched in pesticides and fertilizers, that many acres of soil erosion, and that many aquifers polluted by agricultural chemicals.

This domestication and alteration of the natural landscape is not evenly distributed, however, and agriculture has not only contributed to significant species loss, but has almost completely shattered some ecosystems. For example, 77 percent of Iowa is now cropland, as is 62 percent of North Dakota, and as is 59 percent of Kansas – essentially eradicating the entire tall grass prairie and most of the mid-grass prairie.

Overall, I estimate that approximately 70-75% of the U.S. land area (excluding Alaska) is devoted to livestock production in one form or another – either for the growing of forage crops, for pasture, or as rangelands grazed by domestic livestock. The ecological footprint of this industry is huge.

SOLUTIONS: Immediate and Long Term

The actual amount of land we need to feed ourselves is surprisingly small. All the vegetables grown in this country are produced on slightly more than 3 million acres of land. Fruit and nut production occupies another 5 million acres. Potatoes and grains are grown on nearly 100 million acres of land – but over 60 percent of the grains, including some oats, wheat, barley, and other crops, are fed to livestock. Obviously, if meat were eliminated from our diets, there would be a shift towards greater grain and vegetable production. Nevertheless, given the inefficiencies of grain conversion to meat by large animals – particularly cows – any increase in acres devoted to grains and vegetables would easily be counter balanced by the more substantial decline in acres used for livestock grain production.

We already know that a vegetarian diet is healthier not only for people but for the land as well. There are numerous obvious solutions. Eating lower on the food chain is one of the single most important acts any person can do to promote global health.

In the absence of a widespread diet conversion from meat to vegetables, there are still options that can promote a shift in American diets and land use. The National Public Lands Grazing Campaign (see www.publiclandsranching. org) is leading a campaign to reduce livestock production on public lands (see sidebar, page 42). NPLGC proposes paying ranchers with public lands grazing permits $175 per AUM (animal unit month) if the grazing permit is permanently retired and livestock are forever removed from the land. Though grazing on public lands is a privilege and the American people have no obligation to allow livestock grazing on any of its lands, the political reality is that ranching will not be terminated despite all of the damage done by cows.

This proposal is politically feasible and ecologically responsible. It will lead to a reduction of grazing on up to 300 million acres of land – an area the size of three Californias – no small amount of land. Still, removing livestock from public lands will not lead to a huge reduction in meat production, because only a small percentage of the livestock produced in this country comes off public lands. Nevertheless, the permit buyout would start a movement towards healthier public lands. And once people see the benefits of fewer cows, the opportunities for greater reductions on private lands in the West (and elsewhere) are likely to be realized.

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave?

So what would we do with all those cow-free acres? Imagine a West without fences with growing herds of bison, elk, antelope, and bighorn sheep. Imagine rivers running free and pure. Imagine wolves restored to much of the West. Such a vision is possible, but only if we eliminate livestock from much of the West. Fortunately, on the public lands, such a future is possible – indeed, highly probable.

George Wuerthner is an ecologist, longtime wild lands activist, and wilderness visionary. He has degrees in wildlife biology and botany; and holds a master’s degree in science communication. Previously, he’s worked as a wilderness ranger, biologist, and range conservationist for the federal government. As a writer and photographer, his work has appeared in hundreds of publications; and in addition to being the author of over two dozen books on environmental topics, he is the co-editor of Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West.

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