Articles From The Writings of Vasu Murti

The Next Step in Social Progress

Animal rights should not be solely aligned with a particular political party. Neither should they be tied to a particular religion. The International Network for Religion and Animals (INRA) was founded in 1985. Since then, dozens of books have been written on animals and Christianity. As I told Dr. Richard Schwartz (author, Judaism and Vegetarianism) via email in 1997: arguing as some Christians do that animal rights and vegetarianism are solely "Jewish" concerns is like saying, "It's only wrong to own a slave if you're a Quaker." No. Suffering and injustice concern us all. Like the abolition of slavery, animal rights and vegetarianism are social and moral progress for all mankind, including atheists and agnostics.
 
Richard agreed with me that churches should have animal issues at the top of their agenda as well. Catholic Concern for Animals and some progressive churches (Episcopal, Methodist, Quaker, Unitarian) have shown interest in animal rights issues. The Baha'i faith endorses vegetarianism, and the Eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism) all teach ahimsa, or nonviolence towards humans and animals alike, to the point of vegetarianism.
 
You'd think the unborn-right-to-lifers would immediately understand the animal-right-to-lifers! Talk of a vegetarian future is usually met with an anti-semitic yawn from conservative Christians, recalling Woody Allen’s 1973 movie, Sleeper: a natural foods faddist goes into suspended animation, and wakes up two hundred years later to find that what he thought would become the wave of the future, didn’t happen. I've thought of a vegetarian future along the lines of a future of electric cars: a real possibility! 
 
Food expert Frances Moore Lappe, author of the bestseller Diet for a Small Planet, once said in a television interview that we should look at a piece of steak as if it were a Cadillac. “What I mean,” she explained, “is that we in America are hooked on gas-guzzling automobiles because of the illusion of cheap petroleum. Likewise, we got hooked on a grain-fed, meat-centered diet because of the illusion of cheap grain.” Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain fed to livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.
 
The Worldwatch Institute has released a remarkable report entitled Taking Stock: Animal Farming and the Environment, which lists nation after nation where food deprivation has followed the switch from a grain-based diet to a meat-based one. Most of the nations importing grain from the United States were once self-sufficient in grain. The main reason they aren't is the rise in meat production and consumption. 
 
In country after country the pattern is repeated. Livestock industries are consuming feed to such an extent that now almost all Third World nations must import grain. Seventy-five percent of Third World imports of corn, barley, sorghum, and oats are fed to animals, not to people. In country after country, the demand for meat among the rich is squeezing out staple production for the poor. Oxfam similarly estimates that in Mexico, eighty percent of the children in rural areas are undernourished, yet the livestock are fed more grain than the human population eats! The livestock are exported of course, to satisfy the developed nations' craving for cheap hamburgers. Many of us believe that hunger exists because there's not enough food to go around. But as Frances Moore Lappe and her anti-hunger organization Food First! have shown, the real cause of hunger is a scarcity of justice, not a scarcity of food.
 
One-third of all raw materials in the U.S. are consumed by the livestock industry and it takes thrice the fossil fuel energy to produce meat than it does to produce plant foods. A report on the energy crisis in Scientific American warned: "The trends in meat consumption and energy consumption are on a collision course." According to Greenpeace, over 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to grow grain for livestock. Farmed animals produce an estimated 1.4 billion tons of fecal waste each year in the U.S. Much of this untreated waste pollutes the land and water. 
 
According to the United Nations report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, raising chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other animals for food causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and other forms of transportation combined. Researchers from the University of Chicago similarly concluded that a vegetarian diet is the most energy efficient, and the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by not eating animal products than by switching to a hybrid car.
 
Livestock production affects a startling 70 to 85 percent of the land area of the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union. That includes the public and private rangeland used for grazing, as well as the land used to produce the crops that feed the animals. By comparison, urbanization only affects three percent of the United States land area, slightly larger for the European Union and the United Kingdom. Meat production consumes the world’s land resources.
 
According to the United Nations, raising animals for food (including land used for grazing and land used to grow feed crops) now uses a staggering thirty percent of the Earth's land mass. And a staggering 51 percent or more of global greenhouse-gas emissions are caused by animal agriculture, according to a report published by the Worldwatch Institute!
 
With a world population now at seven billion, colonizing space is not a realistic solution to the pressures of overpopulation and armed conflict over dwindling resources on earth. Nor will it directly address the threat of global warming; global hunger; nor the energy, environmental, population and water crises. According to the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, moving from fossil fuel to nuclear power on a global level would require building a new reactor every one to three days for the next forty years, at a cost of $200 billion per year. This would result in 300,000 tons of radioactive waste in the United States alone.A vegan economy would be easier to implement. On a vegan diet, the world could easily support a population several times its present size. The world's cattle alone consume enough to feed over 8.7 billion people.
 
Science shows that going vegan is one of the most effective ways to fight climate change as well as one of the most powerful steps that you can take to make your life greener and healthier. It alleviates pressure on the world's precious resources, helps tackle climate change and world hunger, and radically decreases your own risk of developing life-threatening diseases. And don't forget that it saves the lives of animals, too!
 
Some find it easier to be vegan on certain days of the week as a way to transition to being completely vegan. Sir Paul McCartney endorses a "Meatless Mondays" campaign.  In 2011, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors signed a VegDay Resolution encouraging a plant-based diet on Mondays. They point out that if everyone in San Francisco went veg one day per week, it would save 37,000,000 lbs. of greenhouse gas emissions.  That is the equivalent of taking 123,822 cars off the streets of San Francisco!
 
peta2 is now the largest youth movement of any social change organization in the world. peta2 has 267,000 friends on MySpace and 91,000 Facebook fans. Several years ago, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was the top-ranked charity when a poll asked teenagers what nonprofit group they would most want to work for. PETA won by more than a two to one margin over the second place finisher, The American Red Cross, with more votes than the Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity combined.
 
Keith Akers concludes in A Vegetarian Sourcebook:
 
"In the long run, we are all going to be vegetarians. Doubtless through further exploitation of the environment, we can prolong the period in our history in which we think it is necessary to kill animals for food. But the ecological limitations of this procedure will soon make manifest to all that a vegetarian economy is both necessary and desirable.
 
"Only a small minority of the world's citizens will ever be able to consume meat at current American levels: the resources to support a more intensive livestock agriculture simply don't exist. To continue to maintain a meat economy can only make matters increasingly difficult for everyone, and can only adversely affect the goals of health for everyone and world peace."

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