The white man destroyed sustainable ecosystems around the world, many of which had extremely high levels of meat consumption by indigenous people, and replaced them with unsustainable, industrialized meat production. That is the only reason “high meat consumption” is a question in the first place.
This video from Mark Rober was eye opening for me. As a meat eater myself I'm convinced that eating meat is unsustainable. It's just a matter of time until we can't keep up with demand and meat will become something only the 1% can afford.
Dramatically reducing meat consumption is the single best thing the average westerner could do to limit their environmental impact. Why did you remove it?
But if you consider the way demand increases because of the scale of the world population and economic growth (i.e. people are getting richer and want to finally be able to afford and enjoy meat) the bottom line is that, when it comes to environmental issues, we also need to reduce the global human population sooner than later because this really is the root cause.
The real culprit is the uncontrolled population growth but nobody wants to talk about that.
Ok, let's assume that people do indeed eat too much meat and that we halve our current consumption. Population grows until it has doubled and the meat consumption is then back to the same level as to what it is now.
Eventually we can all be eating grass and rocks and there'd still be too much demand on nature crated by the existence of humans.
The only real long term solution is start limiting population growth drastically. Any crutch trying to limit energy and material consumption will not solve the root cause. (Ofc it still makes sense to cut off the excess and not be wasteful or a resource hog)
Personally I'd like to have only enough people on this planet, so that everyone can be fed and educated and have access to health care, sanitation and all the basic needs.
A large part from that is due to the abhorrent conditions that most meat is produced in and the fact that (IIRC) livestock amounts to 15 times the biomass of all wild mammals combined right now. If you tally up land used to feed livestock and all the other side effects of the meat industry, it doesn't look very sustainable to me. It's kinda hard to have almost 8 billion people live like hunter gatherers I guess.
> Humanity hasn't had such a high meat consumption ever before, it's an aberration of the last century that is unsustainable.
Humanity hasn't had 7 billion people before. It grew by 6 billion in said century. Is that sustainable, you think? Every extra person has a carbon footprint and consequently contributes to increase in land-use and resource exploitation, and by extension environmental destruction. Modifiers like fossil fuels exacerbate the rate of destruction but ultimately the scaling remains with whatever we replace with. The only sustainable course is for growth to stagnate entirely. This is popularly predicted on the horizon, but it seems too optimistic. So long as there is global poverty and inaccessibility to contraceptives there will be growth.
High meat consumption isn't exactly novel, it just hasn't been done to this scale. During Victorian period of inequality it may have been lower among workers, but that hasn't always been true. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_dining_in_the_Roman_E...
I think a lot of tribal meat eaters ate pretty sustainably because their population numbers held pretty steady, didn't explode. So just hunting wasn't enough to require the wild herds to also grow exponentially for survival. Let's face it, the issue is not meat, it's growth of the human population. But nobody wants to advocate eliminating humans (and definitely I don't), so we have to make the hard choices sometimes. I'd say the bigger issue isn't carbon footprint, it's water supply.
If we hardly know what good nutrition is for humans, how can we assume that meat is some ancillary part of our diet?
This dogmatic view to end meat consumption is a horrible mistake, as it’s predicated on us understanding the human body in its entirety. There’s really no studies that investigate with causality a human diet. It would be unethical/expensive to properly study causality. We have epidemiological studies that find correlation, which has been wrong many times (red meat causes cancer, saturated fats are bad, etc). Epidemiology is meant to point towards a correlation for us to separately study causality, instead of these statistics game of conflating the two via attempting to remove confounding variables.
Further, you’re assuming all land that’s currently used for livestock had no prior use. Much of the land was formally used for crops (until the soil was depleted from poor farming practices, injected with nitrogen/fertilizers, then essentially decimated) if the topsoil was nutrient dense.
Deforestation is needed for crops as well, it’s not exclusively done for animal agriculture. Removing all meat sources would still require some amount of land to fill in the caloric gap. You can’t just subtract all livestock land and say you can plant trees, and thus a net gain.
yeah the whole sustainability issue arises because of our excessive consumption. Just limit your intake by at least 50% or more and then slowly raise it by eating more vegetables.
The whole narrative around sustainability of meat has been completely hijacked by corporate interests who wants to push non-meat as meat.
Their whole goal is to enmesh it at a cultural level so that they can increase sales, not really concerned about the real problem which is cruelty, indifference to the treatment of animals by the bovine industrial complex.
We are simply seeing the usurpation of the latter group by a new commerce-first-pseudo-sustainability industrial complex. It's even more dangerous now because of the misinformation and groupthink by self appointed morality police.
Why even go that far. Just hypothetisize having everyone only consume white meat and not red meat, the latter of which is both more taxing on the human physique, not just on the environment.
There are also problems with meat production: immense pollution of air, land, and water.
And there are a multitude of negative health impacts with high meat consumption as well.
And there's also the catastrophic moral failing: a staggering amount of inevitable abuse of sentient creatures when we look across the modern practices of growing animals for human consumption.
I don't eat meat not to solve any sustainability problems. I don't eat meat because of how the meat industry is treating the animals and the nature
(By the way, most soy and grain is produced to feat our animals). I can give you a lot of examples for the planned economized genocide on other races than humans. But people, like the author of this text, don't want to hear arguments or examples like that. They don't buy at the local market, they buy the cheapest meat at the supermarkets and care about their wallets more than they care about others. We totally lost the connection to the lives of the animals we eat. Additionally I don't eat meat because 80% of our antibiotics is produced to feat it to animals. Just Google MRSA and find out how much your government is doing about that issue. Some scientist, here in germany, call the resistance against antibiotics an equal threat to the mankind like nuclear weapons. This issue brings meat consumption and therefore the meat industry in a total different perspective.
The only reasons to find ways to end consumption of natural meat are 1. to increase efficiency and 2. ethical concerns relating raising animals in confinement to slaughter and eat them.
The effects on the planet can be completely eliminated with massive expansion of nuclear and/or space-based electricity generation to power vertical farms that a) don't displace natural habitats and b) capture and recycle livestock's methane emissions along with other waste products.
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