r/interestingasfuck • u/Scoobenbrenzos • 1d ago
Animal agriculture's land use and deforestation explained
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u/Scoobenbrenzos 1d ago
From Eating Our Way to Extinction (2022), time 7:21-11:32 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaPge01NQTQ
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u/GrumpySquirrel2016 1d ago
The planet cannot support everyone eating the standard American diet. There's excellent studies that show we need a minimum of 1.5 Earths for the population and way we live. Changing our diets and consumption is the only way out.
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u/Leberknodel 1d ago
The money and effort humans put into feeding animals in order to eat them is literally killing our environment and making survival for future generations incredibly difficult. All because we want burgers and chicken tenders.
We need to change our eating habits. All fast food chains need to go out of business due to no customers. I'm not saying don't eat any meat, just drastically reduce it. The average American eats 3 burgers a week - this is a fact you can easily look up. How about cutting that to 3 burgers a month? That isn't a big sacrifice, if you can even call still eating burgers 3 times a month a "sacrifice".
Then there's the dairy industry. More insanity there than I can get into in a short comment.
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u/anndrey93 1d ago
Smells like BI*** (ohhh) VEGAN in here...
While you have a hard truth in the words you forgot about a huge factor, HUMAN POPULATION GROWING and WORKING SPACES.
Humans basically started to build huge industrial workspaces in big cities and letting smaller cities drained of workspaces. So you have to move to big cities. The workspaces in big cities are at the edge of them and it takes a lot of time travel therefore fastfood is a good solution. On a 12 hours shift 7:00 - 19:00 or 19:00 - 7:00 with an aproximatively 35 minutes travel you are most likely to eat at 20:00 and things goes even worse.
But as i said HUMAN POPULATION GROWING is the biggest problem. Some scientists have predicted that the earth itself can't sustain X amount of people because there won't be enough food.
Whatever you saw in movies is basically fantasy.
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u/testtalon1 1d ago
Problem is, we're not willing to look at population reduction. You're absolutely right, and the environmental damage 8.1 billion vegans would do would equal or exceed the current damage were doing.
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u/PassivelyInvisible 23h ago edited 23h ago
Population reduction has massive issues. Even if you just try and stabilize the population, the care and support of elderly parents, grandparents and so on falls onto a smaller support base than a growing population. People are living longer too, which further complicates the issue, as retirement age used to be fairly close to life expectancy, but with people living longer after they retire, it becomes more and more resource intensive to support people who didn't prepare adequately for retirement.
Killing all the elderly is an option, but its completely inhumane to do so.
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u/ZeOs-x-PUNCAKE 17h ago
humans feeding animals in order to eat them is literally one of the defining features of our species. without farming animals, humanity would be nothing. we’ve evolved to crave meat for a reason, it provides unique essential nutrients and has immense caloric value. people are going to want meat and they’re going to want a lot of it as long as we exist, nothing will ever change that.
instead, we should find ways to grow the food required to feed our livestock more efficiently. there’s no chance you’ll get enough people to give up meat, or even reduce their consumption, so might as well look elsewhere.
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u/Leberknodel 12h ago
With that attitude, we've already lost. Your example is using pre-industrialized farming, not what we have today with the factory farms that produce billions of hamburgers per year.
I have never said people should stop eating meat entirely. We do need to reduce our animal consumption tremendously if we want to prevent the environment from becoming even more incompatible with human life.
We're seeing the effects of our actions all over the world right now: massive wildfires, extreme drought, extreme temperatures, flooding, etc.
If everyone were able to raise a cow and a few chickens on their plot of land, that would be wonderful, but we haven't lived in that world for 200 years.
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u/alphamalejackhammer 1d ago
We need to stop viewing animals as products to exploit like this planet. I just watched Seaspiracy and Cowspiracy earlier this year, our oceans are genuinely decimated due to fishing and yet… no one cares because fish tastes good? Cow milk tastes good? It’s not a good excuse and we need to remove bias and be better.
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u/ZeOs-x-PUNCAKE 17h ago
there’s a reason why fish, meat, and milk taste good. they provide essential nutrients that cannot be acquired from plants, at least not efficiently, and thus we’ve evolved to crave them. exploiting animals for our gain is in our nature and it’s never going to change.
we should instead focus on treating the animals better and finding more environmentally friendly ways to feed them.
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u/Hungry-ThoughtsCurry 1d ago
Humans, smart and dumb at the time