If you’ve been following my Instagram stories you may have noticed more pro-meat rhetoric from me.
I follow a lot of different voices in sustainable agriculture here on social media, but I have noticed that environmental critiques of eating meat are popping up everywhere lately.
Many of these points are valid based on the way the system is right now, huge volumes of livestock are living in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) where there are no respiring plants to absorb the gas outputs and manure runs off into toxic lagoons. But pastured animals are different, they primarily use land that can’t be cropped, improve the health of the land, and if the soil is healthy livestock gas outputs get reabsorbed into pastures.
Anti-meat advocates say forgoing meat is the quickest way to make a positive impact, but if everyone in the US was vegan, that would only reduce global emissions by 0.5%!! (EPA.gov) Why do we hear that going meatless will help, when US livestock emissions are 3% but our energy emissions are 85%? (EPA.gov) There are always simplistic and reductive messages circulating in our culture because systemic change is harder to enact than a few diet tweaks. Plus, if the corporations responsible for massive land degradation and energy use can blame you for your meat habits, then the focus is off them.
Everyone likes the idea of small changes leading to big results, but in his report about the failure of environmental “spillover campaigns” Cambridge physicist David McKay says, “Don’t be distracted by the myth that ‘every little bit helps.’ If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little.”
Instead of telling everyone to stop eating meat, we need to eat regeneratively grazed meat and pressure ag corporations to use livestock to restore pasture the way ruminants were designed to do. If we can graze livestock properly, pasture can be a carbon sink and actually counteract the effects of other emissions! #itsnotthecowitsthehow