Inefficient land and resource use
Land degradation
Loss of biodiversity
Soil erosion
In the US, most of the land used for grazing is already insufficient for farming most crops. You take cows and such off of them, you're left with near-useless land.
Chemical runoff from pesticides and fertilizers
Not exclusive to livestock and their feed, feels weird to attribute it to just them.
Widely-available meat in the Western world is a Pandora's Box; it's just not going away. It's better to find ways to make it more efficient than to go all pissed-off-vegan and want to ban meat everywhere in favor of ultra-processed replacement monstrosities. You'll win more people to your side too.
Furthermore, attacking the end-consumer does absolutely nothing. It's like banning plastic bags/straws, It just makes liberal lawmakers feel good about themselves. You want to really change our diets? Go after the billions in subsidies handed out to farmers for growing corn/soybeans/dairy and such in order to stay competitive against cheaper products overseas. Good luck.
We deliberately overproduce food so that when, say, corrupt regimes attack one of the world's largest wheat growers, we don't end up starving. It's a necessary adaptation for a country that has to worry about food security in the event of wars, even if it has 2nd order effects that are not so good.
We are currently consuming upto three times as many cows each year as there were wild buffalos.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-current-mass-extinction-is-...
- Cows (cattle): In 2021, the United States had approximately 94.4 million head of cattle, including those raised for beef and dairy production.
- Beef: In 2021, the United States imported approximately 3.1 billion pounds of beef and veal, that's apx. 6 mil. cows.
- Pigs (hogs): In 2020, the United States produced around 129 million hogs.
- Pork: In 2021, the United States imported approximately 1.0 billion pounds of pork.
- Chickens (broilers): In 2020, the United States produced about 9.1 billion broiler chickens for meat.
- Poultry: In 2021, the United States imported around 913 million pounds of poultry meat, including broiler meat and turkey meat.
- Turkeys: In 2020, the United States produced approximately 229 million turkeys.
Fish, shellfish, ducks, sheep, goats, or dairy products not included.
Source: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service
On average 90 percent of meat and eggs raised in the U.S. come from CAFOs
https://mostpolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/...
Defining any of this as "sensible" is an error imo. In a sense it's certainly sensible to have the goal of providing accessibly-priced meat to every member of a large country. Each step along the way is sensible, I'm sure.
But then we end up here and there is nothing sensible about it. The sheer scale required to provide all that flesh is nearly profane in its own right. There is simply and frankly no way to do it responsibly at the scale we've chosen to do it.
It seems meat will either remain built on human, animal and ecological exploitation at an incomprehensible scale, or it will revert to a rare and expensive luxury mostly available only to an economic elite. I haven't seen a compelling vision of any alternative.
This is a premise from a bygone era. Replace modern farming with integrated permaculture and billions will starve. Such farming techniques only persist in developed countries today as niche activities to amuse yuppies who want to buy some connection to nature at the grocery store.
Raising large quantities of animals in the rhythm necessary to feed meat daily to a large population is irrational and creates these shortcomings.
IMO animal agriculture is just another one of those topics that, if you really deep-dive, turns into a discussion of overpopulation and capitalism.
You must not literally mean nothing, but I still don't understand where the nutrients are supposed to come from if the land is so poor that food crops won't grow, yet there is supposed to be enough nutritious grass for grazing?
When you hit "the world can't support everyone living the way we live" the problem is with the way we live, not with everyone living.
We can easily provide healthy nutritious food to everyone and many many more. Just not in the form that we are currently choosing for ourselves.
Seriously, if you ever dealt with land in your life, you would know agriculture is anything but “easy”. It only exists in today’s shape and form thanks to fossil fuels, massive government incentives and cost externalities.
It still seems pretty clear to me that the problem is resource overconsumption, not simple overpopulation. Let's address that first bit first then see where we are.
Stop believing the anti-meat FDA. Meat is good for you.
Additionally, I see you negated to full read my comment where I said FROSTED mini wheats. Yes, the FDA put sugary cereal higher up than meat products.
But regardless, the alternative to an economically catastrophic meat-centric diet isn't starvation and malnutrition come on. It's not even vegetarianism per se.
Most humans most places through most of time have eaten much much less meat than we currently do. They've eaten a lot more plants and yes bugs and lichen and seaweed and shit than we do. We don't need to idealize that or try to return to it, but we should remember it.
We are extreme outliers among humans who have lived, in this particular way, among others. We should consider the consequences of occupying this extreme and choose where we stand with it deliberately now that we understand what it is.
The real root of the problem is that there is no root of the problem. There are hundreds of causes that all feed back into one another. If you try to boil this down into a root-cause narrative, what you will inevitably end up with is a cartoon caricature that, at best, pushes an anti-human narrative; and worse / more likely, blames some proxy for the poor, racial minorities, or foreigners. I know this because the whole 'population bomb' thing wound up being used by fascists to try and paint their shenanigans as environmentally friendly.
[0] In Russia, this is literally the only thing that will get Putin chucked out a window. A very large chunk of the country moved to mining towns in the 70s and 80s to take advantage of the Soviet Union equivalent of FIRE[1]. Those pensions are a crushing burden upon the government and any attempt to reduce them causes massive protests and riots.
[1] Financial Independence, Retire Early
Sources? In particular, what proportion of the population?
When were the attempts to reduce the pensions?
This video has it's own sources list linked in the description: https://pastebin.com/AbaJ8EW1
To summarize: in Soviet Russia you got early retirement if you worked in mining, or moved to certain smaller towns. A lot of people in Russia maximized their early retirement by doing this. Then the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia went through Hard Times. Their fertility rate fell off a cliff and never recovered. While other countries also had falling fertility rates, they also have lots of immigration to offset that, but nobody wants to move to Russia. So imagine America, but with no millenials, no immigrants, twice as many boomers, and they all only care about keeping Medicare functional for exclusively themselves.
One of Putin's first acts was to attempt pension reform, because it's the $3600 spent on candles[0] in the Russian budget. This led to massive protests, so he backed down. He tried again around the time COVID started, and again, massive protests. It's the one thing that reliably causes Putin's popularity numbers to fall. Not even an unpopular invasion will do that. Because, for a large proportion of older Russians, the government exists solely as the medium by which treasure is pilfered from the rest of the world and into their pocket.
I don't remember the exact proportion of Russian pensioners to the rest of the population, I just remember that it's unusually dire.
Your point is a red herring.
[ The means are my calculations on dataset in https://www.pop.org/simple/countries-with-below-replacement-... ]
There are some negative consequences or at least difficult questions to wrestle with. Where is the tax coming from in a massively aged world? Who pays for healthcare for the elderly and who looks after them? Will retirement remain an option in those countries and will those folk get a pension? Others can comment on the positive aspects of declining fertility.
But I don't blame most individuals: people buy what's available in shops and have little choice to do otherwise. The problem is in the economical system.
The population is going down. People aren't having enough babies for replacement. You're going to have a rude awakening when you get old and there's not enough people to take care of you, pay into the retirement system etc.
- Greenhouse gas emissions
- Deforestation
- Land degradation
- Water pollution
- Water overconsumption
- Loss of biodiversity
- Antibiotic resistance
- Ocean dead zones
- Inefficient land and resource use
- Ethical concerns regarding animal welfare
- Contribution to zoonotic diseases
- Air pollution
- Eutrophication
- Soil erosion
- High energy consumption
- Chemical runoff from pesticides and fertilizers
- Destruction of habitats and ecosystems
- Overfishing and bycatch
- Inequality in global food distribution
- Public health risks from foodborne illnesses
- Nutrient pollution
- Strain on waste management systems
etc.