10 Ways a Vegetarian Helps the Environment
The meat industry is the world's leading producer of greenhouse gases. One of the most effective ways to fight global warming is to go vegetarian. A vegetarian diet is also more environmentally-friendly, saving land, water, and oil resources, and helping to reduce pollution and your ecological footprint.

Eating meat and dairy products is depleting the Earth's resources and destroying the environment. Anyone who really cares about the environment should consider becoming a vegetarian. Here are 10 ways that a vegetarian lifestyle can help prevent damage to the environment, save resources, and make the world a better, more peaceful place for us to live in.

More food available to reduce malnutrition

A vegetarian feeds lower on the food chain and eats less vegetable food directly, than livestock raised for meat, which consume half the world's grain. If the grain was eaten directly, then enough would be saved to feed the world's starving. It requires about 10-16 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef.

Deforestation

A vegetarian saves trees. The Amazonian rainforests are continually being destroyed to grow food to feed cows for the fast food chains, and for grazing. Since 1967, the rate of deforestation has been one acre every five seconds. Vast areas of forests throughout the world are cleared for meat production. More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals.

More efficient use of farmland

Vegetarians require less land per person. An acre of land can produce 20,000 pounds of potatoes, but only 165 pounds of beef. A vegan requires only 1/6 acre per year, a vegetarian three times as much, but a meat-eater needs 3-1/4 acres of land every year.

Water consumption

The vegetarian diet conserves water. Around 2,500 gallons of water is used to produce a pound of beef, yet a pound of wheat only needs around one percent of this amount of water. Half of the water used in the U.S.A. is for animal agriculture.

Pollution

Due to the growing demand for meat, contamination of the air and water from animal waste is increasing, especially by factory farming methods. This pollutes and damages the ecosystems of rivers and creates greenhouse gases that pollute the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. In a recent report by the United Nations, it was found that raising animals for food generates more greenhouse gases than all of the world's automobiles.

Environmental awareness

Conservation of fossil fuels

More than one-third of fossil fuels worldwide are used to raise animals for food. Transport, housing, irrigation, and refrigeration, as well as petrochemical fertilizer production all require vast amounts of energy. Approximately one gallon of gasoline goes into every pound of grain-fed beef. A vegetarian is likely to use less energy when cooking, because most vegetarian meals are quicker to prepare than meat-based meals.

Topsoil erosion

Overgrazing of animals renders the soil infertile and barren. The indigenous plants and animals are lost, and more land is taken to replace what has been lost by damage to the soil. Every year in the US an area the size of Connecticut is lost to topsoil erosion.

Overfishing

Commercial fishing is damaging the ecosystems of the world's oceans, and threatening the extinction of some marine species through overfishing and fishing practices. Non-target and endangered species, such as sea urchins, dolphins, seals, sea birds, and turtles, can be killed when they are caught in the nets. Ninety-percent of the biggest fish in the oceans have disappeared in the last fifty years. Thousands of seals are regularly killed in Russia and Canada to protect the increasingly scarce fish stocks.

Compassion for animals

Vegetarianism prevents the unnecessary suffering caused to animals by raising them for food. The negative vibrations produced by meat-eating go out into the environment and create more suffering and violence. We can become vegetarian and adopt the Indian spiritual tenet of Ahimsa, which is non-violence and kindness to animals, thereby improving the spiritual quality of the environment.