Whilst this is largely true, livestock production today takes place on 40% of the earth and so has grown to the loss of wild lands. The seemingly harmless act of one individual eating the level of meat of an ordinary western diet is one more drop in an invisible sweeping ocean that threatens the natural world.īut how does it threaten the natural world? We no longer hunt wild animals as we used to so we no longer bring about their direct extinction. Of course, the number is even greater if one includes the eating of fish. Current meat consumption is off the scale: over 56 billion land animals are killed each year for the meat industry (that is the human population seven times over). 2.5 million years ago, long before the invention of spears, cave art, or even the evolution of modern man Homo sapiens, early humans (like Homo erectus) used tools to scavenge meat from kills.īut these past deeds are nothing compared to what we are doing today. The available evidence strongly suggests that these widespread extinctions were at the hand of human overhunting. And 11,000 years ago, an array of charismatic animals, including the woolly mammoth, giant sloth and mastodons, were forcibly vanished from North America. Scientists looking at mammal bones 2.5 million years ago see butcher marks created by early humans ( Homo erectus). Our lust for meat appears to run deep into our evolutionary birth in the savannah-lands of Africa. Considering that we face a 6 th mass extinction, and that livestock production is a major threat to the natural world, what can be done? What is the ideal diet for conservation success? And with burgeoning wealth, developing countries like Brazil and China are quickly piling more meat onto their plates too. And every year, these meat diets are satisfied by clearing swathes of tropical forests and grasslands at the cost of both our human and non-human relatives. Every year, the average westerner consumes their bodyweight in fish, chicken, pork or beef. Current diets in developed countries of the western world are a recipe for ecological disaster.
0 kommentar(er)
