One of the real negative impacts, indeed dangers, in the increasing
urbanization of the Western World's population is that it has given rise
to a sanctimonious myths based on wholesale ignorance of food
production and nature. One of the biggest of these is that it's "green"
or "kind" to be a vegetarian, or beyond that a "vegan".
In actuality, the opposite is quite true. If a person really wanted to
be kind to the planet, and still eat, what they'd be is a hunter, not a
vegetarian, and certainly not a vegan. Or they'd hunt, gather, and
plant a little garden. That's about as green as you can get.
The basis for the vegan myth is apparently a view that vegetable farming
is kind to the land, and that by being a vegetarian you are not
responsible for the deaths of any animals.
Taking the latter part of that first, that's far, far, from the truth.
In fact, all farmers kill animals, and all farming kills animals. It is
not possible to be a farmer without killing something, even by
accident. Tractors combine through snakes, birds and deer, just to give
one example. Vermin are killed by necessity, sometimes through the
agents of another animals. And things get killed hauling things to and
fro. Indeed, while I don't know for certain, I'd wager that farmers,
kill far, far, far more animals than hunters do every year. No farmer,
of any kind, doesn't kill something, and probably a fair number of
somethings.
Eat your whole natural wheat bagel and imagine otherwise, but there's
some dead deer DNA in there somewhere. Probably some dead rabbit dna,
some mice dna, and a few bird dnas as well.
Nor is farming environmentally benign. Some farming improves the land,
some does the opposite, but it is not possible to raise a crop without
altering it. One of the prime alterations is that the surface of the
land isn't what it once was, so whatever animal once lived there
probably doesn't the same way. Farming increases forage for some
things, and decreases it for others, but it doesn't leave things in a
state of nature.
Now, I'm not dissing farmers by mentioning this, they know it. It's the
ignorant self satisfied person eating a bowl of all natural oats that
I'm laughing at? Natural? Was it wild and picked up by a gatherer?
No. Did something die to get it to you. Undoubtedly yes. It is
natural in that man is a natural farmer, but it also wasn't raised fee
of any animal deaths, and if it was grown by somebody you didn't see
grow it, fossil fuels were used to get it and produce it.
Of all farming, I'd note, it's animal farming, ie., ranching, that has
the smallest environmental impact, as all it does is put large animals
out where there were otherwise large animals. They probably aren't the
same, to be sure, but there's no plowing or reaping involved. There may
be haying, but that's relatively benign, but not purely so, as well.
Again, I'm not criticizing farmers and ranchers, and I am one. But I am
amazed by the extent to which certain people think they're morally
superior because they don't eat meat. They actually do eat meat, they
just don't realize it's in there. And they're causing greater acreage
per man to be tilled to feed them personally. They don't know that, as
they're ignorant. And they're ignorant, as their exposure to the real
world is lacking.
