Can Meat Eaters Also Be Environmentalists?
This is an interesting article. She assumes that as long as marginal land is used for meat production and that this land is not suitable for crop production then small scale farming of livestock is not necessarily unsustainable. This is a good point, but I feel she has simplified the issue. Marginal land is often land that was cleared for agriculture during European colonization and abandoned due to poor productivity. Putting this land back into pasture removes the potential for these sites to serve as the CO2 sinks they once were when they were forested hundreds of years ago. Preventing this land from being reclaimed by the forest lowers the CO2 sequestration potential of the land base. We have to make choices when it comes to our marginal land as it is increasingly being eyed by many industries. Should we let it be reforested to serve as a CO2 sink? What if it were to be reforested and we harvest the biomass off this land for energy production? Or perhaps this land can be used to sustain our insatiable desire for meat consumption. Seems to me that her same argument for sustainable meat production can be applied to sustainable crop production. Isn’t it more efficient to focus on reducing various GHG emissions associated with crop production and then allow marginal agricultural land to serve as a CO2 sink?
Anywho, back to work.
Also, most North American meat is not from pastured animals, it’s from animals on confined feedlots (which have a whole host of other issues). Their food will mostly be corn, which can’t be grown on marginal land, – it has pretty heavy nutrient needs. Industrial meat production practices were what made me stop eating most meat, the environmental toll is far too big to justify. However, I have no problem eating last year’s laying hens and male goat kids.
As for taking pasture land and using it as a sink, it seems like it would depend on the particular location. A pasture in a wet, low-lying area probably has good potential as a sink if left to nature, since it’d likely go to peat or something heavy on OM and carbon. Drier areas, maybe not… dry grasslands are often susceptible to wildfires, so looking at it from a purely CO2 centered perspective (and ignoring the importance of fire for such ecosystems), it might be better to pasture some animals on it, manage it well, and fill a human need. There is also the possibility of developing agroforestry systems where you combine forests/orchards and grazing.
By: Adam on July 5, 2010
at 20:20