Opinion

The whole story

Margaret Hurley
Claremont
To the editor,

We have entered the most terrifying crisis known to humankind. Yet clarion calls about stopping  global warming and environmental collapse fall misleadingly and dangerously short. Rarely, is the real truth mentioned in the press — that eating animals is killing the planet. We have entered the Sixth Mass Extinction driven foremost by animal agriculture.

It’s the animal agriculture factor — the leading driver in environmental destruction — that environmentalists too often leave out of discussions and solutions as it was from the May 6 letter to the editor by Hutchinson and MacKenzie. The hard truth, according to the UN and Worldwatch Institute, among others, is that eating meat and dairy, water animals, and eggs kills humans, the planet, and animals, including wild animals as, for example, rainforests — the planet’s lungs — are cleared at alarming rates for industrial beef cattle operations.

Farming animals — on both small and industrial scales — accounts for 51 percent of all greenhouse gasses, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, the latter two being the most destructive, absorbing far more heat than carbon dioxide. The brutal system of forced breeding animals for murder — the crops, the transportation and slaughter operations — and the animals themselves — produce more greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation together.  (Watch the documentary “Cowspiracy.”) And poisons land, water, and air.

In 2010, the United Nations urged everyone to eat plant-based diets — the most effective way to slow deadly global warming and to end hunger and starvation. No reputable science-based health organization says that a whole foods plant-based diet is unhealthy. Not one. So given that plant-based diets can save the planet, stop the annual killing of trillions of defenseless land and water animals, and improve human health, there is only one ethical thing to do. Unplug ourselves from the corporate matrix and its lies about humans needing to consume animals, their secretions and dead embryos. Stop eating land and water animals. Join the largest and fastest growing social justice movement in history — veganism — which protects animals and the planet from human harm. That’s the Golden Rule. Follow it or we suffer and perish. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the UN says we have less than 12 years to change.

 

Margaret Hurley

Claremont

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