Meat: Eco-friendly?

(unknown source) examines the “greenness” of our addiction to red meat:

"Meat is not sweet, ecologically speaking. According to an extensive U.N. report from 2006, the livestock industry not only uses more land than any other human activity; it’s also one of the largest contributors to water pollution and a bigger source of greenhouse-gas emissions than all the world’s trains, planes, and automobiles combined.
You can do a lot for the planet simply by cutting back your overall meat intake—food writer Michael Pollan recently suggested that if Americans went meatless one night a week, it would be equivalent to taking “30 to 40 million cars off the road for a year.”

As a general rule, red meat—beef, lamb, goat, and bison—are the worst offenders. A recent report for Defra, the British government’s environmental authority, compared common animal products across seven categories: use of energy, pesticides, land, and nonrenewable resources; and impacts on global warming, acidification, and eutrophication (a kind of water pollution in which excess nutrients lead to fish-killing algae blooms).

Beef and lamb got the poorest marks of all meats in terms of energy usage, global warming, and eutrophication. Beef also used the most land, had the highest acidification impacts, and came close to the bottom in the remaining categories. Lamb did better, though—in fact, it scored the highest of all meats in terms of pesticide and nonrenewable resource usage. All in all, chicken and turkey were the greenest meats surveyed.

Now you know."


I am no longer a Vegetarian, and when I was it was due to the desire to better my health. As I read this as a non-vegetarian, I do not plan on switching back to vegetarianism, but it does make you double think things. There has to be a better way to do things. This just isn't healthy for the planet. We are creating our own demise and downfall.

Im beginning to realize that as time goes by, events happen, and surroundings change, so do the people in them. Look back in your life; how many of your friends are the same as they were 2 years ago? Let alone how many of those friends that you had two years ago are still in your life? I still have yet to find who I am, and I don't plan on it for a while. Im too indecisive, and too submissive. I care too much about others to focus on myself, I care about a lot of people that most likely don't give two seconds of thought throughout their day to me. But that doesn't matter to me because they owe me nothing. They didn't ask me to care, I do because I want to, because making people happy and doing things for them that make their day is something I'm good at.

I think all journals/diaries/blogs/whatever records of time/thought/experience/events begin with intent on keeping a detailed chronological event on what one thinks about, what provokes them with enough inspiration to to put those ideas and thoughts in their head out into the world. More often than not they start with multiple daily entries, and slowly fade and dissipate to few and far between. I want to make a blog that can inspire people, that people will want to read, that can make a change. My problem; I don't know what to blog about. I guess you could call me a perfectionist in that I haven't written merely because I feel that I don't feel qualified and informed enough about anything to feel as if I have any right to impose my opinions onto others. I just want to make an impact. I want to make others think and I want them to feel as if what they have just read has inspired them to do something, anything. I just need something to write about...