/ Environment

Eat Less Meat For Greener World

Published August 2, 2011 in Love For Earthlings, We Love Gaia |
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The Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a reported titled A Meat Eater’s Guide to Climate Change + Health: What You Eat Matters. Their main point is that the production of meat for mass consumption contributes very much to climate change. It also creates large amounts of pollution and consumes vast stretches of land that used to be part of the wild, but were converted to factory farming.

Beef, cheese, lamb, pork and farmed salmon generate the most greenhouse gases, according to EWG. They also have the largest environmental impact, other than farmed salmon.

“Producing tremendous quantities of meat and dairy requires large amounts of pesticides, chemical fertilizer, fuel, feed and water. It also generates greenhouse gases and massive amounts of toxic manure and wastewater that pollute groundwater, rivers, streams and, ultimately, the ocean.” (Source: EWG)

The amount of faeces and urine generated by factory farms is huge. As it was reported on this site recently, they generate 100 times the waste of human sewage plants. Excess manure generates methane, a greenhouse gas, and factory farming is the fastest growing source of it, according to Mercy for Animals.

Dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico where there is no, or virtually no, marine life are created by excess fertilizer on crop fields that are grown to feed factory farm animals. The runoff of animal faeces and urine also contributes to these dead zones. 607 028 square kilometres of land in the U.S. is used just to grow food for farm animals.

In a sense, the connection between meat and dairy consumption and climate change has already been covered by a United Nations report from several years back. The UN report stated agriculture contributes more to climate change than all transportation combined. (One might have assumed emissions from cars, trucks, buses, trains and planes, etc. were the greater contributor to climate change.)

The EWG report contains some shocking statistics, such as this one: “From 1971 to 2010, worldwide production of meat tripled to around 600 billion pounds while global population grew by just 81 percent (US Census Bureau, International Data Base).” (Source: EWG) They also say by 2050 if the rate of production remains the same, the total globally could be 1.2 trillion pounds per year.

Each one of the above factors should be a compelling enough reason to reduce meat intake or stop altogether, but there is still another major issue with mass meat production. Most antibiotics in the U.S. are used on factory farms, and they wind up in the environment where they could create resistance in bacteria that eventually could make people sick.

The global human population is also steadily increasing, a trend that will undoubtedly make climate change worse. Our food choices on an individual level do make a big difference collectively.

Image Credit: H2O

Adapted from an article by Jake R.

Modern Polar Bears Orginated in Ireland

Published July 25, 2011 in Love For Earthlings |
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Brown Bears and Polar Bears Met Often during Last 100,000 Years
A team of scientists discovered that the female ancestor to all modern polar bears was actually a species of brown bear living in Britain and Ireland just before the last ice age. The hybridization occurred between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago, and the species of brown bear has been extinct for the last 9,000 years.

According to the press release, “Beth Shapiro, the Shaffer Associate Professor of Biology at Penn State University and one of the team’s leaders, explained that climate changes affecting the North Atlantic ice sheet probably gave rise to periodic overlaps in bear habitats. These overlaps then led to hybridization, or interbreeding — an event that caused maternal DNA from brown bears to be introduced into polar bears.”

Researchers once thought that the female ancestor of polar bears lived about 14,000 years ago on the Alaskan islands of Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagof. However, the new evidence collected from studying 242 brown bear and polar bear mitochondrial lineages (tracing genetic history from the mother’s side) from the last 120,000 years shows it happened tens of thousands of years earlier, and on a different part of the planet.

Hybridization Could Help Polar Bears Survive Environmental Changes
While polar bears and brown bears are strikingly different in their physical appearance, their ancestry seems to be intricately linked — and could be intermingled again as melting ice brings brown bears and polar bears back into contact with one another, creating hybrids of grizzlies and polar bears called “growler bears” or “pizzly bears.”

Apparently the hybridization we’ve witnessed recently due to global climate change and a reduction of sea ice has happened often over the last 100,000 years as warming and cooling cycles brought the bears in and out of contact with one another.

Shapiro states that a thorough understanding of the genetic history of polar bears as well as previous responses to environmental changes could conservationists form strategies for keeping polar bears from disappearing altogether.

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