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How Veganism Helps the Environment

Being vegan is mainly about the ethics of using animals for our benefit, but there are other important reasons why you might want to give up eating animal products. Besides helping the animals themselves, a vegan diet can help the environment as a whole.

Raising animals for food is a huge drain on the environment, and it uses up many more resources that using the same space to produce plant-based food.

To start with, keeping animals for meat is an enormous waste of water, which is a resource we are starting to run out of in many parts of the world. It will take more than 2,000 gallons of water to eventually produce 1 pound of beef for consumption. A pound of wheat would only require 25 gallons. Add in the use of fossil fuel to maintain the vast amounts of crops for feed as well as everything else (transport, slaughter, and processing). On average, it will use up 11 times as much fuel to produce one calorie of animal protein as it would for an equal calorie of plant protein.

Now, that’s just wasted resources. The bigger shame comes in land use. Not only are millions of acres used for pasture and feed lots, even more land is taken up in the growing of feed crops. Food is grown, just not for us. According to PETA, approximately one third of the entire planet’s land surface is used to house livestock animals or grow their feed.

The problem isn’t just that space is wasted and native ecosystems are razed, but land is made dead and barren by overgrazing and the repeated growing of the same crops. Land used as pasture gets heavily contaminated with animal manure, which can negatively impact the local water supplies too. The EPA estimates that 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states are polluted due to animal waste runoff.

The bottom line is that the animal food industry is a horrible drain on the Earth’s space and resources. We can all eat much better with less environmental damage if we ditch the animals.