Veganism

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm not a farmer, but doesn't clear-cutting for ploughed fields reduce the ability of naturally-evolved species to do what they've evolved to do?

The clearcutting will continue no matter what we eat, and for the timber alone.  Throwing cattle on aftwerwards is just a value add (and it's done because clear cut forest land is notoriously unproductive while beef commands a premium). The general selling point here is that a vegan diet compared against a particularly high meat-consumption american diet might contribute to 30% less greenhouse gas in and of itself - as in a 30% reduction to the contributions from ag - but this reduction comes primarily from livestock reduction - it does not mean that any other animals will be better off, and assumes we will not, then, create that 30% some other way.  More fields of whatever we're then eating and more extraction and application to grow it or replacing ag industries with other industries to offset the economic loss - which is what would be expected.  All of which harms animals, all of which entails more ecological damage. Generally speaking, advocates say that won't happen...but that's because they believe we should do a ton of other things to prevent that as well.  Which we should!  However, that does suggest that the intended benefits do not come from swearing off meat, but from doing those other things - which we could do without swearing off meat.        

Also, how might transportation and energy might reduce dead zones in river deltas in a way that supports the local ecology? Massive hog-farms far upstream are fairly well-known for making those river deltas oxygen-starved with a resultant impact on the fishermen who also rely upon a balanced ecology for their livelihoods. Are you wanting to truck all that fecal matter? Do we need that much nitrogen injected into our economy? Is that trucking not also affecting us? I don't understand this response of yours.

To answer the big question from the start - yes, we need that much nitrogen injected into our economy.  In fact we need even more nitrogen injected into our economy as it is than we have right now if we factor in hunger.  Chemical sources are more dense, but also more ecologically destructive - and on a global scale.  As in, there's all sorts of damage you might do to your local area by modifying or using the land a particular way - but your input and energy sources, your transporatation decisions, will damage the fuckin amazon or coral reefs off australia. Ideally, we'd source nitro locally by grazing in a fallow year or onsite feedlots, for example, but as it stands food production and input extraction are often not done in the same areas.  We have to remember that we're considering an ethical argument against eating meat, not an ethical argument against producing it a particular way.  If sustainably produced livestock does not do The Bad Thing, or could even help to reduce The Bad Thing then eating sustainably produced meat is not ecologically or morally wrong according to that arguments own metrics.  

I'm not arguing for not eating meat. I do so myself. But I am wondering about the ecological impacts of factory farming. Where do you put all that cowshit and pigshit to feed umpteen millions of people and maintain your export markets? It's gotta go somewhere. Is the Mississippi Delta worth the money from China?

Depends on how much we value human life, and whether or not we consider harm to humans worthy of consideration just like harm to other animals is.  We put all that shit into our food right now - in addition to turning oil into food.  If we had to choose between the health of a river and starving people I don't think that contributing to hunger would be the ethical decision.   These things are rarely that clean, ofc, the health of a river and the health of the people on the river being tied together.  We're a riparian species too.   

Ag isn't haphazard or set up wherever we would like however we like.  You'll see numbers floating around, for example, of how much "farmland" is used for cattle.  OFC it's only "farmland" because it's being used for cattle.  It's suitability to grow food crops is not guaranteed by the presence of grazers.  That's actually one of the main considerations as to whether or not to put cattle on land in the first place.  Similarly, you'll hear about how much farmland is used to grow feed for cattle.  Here again the implication is that it could be freed up to produce food for people directly - but his is not necessarily so.  There are land capacity, equipment, skill, budgetary, and economic considerations that went into those decisions.  At the bottom of the well, there are no purely good decisions in ag.  It's an exlusively sub-optimal decision field. At least from the standpoint of animal harm or ecology.  Baked in.  We have some leeway to decide who or what suffers where, but no ability whatsoever to stop that suffering - short of committing self righteous suicide.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. It is often hubris informing us that we might stop this or that thing by some personal decision we make, not understanding that all of the decisions we make will inevitably lead to that very thing by natural laws which we cannot negotiate with, and do not change based upon our moral or ecological sympathies. To wit, all we've ever been doing on this rock, from the very start, is shifting suffering and damage between two buckets. Ours, and everything else's.