Any Vegetarians/Vegans here?

[bennyboy]

Manufacturing, tourism, services would all have to be well developed. They are also up high with long hours of daylight, so you would have increased efficiency of solar energy collection. Yes they are very poor, but we have an obligation to support development. As for transportation, this would require investment in infrastructure, but using efficient sources of transportation like rail would reduce the environmental impacts.

I've often wondered why Tibet, a hard-core Buddhist nation (at least up until recent historical events), would be a meat-eating nation. What happened to "every animal is a reborn soul which was once your mother"? What happened, presumably, is that mother is more nutritious than dirt.

At any rate, I'm pretty sure that by ANY transportation means, much more environmental harm would be done in transporting grain to Tibet than would be done by killing a mountain yak. Does that mean it's okay to kill mountain yaks? In my opinion, no, not really. It just means that there are some cases where the efficiency argument for vegetarianism doesn't apply.

But in the LONG run, I agree with you about this: the current inability to viably deliver grain and plant foods, or to provide adequate B12 to some vegetarians, is not a great reason to eat meat-- it's a much better reason to put more resources into developing better food-production and delivery systems. If you look at other systemic realities that were once considered necessary, you'll see that some of them are now considered immoral: making poor children work, slavery, chastity belts: all these once were accepted due to "necessity." But new a new moral climate and new technologies allowed all those necessities to fall into the moral trash-heap where they rightly belong. You and I hope that meat-eating will go that route, too. Whether that actually happens, in my opinions, depends on whether the world continues developing, or falls into decline in a state of post-war or disease epidemic. It's clear that without a sustainable advanced technology, people are going to turn to meat as an easy dietary supplement (or even prime food source).