Your thoughts on George Monbiot?
And his public recant on his reasons for being vegan over the last decade?
“The meat-producing system Fairlie advocates differs sharply from the one now practised in the rich world: low energy, low waste, just, diverse, small-scale. But if we were to adopt it, we could eat meat, milk and eggs (albeit much less) with a clean conscience. By keeping out of the debate over how livestock should be kept, those of us who have advocated veganism have allowed the champions of cruel, destructive, famine-inducing meat farming to prevail. It’s time we got stuck in.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/06/meat-production-veganism-deforestation
I think he still plays by the vegan tune of ” minimizing personal contribution to animal exploitation and suffering” and is being “as practical as possible avoiding animal products” which I believe is the more “sustainable” and realistic approach rather than the often heard hard and fast and uncompromising “no animals whatsoever” rules that some vegans, particularly PETA influenced/activist vegans, insist on.
Contrary to what another poster said, animal farming is sustainable as it has been for ten thousand years. What is not sustainable is continuing human population growth whose food requirements will eventually reach levels that no food production system satisfy. India is a country where 35-50% of the population is vegetarian. It does not have a cattle industry to speak of as compared to Western countries. Yet it is a country that can barely feed itself. Mass natural habitat destruction in India is not caused by land conversion to animal farms but to crop farms. Simply put, even with a population that is vegetarian/vegan or living on higher proportion of plant based foods or on “naturally” obtained (foraged/gathered/hunted) food, it’s production systems remain inadequate. Blaming animal farming is merely perpetuating the false and misleading claims by vegetarian groups that Monbiot wants to avoid.
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Modelling of Livestock Production Systems: Sponsored by $124.69 |
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