If you want to be an environmentalist, you have got to be vegan. The environmental damage done by factory farms, fish farms and commercial fishing is beyond calculation. The personal damage done to individuals, millions of them every day, billions every year, is astronomical.

Sadly, even radical environmentalists just don't understand our responsibility to our fellow earthlings. An article in the current Earth First! Journal: Human Diet and Its Effects on Natural Ecosystems "Herbivore Because I Give a Shit" by Gedden Cascadia, covers many of the environmental bases. And yet one of the commenters is a person who supports direct action but is, shall we say, "anti-vegan".

Apparently animals are not part of the environment, in his/her world.

10 billion land animals tortured and killed every year in the US alone, hundreds of billions of ocean animals are killed every year (including about 1,000 marine mammals every day).

Do you know what 1 billion is? One billion seconds is almost 32 years. One billion minutes is about 1,900 years. One billion inches is more than half-way around the world, and one billion meters will get you to the moon, and back, and practically to the moon again.

Killing hundreds of billions of animals in the ocean. Trawling is even worse than clear cutting forests and takes out thousands of miles of ocean floor ecosystems. Run off from land factory farming and fish factory farming poisons the water and creates dead zones which get bigger every year.

Ocean ecosystems are decimated due to our animal-eating ways (to say nothing of our plastic-using ways). The Ocean will be completely dead within our lifetime.

Why would anyone who cares about the environment want to be a part of that?

You care, right? Stop eating fish! Stop using animals for food!

Go Vegan!

Static8 > Journal > Archive > 4 Aug 2008 Entry