<em>Relative</em> Sustainability, Differing Time Lines, and Ethics

The reality of un-sustainability

We are running out of land and freshwater. Pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are threatening our atmosphere and waterways and negatively affecting our climate. Our oceans are being ravaged. We are losing ecosystems and biodiversity, with mass extinctions occurring at a rate we haven’t seen since the dinosaurs were lost 65 million years ago. Nearly one billion people in the world are suffering from hunger, even though we produce enough grain to feed twice as many people as there are on Earth. One half of Earth’s precious topsoil has been lost, with increasing numbers of areas becoming completely desertified. And, as we witness escalating rates of chronic disease, our own human health is in decline. These are the facts regarding our current state of sustainability, and they shouldn’t be ignored or whisked under the rug for the next generation to unwittingly inherit.

The single factor most responsible for affecting all of these aspects ofun-sustainability is our choice of food and corresponding food production systems—specifically, eating animals and animal products. Raising and eating livestock and commercial fishing are responsible for all of the following:

• Using 45% of the entire land mass of our planet and 29% of all freshwater drawn annually. • Emitting 37−51% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gases. • Consuming 77% of all the coarse grain produced annually. • Using 80% of the antibiotics produced in the U.S. • Creating more pollution of our waterways than all other industries combined. • The collapse of 85% of oceanic fish species. • Significant driver of western diseases and rising healthcare costs. • The needless killing of trillions of sentient beings annually.

Even so, the meat, dairy, and fishing industries, and their well-greased political and economic machines, combine with strongly reinforced cultural doctrines to generate formidable challenges to those attempting to advance the change necessary for the survival of our civilization … and perhaps of our very planet.

It’s interesting to note that the wordsustainablecan be found just about everywhere today—but rarely is it associated with food choice, and never is it accurate when applied to raising animals for food. To most, sustainable simply means reducing our energy consumption or recycling to minimize waste. To businesses, it means realizing economic viability. Or perhaps use of the word becomes another marketing tool, despite limited understanding of its meaning or the improbability of ever achieving it. In fact, without factoring food choice (specifically, eating animals and animal products) into any sustainability policy, we are likely to continue floating around aimlessly in a state of pseudo-sustainability, following ill-informed or misguided food movements,NY Timesbest-selling authors, scientists, and policy makers who are all unaware … and never actually arriving at the state of being truly sustainable.

Relative sustainability

Given the subjectivity and lack of clear direction for achieving true sustainability, we need to begin viewing food choice and its effect on sustainability in arelativeor optimal sense. Individually and collectively, we should ask:

• How does any animal product compare to plant-based foods in a relative manner? • Which foods have the least impact on climate change? • Which are the most land and freshwater efficient? • Which are the most sustainable for our own human health? And which are the most compassionate?

It’s time we strive for the highest possible level of relative sustainability—ultimately asking ourselves daily, “Is the food I’m about to eat in the best interest of all living things?” For the 75% of U.S. citizens who consider themselves “environmentalists,” this is the only acceptable way to approach food choice—recognizing that what we decide to eat plays a more significant role than any other factor influencing our environment, including that of energy. Therefore, minimally, 75% of the human population of the U.S. ought to be vegan—driving food demand and production systems, economics, policy, and the dissemination of reality-focused information.

Global depletion, differing timelines

I like to view the issue of sustainability with an unfiltered lens, in terms of “global depletion” (the loss of our primary natural resources on earth), as well as the decline of our own human health. We then are able, in a more quantifiable manner, to begin to clearly see the predicament itself, the timelines we are on, and the most effective resolution: swift, collective change to a fully plant-based diet.

By the year 2017, the door will close for us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to mitigate the climate change we are responsible for, which will likely send our planet into a spiraling downward vortex of devastation—increasingly severe storms and temperature fluctuations, loss of island countries, and imperiled world food security (IEA). This, combined with certain aspects of global depletion—irreversible loss of habitat, ecosystems, and species; rapid decline in the health of our oceans; and depletion of global freshwater—has created a set of critical timelines we must acknowledge and quickly act upon.

Since raising and eating animals is the single leading factor in global depletion, our decisions about what to eat each day should be one of the most important that we make. Our current approach of eating meatless on Mondays, taking baby steps and eating “less” meat is fit to what could only be considered arbitrary timelines of indifference—a “what is comfortable for us, when-we-get-around-to-it” type of rationale. Unfortunately, our planet has a set of depletion timelines and a degree of urgency that are quite independent of this approach.

Redefining “ethics”

Daily, resources are being exhausted and many species are dying while we continue eating the foods that are implicated in this debacle—because we are disconnected by lack of awareness or because we view changing to a fully plant-based diet as an infringement on our rights to make decisions. Re-connection begins with recognizing the reality of our urgent timelines. It also requires that we recognize consciously choosing to eat exclusively from the plant kingdom to be an issue that extends far beyond animal welfare or animal rights. That in fact, eating animals is a decidedly destructive act that harms all other life on earth and future generations.

Ethical food choice is no longer an issue confined simply to the manner in which domesticated farmed animals are raised for us to eat. We must also consider questions like the following:

• Is it ethical for us to raise and eat food that causes the extinction of other species and is the largest contributor to global depletion, if it is not necessary? • Is it ethical for us to eat food that exacerbates world hunger and reduces the potential for future generations to survive? • Is it even ethical for 310 million Americans to impose their diet-related healthcare costs on the 5 million who choose to eat foods that prevent or reverse, rather than cause, our most prevalent degenerative diseases?

Indeed, it’s time to reevaluate ethics, to view it in a much larger context, and to change to a fully plant-based diet.

Today.