This land isn’t for you or me. It’s for the meat industry. | Almost half of the continental US is used for meat production. There’s something better we could do with it.
Empty... to humans but not to native species that living there. Grazing still affects those ecosystems there. From the article
As the cattle graze, they tend to disrupt ecosystems and do a lot of damage to the land. They eat or destroy plants consumed by native species, like turtles, which can lead to biodiversity loss. Their manure pollutes rivers and streams, and as they move about, they erode soil.
[...] analyzed decades of BLM data and found that about half of the acreage it oversees that has been assessed fails to meet the agency’s own land health standards (in Nevada, it’s an alarming 83 percent). PEER points to livestock grazing as the primary source of land degradation.
There's an opportunity cost in using all that land. If we let land go back to its natural state we can sequester quite large amounts of carbon
A 2020 study published in the journal Nature Sustainability highlights the immense environmental potential of changing how we farm and eat. Researchers found that if all high-income countries shifted to a plant-based diet from 2015 to 2050, they’d free up enough land to sequester 32 gigatons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of removing nine years of all those countries’ fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere. Globally, if we shifted to plant-based diets over that same time period, the land saved could sequester the equivalent of 16 years of global fossil fuel emissions.
Well when you try to run a service that is by definition unprofitable, "like a business," the only way to hit the financial metrics is to cut salary and headcount. This obviously leads to shitty service. That said in states like New York and Illinois the DMV is actually pretty well run, though the number of locations and hours of operation leaves something to be desired.
Every time I hear someone complain about the DMV, USPS, etc, I assume they're being difficult to the workers. Every experience I've had with these kind of government services, I read up ahead on what I need, organize my shit, and show up prepared with a smile.
When I do that you see a wave of relief over the worker and they return the smile and respect. You can basically extrapolate the verbal abuse they deal with all day long.
With my secret method(being nice and respectful), every USPS worker I've interacted with has either been very friendly, or neutral but relieved.
Leave our brave troops alone goddamnit, be nice to them.
Yeah, and neither deforestation nor meat make a dent in that. If you want to end global warming, end the use of fossil fuels.
The statistics they parrot about nothing emissions are largely bullshit and even if everyone stopped eating meat tomorrow we'd still have all the same problems we do now.
You can't offset global warming with forests, what humans are doing is an order of magnitude larger than what nature is equipped to handle.
Nor is this even relevant at all, because even fossil fuels serve the average person. There's a reason we keep using them.
A 2020 study published in the journal Nature Sustainability highlights the immense environmental potential of changing how we farm and eat. Researchers found that if all high-income countries shifted to a plant-based diet from 2015 to 2050, they’d free up enough land to sequester 32 gigatons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of removing nine years of all those countries’ fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere. Globally, if we shifted to plant-based diets over that same time period, the land saved could sequester the equivalent of 16 years of global fossil fuel emissions.
“The problems are huge, sprawling, and major,” said Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist and executive director of the Western Watersheds Project (WWP), the group that sued numerous federal agencies for failing to preserve the habitat of the Mojave desert tortoise and 77 other species.
WWP alleges that for decades, the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and other agencies have violated an agreement they signed in 2001 that forbids cattle grazing in a part of Nevada’s Gold Butte National Monument in order to protect the desert tortoise, whose population has plunged since the 1980s.
The permitting program is costing the federal government tens of millions of dollars annually to administer, all while giving cattle ranchers a deep discount on public lands.
Even worse, the federal government spends millions annually on its “Wildlife Services” division, which kills wild animals it deems a threat to grazing livestock.
The programs that subsidize the beef industry represent some of the most striking examples of America’s tradition of “agricultural exceptionalism” — giving farmers and ranchers special treatment, like sweeping exemptions from critical environmental, labor, and animal welfare laws.
Agribusiness also benefits from getting large swathes of the West to itself, illustrating a simple fact of land use in America: Contrary to the famous Woody Guthrie song, much of it isn’t for you and me — it’s for the meat industry.
The original article contains 1,123 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The autotldr isn't great here, focusing on one example and missing quotes about the broader picture like these:
All told, a staggering 41 percent of land in the continental US is used for meat, dairy, and egg production. Globally, it’s more than one-third of habitable land. Much of it was once forest that’s since been cut down to graze livestock and grow the corn and soy that feeds them.
not all agriculture is equally land-intensive. Meat-heavy diets require far more land than low-meat and vegetarian diets.
A 2020 study published in the journal Nature Sustainability highlights the immense environmental potential of changing how we farm and eat. Researchers found that if all high-income countries shifted to a plant-based diet from 2015 to 2050, they’d free up enough land to sequester 32 gigatons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of removing nine years of all those countries’ fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere.
What a stupid and annoying title, trying to imply that I am on some team that is not the "meat industry" team. I eat meat and I have nothing against ranching.
Sometimes I feel like dae le epic bacon treat defenders have a number of trenches to fall back to, where one dismisses animals' right to life, another dismisses animal cruelty, another dismisses industrial waste and environmental damage, and the one behind that dismisses inefficient energy use and the waste of land and resources. Ultimately, all of it amounts to "don't tell me what to do" with layers of decoration on top.
It's ok if people don't care about animals. No one is going to force you to eat meat. I promise. It's also ok if we don't use all land everywhere as efficiently as possible to grow the maximum amount of calories so that the earth can support the largest number of people possible. We can have a wealth of variety in our diets that include animal products and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
No one is going to force you to eat meat. I promise.
Actually, that did happen while I lived with my immediate biological family in my formative years. You don't speak for me. You don't speak for anyone outside of your bubble world.
The planet's getting cooked with escalating feedback loops that are furthered along by animal factory farming while hundreds of millions are already experiencing a slow gnawing mass starvation from terrible land management. The rain forests of Brazil, for example, are being destroyed methodically largely for the sake of more industrialized meat farming and to grow feed for that industrialized meat farming.
Meanwhile, bubble worlders like you keep expecting your meat treats in a timely and convenient matter. And with all that in mind, here you are condescendingly smugposting about the current status quo being "okay."
That's mainly because you can raise livestock/ruminants on non arable land. But the idea that ranchers should be able to just use any land without proper consideration for the environment is crazy.