Opinion: Could Changing to a Plant Based Diet Save the Planet?

Photo by Bekky Bekks on Unsplash

As someone who was raised vegetarian for the first 12 years of my life, the thought of animals dying en masse for human consumption has never seemed morally just. In spite of this, the allure of burger vans outside Celtic Park was too much to handle as a teenager following Glasgow’s finest.

Vegetarianism is something that only 2-3% of people in the UK subscribe to and yet according to the ‘Vegetarian Society’, eating a vegetarian diet would cause 2.5 times fewer carbon emissions than a meat diet.

Global warming has shown itself to rise from many different areas of human life; CO2 production, methane/nitrous production, water pollution as well as habitat and rainforest destruction. These are all massively reducing the habitability of our planet and are all the result of human interference with our natural environment.

These changes to our climate are causing catastrophes across the globe with flooding, heatwaves, forest fires becoming increasingly prevalent.

Although there may be large capitalist structures at play, allowing multi-billion-pound companies to extract natural resources in damaging ways to the environment.

This is neither the sole cause of climate change nor should it be seen as a convenient excuse not to hold to account those producing the meat we eat every day - if not for the suffering inflicted to the animals on our plates, for your great-grandchildren’s right to walk the same earth and breathe the same air that you do.

Many critics of animal rights activists often point to their preachy and emotional arguments as an absurd misunderstanding of the food chain.

However, cultures across the globe have embraced plant-based diets for centuries: Jamaican ‘Ital’ food is a Rastafarian movement born from the 1930’s to keep a connection with the earth’s natural ingredients; Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia commit to roughly 200 days without any animal products every year and India is home to roughly 400 million vegetarians due to the pacifism preached towards living things in their mainstream religions.

One of the largest contributors to changes in the earth’s atmosphere is the methane emitted from cattle digesting their feed. Methane produced from animals’ digestion is known as enteric methane and is damaging to farmers profit margins as well as the environment.

According to Beef Research: “Farmers and ranchers have an incentive to reduce enteric methane emissions not only for environmental reasons, but also because methane represents a loss of the energy value of feed. Thus, if methane emissions are lower as a percentage of feed energy intake, cattle can extract more calories from every pound of feed consumed to meet their energy needs.”

The solutions for climate change being proposed are often ineffective, lacklustre, or wilfully ignorant to the scale of the problem we are faced with. We see the end of life as we know it approaching and treat it as a biproduct of the world we inhabit.

If we do not take radical action without the prompt of a government or big business: paper straws, recycling bins and 5p carrier bags will be the damaging legacy of a westerner’s sacrifice to mother nature. Medical conditions, religious commitments, and nomadic survival aside, it is time to reduce our meat intake, our meat production and start treating animals with the respect they deserve.