Our forests are crucial carbon stores

The forest debate in Australia remains dominated by conflict between those who see the forest as a source of raw material (woodchips) and those who value the forest left intact for nature conservation. We need to update the forest debate to reflect current concerns and the growing imperative that we solve the global warming problem. This means that forest policy, nationally as well as internationally, must begin to reflect the role of forests as part of a coordinated greenhouse-gas mitigation strategy.
In addition to reducing our use of fossil fuel, the other major mitigation strategy is to increase the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by natural processes through protecting and restoring the world’s natural forests.
Natural forests are an important part of the global carbon cycle. They are buffers that soak up excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and store it in the biomass of trees and in the soil. Forests are an essential natural mechanism for stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in the short and long term.
One hectare of mature, tall, wet forest can store the equivalent of 5,500 tonnes of carbon dioxide. This is about the same as the annual carbon dioxide emissions from 1,300 cars. Even less productive dry forests and woodlands store significant amounts of carbon.
Most of the carbon in a natural forest is stored in the woody biomass of big old trees, dead wood on the forest floor, and in the soil. It is easy to forget about the carbon below ground: in the tree roots and associated fungi, other micro-organisms and decomposed plant material. These represent significant stocks of carbon that are continually replenished through natural ecosystem processes.
Forests contain about three to four times more carbon than is now in the atmosphere. About half the world’s forests have been cleared for agriculture and human settlement. Much of what is left is commercially logged for timber products; especially woodchip for pulpbased products.
Forests that are commercially logged store about 30 per cent to 40 per cent less carbon than unlogged forests. If we were to halt further deforestation and allow the world’s forests that have been logged to naturally regrow, the amount of carbon taken up and stored in these ecosystems would make a significant contribution to solving the global warming problem. Plantation timber can be grown on land that has already been cleared and used to meet the demand for pulp and related wood-fibre products.
If global warming really is the mother of all environmental problems, then perhaps the time has come to bring to an end the clearing and logging of natural forests. This will make a significant and cost-effective contribution to solving the global warming problem. We must not forget that the laws of science apply universally and do not recognise political boundaries. Whether a natural forest is inn Tasmania, Victoria or Papua, it performs the same kind of role in the global carbon cycle and in helping to regulate atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.
All the signs are that sooner or later the carbon that is stored in natural forests will be assigned an economic value and become part of the global carbon market. When this happens, companies will be allowed to offset some of their carbon emissions by investing in forest protection. Once the carbon in forest ecosystems has a market value, companies that are fossil-fuel hungry (such as steel and aluminium producers) will seek to take advantage of offset opportunities in natural forests to give themselves more time to maintain production levels while making the transition to greenhouse-friendly energy sources.
For this reason, I predict that as the impact of global warming increases in the coming years, the market values of carbon in natural forests will dramatically increase. It will be ironic if Australia’s natural forests are taken out of wood production not by conservationists but by international corporations.
Of course, before this can happen in a substantial and enduring way, the international rules have to change. But this process has already started, at least in terms of recognising the need to prevent deforestation in developing countries, and voluntary investments in forest conservation are already occurring.

Brendan Mackey is a professor of Environmental Science at the Australian National University and a member of the WildCountry Science Council.

For more information, please contact:
National Campaign Administrator
The Wilderness Society Inc
GPO Box 716, Hobart TAS 7001, AustraliaPhone: (03) 6270 1701 Fax: (03) 6231 6533 Email: info@wilderness.org.auMembership enquiries, donations: Freecall 1800 030 641 Email: members@wilderness.org.auABN: 62 007 508 349.

Source : http://www.wilderness.org.au/articles/crucial-carbon-stores

The task of avoiding dangerous climate change

Climate change is already having a significant impact on Australia’s natural ecosystems, farming, water supplies, coastal planning and myriad other activities. This, and the climate change already locked in to the climate system, demand that we think and plan for how we can adapt. However, adaptation will be costly, increasingly difficult the more we allow climate change to increase in severity and potentially too late for many of our native plants and animals.
We must do all we can to limit climate change now. This means large and rapid reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gases from all sources.

Keeping as far below 2°C as possible

To give the planet its best chance of long term survival the current scientific thinking supports keeping global temperature increases to less than 2°C, above which the impacts will be extremely damaging.
To stay under this 2°C ‘target’ international environment groups are calling for global emissions to peak by 2015 and for industrialized countries to reduce emissions by at least 30% by 2020 and 80% by 2050 (compared to 1990 levels). This is a phenomenally challenging target.
This ‘peak and decline’ approach comes from the panel of scientists set up to advise the United Nations on Climate Change. Known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), these scientists (numbering over 400), ran a number of global emissions scenarios and their impacts in their fourth assessment report on climate change.

The longer that global emissions continue to grow, the more warming is injected into the system, the steeper (or more abruptly) declines in emissions are needed, and the risk of missing the 2°C target grows.Australia’s 2008-2012 Kyoto target allows it to increase its emissions from 1990 levels by 8%. Australia is currently struggling to achieve this target and yet it is clear that the Kyoto targets (agreed to in 1998) are far from adequate to address the current climate situation. Developed countries such as Australia and the United States must therefore follow the lead of countries in the European Union in committing to serious rates of emissions reductions, of the order of tens of percent per decade.
Admittedly this is a tall order, but it is achievable with the necessary will to act. It will involve significant changes in how we do things, in efficiency standards and lifestyles, in completely shifting our development expectations away from carbon based fuels and into the rapid growth of new technologies and renewable energy systems, and in protecting our natural carbon stores such as forests and bushlands. If we get this right, we can transform Australia into a place that wastes less resources, is more self-sufficient, is cleaner and less polluted, where we have built more sustainable urban villages with healthier lifestyles and where our natural environment is properly protected.
The Wilderness Society is an active member of Climate Action Network Australia. Read the CANA report, Turning Down the Heat for a comprehensive look at what Australia can do to address climate change.

There are three things you can do to help:
Actively support campaigns to save our wild places. This means ending land clearing and most native forest logging – a guaranteed, immediate and cost-effective way to stop carbon pollution – and creating more protected areas to give habitats and wildlife a better chance to cope with climate change.
Help The Wilderness Society to make sure Australia doesn’t choose a nuclear future. Nuclear is the wrong answer to climate change.
Help reduce greenhouse emissions from energy use.

Six simple things you can do at home to reduce your energy consumption and help reduce climate change:
1. Save energy at home: use appliances with 5-star energy ratings and turn them off at the wall; change over to compact fluoro light globes and turn lights off when you don’t need them; install solar water heating; and choose accredited Green Power electricity suppliers!
2. Drive less: take a bus, train, walk or ride a bike – every 5 kilometres driven creates 1.5kg of carbon dioxide.
3. Reduce, reuse, recycle: cutting down on packaging and recycling your waste can save thousands of kilograms of greenhouse pollution for each household.
4. Buy local: transporting products creates huge amounts of greenhouse pollution – buy local and cut down on carbon emissions!
5. Turn down the air conditioning: Australians spend tonnes of greenhouse gases to heat and cool our homes. By building and insulating more efficiently, and learning to live with our natural environment we can make a huge contribution to reducing global warming.
6. Plant some trees: each tree can absorb a tonne of carbon dioxide over its lifetime. Fill your garden with water-wise natives and help make a difference.

For more information, please contact:
National Campaign Administrator
The Wilderness Society Inc
GPO Box 716, Hobart TAS 7001, AustraliaPhone: (03) 6270 1701 Fax: (03) 6231 6533 Email: info@wilderness.org.auMembership enquiries, donations: Freecall 1800 030 641 Email: members@wilderness.org.auABN: 62 007 508 349.

Source :http://www.wilderness.org.au/articles/avoid-dangerous-climate-change

RESTRICTIONS ON TURTLE HUNTING IN THE OPEN SEASON

By Tanya Clovis

Following reports of turtle hunting at Kilygwyn in last week’s article, Environment TOBAGO and Save Our Sea Turtles (SOS) Tobago would like to remind the general public that while we are now in the ‘open’ hunting season, there are still restrictions on turtle hunting that apply.
The Conservation of Wildlife Act, Ch. 67:01 addresses the protection of all wildlife through providing lists of pest and game species that can be hunted, sea turtles appear on neither list and are therefore, by omission, a protected species. This is the Act under which the ‘open’ and ‘closed’ hunting seasons are enforced by wardens and honorary game wardens under the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment (DNRE) of the THA, which used to be known as the Forestry Department.
However, the Fisheries Ordinance, Ch. 25. No. 9. is much more specific in how it treats with turtle protection both at sea and on land. This Ordinance is actually called “The Protection of Turtle and Turtle Eggs Regulations, 1975” and it is here that we find, in addition to the open and closed season restriction, a detailed, year round prohibition on taking possession of a female turtle and on taking, removing or selling turtle eggs.
In accordance with these regulations, no person shall, at any time, “kill, harpoon, catch or otherwise take possession of any female turtle which is in the sea within any reef or within one thousand yards of the highwater mark of the foreshore where there is no reef.” It is under this law, that the juvenile green turtle captured in a turtle net at Kilygwyn on Sunday 23rd November, should have been protected.
Most turtles caught in the open season are seized in nearshore waters by spear gun or turtle net. There is, for example, the long standing and lucrative tradition of laying turtle nets at Lambeau, Petit Trou, Canoe Bay and Kilygwyn where sea grass beds surrounded by reef provide an ideal feeding ground for young hawksbill and green turtles. There have in fact been reports of as many as twenty turtles being captured in one net at one time in this area with little or no official monitoring by the authorities.
The existing laws make turtle hunting particularly complex to address in the open season in part, because of the whole male/female issue. The only visible way to distinguish between a mature male and female turtle is by tail length, it is almost impossible to make this distinction in young turtles. Some will also argue that it is difficult to prove exactly how far a net is from the shore. While this may be true, it is also true that most turtle nets, like those in the Kilygwyn area, are set within or near areas of reef so the issue of distance from the highwater mark is therefore irrelevant in most cases.
While no comprehensive studies have been done to determine the sustainability of our current levels of sea turtle consumption, almost everyone agrees that the turtles are becoming less and smaller. All turtle species that inhabit in our waters are endangered worldwide and although Trinidad and Tobago is a signatory to many international and regional conventions recognizing the need to protect endangered species, our actual laws remain obviously inadequate with regards to marine turtles.
However, we each have the right and perhaps, in this case, even the responsibility to make an informed and compassionate dietary choice. Marine turtles have played a critical role in the ocean’s food chain for millions of years; their decline disrupts the natural balance of the sea upon which we depend for food and recreation. The possibility that Tobago’s turtles may be hunted to extinction in our lifetime is very real and could have more serious consequences than we will ever fully understand.

Source : http://www.sos-tobago.org/articles/dec03.html

Killing Turtles Affects Fishing and Tourism

Every year, many turtles are killed in Tobago to satisfy our seemingly endless appetite for ‘wildmeat’ and this year seems to be no different. In one week alone, three pregnant, female Leatherback turtles were slaughtered at Speyside, Bacolet and Turtle Beach, their carcasses left to rot in the sun. In the case of the Bacolet turtle, one of the biggest recorded in recent times, only her flippers were removed and she was left gasping for breath on her back until she bled to death. The Turtle Beach turtle was killed only 300 metres from the Rex Turtle Beach Hotel revealing the other side of our supposedly ‘eco-friendly’ island to a number of horrified Virgin Airlines visitors. Will this senseless killing stop before it is too late?
Sea turtles have been a traditional food source in the Caribbean since Amerindian times. However, as the number of people dining on turtle increased, the number of turtles decreased. An increase in human activities, both on and around the sea, has also contributed to the decline; pollution, coastal development and the commercial fishing industry have all, inadvertently, taken their toll on the fragile sea turtle population. Most sea turtles take up to 25 years to reach sexual maturity and they are now dying faster than they can reproduce. Leatherbacks, Hawksbills and Green turtles are all found in Tobago and are all facing an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild in the immediate future. Unless our attitudes and habits change drastically, we are going to lose our turtles forever.
Take for example the Leatherback, the largest and most migratory of our sea turtles. Leatherbacks travel extensively throughout the Atlantic coming into Caribbean waters between March and July to breed. Leatherbacks are now critically endangered due mainly to poaching (illegal hunting) and accidental entanglement in commercial deep sea fishing equipment such as longlines; recent studies show that they could be completely extinct within the next thirty years. Tobago is one of the only Caribbean islands that Leatherbacks nest on and given their increasingly endangered status, we bear a huge responsibility to the entire Atlantic Leatherback population to provide safe breeding grounds so that this species may have a chance to replenish itself.
Sea turtles have played a critical role in the ocean’s food chain for millions of years, their decline and eventual extinction has serious consequences for the sea upon which we depend for recreation and food. Leatherbacks feed almost exclusively on jellyfish, eating up to twice their body weight each day in the soft bodied and often poisonous jellies. Jellyfish themselves have been known to feed on the eggs and larvae of spawning fish as well as on the plankton that would otherwise nourish the surviving baby fish. Swarming jellyfish are now being blamed for destroying fish farms throughout the North Atlantic and preventing fisheries recovery in areas that have suffered from overfishing. Right here in Tobago, the jellyfish swarms this year were responsible for clogging seines and they held more poisonous Man’o’War jellyfish than any in recent memory. Without Leatherbacks, the jellyfish population thrives, not only endangering local and visiting bathers, but also our invaluable fisheries.
Our insatiable desire for ‘wildmeat’ in every harvest pot, is destroying what is left of our wildlife and may well eventually destroy the very fishing and tourism industries that we depend on for survival. Sea turtles are just one more critical part of the web of plants and animals that makes Tobago beautiful and unique. Without this natural abundance and variety we would be living on nothing more than a barren rock in an empty sea with only ourselves for company… with only ourselves to blame.

Source :http://www.sos-tobago.org/articles/july03.html

Save Our Lake campaign

by Jenn K.

I hope more peope in the Chicagoland area are aware of this and help stop the pollution of our beautiful lake and water supply....The Chicago Park District and the City of Chicago announced plans for a petition drive on local beaches to save the lakefront from industrial sludge. The Park District and the City are urging concerned citizens to sign a petition to "Save Our Lake."In addition, the Park District is asking for volunteers to come out to the 14 locations along the City of Chicago's entire Lakefront this Saturday and Sunday, July 21 and 22 from 9am to 1pm to sign petitions and/or volunteer to get more signatures.BP's oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana, located just three miles from the beaches of Illinois's Calumet Park has been granted a permit to dump 1,500 pounds of ammonia and 5,000 pounds of toxic sludge DAILY into Lake Michigan.For years, no other company has been allowed to increase dumping in the lake. It's essential - for the health of the lake as well as 3 million Illinoisans who drink its waters daily - that Indiana's Department of Environmental Management and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency withdraw this permit immediately. On Saturday and Sunday, July 21 & 22 from 9 a.m. - 1 p.m., the Chicago Park District & City of Chicago will be staging a volunteer effort along the City of Chicago's entire Lakefront to "Save Our Lake." The following is a list of 14 locations that will be staging the volunteer effort to "Save Our Lake":
Loyola Park, 1230 W. Greenleaf Ave.
Foster Avenue Beach, 5200 North and the lake
Montrose Beach, 4400 North and the lake
North Avenue Beach, 1603 N. Lake Shore Drive
Oak Street Beach, 1000 North and the lake
Navy Pier
Buckingham Fountain, Congress Parkway and Columbus Drive
Museum Campus (12th Street Beach)
31st Street Beach, 3100 South and the lake
57th Street/Museum of Science and Industry, 5700 South and the lake
63rd Street Beach, 6300 South and the lake
South Shore Cultural Center, 7059 S. South Shore Dr.
Rainbow Beach, 3111 E. 77th St.
Calumet, 9801 S. Ave. GFor more information about how you can help "Save Our Lake" please call (312) 742-4775 or email at janis.taylor@chicagoparkdistrict.com.

Source : http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977061730

Fair trade for British farmers

Fair trade for British farmers
This year Waitrose is supporting a campaign with Country Living magazine and Farmers Guardian newspaper entitled "Fair trade for British farmers".

The campaign highlights that although many of us now chose to buy ethically traded products, these principles need to be extended to domestic farming.
From the lush pasture of Devon to the dry-stone walls of the Yorkshire Dales, farming has shaped the countryside we know and love. Yet, with just 18 per cent of us choosing to buy British-produced food, thousands of farms and livelihoods have been lost and our unique landscape further endangered. The campaign slogan "no cows = no countryside" seeks to reinforce the message that we need to give British farmers and our countryside the future they deserve.
One of the key elements to achieving this is that the farmer receives a decent price for his produce. By applying the principles of fair trade to British farmers this could be guaranteed. In a nutshell: How many of us have made a cup of coffee smug in the knowledge that a producer in Kenya has been paid a fair price for it but when we added the milk, didn’t give a second thought to the farmer is Sussex who is going under because he isn’t receiving enough to cover even his costs of production?
At Waitrose, we believe that few things in life are more important than the food people buy. We are adamant that the availability of good, healthy food is not just essential but also one of life’s great pleasures. Therefore farmers, as the food producers, deserve our passionate support through fair prices and respect.
The Fair Trade for British Farmers campaign was launched during Fair Trade Fortnight 2007 and focuses particularly on Lamb, Beef and Dairy - the farming that has shaped Britain’s countryside - to illustrate both the problem and examples of good practice. Some of Waitrose’s own farmers are participating in features in the magazine and online on the dedicated website www.fairtradeforbritishfarmers.co.uk .

Source : http://www.waitrose.com/food/foodissuesandpolicies/fairtradeforbritishfarmers.aspx

How Our Food Choices can Help Save the Environment

by Steve Boyan, PhD

The Union of Concerned Scientists says there are two things people can do to most help the environment. The first is to drive a fuel-efficient automobile (that means, not an SUV or a truck) and live near where we work. The second is to not eat beef.
I’m going to go one step farther than UCS: I suggest that you refuse to eat any animal or animal product produced on a factory farm. And I’m going to tell you why.
In 1990, when I first read that 10 people could be fed with the grain that you would feed a cow that would be turned into food for one person, I was impressed. But I was not moved. The reason: If 10 people would be fed because I gave up meat, I’d give it up. But, I thought, if I give up meat, it won’t have that impact: it probably won’t have any impact on anything at all, except me.
I was wrong. If I had known that for every pound of beef I did not eat, I would save anywhere from 2,500 to 5,000 gallons of water, I would have been moved. It’s a good idea to save water; we are depleting our underground aquifers faster than we are replenishing them. The largest one, the Ogallala, which covers a vast part of the country from the Midwest to the mountain states, is being depleted by 13 trillion gallons a year. It is going to run out. Northwest Texas is already dry. They can’t get any water from their wells.
John Robbins points out that in the 1980s and 1990s, to conserve water, most of us went to low-flow showerheads. If you take a daily seven-minute shower, he says, and you have a 2-gallon-per-minute low-flow showerhead, you use about 100 gallons of water per week, or 5,200 gallons of water per year. If you had used the old-fashioned 3-gallon-per-minute showerhead, I calculate you would have used 7,644 gallons of water per year. So by going low flow, you saved almost 2,500 gallons of water per year. Wonderful. But by giving up one pound of beef that year, you’d save maybe double that. You’d save more water than you would by not showering at all for six months! And that’s just one of the environmental impacts you’d have.
The modern factory farming system is a prolific consumer of fossil fuel and a prolific producer of poisonous wastes. Up to 100,000 animals are herded together on huge feedlots. These animals do not graze on grass, as picture books tell us; they can’t graze at all. Feedlots are crowded, filthy, stinking places with open sewers, unpaved roads and choking air. The animals would not survive at all but for the fact that they are fed huge amounts of antibiotics. It is now conceded that the antibiotics fed to cattle are the main cause of antibiotic resistance in people, as the bacteria constantly in these environments evolve to survive them. The cattle are fed prodigious quantities of corn. At a feedlot of a mere 37,000 cows, 25 tons of corn are dumped every hour. It takes 1.2 gallons of oil to make the fertilizer used for each bushel of that corn. Before a cow is slaughtered, she will eat 25 pounds of corn a day; by the time she is slaughtered she will weigh more than 1,200 pounds. In her lifetime she will have consumed, in effect, 284 gallons of oil. Today’s factory-raised cow is not a solar-powered ruminant but another fossil fuel machine.
And she will produce waste. Livestock now produces 130 times the amount of waste that people do. This waste is untreated and unsanitary. It bubbles with chemicals and diseasebearing organisms. It overpowers nature’s ability to clean it up. It’s poisoning rivers, killing fish and getting into human drinking water. 65% of California’s population is threatened by pollution in drinking water just from dairy cow manure. It isn’t just cows that produce this waste. Factory-raised hogs produce four times the waste in North Carolina as the 6.5 million people of that state do. Even the oceans are polluted: 7,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico are a dead zone.
There are more environmental impacts. Cattle don’t spend their entire lives in feedlots. When they are young, they graze. Where do they graze? Well, more than two-thirds of the land area of the mountain states are used for grazing. 70% of the lands in western national forests are grazed; 90% of Bureau of Land Management land is grazed. These are public lands, lands that President Clinton didn’t even try to save. These lands are trampled by the cattle, compacting the soil. When it rains, the land doesn’t absorb the water. Instead, it runs off, taking away topsoil, forming deep gullies and damaging streambeds. The government protects the cattle by killing off any creature that might threaten the livestock. They poison, trap, snare, den, shoot or gun down the wildlife. Denning, by the way, is the practice by federal agents of pouring kerosene into the dens of animals and setting them on fire, burning the young animals alive in their nests. According to Robbins, agents kill badgers, black bear, bobcats, coyotes, gray fox, red fox, mountain lions, opossums, raccoons, skunks, beavers, porcupines, prairie dogs, blackbirds, cattle egrets and starlings using these methods. These activities take place on public lands, which were created in large part to protect the environment! Your tax dollars subsidize these activities.
I’m not done yet. We in the United States do not get all of our beef from the West. We import more than 200 million pounds of beef from Central America alone. Every second of every day, one football field of tropical rainforest is destroyed in order to produce 257 hamburgers. Every time you destroy rainforest land, you destroy rich plant and animal life, varieties of life we don’t even understand, and forms of which may provide the medicines we need to cure disease. Rainforests supply us with oxygen. They moderate our climates. When rainforests are destroyed, it’s only a matter of time before the land becomes desertified. Rainforests absorb some of the carbon dioxide we are spewing into the atmosphere.
We humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 25% compared with any other period when humans were on this planet. Most of that has taken place in the last 50 years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, consisting of some of the best scientists in the world, says global warming is a fact. If uncontrolled, we will have ecosystem collapses, crop failures, weather disasters, coastal flooding, the spreading of previously controlled diseases, the death of coral reefs and new insect pests. Some of these things are starting to happen already. Coral reefs are dying. Insect pests are spreading out of their range and killing off new kinds of trees. Weather patterns are changing. Some places have had extreme weather events, with billions of dollars of losses. Some island people have had to abandon their islands because rising seas have salinated their underground aquifers.
Carbon dioxide is largely produced by the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal, and especially our use of inefficient vehicles for transportation. But not often mentioned is the fossil fuel used to raise farm animals. As I said earlier, a factory cow is a fossil fuel machine, not a solar-powered ruminant whose wastes fertilize the fields to produce more grass for the cow to eat. When you eat beans, for example, you use 1/27 the amount of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of energy as you do when you eat beef. You get the same food energy producing only 4% of the carbon dioxide that a person eating beef does. Another fact we don’t talk about: cattle produce almost one fifth of global methane emissions. Cattle fart. Big time. Their gas is methane. Methane is actually 24 times as potent as carbon dioxide in causing climate chaos.
There’s another major environmental consequence of our factory system of animal raising: that’s the matter of species extinctions. It is true that species die off all the time. Normally, the Earth has lost 10 to 25 species per year. But in the billions of years of life on this Earth, we have had five periods of major extinctions; the last one was 67 million years ago, when, possibly because of a meteor colliding with the Earth, we lost the dinosaurs. But now there’s a sixth extinction, and it is not caused by a meteor, but by human beings. And this is a big one; we are losing several thousand species per year, and maybe tens of thousands. We think of mammals that are endangered, and 25% of mammalian species are endangered. But what’s much more endangered, or wiped out already, are the plants, including varieties of plankton, fungi, bacteria and insects, that are fundamental to all so-called higher forms of life. All life will unravel if these creatures are wiped out.
The driving force behind all these extinctions is the destruction of wildlife habitat, especially the rainforests. The driving force behind the destruction of the rainforests is livestock grazing. The leading cause of species in the United States being threatened or eliminated is livestock grazing. A 1997 study of endangered species in the southwestern United States by the Fish and Wildlife Service found that half the species studied were threatened by cattle ranching.
You and I cannot change all this. We are not going to be able to get a bill through Congress outlawing factory farming. Yet EarthSave as an organization believes we can still have a dramatic effect: We believe that you can protect your health and protect the environment one bite at a time.
Let’s review what I’ve said here: By not eating beef– and other farm animals as well–you:
save massive amounts of water – 3,000 to 5,000 gallons of water for every pound of beef you avoid,
avoid polluting our streams and rivers better than any other single recycling effort you do,
avoid the destruction of topsoil,
avoid the destruction of tropical forest,
avoid the production of carbon dioxide. (Your average car produces 3 kg/day of CO2. To clear rainforest to produce beef for one hamburger produces 75 kg of CO2. Eating one pound of hamburger does the same damage as driving your car for more than three weeks);
reduce the amount of methane gas produced. (I imagine the next bumper sticker: stop farts, don’t eat beef);
reduce the destruction of wildlife habitat, and
help to save endangered species.
That’s a pretty good day’s work, for just what you don’t put in your mouth.

Steve Boyan PhD recently retired from his post as a political science professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has published two books on environmental issues

Source : http://earthsave.org/environment/foodchoices.htm