Endangered Species Condoms
Dave Gardner distributes Endangered Species Condoms, in conjunction
with the Center for Biological Diversity.
On USENET in either 1987 or 1988, I pointed out via e-mail from Southern
California to John Morrow, a pro-life student at Rutgers University in New
Jersey that we never see anti-abortionists distributing condoms on campuses,
in order to bring down the abortion rate (what to speak of addressing the
threat of "overpopulation"!).
The pro-life response?
In 1990, CNN ran a news story about "entertainers" distributing condoms on
campuses!
This led me to conclude that pro-lifers (thinking themselves smugly superior to other religions, where there isn't supposed to be any dating or boyfriends or girlfriends, when in reality Christianity has merely embraced the past five hundred years of secular social progress, which past generations of Christians resisted, like Christians today resisting animal rights) find it impossible themselves to be open and honest about fellatio and contraception!
Distributing condoms is fine, but the real cause of environmental destruction is not "overpopulation," but overconsumption: our
meat-centered diet.
It makes sense to eat lower on the food chain!
"All Things Are Connected," the concluding chapter to Vegan author John
Robbins' Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet for a New America (1987), begins with
a quote from (reincarnationist) Christian mystic Edgar Cayce:
"Destiny, or karma, depends upon what the soul has done about what it has
become aware of."
Vegan author John Robbins provides these points and facts in his Pulitzer
Prize nominated Diet for a New America (1987):
Half the water consumed in the U.S. irrigates land growing feed and fodder
for livestock. Huge amounts of water wash away their excrement. U.S.
livestock produce twenty times as much excrement as the entire human
population, creating sewage which is ten to several hundred times as
concentrated as raw domestic sewage.
Animal wastes cause thrice as much water pollution than does the U.S. human
population; the meat industry causes thrice as much harmful organic water
pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined.
Meat producers, the number one industrial polluters in our nation,
contribute to half the water pollution in the United States.
The water that goes into a 1,000 lb. steer could float a destroyer. It takes
25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, but 2,500 gallons to
produce a pound of meat. If these costs weren't subsidized by the American
taxpayers, the cheapest hamburger meat would be $35 per pound!
Subsidizing the California meat industry costs taxpayers $24 billion
annually. Livestock producers are California's biggest consumers of water.
Every tax dollar the state doles out to livestock producers costs taxpayers
over seven dollars in lost wages, higher living costs and reduced business
income. Seventeen western states have enough water supplies to support
economies and populations twice as large as the present.
Overgrazing of cattle leads to topsoil erosion, turning once-arable land
into desert. We lose four million acres of topsoil each year and 85 percent
of this loss is directly caused by raising livestock.
To replace the soil we've lost, we're destroying our forests. Since 1967,
the rate of deforestation in the U.S. has been one acre every five seconds.
For each acre cleared in urbanization, seven are cleared for grazing or
growing livestock feed.
One-third of all raw materials in the U.S. are consumed by the livestock
industry and it takes thrice as much fossil fuel energy to produce meat than
it does to produce plant foods.
A report on the energy crisis in Scientific American warned: "The trends in
meat consumption and energy consumption are on a collision course."
Nor can fish provide any help here, notes Keith Akers in A Vegetarian
Sourcebook (1983). There are signs that the fishing industry (which is quite
energy-intensive) has already overfished the oceans in several areas.
And fish could never play a major role in the worlds diet anyway: the entire
global fish catch of the world, if divided among all the world's inhabitants
would amount to only a few ounces of fish per person per week.
The American Dietetic Association reports that throughout history, humans
have lived on "vegetarian or near vegetarian diets,"; meat has traditionally
been a luxury.
Nathan Pritikin, author of The Pritikin Plan, recommended not more than
three ounces of animal protein per day; three ounces per week for his
patients that already suffered a heart attack.
Providing the entire world with a meat-centered diet is absurd. But what
about providing only the affluent with a meat-centered diet?
According to Keith Akers, if the world population triples in the next 100
years, and meat consumption continues, then meat production would have to
triple as well.
Instead of 3.7 billion acres of cropland and 7.5 billion acres of grazing
land, we would require 11.1 billion acres of cropland and 22.5 billion acres
of grazing land.
But this is slightly larger than the total land area of the six inhabited
continents! We are desperately short of forests, water and energy already.
Even if we resort to extreme methods of population control: abortion,
infanticide, genocide, etc...modest increases in the world population would
make it impossible to maintain current levels of meat consumption.
On a vegan diet, however, the world could easily support a population
several times its present size. The world's cattle alone consume enough to
feed 8.7 billion humans.
According to the editors of World Watch, July/August 2004:
"The human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually
every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human
future--deforestization, topsoil erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and
water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the
destabilization of communities and the spread of disease."
Go on to: Environmental Catastrophe or Sustainable Future?
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