Environmental Damage

[scotsboy]

Farming has caused significantly more environmental damage than the nuclear industry.

Discuss.

[Alli]

How did you work that one out?

[Zael]

Pollution in the rivers from fertilizers etc...

Death on the shop shelves in the form of beef, chicken etc...

[Alli]

chernobyl caused a lot of damage and death
the deaths from eating meat etc has caused a lot less in my opinion

[smee]

Farms produce food and have done for a long, long time! would love to see you eat a reactor rod.

[Margaret M.]

Certainly seems like it according to this article:

"Raising animals for food is steadily and rapidly depleting and polluting our arable land, potable water, and clean air. All animals need food to survive. For example, a 200-pound man will burn off at least 2,000 calories even if he never gets out of bed. As in humans, most calories that go into an animal are burned off; only the excess
calories are available to make milk, eggs, or flesh and fat.

It’s bizarre, really: You take a crop like soy, oats, corn, or wheat, products high in fiber and complex carbohydrates, but devoid of cholesterol and artery-clogging saturated fat. You put them into an animal and create something with no fiber or complex carbohydrates at all, but with lots of cholesterol and saturated fat. It makes about as much sense to take pure water, run it through a sewer system, and then drink it.
E, the respected environmental magazine, noted in 2002 that more than one-third of all fossil fuels produced in the United States are used to raise animals for food. This seems a conservative figure. If we have to grow massive amounts of grain and soy (with all the tilling, irrigation, crop dusters, and so on that that requires), truck all that grain and soy to factory-style farms and feedlots, feed it to the approximately 10 billion land animals who are raised for food in the U.S. each year, truck those animals to automated slaughter facilities, truck the dead animals to processing centers, run the
processing and packaging machines, and then truck the packaged meat to grocery stores—well, there’s a lot of energy being used up at each one of those stages.
If all this energy is being used, all these fossil fuels are being burned, and all this manure is being produced, of course, we’re talking about some serious air pollution. Many environmentalists will sooner walk or ride their bike than drive, in order to decrease air pollution in their area, and then will happily eat some dairy, meat, or egg product without a second thought about the fact that they are paying for gas-guzzling animal transport trucks, refrigerated meat trucks, pollutionchurning processing plants, and so on.

A friend of mine says that where the environment is concerned, eating meat is like driving a huge SUV or an 18-wheeler. Eating a vegetarian diet is like driving a mid-sized car, and eating a vegan diet is like riding a bicycle or walking. A similar analysis holds for land. According to John Robbins, the average vegan uses about 1/6 of an acre of land to
satisfy his or her food requirements for a year; the average vegetarian who consumes dairy products and eggs requires about three times that, and the average meat-eater requires about 20 times that much land. We can grow a lot more food on an equal amount of land if we’re not funneling the crops through animals. Also, the use of herbicides and pesticides and the monocropping of feed crops like corn, soy, wheat, and oats are destroying vital topsoil. Howard Lyman, a fourth-generation cattle rancher who has become a vegan advocate, talks about how he became a farmer because of his love for the life-filled soil. Now, he says, the soil has become lifeless dirt—in large
part because it has been ruined by raising animals for food.
And think about water. According to the National Audubon Society, raising animals for food requires about as much water as all other water uses combined, even as many areas are experiencing drought conditions. It requires about 300 gallons of water to feed a vegan for a day. It requires about four times as much to feed a vegetarian, and 14 times as much to feed a meat-eater. Of course, if you have to feed animals, you have to irrigate the crops that you’re feeding them. You have to give them water. The systems that keep animals today use water to hose down both the factory farm and the
slaughterhouse. It’s a water-intensive operation.

Raising animals for food is also a water-polluting process. One dairy cow produces more than 100 pounds of excrement per day. The animals raised in the U.S. produce 130 times the excrement of the entire human population of this country.
Their excrement is more concentrated than human excrement and is often contaminated with herbicides, pesticides, toxic chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, and so on. These massive farmed animal factories don’t have waste treatment plants, so this sludge goes in vast quantities onto and destroys topsoil, or it goes into and pollutes water, often causing ecological imbalances and killing fish and other aquatic life.
Clearly, all of these statistics are going to be approximations. Some of them will change based on the time of year and the area crops are being grown in. What doesn’t change is that animals will not grow or produce milk and eggs without food and water, and they won’t do it without producing excrement. Thus, eating meat, dairy products, and eggs will always be vastly more resource-intensive and vastly more polluting than using the land to grow food for human beings."

[Riffman]

Nuclear doesn't pollute. People do. A nuc powerplant is very low on pollution in some ways....but then again a couple of accidents, chernobly, TMI, Windscall and the average score goes up.

Who cares? sorry.

Riff

[fred]

Certainly seems like it according to this article:

Which has more bovine excrement propoganda than the Labour Party manifesto.

Tell me what sort of crops you can grow on the moorlands of Caithness, people don't do
too well on a diet of heather but the sheep do.

Take a look around the countryside and see what grows naturally and in abundance, grass,
grass beats everything because its leaves go right to ground level so it can be eaten over
and over again without being killed. People don't do to well eating grass, it is by far the
most abundant and natural food source on the planet and people can't eat it but the cow
has no problems converting cellulose to protein.

[Rheghead]

Farming and the nuke industry has both caused damage but it would be unhelpful to compare them directly.

Farmers can certainly help the environment more if they listened to the scientists more and stop doing what they have always done. For example with regard to fertilisers in the river water they can make a big step towards reducing this if the planted rapeseed in the autumn months. This would act as a 'catch crop' to take up the nitrates before they run off the land. Rapeseed is increasingly in demand now plus I like the yellow flowers as well.

[Speyside]

I agree that farms could do more to slow excess nitrates going into the rivers and streams. Vegetated buffer zones along streams are a good start. Nitrates, phosphates, and other fertilizer ingredients can reek havock on aquatic biological systems. I have seen where runoff has caused algae blooms that have killed thousands of fish. As for nuclear power (fission), the waste products are the biggest obstacle...How about fusion or tidal water power?

[Zael]

For example with regard to fertilisers in the river water they can make a big step towards reducing this if the planted rapeseed in the autumn months.
PLEASE NO!!!! Just as my hayfever is sodding off for the winter, you'd have thousands of us suffer for a further 2 or 3 months :( Tell me there is another way...