The article I chose to blog on is called How Our Food
Choices can Help Save the Environment
By Steve Boyan, PhD. The
article was written on November. 1, 2011 and the is at this website, http://www.all-creatures.org/articles/env-how.html. The article is about our impact on the
environment by eating beef. A man called
Steve Boyman explains to us the effects to the environment by eating beef and
how much necessary resources can be wasted through the simple bite of a
hamburger.
Meat is a major part of American’s lives. We eat so much of it we sometimes do not
realize how it is affecting the world around us, and the future planet Earth
that the next generation of people and animals will inhabit. This quote inspired me to lower my meat
intake because of the difference it can make, “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.”
This quote shows us that eating just one pound less of meat
can save 2,500- 5,000 gallons of water! The
article really shows us the effects of eating meat and what you will be doing
when you cut down on it. One of the most
important parts of the article shows us that our underground aquifiers are
decreasing in size every year.
The largest
underground aquifier the Ogallala, which covers a large part of America, from
the Midwest to the mountain states, is being depleted by 13 trillion gallons a
year! If we continue to use us so much
water for the production and transportation of meat, eventually our water
sources will be gone completely are we will have to find a solution before
death strikes.
This article on how the processing of meat wastes water can
relate to our Honors Biology class. We have
been learning about ecosystems and food webs and how energy is transferred from
organism to organism. Food webs need
water because most organisms need water to survive. If the producers to not have water, they will
stop growing and die out. Stopping the
entire food web completely because the energy cannot be transferred to the
primary consumers if the producers are dead.
We need to cut down on meat because our world depends on it
due to the necessity of water. As
Americans, a lot of us do not realize this because we can simply turn on the
faucet and use up as much water as we want.
We sometimes think the water will never stop, but it will if we keep
consuming meat as much as we do. This
quote can show you the other effects of meat; it may be only one hamburger to
us but think about each human in North America consuming 8 ounces of meat a
day, the average consumption of meat for an American.
“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.”
Consuming meat not only lowers the amount of drinkable water
on Earth but it also destroys rainforests.
The rainforest supplies so many species of organisms and oxygen that the
results of destroying it can literally be deadly. This is because rainforests may hold medicines
we need to cure diseases. Think of that
person you love who is sick, maybe there is a cure for them hidden in a
rainforest, this is why we cannot destroy them through consuming so much meat!
I really enjoyed this article because it shows steps that we
can do to not consume so much meat. Personally,
I love meat and I eat it just as much as most of you do! But this article has let me see reality and
that we need to put others’ lives before our own desires. When this article told me about how much
water is wasted to have one pound of meat, I was in shock. I was shocked because I have been to places
where one gallon of water determines whether you live to see tomorrow.
When I went to Trinidad this summer with my church, we
visited towns where children were so dehydrated they could not go on. Living in my American bubble, I realized that
children around the world need the simple necessities of life like clothing and
water whereas we are not satisfied with what we have a lot of the time. When I was in Trinidad, children cried with
joy when we gave them water bottles and new toys. Seeing those kids faces light up with the
sight of water really showed me how fortunate we are and how we need to
act. We can all act to preserve water by
lowering our meat intake.
Maybe it means saying
no to that trip to McDonald’s or deciding to have salad for lunch. I know that meat is very important to a lot
of us but sometimes we need to realize the affect it has on us and the rest of
the world. So take a step towards saving
water and think about the differences you can make by saying no!
By, Carolyn Lovvoll
Good Job Carolyn! I thought your article was very interesting, I loved the line "...how much necessary resources can be wasted through the simple bite of a hamburger." It really set up the article! I was shocked to find out how much water we use in total to make a hamburger! I wonder if people are trying to find another way of getting meat without using so much water! I hope people are! This is just a bad situation because we need both meat and water to live! A question I had is how long do you think it would before all the water ran out? I know some areas don't have clean drinking water, but how long is it before the water is completely gone. I really liked your connection to Trinidad. Good Job Carolyn! :)
ReplyDeleteCarolyn,
ReplyDeleteTHis article is almost a heads up for where our country could be going in the near future. I think it is amazing what you saw in Trinidad but even in America this is happening. Some people are starving while others are goruging in food. We do need to change in the next few years. But we cannot completely eliminate meat. It is a good source of protein and most Americans have some vitamin defiencies. Your suggestion I think would work well, cuttig down and think before we eat. That fact aslo stunned me. Eating 1 pound of meat can take that much water, that is upsetting, but when I see kids just throw away 5,000 gallons of water is devasting. This American generation needs to lose its "Toss It!" mentality. We should eat what we have and give our leftovers to others. If we buy a school lunch and we throw awy it but the lunch ladies don't know, they will make batch after batch and it will be trash. This was a very inspiring article and I think you could make some serious change with these word. Meat or Water? It is up to us. Amazing Job Carolyn!