Too much meat, too much nitrogen

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

The human race is responsible for too much nitrogen being produced, which threatens the environment in a number of different ways, all potentially devastating. The primary causes, according to this very interesting BBC article, are the overconsumption of meat and chemical fertilisers used in intensive farming.

Policies to reduce nitrates in water have banned wintertime spreading of farm manures across much of Europe’s farmland. The focus on springtime manure spreading has intensified peak ammonia emissions, giving a new threat to biodiversity and air quality. Most organic gardeners in the West, as yet unrestrained by this governmental stupidity, continue to be well aware that manure is best applied from October through to December. By doing so, its breakdown is much slower and emissions from its decay dramatically reduced when compared to applications from March onwards.

The article points out that eating meat and dairy products adds an extra step to the food chain, massively increasing nitrogen losses. In stark terms, how to address the carbon problem can be boiled down to the edict: use less fuel. Where nitrogen is concerned, the challenge for developed countries is to produce and eat less meat. Even if you choose to do a Dubya and ignore or otherwise repudiate the nitrogen crisis in much the same way as the carbon naysayers, the amount of meat most people eat is bad for their health, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

If you eat a slab of meat once a week, you’re privileged compared to our ancestors—and I’m not talking Stone Age, I’m only going back a hundred years or less. When I was a child myself, meat was very expensive and my family made do with minced beef and whatever was being sold off cheap at the last minute by the local butcher. Of course, you’re unlikely to place your blessings in a historical context, and more likely not to recognise how lucky you are (if meat-eating is something you like to do). But if you’re eating meat every day, or even four times a week, you’re more than just privileged and lucky—you’re glutting, probably completely ignorant of the fact, and the consequences to your health and the environment are surely significant enough for you to give serious consideration to cutting back. You’ll save money, you’ll help the environment, you’ll be healthier—it’s a win-win-win scenario.

From the perspective of vegetarians like myself, and vegans, of course there’s another win aspect to this as well, for the animal kingdom. That is, if a reduction in farm animal breeding follows on. Eat less cows, demand drops and so less calves should be born to end up on dinner plates. I say ’should’ because the situation is very, very complicated—everyone knows that—and there’s a difference between small-scale smallholder operations keeping a few animals reared organically, and huge farming corporations breeding thousands of animals and pumping them up with antibiotics. But the theory is, at least, sound enough and applicable to most people. The complexity should not be used as an excuse for inaction. Because we must act.

Vegans use the expanding body of evidence to argue the rightness of their personal choices, and that’s a choice they make—but it is frankly unrealistic to expect the entire human species to forsake meat and dairy completely. Still, nobody should ever knock idealism—and I’m idealistic myself, so understand the frustrations first-hand. Nevertheless, veganism has historically not made much sense to a lot of people, and neither, to a lesser extent, has vegetarianism. Now that might well change. If the evidence is to be believed, more people need to choose the vegetarian and vegan lifestyles for reasons that are not traditional—the most traditional being the desire not to kill or encourage the killing of animals for food—but to help detoxify our world and ensure the survival not only of our own species, but others as well.

People also need to reject intensively-farmed meat, meaning no more £1.99 Tescos chicken served up to the kiddies with a dollop of paper-thin excuses and self-justifications. Again, a lot of us find the battery and broiler hen production line to be morally reprehensible. But if you don’t, even if you don’t give a damn about animal welfare, these systems still involve methods that are damaging to personal health and the environment. That means you and your kids will suffer, and their kids as well. Is cheap meat as appealing as ever when you consider the long-term implications of buying it?

And then there’s the question of how you approach gardening, if you have a garden space. You can leave it to go wild, which is no bad thing, it’s a positive, or you can commit to your garden being a pesticide-free and fertiliser-free zone. If you need manure for your flowers and vegetables, as is likely—perversely, our soil is depleted of goodness—then get yourself a couple of chickens or ducks or geese. Maybe a goat, or a pig. And if you’ve got the money for the initial investment, install compost toilets in your home. These convert our own doings into ‘humanure’ and, contrary to general perception, the toilets with such a system don’t look any different to conventional loos and don’t smell. They also, importantly, save on water and energy.

Of course, the ultimate reason why we are seeing overproduction of nitrogen and carbon is because the planet is overpopulated by human beings. How we tackle that is anyone’s guess. Perhaps we won’t have to, maybe nature will tackle that problem all by itself. No matter how environmentally aware any of us are, we still have to hope it doesn’t. Those of us who care about animals and the environment should care about human beings as well, and the overwhelming majority do, but a tiny minority are guilty of cutting people out of their grand schemes. To do so risks the development of an ‘us and them’ divisive mentality. There’s enough of that already, thanks to politics and religion. The measures being proposed, however, for the most part are about preserving all life on Earth—even, and especially, the dominant life-form responsible for the problems that need to be urgently addressed.

categories: animals, healthy planet