Comfortably Unaware (6 page)

Food depletion is also ongoing and occurring at an alarming rate. What is food depletion? Well, let's look at the United States, for instance, where an almost unbelievable 70 percent of all grain produced is fed not to humans but to animals that are raised for food.
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The World Hunger Organization reported that six million children died of starvation in 2009 alone. Another one billion people currently are suffering from hunger and malnutrition. There is more than enough grain produced each year to eradicate world hunger, but the solution is to
stop giving grain to livestock
and to simply give it to those who are starving to death.

In 1986, during the food crisis in Ethiopia, there was an increase in global awareness of hunger in that country—most media services covered the topic well, including using infomercials on television. What was blatantly lacking in media coverage, however, was the fact that each day, while thousands of people were dying from hunger, Ethiopia was—at the very same time—using a significant amount of its agricultural land to produce cereal grains (linseed, rapeseed, and cottonseed) for export to the UK and other European nations, to be used as feed for European livestock.
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Today, as then, millions of acres of undeveloped third-world land are being used exclusively to produce feed for European livestock—and those livestock eventually end up in the United States. I find it interesting and tragic that 80 percent of the world's starving children live in countries where food surpluses are fed to animals that are then killed and eaten by more well-off
individuals in developed countries. It is estimated that one-fourth of all grain produced by third-world countries is now given to livestock. This figure has tripled since the 1950s.
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Each year in the United States, inefficient use of land for food is exemplified by the fact that 157 million metric tons of cereal, legumes, and vegetables—all suitable for human use—is fed to livestock to produce barely 28 million metric tons of animal protein for human consumption.
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Globally in 2007, there was a “record harvest,” with 2.1 billion tons of grain production.
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There should not have been much difficulty, then, with providing assistance to those people in the world who suffered from hunger—except for the fact that over 50 percent of all crops grown were used to feed livestock instead. Each year nearly, one billion tons of grains and vegetables are fed to animals in the meat and dairy industries.
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We have enough of the right type of land on this planet to provide healthy food for humans in a sustainable manner, but currently, the land is being depleted—perhaps irreversibly—by livestock operations and unsustainable agricultural techniques used to produce feed that supports animals to be slaughtered, instead of its going directly to humans to keep them alive and healthy.

Part 1: Drinking water and sustainability—where is it all going?

Part 2: Our oceans—what is happening below the surface?

“When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.”
—Benjamin Franklin

THERE ARE THREE PRINCIPLE AR
eas of global depletion as it relates to water: the realities of our drinking water and who is using it; the current exploitation of our oceans and fish; and the pollution of both of these. Let us begin by taking a closer look at our drinking water.

Once again, we are raising 70 billion animals each year that are
killed and eaten. Each of these animals, particularly cattle and pigs, require much more water daily than either you or I would—many, many more gallons. Now, multiply that times 70 billion. It is not so difficult to surmise where all of our drinking water is going. It actually requires over five thousand gallons of water to produce one pound of meat.
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It is well-known that each of us needs six to eight eight-ounce glasses of water each day for proper hydration and proper health. Were you aware that a cow needs thirty gallons of water each day, just to stay alive, and a pig needs up to twenty-one gallons?
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That is
up to sixty times
more water for just one animal than we humans would drink in one day. And that does not count all the water it requires to wash the areas where the animals live or that is used in their slaughtering and butchering processes. Are you asking, “So what?” Well, why would anyone want to give sixty times the amount of water that we would drink ourselves in one day to pigs or cows or any other animal that we then kill a year later and eat parts of it—parts that are, factually, unhealthy for us?
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Remember that much of the water that is used for these animals is to produce crops for livestock feed, drinking water, or slaughtering is, in most cases, nonrenewable in our lifetime.

To understand what can only be viewed as bizarre misuse of our drinking water, it is important to know that there are currently eight million people living in the states of Iowa and Missouri, amid more than 50 million pigs.
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That's 50 million pigs,
in just two states
, that are raised each year, using our land, crops, fossil fuel, and water, with massive amounts of waste polluting our ground, water, and air. Again, so what? Well, that is where your bacon, pork chops, hot dogs, etc., are really coming from, not from your local grocer. Every time you eat bacon, pork chops,
hot dogs, or any other animal product, please keep in mind all the depletion for which you, personally, are responsible. Don't look the other way or pass the blame; it is you—and you alone—who ate that particular animal, thus keeping the wheels of depletion moving onward. If you did not ask for and eat it, the meat and dairy industries would not produce it and exploit our resources. There are alternatives—many alternatives.

In fact, more than one-half of all the water used in the United States is, in one way or another, given to livestock. That means one-half of all the water used by all humans and businesses is going to animals raised for us to eat.
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Consider that it requires more than five thousand gallons of water to produce one pound of edible beef, but only twenty to sixty gallons to produce one pound of vegetables, fruits, soybeans, or grains (all of which are more nutritious than meat and which do not contribute to a number of diseases, as do animal products).
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Essentially, one person can save more water simply by not eating a pound of beef than he could by not showering for an entire year. It does not seem logical to continue in the direction we have been going with regard to raising animals for food.

It must be understood that fresh drinking water from the ground is not infinite in quantity, and it is
not renewable
in our lifetime. Freshwater resources are scarce—just 2.5 percent of all water on earth, and 70 percent of that is locked in glaciers, snow, and the atmosphere. This leaves accessible fresh water at less than 1 percent.
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While some water is replenished through the natural evaporation/precipitation cycle, much is gathered from underground aquifers or surface water, such as rivers and streams. Depletion of our freshwater supply occurs globally, due to excessive withdrawals for agriculture, as well as poor water management.
Whether using surface water or groundwater, agriculture accounts for 93 percent of water depletion worldwide, with the majority used for irrigated crops for livestock.
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We must also redefine which water resources are really “renewable” and which are clearly not. In the United States, there are common misconceptions:

•  You do not have to worry about water; it's just there for you whenever you want.

•  Use of our surface water is mostly by industries.

•  Underground water supplies are renewable.

Actually, depletion at all sources is occurring at a rate that simply cannot be sustained.

The mighty Colorado River—1,400 miles long, with up to 24 million acre feet of annual flow—is one of the largest and longest in the world.
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It has been such a force that, over time, it created the Grand Canyon on its way to the Sea of Cortez. Until 1936, when the Hoover Dam was constructed, this river continued its natural path to the ocean in Mexico, where it formed the two-million-acre Colorado River Delta. This delta was once one of the largest in the world, supporting a large population of plants, birds, fish, marine mammals, jaguars, and deer, as well as the descendants of Native Americans who had lived there for over one thousand years.
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Today, this great delta does not exist; freshwater flows no longer reach it. Unbelievable as it might seem, the mighty Colorado River ends in the desert, some two to three miles from the sea, and has only reached the ocean sporadically over the past eighty years.
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This happened because Americans needed water to fuel
their activities in the very dry western states; most of these activities were related to raising cattle. In the process, the United States claimed—and now retains—95 percent of the river's water and has built nine major dams and eighty diversions on the Colorado River that control the water to the point where only a trickle makes it to the point where it once roared mightily out to sea.
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The water that does eventually make its way to the Mexico desert is now heavily laden with chemicals, such as pesticides and fertilizers, which is runoff from all the alfalfa fields in California and Arizona—alfalfa fields that are producing feed for cattle operations. The Colorado River has had its water tapped, mostly for livestock, with the belief that it is renewable and will not run out.
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There are two common misconceptions regarding water use of the Colorado River and in the western United States in general. One is that water is renewable. To a point, it is not. The second misconception is that the rapidly growing urban areas (Las Vegas, Phoenix, and many others) are the primary users of this river's water supply. They are not. Most of the water has been and is still being used for livestock. In the Upper Colorado River states, such as Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, 90 percent of the water use of the Colorado River is irrigation of crops, leaving only 10 percent for urban and other uses. Eighty-eight percent of this irrigated land is for crops fed to livestock.
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,
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Similar percentages are found in the lower Colorado River Basin states, such as California, Arizona, and Nevada, with nearly 80 percent of all river water used for livestock. So while enormous public cost has resulted in the area's massive water damming and diversion projects, the Colorado River Basin states and portions of the states just outside the basin are not receiving much of the
river's water, while the river itself is slowly drying up.

Studying the expansive eight-state High Plains area of the United States also provides an example of how our demand for eating animal products has affected drinking-water use and just how ridiculously it has been managed. A portion of this area has been termed the “Dust Bowl,” due to how dry it is and its susceptibility to repeated episodes of drought. But nearly half of the cattle in the United States are raised in the High Plains states and rely on one aquifer system. With average annual rainfall of less than twelve inches, it is not an area that could naturally support the growth of crops. Since the early 1960s, and with technological advancement related to pumping, farmers have irrigated the dry land, which dramatically increases crop productivity. Low-budget, small-scale local irrigation systems from an underground water supply just a few feet below the surface—an aquifer called the Ogallala—allow for more crop growth without regulation.

While different types of grain are produced in this area, the majority is corn. The difficulty is that 93 percent of the grain grown in this area and in America is used to feed cows, pigs, and chickens that are then killed for us to eat.
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And that is not where the inefficiency ends, as water from this aquifer is also used in the slaughtering and processing of the animals. This scenario is also found elsewhere in the world, with freshwater supplies used primarily for livestock. Although direct annual water use by livestock worldwide is estimated at 23 percent, there is a recognized inability to properly quantify the real global depletion impact of the livestock sector. This figure could very well be much higher, because most water loss is unreported or is difficult to measure, as it is used and depleted throughout the livestock chain. For
instance, massive amounts of unreported water are lost due to evapotranspiration by feed crops, use in chemical application, and various washing areas, transportation, processing, and packaging.
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In California, 42 percent of irrigation water is used to produce feed grain or drinking water for cattle and other livestock, which has caused such a drop in water tables that some areas of land in the San Joaquin Valley have sunk by as much as twenty-nine feet. There, aquifers are pumped at rate that exceeds recharge by more than 500 billion gallons annually.
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At Iowa Beef Processors, just one of many slaughterhouses in that state, over four hundred gallons of water are used to kill and process one cow.
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That plant alone slaughters over five thousand cattle per day, or 1.5 million each year. This requires that one Iowa plant, which processes a fraction of the world's livestock, to use 600 million gallons of water, which is pumped from the Ogallala aquifer in a single year.
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This is nonrenewable, pristine drinking water, formed from glaciers thousands of years ago. The Ogallala, which is one of the largest aquifers on earth, supplies water to eight states and is a striking example of the unnecessary depletion caused by the demand for animal products for food. By 1990, it was drawn down by three to ten feet per year, a rate many feel will deplete it entirely by the year 2020.
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Like many underground water supplies worldwide, and with recharge rates of less than a half-inch per year, the water of the Ogallala, which was formed in the ice ages, surely will be gone soon—unless there is drastic reduction in our dependence on it for raising livestock. Once it is gone, it is gone.