If you read just one article on the climate emergency and how it intersects with food production and the holy cow, read this August 2nd, 2023 blogpost by George Monbiot:
https://www.monbiot.com/2023/08/02/all-hat-and-no-cattle/
Monbiot touches on several interrelated issues which TreeSpirit repeatedly focuses on, because they’re so damned important: the climate crisis (aka, global warming), deforestation, and, most critical of all, the #1 driver of the climate crisis and deforestation, which is raising animals, especially cows, for human consumption.
Author George Monbiot also tackles the beef and dairy cow industries’ ultimate propaganda effort, which is so-called “regenerative ranching,” which George here refers to as, “Holistic Management.” Whatever the name, the recipe is roughly the same: moving beef & dairy cows (moreso in the U.S.), and sheep & goats (more in the U.K.) around the land more than in traditional industrial feedlots. (It’s also often called “rotational grazing.”
TreeSpirit has written extensively about all these issues, and has a webpage devoted to each subject. (LINKS are embedded above.)
Now, rather than read more of my own words, just jump in and READ Monbiot’s COMPREHENSIVE ARTICLE FOR YOURSELF: https://www.monbiot.com/2023/08/02/all-hat-and-no-cattle/
Below is his blogpost’s Intro to get you started, to whet your intellectual appetite:
EXCERPT:
Every industry has its apparatus of justification. The more damaging the industry, the greater the effort spent constructing it. Few if any industries are as damaging as meat production, especially meat production from ruminant animals, such as cattle and sheep.
The principal reason is their vast hunger for land. Every hectare of land used for an extractive industry is a hectare than cannot be occupied by wild ecosystems. Cattle and sheep ranching has destroyed more habitat and seized more indigenous people’s land than any other enterprise – and continues to do so. Rainforests, dry forests, wetlands, natural grasslands and savannahs have all been converted on a massive scale to ranchland.
Allied to this is the sector’s massive contribution to global heating.