Greetings, eco-conscious viewers to today’s episode of Planet Earth: Our Loving Home. June 5th is World Environment Day, a day established by the United Nations in 1973 to raise global awareness of the vital importance of preserving of our biosphere. This year’s theme is “Many Species. One Planet. One Future.”

In honor of this day, our program features excerpts of interviews with respected climate scientists, prominent political figures, knowledgeable environmental specialists, and concerned citizens regarding how intensive animal agriculture devastates our environment.

According to "Livestock’s Long Shadow,” a report released in 2006 by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the livestock industry is chiefly responsible for almost all the very serious environmental issues currently facing the planet, including land degradation, deforestation, water pollution and shortages, and above all, global warming.

We begin with how production of animal products takes up huge tracts of land across the globe and thus robs humanity of the true productivity of the soil.

The whole operation of the meat system requires a lot of land. There is a whole bunch of agricultural land somewhere making the food to grow those animals. We’re all connected together, we live on the same planet; we do one thing, it affects everybody. And this is a very important illustration.

The livestock sector is by far the single largest anthropogenic user of land. Livestock production accounts for 70% of all agricultural land and 30% of the world’s surface land area. And 70% of previous forested land in the Amazon is occupied by cattle pastures, and crops for animal feed cover a large part of the remainder.

Forests everywhere play a crucial role in absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Deforestation due to livestock raising erases these priceless carbon sinks.

Animal agriculture is the driver of land clearing around the world, particularly in Australia. Of the hundred million hectares of Australia that’s been deforested, about 70 million of that has been down to animal agriculture. About 25, 26 million is what we crop (farm). We only live on about 2 million hectares.

In places like Brazil, suppose they stop producing meat, they won’t need to burn a lot of rainforest to turn them into grassland for animal farming. They can then preserve the rainforest and let them continue to grow. This can prevent the CO2 emissions coming from burning rainforest, which is very important.

Production of animal products is inherently inefficient. It drains enormous amounts of our precious natural resources such as water and diverts food crops away from the hungry in order to feed factory farmed animals instead.

Other environmental impacts of livestock: The amount of water needed to produce one kilogram of maize is 900 liters, rice, 3000 liters, chicken, 3900 (liters), pork, 4900 (liters), and beef, a whopping 15,500 liters. So it’s also intensive in the use of water if you take the entire cycle.

One-third of the world’s cereal harvest and over 90% of soya is used for animal feed. It takes close to 10 kilograms of animal food to produce 1 kilogram of beef and 4 to 5.5 kilograms of grain to produce 1 kilogram of pork, and 2.1 to 3 kilograms of grain to produce 1 kilogram of poultry meat.

Indeed, there is a lot of water that goes into producing a kilogram of beef and a lot of water also goes into producing dairy products. Much dairy in Australia is conducted on lands that wouldn’t actually be suitable for dairy except for irrigate agriculture. So this is water that is piped from the Murray (River) and sprayed over vast areas of pasture to produce sufficiently green pastures to produce milk.

But that’s the same water that’s in desperately short supply in Adelaide, that’s killing the Coorong (wetlands), for instance, because it’s not getting enough water flow. These are being sprayed onto the green fields of Western Victoria to produce dairy. It’s not actually a very sensible use of water at all.

I would say that it is an issue that is quite important and we need to grapple with it, that producing protein from livestock is extremely consumptive as far as water requirements, to produce the same amount of protein from meat compared to legumes; I think it’s on the order of seven or eight times more energy is required to produce that.

In other words, it is quite costly for natural resources and energy consumption to produce beef. So, as far as environmental responsibility, I would say that livestock has been shown to be quite energy intensive, water intensive and land intensive; converting forest into pasture land, we’ve changed much of our landscape.

In fact, agriculture alone has changed the landscape of the planet more than any other driver. So I would advocate getting off of the meat diet, that it really is not sustainable.

The global biodiversity crisis is closely related to the rapid growth of the livestock industry in recent decades.

We, human beings are living things; we came into existence and evolved in living systems as part of the ecological systems. Every time we reduce the amount of biodiversity, we basically impoverish our own future.

We need to really think about ecosystems and biodiversity across the face of the planet. And we also need to think about maintaining representative natural areas that are of sufficient size that they continue to be representative. That was the idea of a minimum critical size of ecosystems, and how big should a part be in order to really be representative. If we fail to do this, it’s a pretty unattractive future, not only for the rest of life but for human beings.

When we return, we will continue to examine the harmful effects of the livestock industry. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

It is important to make people aware that their meat consumption is an important contributor both to climate change, but also to the food crisis in the world.

Welcome back to Planet Earth: Our Loving Home here on Supreme Master Television. As June 5th is World Environment Day, today’s program discusses intensive animal agriculture’s severe detrimental impacts on our environment and climate.

Factory farms severely pollute streams, rivers and lakes, where the drinking water becomes contaminated with nitrates and phosphorus from the manure. Residents around such operations suffer from respiratory illnesses from the fouled air.

I must admit that I have much more frequent diarrhea in the spring time or when the water is dirty, when the river water gets brown. If I drink too much water out of the faucet, there's a good chance I have a diarrhea the next day. I went to the annual Public Health Day and I saw a study about people getting sick, getting diarrhea, because of living near either pig farms or cattle farms.

We cannot breathe. It’s the ammonia. We lack air. There have been days when we had to leave. We leave in the morning, we return in the evening when the winds have changed direction.

Livestock raising for meat production is the single largest emitter of humane-produced methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. It has 72 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide measured over a 20-year period.

Methane in particular, is produced by ruminates when they digest their food. We have 90 million sheep and 28 million cattle in this country. They are 24/7 methane-producing machines. The amount of warming that that methane creates in Australia is more warming than all of our coal-fired power stations. It’s absolutely staggering.

The change in animal farming is actually more effective than controlling CO2 emissions, because the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere is very long, it could be from 50 to 200 years. So, even if the whole world stopped emitting carbon completely, it would still take us 50 to 200 years to see any significant results.

But, methane is different; the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere is only 15 years. So, if we can reduce methane emissions from today, the results would emerge in our generation. So the effect is very fast, very direct.

Retired World Bank Group lead environmental advisor Dr. Robert Goodland and research officer and environmental specialist for the Group’s International Finance Corporation division Jeff Anhang in their article “Livestock and Climate Change” - that was published in World Watch Magazine concluded that the livestock production cycle and supply chain produce at least 51 percent of human-caused, global greenhouse- gas emissions. They recommend adopting a plant-based diet as the first-choice solution to climate change.

All of these things are connected and so we see a strong need to help to move to reduced meat consumption as part of a response to climate change, as well as all the other good reasons for doing it, to do with health, to do with obesity, all the other things that we know about.

We can also take other steps, such as changing our diet. Those of you who are vegans, and have chosen to avoid animal products completely, then you’re already taking a major step to reducing your own footprint in terms of reducing your carbon emissions from your diet.

A study by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency entitled “Climate Benefits of Changing Diet,” analyzed the entire chain of animal-raising activities from field to fork. It calculated that the US$40 trillion cost to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to take other climate change-related mitigation measures to halt the global warming could be reduced by up to by 80% if the world adopted a vegan diet.

We assumed that the grasslands that were not used by cattle anymore would go back to their natural state. For that reason, several parts of the world will grow forests and retain carbon in terms of more woodland.

As the best and most effective answer to the climate crisis, Supreme Master Ching Hai has advocated organic vegan farming and adoption of the plant-based diet, as highlighted in an October 2009 climate change conference in Formosa (Taiwan).

Without the needless animal industry, not only will we gain forests, we can also have organic vegan farmlands to grow real, decent food for humans, and like the forests, these farmlands can also absorb a lot of heat from the atmosphere.

And a global shift to organic vegan practices could mean 40% of all greenhouse gases absorbed as well, apart from the 50 plus percent that we eliminate through the terminating of the animals raising practice.

World governments could save tens of trillions of US dollars, if everyone be veg and plant organic. So you see, 50% less from no more animal industry, 40% less carbon dioxide from organic farming, then we will be singing, our world will be saved.

Our sincere thanks go to all those featured on today’s program for their insightful perspectives on the livestock industry and its destruction of our environment. Following an organic vegan diet is the simplest and quickest way to heal our Earth and prevent runaway climate change from occurring. We wish all viewers a very splendid World Environment Day.

Thank you for joining us on Plane Earth: Our Loving Home. Coming up next is Enlightening Entertainment after Noteworthy News. May we all be noble-minded and have life-saving compassionate hearts.