It takes approximately 4,664 liters of water to produce just one serving of beef, but an entire vegan meal can be produced with only 371 liters of water. The livestock sector is probably the world's biggest source of water pollution as well, Mr. Lai. I am sure you know all this, being an environmentalist. Excessive animal waste, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides degrade waterways, killing aquatic organisms by creating algae blooms, which in turn choke the oxygen from water systems and help form these oceanic dead zones.

There are tens of thousands of rivers and lakes dying all over the world. People are dying from droughts, people are leaving their villages, their hometowns, because they don’t have any more water to drink.

Please help. Please help each other, please help us. Because many of our world co-citizens are not aware that many of our other co-citizens are dying because of lack of water, and lack of water means lack of food, lack of security. Water means everything to our existence. We must conserve the water. We must do everything we can, and the first step to begin is to be vegan. Because animal industry uses 70 more percent of our clean water of our planet!

In one lecture that was shown on Supreme Master Television, I saw Master saying that if we all become vegan, then within a couple of weeks only, we could see the result. Could you please elaborate more on how this can happen? Thank you. Yes, Mr. Sukadana. How are you? Good. I’m glad that you are here and I’m glad that you asked a very good question. I didn’t say “a couple of weeks,” I said a few weeks, like eight weeks. Okay, eight weeks, two months.

It’s nothing miraculous, Mr. Sukadana. But you know miracles do happen as well. Now, we talk scientifically. As I have said before, if the world’s people all become vegans, we will see a dramatic change in a short period of time, a couple of months. Nature will rebound almost before our eyes, almost overnight, and we may see the oceans healthy again, the cyclones silenced, earthquakes calmed, forests regrowing, etc. These changes would be just the beginning signs of a real Eden on Earth.

Actually, there is the physical scientific reason, as well as the spiritual karmic explanation for this. First, for the scientific reasons, is that without any more meat or dairy consumption, the livestock industry would shut down. Without the mad breeding of cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and other animals, and fishing, and without the need to constantly grow crops to feed them, we would eliminate the biggest, most urgent problems of the environment – that is the methane and other gases that heat up our planet.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said that the livestock industry is the major cause of the most pressing world problems, namely, global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Can you believe this? It’s like that. For example, global warming: with no animal breeding industries, we immediately stop the number one cause of greenhouse gas emissions. Not just CO2, not just carbon dioxide, but also methane, nitrous oxide, black carbon from burning down the trees for the livestock, and also toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide. This kind of gas, even if you just breathe once, you die immediately,

if it’s a strong enough concentration. Some of them are much more potent than CO2, like nitrous oxide. The livestock sector is the number one source of nitrous oxide emissions, and it is almost 300 times more heat-trapping than CO2 over a 100-year period. Now, methane and black carbon are what scientists call short-lived gases, meaning although they are very potent climate warmers, they dissipate and exit the atmosphere very quickly. And it’s not just global warming we are talking about.

If we are vegan, we don’t have to worry about avian flu, which was found in 22 out of 33 provinces in Indonesia alone, and has caused millions of poultry deaths and caused many human fatalities in Indonesia – more human deaths in your country than in any other country due to the deadly form of avian flu. If we are vegan, Indonesia’s coral reefs, known as the “Amazon of the Seas” for their thousands of marine species, will be left in peace and beauty, and they will protect us. The coral reef is a protector of our lives, of the sea. Right now it is endangered, the coral reef, due to overfishing, which includes a destructive form that uses gruesome methods like cyanide poisoning and blasting the fish with bombs and dynamite.

My God. The World Resources Institute stated that these types of fishing only bring short-term profit and will cost the Indonesian economy more than US$600 million in losses over 20 years. Moreover, around the world, countless enormous ocean dead zones will have a chance to return to life, because the rivers and the lakes that were polluted by manure and toxic fertilizers for animal feed will be left alone to purify themselves and recover. Also, when we stop vacuuming all the poor fish out of the sea, they will have a chance to restore the balance in the oceans. We desperately need the fish in the sea to balance the ocean; otherwise our lives will be in danger. God puts them there for a reason.

By the way, at least one-third of all the world’s fish caught and murdered today is fed to livestock – not to us humans even. On land, millions of hectares will be spared livestock’s serious effects of soil erosion, deforestation, poisonous water pollution, and displacement of wildlife, if all turn to vegan. Scientists found that forests are resilient and can grow back if given a chance – very fast. We have seen that evidence in some parts of the world. The scientists also observed that when the ocean is healthy again, even the dead coral reefs will revive themselves.

Imagine! Nature is miraculous and incredible; but in order to witness nature’s recovery, we must not let our current way of life continue. We cannot continue this way, or else we will pass the point of no return and then we will have a runaway planetary crisis. Then we might lose the whole planet or the life on the planet. Another factor to consider is, sir, the vegan solution is the fastest and most effective because any other solution such as sustainable technologies will take too long to perfect and use. For example, in Indonesia, your precious forests are being cut down to grow palm oil to be used as biofuel energy, and we thought that will help to minimize the CO2.

We are wrong. It’s a failure, causing more destruction and more greenhouse gas emissions than it saves. In fact, it’s releasing the world’s third largest amount of carbon emissions, because of biofuel… in the wrong way. You see, the green technology is not always reliable. This is particularly very tragic because Indonesia has the world’s third biggest rainforest, only behind the Amazon and the Congo, yet your rainforest is being lost at an alarming rate of one football field per minute. Every minute, Indonesia loses one football-field-size of rainforest.

God. And the United Nations says that 98% of the whole forest could be gone in just 15 years– your forest, 15 years, sir – the year of your newborn child to grow up as a teenager. Ninety-eight percent – so why don’t we just say 100% will be gone? What’s the difference two more percent makes to us anymore? Actually, not all of this palm oil product is used as biofuel even. Part of the palm oil products goes to make livestock feed. Imagine, everything goes to the animals. In the name of biofuel even, it will also go there to feed the livestock. Everything goes to the animals.

Everything to the animal industry and we don’t have much. So we can see how many activities are linked to this destructive practice of animal raising. Fortunately, we have the solution ready at hand, sir, which is the organic vegan solution. It’s so simple, so easy, we might overlook it. We might not believe it. But if we look into all the scientific and the physical evidence so far, we have to accept this organic vegan solution as the one and only to save our planet right now. Instead of spending more money on new technology, we even save money from having to buy meat and subsidize meat with our tax dollars.

We simply cannot depend on green technology alone, sir. Now, there is also an invisible aspect to the reversal in the destruction. A compassionate person harms no one and, therefore, brings no harm upon himself. That is why in Buddhism, they say that the moment we drop the butcher’s knife, then we are protected, then we can become the Buddha, the saint. It’s really like that. We hear real stories about hospital patients who had a terminal sickness like cancer, turned vegetarian or vegan, and then the tumor disappeared, so operations were cancelled and doctors were very astonished. So, people turned vegans and the terminal cancer situation was gone and operations cancelled, and the doctors were very surprised.

Because the vegan diet protects us from inside out, starting immediately, so that all kinds of calamities will avoid us, stay away from us; and on a bigger scale, our planet will also be healed. Just like an individual being healed by turning to a compassionate diet; like attracts like. The good, loving, compassionate energy will ward off the darkness that is looming toward us, that is next to us right now. We will, in short, have a paradise on Earth. If you have ever wondered what that might be like, we may soon live to see the day when all beings will truly live by your nation’s motto, that is “Unity in Diversity” – in oneness, understanding, caring, faith, and happiness. I invite everyone to share the hopeful vision that we will save the planet, and will make it a Heaven one.