My question is: If more and more people give up meat eating but keep on eating fish only one or two times a week, with this, how much can it help to save our planet? And could you also tell us how we can more effectively advise people to stop fish eating? Thank you. It's already very good that they stop eating red meat and big animals’ meat.

It's already very good. You tell them that, “Bravo! Bravo! Thank you very much. You are very brave. And I thank you and the planet thanks you! And many animals thank you!” And after that, you give them a flyer. You gather all the information about the harm of fish eating and you give it to them. You say, “Now, if you go one step further, and no more fish eating, then you'll be perfect! You'll be my hero.” Okay. Good!

Because, fish eating is also very depleting to planetary ecosystem. They have proven that overfishing of sardines has resulted in many dead zones. Because they are there for some reason. They are there for maybe oxidizing the ocean or give life to some other kind of species or cleaning the environment. Whatever the species that God has left on the planet, they have work to do. The species has work to do. Just like humans, we have work to do, animals, they have work to do.

Even little fish like sardines, they have work to do. It's just many humans are ignorant. They think it is a little fish, they're helpless anyway, “they're useless.” No, they're not useless. They think they're useless so they fish them up and eat them; but they're very, very useful to our ecosystem and to the health of the planet and, consequently, to the health of humans and all beings on it. So you gather all these facts from Supreme Master Television or any internet, or information you can find in the library or anywhere, and then you print it all on the flyer, and you give it to the fish eater.

This is a quick running report that you can find on the internet and elsewhere. This is mostly concerning Mexico alone. Disappearing glaciers: the glacier on the Iztaccihuatl volcano in Central Mexico lost 30 meters in 6 years. And the temperature of the glaciers is close to freezing, but it’s not freezing. So the temperature does not preserve the glacier, so the glacier on the Iztaccihuatl , Pico de Orizaba volcanoes, the glaciers there are expected to disappear in the next 10 or something years.

You can look that up on the National Autonomous University of Mexico. There’s another one: eroding beaches. Hurricanes and rising seas are eroding beaches in at least five Mexican states, including Quintana Roo, Yucatan Peninsula, home to Cancun and other famous tourist areas; and Tamaulipas, Veracruz and Tabasco on the Gulf of Mexico; Sinaloa on the Pacific and some locations of coastal resort in Mazatlan. These beaches are eroding. Hurricane Wilma took much of the sand off Cancun’s beaches. The government has spent US$21 million to restore the beach, but much of these efforts were undone by the nonstop erosion. Not that we could even repair the damage.

The eroding beaches threaten the tourism industry which employs 2 million people and is Mexico’s third greatest source of foreign exchange. A report of the sea-level rise found that 46.2% of Mexico’s Gulf coast is at risk of rising sea levels. Coastal lakes, marsh lands and agriculture areas are most at risk across central and southern portions of the Mexican Gulf of Mexico. And in Mexico, we experience more frequent and stronger hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea. Powerful hurricanes have increased significantly in the past few decades.

The US National Center for Atmospheric Research has identified warming sea surface temperatures as the main cause and correlated the warmer seas with global warming. Warmer water leads to more water evaporation, giving the storms more fuel to create stronger storms which destroy some counties. Hurricane Stan from October 4, 2005 visited seven Mexican states, leading to loss of homes, deaths, and some entire communities being wiped out completely.

Over 100,000 people were sent to shelters. Fatalities were estimated at 1,620, making Stan the 29th deadliest Atlantic hurricane. August and September 2007: intensive 240 rainstorms came to northern states, with rainfall 19% above historical average. In June and July 2008, the country was struck with 184 storms with rainfall exceeding the average by more than 50%. Hurricane Dean, August 21, 2007, made landfall on the Yucatán Peninsula as a Category 5, with gusts of 200 miles per hour. It completely destroyed the town of Majahual. The government’s preparations and ample warning by forecasters is credited with saving lives, although its aftermath did bring fatalities. The storm brought rain all the way to the country’s Pacific Coast, including up to 200 millimeters in Jalisco and Nayarit.

In September 2008, Tropical Depression Lowell landed in the states of Michoacán, Sonora and Sinaloa with almost 27,000 people affected by flooding who were rendered homeless. Tropical Storm Marco landed in Veracruz during the first week of October 2008; caused flooding in the city with high winds and heavy rains in Veracruz and surrounding regions. Veracruz officials opened 200 shelters to accommodate the homeless people. Some 400,000 people were affected – that’s almost half a million people – with 800 towns flooded by water levels up to 3 meters. Hurricane Norbert hit the Mexican Peninsula in October 2008, with winds of 165 kilometers per hour; hundreds of people were evacuated from their homes due to flooding.

Now, droughts and desertification: Mexico experienced the worst drought in living memory during 1999, with five northwestern Mexican states having been declared disaster areas, drinking supplies dangerously low, and the area was turned into a fire-prone area – in danger of fire. Mexico’s National Institute of Ecology states that between 50-70% of the nation is afflicted by some degree of drought. The Lerma Chapala Santiago River Basin is one of the most significant water areas of Mexico. It has lost 61% of its water drainage and 99.7% of the reservoirs. Usable water volume increased 142%, indicating the population centers, including Mexico City have been drawing too much water.

The environmentalists are very concerned for the biodiversity of the region, which has historically been home to 7,000 species of plants, 170 species of mammals, and 525 bird species and 300 aquatic species. Rain-fed corn, maize, is the most important food crop for Mexicans, and has been vulnerable to drought. In 2003, over 200,000 farmers were affected by climate change, most of which was drought related. Of course, that’s due to climate change. Forty-seven percent of Mexico has some degree of desertification, with 70% of the nation vulnerable. Between 700,000 to 900,000 Mexicans are estimated to leave their homes each year in search of better opportunities elsewhere, maybe in the United States, even.

Puebla State has seen increased forest fires over the past few years; rainfall decreased by 200 liters per square meter; increase in average annual temperatures to 17.5 degrees Celsius. The winter temperatures are now also above normal. Rapid deforestation between 1980 and 2002 on the Puebla mountain, La Malinche, has decreased forest area by 5,355 square kilometers, and it’s believed to have resulted in lower rainfall of up to 100 millimeters.

By July 2007, the deforestation in Puebla led to a landslide, burying and killing 32 passengers in a bus. Harbingers of global warming: we have dengue fever, which has historically been found at elevation below 1,000 meters in Mexico, has now spread up to 1,700 meters. Forty percent of Mexico’s coral reefs are experiencing bleaching on both the Eastern and Western coasts.

Intensity of wild fires: Mexico had the worst fire season in recorded history in 1998 affecting 505,857 hectares during a drought, bringing smoke across the border into Texas where it triggered a statewide health alert. Now, we even have extreme cold weather. Between October 2008 and February 2009, over 36 people in Mexico died due to extreme cold weather, with 22 of them having suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning from burning firewood and charcoal to warm themselves. The average temperature in the north of Mexico during this cold spell was minus 5 degrees Celsius for four months. The Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone is created primarily by runoff from US agriculture.

The Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone is expected to increase. Oceanography Professor Steven DiMarco of Texas A&M University, USA, stated that the increase river runoff from recent flooding in the United States is likely to cause the Gulf of Mexico’s 7,900 square mile dead zone to become even larger. It’s already an almost 8,000-square-mile dead zone and now it’s going to increase larger. Dead zones are ocean areas that no longer contain enough oxygen to support marine life.

River run off laden with nitrates of farm fertilizers is a main cause of these oxygen-deprived areas, with this year’s Gulf of Mexico zone expected to extend beyond 10,000 square miles. There are surely more terrible situations in Mexico that are not checked, due to our carelessness in taking care of the environment, and the global warming resulting thereof. I’ve finished my report, but the damage is not finished here. Please do something for your country at least. Thank you so much for your patience and for sharing the concern with me for Mexico. God bless you. God bless and protect Mexico.

Hallo, I’m honored to be in this exchange and it’s an opportunity that I enjoy. (Hi, love.) My name is Ray Fred. (Hi.) Many people say that we can just stop eating beef and we can switch to chicken and fish instead, and lower our emissions. What would you respond to somebody considering that as a choice? You agree to that, sir? No, I just hear a lot of it. How would I respond to someone who is going that route?

Switching to anything at all other than a purely plant-based diet will not really help at all. This is because of all the things I mentioned above and, first of all, eating both fish and chickens does not significantly reduce global warming at all. Eating chicken, for example. Chickens that are grown for food are a huge source of antibiotics, arsenic poison, and fertilizer runoff which increases pollution and the global warming effects. For example, in the United States alone, the Centers for Disease Control reports that 76 million cases of food-borne illnesses are reported each year with poultry – the chicken that you mentioned – triggering more cases than any other food group even.

Sometimes these are also life-threatening or they can leave permanent damage in the person. So, there really is no reduced cost for eating something like chicken. As for fish, over-fishing of the seas has already resulted in imbalances such as the so-called “dead zones” everywhere in the sea that do not support life. “Dead zone” is the area of the sea, sometimes as big as Texas, that there’s no life in there at all – no fish, no shrimp, nothing live in there because there’s no oxygen. The reason is over-fishing.

There’s another condition called “acidification” where the lack of certain fish has contributed to higher ocean acidity which, in turn, reduces the capacity of the ocean to absorb CO2. And the ocean is a very complex ecosystem where every living thing has a unique function, so removing even a small fish for humans to eat creates an imbalance in the sea. In fact, we are already seeing an effect of this imbalance on marine mammals. As the ocean becomes warmer and warmer and more acidic, more toxins are present in the water. The whales and dolphins are thus being driven from the ocean as conditions worsen. It is suffocating them.

Sometimes hundreds at a time, they’re dying on the beach because they cannot tolerate this toxic condition in the seawater anymore. What do we think, why the dolphins and the whales beach on the sand? You think they go there for vacation? They die hundreds at a time because they cannot suffer anymore the water in which they live. Water means life to them but now the water becomes poison so they have to go out. They go out, they die. They stay in the water, they die. They come to the beach, but it doesn't help them either. They die either way.

So, even though fish and chicken may not have the obvious carbon impact that other animals do, everything is interconnected; and there is no way to say that consuming these things results in lower carbon price to the Earth at all. (Thank you.) And, yes, sir, you know according to scientific research, chickens are very intelligent. They have DNA almost like humans. And fish as well. It has been proven that fish are also intelligent. They communicate with each other, they can talk. They lead a very, very organized, very, very intelligent life. Even ants are talking to each other, according to new scientific discovery. They talk to each other in such inaudible languages that it’s recorded by the sophisticated scientific apparatus.

So, even ants, they're intelligent. Look at the way they build their city and their palace; we could not do that compared to our size. They’re building like skyscrapers by their own hand only. But they talk to each other even. Even ants talk to each other, fish talk to each other. They do lead an intelligent life and they all have souls, consciousness, in them. Anything God puts on Earth is for a purpose. We should not kill anything. We should not eat anything except plant-based diet.

A vegetarian lifestyle is almost all that we need right now to stop the global warming, to balance the scale of the negative consequences. Even physically speaking, most of the pollution will be stopped by being vegetarian, by all the people on the planet being vegetarian. I really mean it. Eighty percent of the pollution will be stopped. Eighty percent of the global warming will be stopped if all people begin to be vegetarian – I mean, whole vegetarian, or at least more than two-thirds of the time should be vegetarian.

But why not just be vegetarian altogether? It won’t hurt. It will only do us good. It helps the world, it saves the planet and it saves our children. If we really love our children, this is what we must do, because the governments sometimes hesitate to broadcast to limit people to eat this or eat that. Maybe the governments are too polite. But consider the dangerous and urgent situation of our planet. This is the solution that’s the best, the fastest that we can do.

Meat diet consumes more energy, a lot, a lot more energy than vegetarian diet, and pollutes the planet much more than any other activities of humans, if not most of it. So a vegetarian lifestyle is a must. Truly, it is a must. I’m not speaking as a religious believer. I’m speaking as a citizen of the world, concerned about our home, loving our co-inhabitants, human and animal.

I’m speaking as your friend, as your co-citizen, as the one who lives in the same home that you do. Please be vegetarian, and go green. That we can do also, but go green takes a longer time and it does not help as much as being vegetarian. If you really want to know the truth of it, just go on the research, the scientific evidence on the internet, or look up on our Supreme Master Television or SupremeMasterTV.com. If you cannot look on your TV in your area, we have internet access 24 hours every day of the week, every week of the month, every month of the year.

Truly, we don’t need to talk about bad karma (retribution) or karmic consequences anymore. Physically speaking, vegetarian diet will save the planet: the fastest and the easiest and everyone can do it, and it’s so easy.

We have to stop killing people and stop killing animals. We also have to stop using insecticides and those substances that are terribly harmful to our health and the environment. And also, if we stop global warming, at least the gas will stay put where it is and do not release into the atmosphere. Also, it will not increase due to animal-raising. Because livestock raising, animals breeding, is the #1 cause of damage to our planet, and it is going to destroy our world if we do not stop.

I really mean it. We have to stop this. We have to stop the killing. We have to stop the meat eating. We have to stop insecticides. We have to go organic. And vegetarian is a must. Otherwise, there will not be just the dead zone in the ocean. I repeat: otherwise, if we don’t do anything now, if we don’t be veggie and we don’t stop polluting our planet in many ways, then there will not be just the dead zones in the ocean, there will a dead planet. And we also will be dead beings, too. In four or five years’ time, the way it is, we cannot survive. Thank you, sir, for asking. Please do something.

Good evening, Master. Please accept all my gratitude. In the global warming flyer, it is stated: ''Due to overfishing and the loss of tens of millions of sardines, a vital chain, the waters of the southwest African coast are loaded with a toxic gas that bubbles from the bottom of the ocean, killing marine life on the surface. The size of the area is equivalent to that of the city of New Jersey (USA), and worsening the greenhouse effect.” What is the original nature of this gas? Thank you, Master.

Hallo. Hallo. Bonjour, Madamoiselle Araba. You came all the way from Cotonou, Benin (Yes, Master.) to be with us? You’re from Radio TOPKA, in Cotonou, Benin, right? (Yes, Master.) Thanks for coming to share with us your concern. It is very disturbing to know about the state of the waters off the western coast of your continent. You see, this poisonous gas that you are asking about is formed from the elements that create oceanic dead zones. Dead zones are exactly as they sound: they are areas of the ocean that are dead, the areas of the ocean that are unable to support any more life, which arise mostly from livestock feed agricultural pollution, as well as livestock manure running into the ocean, or some other kind of imbalance.

Good evening, Master. Please accept all my gratitude. In the global warming flyer, it is stated: ''Due to overfishing and the loss of tens of millions of sardines, a vital chain, the waters of the southwest African coast are loaded with a toxic gas that bubbles from the bottom of the ocean, killing marine life on the surface. The size of the area is equivalent to that of the city of New Jersey (USA), and worsening the greenhouse effect.” What is the original nature of this gas? Thank you, Master.

Hallo. Hallo. Bonjour, Madamoiselle Araba. You came all the way from Cotonou, Benin (Yes, Master.) to be with us? You’re from Radio TOPKA in Cotonou, Benin, right? (Yes, Master.) Thanks for coming to share with us your concern. It is very disturbing to know about the state of the waters off the western coast of your continent. You see, this poisonous gas that you are asking about is formed from the elements that create oceanic dead zones.

Dead zones are exactly as they sound: they are areas of the ocean that are dead, the areas of the ocean that are unable to support any more life, which arise mostly from livestock feed agricultural pollution, as well as livestock manure running into the ocean, or some other kind of imbalance. The number of dead zones observed since 2003 has more than tripled, with now in excess of 400 that exist and are growing worldwide. The African dead zone, according to scientists, has been caused by a combination of a strong upwelling current that brings abundant plankton, along with the loss of sardines because of human fishing.

In the past several decades, tens of millions of these tiny fish have been removed from the ocean for human consumption. So now, instead of sardines helping to consume the plankton, the plankton just dies in the water instead, and sinks to the bottom of the ocean where it decays and contributes to the formation of the poisonous gases methane and hydrogen sulfide. While methane gas can be volatile and explosive, hydrogen sulfide is poisonous to both human and marine life. So, this area has periodic explosions of methane and hydrogen sulfide, and when these gases erupt off the coast of Africa, many other fish die and animals such as lobsters and crabs run onto the shore, trying to flee the poisonous gas. But sometimes they cannot avoid either.

Scientists are now concerned that, without a restoration of the ecological balance, dead zones like this will just continue to be more and more, get bigger and bigger, which of course is lethal for all life. So, this is a small but very good example of why we need to be vegan, to renew the rightful balance of life. And, of course, we also need to be organic vegan because so many of these dead zones are caused and made worse by chemical fertilizers that are primarily used for livestock feed. So, yes, be organic vegan.

Supreme Master and honorable guests, (How are you?) good evening. I’m here to prove to you that after being a vegetarian for over 40 years, ever since childhood, a vegetarian diet is good for our health! When I was little, I aspired to promote environmental protection when I grew up, and I’ve now worked in this field for over 20 years. (Bravo!)

I’ve been promoting changing organic waste into food. This is the result of my previous work. But I won’t talk about my work today. I’m here to ask Master’s advice. Global warming has caused many changes to planetary climate. One area of humans’ negligence is using clean water to flush the toilet. How can we call on everyone to cherish our water resources, reduce water waste, establish a system for recycling water and capture rainwater for utilization? Thank you! Yes. Thank you, Mr. Lai.

Thank you for being veg, and thank you for protecting the environment all these decades. We have tried to go in your direction all these years as well. Recently, we go a step further to try to inform the people all this on Supreme Master TV, such as what foods to plant to save water, like edible plants that don’t need much water and can sustain us with more than enough nutrition. We tell people to do organic farming, how to conserve rainwater, ground water, and conserve land, planting trees to attract rain, and the trees also preserve water in the soil so it doesn’t erode the land and run away, etc., etc.

And we also show many of the organic self-farmers everywhere in different countries to show people the examples of how easy it is to plant organic, nutritious, and waterless vegetarian food. For example, in Âu Lạc, meaning Vietnam… I like the name “Âu Lạc” because it denotes a lucky, auspicious meaning and also wishing the people of Vietnam well. “Âu Lạc” means “happy and prosperous,” and also the name of our ancestors. Now, the farmers in Âu Lạc, meaning Vietnam, discovered a way to reap bountiful harvests during their dry season, which lasts from November to May.

They plant drought-resistant crops like green peas, peanuts, black sesame, sweet potato leaves, and creamy beans, etc. They don’t need any water for this. They just plant them on dry land, or even watermelons and some other melons, etc. – no watering, no irrigating, nothing needed. The farmers explain that the leaves from the bean plants and other plants spread over the soil to keep the moisture in. The leaves also later become part of the soil and help the soil stay rich. So, there is no need even for fertilizer as they would need for rice or corn, for example. It’s nature’s miracle at work. And there is a bare minimum to almost no labor required even, until it’s time to harvest, which is also very easy.

They don’t even need much work. They just pull the plant up. That’s it. As you mentioned, Mr. Lai, there are also good ways to harvest the rainwater, by guiding the rain into the soil to be used by the trees and the plants. The trees are like living pumps to use the water to give fruits, and prevent erosion, etc. They use these water-conserving techniques in dry parts of Africa and India and, as a result, the water level rises more than they take out from their wells. And the villagers in the Alwar district of Rajasthan, India, where one Indian village was able to guide the water enough that it brought back to life five flowing rivers – five flowing rivers – that had been dead before, been dried up before due to withdrawing too much water.

Now they bring back to life five flowing, abundant rivers, five, which had been dried up before – you see? – because of withdrawing too much water and deforestation. So now, the Indian villagers, they have organized and they have done their best to revive these five dead rivers. We could learn from them as well. But even these water losses pale in comparison to the incredible amount of water that is wasted for animal production. 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. The number of oxygen-depleted oceanic dead zones has increased from only 49 in the 1960s to 405 in 2008, and I am sure there are more now, there are much more sea dead zones right now. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is one of the largest in the world. It is 22,000 square kilometers and was created mainly from agriculture runoff, including food raised for livestock and manure. Around 212,000 metric tons of fish are estimated to die in the Gulf of Mexico dead zone every year, Mr. Lai.

I’m sure you know this. I am just saying all this for the knowledge of the audience. However sad it is, we must be informed of the facts. Mr. Lai, in addition to these useful farming programs, we try our best to inform people of the numerous, contaminated, drying or disappeared dead rivers and lakes all over the world. 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. Just because we Formosan (Taiwanese) still have water, just because where I am sitting, I am lucky to still have water, doesn’t mean tens of millions of other people are as lucky. Some die on the road because of starvation, some die on the road looking for water. This is very, very tragic, Mr. Lai. I hope we all wake up and wake up quick to save our people, to save our home.

We have listed some on the for your reference. Please copy at no cost and send it to all other people who you can come in touch with - by mail, by email, by post, leaflets, poster, whatever may be suitable to you. I also encourage the audience to do the same. 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!

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.