“It's about your life, it's about life on this planet and it is about what we are doing to this planet with our eyes open today and increasingly being culpable of being accused by the next generation of having acted irresponsibly and increasingly questionable from an ethical point of view.”

Virtuous viewers, welcome to Planet Earth: Our Loving Home. Scientific experts fear that our world is in the midst of its sixth mass extinction and say its cause is human actions.

Today in the conclusion of a two-part series we’ll further explore the challenges facing biodiversity worldwide including the extreme dangers posed by global warming, the necessity of species preservation to ensure the survival of humankind as well as the most effective tools for biodiversity conservation and mitigating climate change. As discussed last week, biodiversity loss is occurring with such speed and severity that it’s threatening all life on Earth.

Human activity itself is a combination of population, levels of consumption and the particular technologies that people choose. We may have lost tens of thousands of species out of the estimated 12 million that exist.

But I think the important thing is that the rate of losing them is going up very rapidly. In the past, in the geological record, we were losing about a dozen or so per year. Over the last 500 years, since people began writing about well-known groups of organisms, we’ve been losing hundreds a year.

And now we seem to be losing thousands per year, going up towards tens of thousands, which makes this by far the strongest level of extinction since the end of the Cretaceous Period 65-million years ago when the dinosaurs disappeared and mammals came into the ascendancy and the whole quality of life on Earth changed radically.

We are in this extraordinary moment in history where through our collective capacity to affect the life support systems on this planet, that terms such as “thresholds,” “tipping points,” and “collapse” are becoming part of our vocabulary.

The Global Biodiversity Outlook that was published earlier this year (2010) by the CBD (Convention on Biological Diversity) and the significant support also from the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre was a very sobering report. Not a single country could document its ability to have reversed the rate of loss of biodiversity.

Many species are disappearing every day, and if we just leave it, biodiversity will be completely destroyed without fail.

Species decline in our beautiful oceans is accelerating due to toxic pollution generated by industrial activities, hugely destructive intensive animal agriculture operations, global warming and massive overfishing worldwide.

The pollution problem is strongly related to agricultural practices which produce much of the nitrogen, phosphorous, pesticides, and herbicides that enter the coastal waters and cause a lot of damage to marine ecosystems in general.

There were more than 400 known dead zones, or spaces in the ocean devoid of oxygen and hence most marine life, in coastal waters worldwide in 2008, with only 49 zones in the 1960s.

Those dead zones are frequently caused by too many fertilizers that enter the coastal areas around our countries and one of the most important ways of dealing with that is changing the way that we do agriculture and that means doing a much more reasonable practice of agriculture, especially in the way that we use fertilizers, reducing greatly the amount of fertilizers. And that can be done actually without affecting very much the yields.

And it also has to do with the amount of meat that we produce. Meat production actually increases the amount of plants that we have to grow and it also creates a lot of animal wastes that are part of the problem of that nutrient pollution. So those are two important things we can do that are largely to do with improving agricultural practices.

With so many dead zones in the ocean, again it’s really the way we farm that’s contributing to these dead zones. The soils run off, the soils contain high levels of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides that kill the ocean. So as long as we keep dumping on so much fertilizer, as long as we crowd cows together and make so much waste and crowd pigs together and make so much waste, we’re going to have dead zones.

Marine biodiversity has especially been seriously destroyed. Why? It’s due to destructive fishing or overfishing, such as trawling.

Recent research led by Dr. Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, indicates that up to half of ocean species have disappeared due to overfishing.

A bit more than 80 percent of the commercially exploited stocks are over-exploited, they are collapsing. Some stocks like, for instance, the lobster has been collapsing for a long time already. The number of fleets increased three to five times in the last few decades in some fishing areas and the fish stocks can’t handle such a level of exploitation anymore.

Scientists project that if the current trend continues, a complete collapse of global fisheries will occur around 2050, creating “ghost waters” devoid of fish. Fish farms, a type of aquaculture, which some say are a so-called “sustainable alternative” to fishing, environmentally devastate the waters in which they operate and speed up the depletion of ocean life. It takes one to two kilograms of sea-caught fish to produce one kilogram of farm-raised fish, essentially making the captive fish artificial ocean predators.

Given the state of our world, species preservation, whether on land or at sea, appears to be a highly daunting task, but fortunately there is a ready solution at hand. The global adoption of the plant-based diet can protect ecosystems, plants and animals and halt climate change, because both biodiversity loss and global warming have a common cause: the consumption of animal products and the livestock industry.

Eating a lot of meat is not a very efficient way to nourish the populations. In fact there is a really high environmental cost in eating meat, which is really high up in the (food) chain and it would be much more efficient to eat lower in the food chain – that is for more people to be vegetarians.

The 2006 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ landmark report “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” estimated 18% of all human-caused global greenhouse gas emissions are related to livestock raising and more recent estimates by other researchers, when accounting for the entire cycle of producing and consuming animal products, put the percentage at 51% or higher.

How are our dietary choices driving biodiversity loss? In “Livestock’s Long Shadow” the authors explain the effect of meat-eating as follows:

“Livestock now account for about 20% of the total terrestrial animal biomass, and the 30% of the Earth’s land surface that they now pre-empt was once habitat for wildlife. Indeed, the livestock sector may well be the leading player in the reduction of biodiversity, since it is the major driver of deforestation, as well as one of the leading drivers of land degradation, pollution, climate change, overfishing, sedimentation of coastal areas and facilitation of invasions by alien species.”

The livestock industry is the leading cause of an alarming decline in wild species. In a new October 2010 study, Dutch researchers found that protecting natural areas is not sufficient to stop these fast extinctions of flora and fauna; rather, one of the most effective policies is changing to a no-animal diet, meaning plant-based food.

In that study, entitled “Rethinking Global Biodiversity Strategies,” the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency evaluated the efficacy of modifying global-level production and consumption patterns to stem species decline. The level of biodiversity on land was estimated using a benchmark called “Mean Species Abundance” (MSA) which is “the composition of species in numbers and abundance compared with the original state and provides a common framework to assess the major causes of biodiversity loss.”

As an example, converting forest land to crop fields would mean a huge drop in an area’s MSA level as all species dependent on trees and forest cover to survive would be gone. Comparing eight different policy options to reduce an assumed baseline 10% global biodiversity loss between 2000 and 2050, including protecting natural areas, managing forests better, and humanity adopting a meatless diet, the animal-free diet was found to best safeguard species survival out of all the possible choices.

So if we stop all animal products – fish, eggs, meat and dairy - we will save the oceans, save the climate and we could halt also biodiversity loss.

I’m Jo Leinen, the Chairman of the Environment Committee in the European Parliament in Brussels.

The protection of biodiversity means that we have to reduce emissions and the consumption of resources; and that means we have to change our lifestyle – our lifestyle is much too heavy for nature and the ecosystems, and especially our eating habits have to be changed. I think we eat too much meat and we eat too much fish, and we have to reduce both and be more vegetarian.

The 2010 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) study “Assessing Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production: Priority Products and Materials,” found that animal-based food is the common denominator with respect to most of our planet’s serious environmental issues. The paper states, “Agriculture and food consumption are identified as one of the most important drivers of environmental pressures, especially habitat change, climate change, water use and toxic emissions.”

Regarding the report, UNEP’s executive director Achim Steiner said: “The Panel have reviewed all the available science and conclude that two broad areas are currently having a disproportionately high impact on people and the planet's life support systems — these are energy in the form of fossil fuels and agriculture, especially the raising of livestock for meat and dairy products."

The ecological damage caused by animal products is so severe that the UNEP study concluded: “A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.”

Given the unprecedented threat all life on Earth faces, as global citizens it behooves us to take immediate action and spread the good news about how taking the simple step of embracing the vegan diet can simultaneously halt species decline and climate change. Let us all quickly convert to an animal-free way of life to usher in a bright new era for our planet.

Precious viewers, thank you for joining us today on our program. Coming up next is Enlightening Entertainment, after Noteworthy News. May the Providence always grace our lives.