Be a Superhero: Save the Planet

You don’t have to have superpowers to save millions of lives and the planet—you just need to be vegan.

Save the Sea
In the past 50 years, commercial fishing has caused the extermination of 90 percent of large fish populations. Methods such as bottom trawling and long-lining (using a fishing line up to 120 kilometers long with hundreds of thousands of hooks) have emptied millions of square kilometers of ocean and pushed many marine species to the brink of extinction. Bottom trawling scrapes the ocean floor of all life—including coral. Elliot Norse, president of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute, says, “Scientists find that bottom-trawling is the largest disturbance to the world’s sea floor and possibly the largest human-caused disturbance to the biosphere.”

Save the Land
Raising animals for food uses mammoth amounts of land—30 percent of the world’s total land mass. Millions of acres of forest are being clear-cut for crop land to feed livestock. Ancient rainforests like the Amazon are rapidly shrinking, devastating the eco-system and every single living being on Earth.

Save the Air
According to United Nations reports, raising animals for food is one of the largest sources of carbon-dioxide emissions and the single largest source of methane and nitrous-oxide emissions. It takes 11 times more fossil fuels to create animal protein than it does to create the same amount of plant protein. The math is simple—using animals for food is bad.

Save the Water
It takes more than 9,000 liters of water to produce 1/2 kilogram of meat. Only 2.5 percent of the world’s water is fresh, and much of that is frozen in glaciers. Watering the crops that farmed animals eat, providing them with drinking water, and cleaning up the feces, blood, and other filth inside factory farms, transport trucks, and slaughterhouses is wasting our most precious resource. The former vice president of the World Bank, Ismail Serageldin, warned that “the wars of the next century will be fought over water,” and yet we throw it away every day by eating meat. Not only is water being wasted, it’s also being contaminated with toxins by the meat, dairy, and egg industries. According to the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S., the runoff from factory farms pollutes our waterways more than all other industrial sources combined.

Save Yourself
Animal products are bad for you. Studies have linked meat, dairy products, and eggs to sicknesses such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and more. Health experts around the world agree that going vegan is the single best thing that we can do for our health. Not only does our quality of life improve, the quantity of it also improves—vegans and vegetarians live on average six to 10 years longer than meat-eaters do.

Save Animals
Hundreds of billions of animals are killed for food. Fish, chickens, dogs, cows, monkeys—few species are spared. All animals deserve to live, love, feel the sunlight on their faces and the grass under their feet, and breathe fresh air. Being vegan means that you do not have to be responsible for the suffering and death of any animal.

Save the Planet
With rising temperatures, rising sea levels, record weather extremes, water shortages, food shortages, and a growing hole in the ozone—it’s time for action. The United Nations reports that there needs to be a global switch to a vegan diet to combat the worst effects of climate change. There’s one simple solution: Go vegan today to save the world.

Posted by Edwina Baier