Destroy the Forests, Kill the Animals, Enslave Humans, and Bring on the Warming: We Want Meat

Everyone thought Copenhagen would result in a clearly defined, specific (and strong?) plan to slow deforestation — it didn’t. Some ideas found general consensus, but no binding plan was agreed on; deforestation got a mention in the accord, but only a brief, vague one. And if you ask me, both the plan that was hoped for and the general acknowledgment of the problem and need for solutions in the accord are frustrating and offensive excuses for real action; they ignore the cow-shaped elephant in the room (among other things) and perpetuate the idea that the wealthiest nations can buy their way out of this catastrophe while shifting responsibility to other nations and ignoring what we actually must do, now. The Associated Press reports,

A plan to protect the world’s biologically rich tropical forests by paying poor nations to protect them was shelved Saturday after world leaders failed to agree on a binding deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions….

“No treaty means that forest destruction will continue unabated, forest-dependent peoples’ rights will not be protected and endangered species will continue down the path to extinction,” said Stephen Leonard of the Australian Orangutan Project….

World leaders at the U.N. talks in Copenhagen did agree to spend $30 billion over the next three years and $100 billion by 2020 to help poor nations — and some of that money could go toward the forest program.

How can even the leaders who are supposed to be well-versed in the implications of what we’re doing to the planet and its inhabitants be so ignorant and stubborn and short-sighted as to not make halting deforestation a clear, top priority, beyond empty, nonbinding words? And how can even the supposedly best proposals not clearly and strongly address the massive role played by animal agriculture in deforestation?

Do we really care more about profit and continuing to eat animals than we do about, you know, saving the world?

Let’s look at the Amazon, for example. Sure, there are local communities clearing sections of the Amazon for their own subsistence agriculture. But the greatest villain industry in the Amazon deforestation isn’t, by far, local communities or even the logging companies — the Amazon is being wiped out for cattle ranching, for the export of flesh-for-meat and skin-for-leather. Even the soybean cultivation often discussed in relation to environmental degradation in and around the Amazon is itself largely a result of animal agriculture: roughly 80% of the global soybean crop goes to feed and fatten so-called livestock.

Local communities in Brazil aren’t the ones really wiping out the Amazon and its plant and animal species. Vegans aren’t the ones whose diet is contributing to 20-50% of global greenhouse gas emissions, displacing people and nonhuman animals, and supporting the use of human slave labor (in addition to enslavement of nonhuman animals, of course) in Brazil’s cattle-ranching industry. The world’s demand for meat, dairy, and leather, combined with wealthy nations’ belief that they can buy their way out of anything, including planetary disaster, when substantial, immediate personal and societal changes are what we actually need, is the problem, both in the Amazon and around the world. Animal agriculture in all forms, from “factory farming” to pasture-based, is an environmental nightmare.

And our world’s and our leaders’ absolute refusal to take (and talk about) the role of animal agriculture in the impending global disaster seriously or (gasp!) pull our support from it or even dare to stand up to these powerful, moneyed industries is inexcusable — and surely among the reasons that the Copenhagen response to deforestation is so pathetic.

The supposed solution to the deforestation problem is for wealthy nations to throw money at the poorer nations where the forests are being wiped out, as an incentive to keep those communities from burning and cutting down those forests. Um, hello? Do we think that the cattle ranching that is responsible for roughly 70 percent of the Amazon’s deforestation is happening for the benefit and profit of those local communities?

Wealthy nations are indeed going to have to send billions of dollars to financially poorer nations under the general agreements that were made, to generally help them deal with their climate-change problems and solutions, and a chunk of these funds may go to forest-protection efforts, it seems. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter how much money arrogant wealthy nations throw at the problem or how much they tsk-tsk the nations where the most frightening deforestation is happening if they’re not also going to own up to — and change — their role in the problem, both in the Amazon and, again, around the world. Environmentalists and politicians who make big speeches about the need to halt climate change in general, stop deforestation in the Amazon in specific, and drastically scale back the environmental impacts of industry throughout the world but who then leave their press conferences and meetings and head straight to the nearest restaurant (in their leather-seated cars, of course) for a plate full of animal are hypocrites.

Writing a check, even a big one, doesn’t solve the problem. If we’re not going to be honest about the disastrous effects of animal agriculture, for nonhuman animals, humans, and environment alike, and loudly, openly encourage people to change their eating habits too, we might as well admit defeat — and say goodbye to the world as we know it — right now.

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Photo by Flickr user Threat to Democracy