Eating Just 10% Less Meat Could Help Protect Drinking Water
Eating Just 10% Less Meat Could Help Protect Drinking Water
newshub.sustech.edu.cn
Researchers uncover how changing meat consumption can improve groundwater quality
7 comments
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Yeah. Right. How long would a 10% reduction last before we were right back where we were.
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First of all, the goal here is simply to meet the Chinese governments "Sustainable Development Goals." That's what "could help protect ground water" means. It's a meaningless goal from the perspective of veganism or even global conservation.
But it's also a meaningless solution. The rate of consumption increases each year. In that context, the goal isn't just, "eat 10% less meat", it's, "establish a hard limit on the amount of meat consumed, which is 10% less than our current rate of production." Maintaining that hard limit becomes a larger and larger commitment each year, with a growing population sharing a fixed amount of meat. There might be a mechanism for accomplishing that IN CHINA, but globally that is an utterly unimplementable solution to any problem that animal ag is currently causing.
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7 comments
From an environmentalist standpoint, I get the headline, but from a vegan perspective, it's like saying "Stabbing just 10% less people could help protect blood"
How about we just don't stab people??
The most effective policies are often not fancy ones. For example, if you want to fix housing isolation, you do not isolate a few houses very well, but you try to improve the least isolated houses and get them all to decent levels.
Getting everyone off meat will not happen. But if you want to reduce the amount of meat eaten the most, then you want to try to get meat eaters to consume less meat. Not a few people to consume none.
I don't give a shit about eating meat, I care about murdering individuals I love. You can't trick people into not committing atrocity. It will never work. They've already been thoroughly tricked by someone much more clever and devious than we. That's not a contest we can win. The only thing we have are our principles. It worked on us, it has worked on others, and it will continue to work.
This is not the way to fix anything. It's a temporary band-aid on a problem (industrialized mass murder on a scale which makes all other human atrocities combined seem insignificant), that will only get worse with time if not kept in check.
I agree with you that individual veganism is not the (full) solution. And I even agree with you that reducing meat consumption is a good (albeit small) stepping stone towards the solution (kinda like getting someone left-of-center elected, or divesting from Israel financially). However, the full solution is banning animal agriculture entirely.