A new piece by The
Guardian is highlighting the startling impact that animal agriculture,
especially dairy farming, has on the environment.
“Climate change, water use, forest destruction, river
pollution, floods, dead zones in the sea: the impacts of animal farming are
massive and global; in many cases greater than those of anything else we do, explains
the article.
The author details how subsidies encourage dairy farmers in
the U.K. to produce milk in excess of demand and also observes that people’s attitudes
about farming and eating meat have played their part in creating an incredibly
unsustainable system that is literally
destroying the planet.
“Imagine how we would respond if this were any other industrial
sector. If rivers like the Culm were frequently trashed by toxic sludge from
factories, there would be an outcry, he asserts.
These problems aren’t isolated to the U.K. The U.S. dairy
industry has a record of egregious water pollution. In fact, animal excrement
and other agricultural runoff from large-scale farms have polluted nearly
one-third of rivers in the U.S.
To make matters worse, dairy cows are treated as mere
milk-producing machines, and there is a wide spectrum of chronic diseases
associated with dairy. Dairy is not only unsustainable, but also cruel and
unhealthy, plain and simple.
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here to see some of our favorite delicious dairy-free alternatives!