We’re Running Out of Planet: Cowspiracy

By Frosty Wooldridge

As the human mob overwhelms this planet with 7.3 billion on its way to 10.1 billion within 35 years by 2050—more and more “average” Americans speak up with a video, research and social media voice. Last night, I watched a movie:  “Cowspiracy” by Kip Anderson and Keegan Kuhn.  www.Cowspiracy.com

(The wilderness must be preserved if we are to preserve our sanity, our spirits and our world.)  Photography by Frosty Wooldridge 

The movie walloped me upside the head with the facts and figures about how we intend to feed ourselves with less and less water and less and less arable land.  The most compelling statement from one of the interviewees, “We can’t keep up with exponential growth; we’re running out of planet to feed ourselves.”

As I sat watching the 80-minute video, the facts spellbound me into a kind of intellectual despair. 

—–100 billion gallons of water toxically polluted annually by fracking for oil.

—–34 trillion gallons of water drank by livestock annually.

—–1,500 gallons of water used every second 24/7 in California.

—–1 hamburger takes 660 gallons of water to produce it.

—–Livestock on this planet cause more methane gas pollution than anything else.

We feed 16 pounds of grain to a steer to add one pound of beef.  It takes 2,500 gallons of water to add one pound of beef on a steer. The average cow eats 150 pounds of feed daily.

Human agriculture grows as the greatest cause of rain forest loss, species extinction and water pollution.  A mind-numbing 91 percent of the Amazon forest suffers destruction from raising cattle.

“The Sierra Club, born to protect the wilderness by visionary John Muir, totally evades and avoids any discussion about population because it would stop contributions.  The rest of environmental organizations follow suit.  They make people feel good about doing something for the environment, but in reality, they waste their money.”  Dr. Will Tuttle, environmentalist

Cattle create 116,000 pounds of excrement every second 24/7 in the USA.  That much waste covers every square foot of 10 major cities around the world. The ground water poisoning grows beyond solving.

When the video addressed the fisheries, it featured more mind-boggling statistics of fish kills.  Humans kill 100,000,000 sharks annually and have been for the past 25 years.   Humans slaughter 28 billion marine creatures annually. www.oceana.com

One fisherman scientist said, “When the oceans die, we die.”

As to GMO’s, they change the DNA and destroy the natural balance of pollinators, bugs and nitrogen fixing bacteria in the soil. GMO’s equate to giving a drowning man a drink of water.

At the end of the video, one former mega-rancher said, “We won’t make it as a species if we don’t stop animal agriculture.”

Solutions:  humans need to move toward vegan food consumption.  Otherwise, massive human starvation awaits the human race within the 21^st century.

A lot of people ask, ‘Do you think humans are parasites?’ “It’s an interesting idea and one worth thinking about. People casually refer to humanity as a virus spreading across the earth. In fact, we do look like some strange kind of bio-film spreading across the landscape. A good metaphor? If the biosphere is our host, we do use it up for our own benefit. We do manipulate it. We alter the flows and fluxes of elements like carbon and nitrogen to benefit ourselves—often at the expense of the biosphere as a whole. If you look at how coral reefs or tropical forests are faring these days, you’ll notice that our host is not doing that well right now. Parasites are very sophisticated; parasites are highly evolved; parasites are very successful, as reflected in their diversity. Humans are not very good parasites. Successful parasites do a very good job of balancing—using up their hosts and keeping them alive. It’s all a question of tuning the adaptation to your particular host. In our case, we have only one host, so we have to be particularly careful.” Carl Zimmer