鼓勵此網誌：0
這幾天翻出一篇以前看過的文章，是關於我們食物的選擇與環境保護，作者呼籲大家不要吃牛肉，並詳述肉牛大量養殖對環境造成的傷害。作者並歸納，若我們不吃牛肉或其他其他大量生產的肉類，我們就可以節省大量的用水量、避免河川遭到污染、避免表土流失、讓熱帶雨林免於收到摧毀、減少溫室氣體的排放、減少野生動物棲息地所受到的破壞、並協助保護瀕臨絕種的動物。我將原文轉貼在這裡讓大家參考，並把重點簡略翻譯出來。
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by Steve Boyan, PhD
The Union of Concerned Scientists says there are two things people can do to most help the environment. The first is to drive a fuel-efficient automobile (that means, not an SUV or a truck) and live near where we work. The second is to not eat beef.
I’m going to go one step farther than UCS: I suggest that you refuse to eat any animal or animal product produced on a factory farm. And I’m going to tell you why. (建議大家不要吃任何來自於養殖場肉類)
In 1990, when I first read that 10 people could be fed with the grain that you would feed a cow that would be turned into food for one person, I was impressed. But I was not moved. The reason: If 10 people would be fed because I gave up meat, I’d give it up. But, I thought, if I give up meat, it won’t have that impact: it probably won’t have any impact on anything at all, except me.
I was wrong. If I had known that for every pound of beef I did not eat, I would save anywhere from 2,500 to 5,000 gallons of water, （少吃一磅牛肉，就可以省下兩千五到五千加侖的水）I would have been moved. It’s a good idea to save water; we are depleting our underground aquifers faster than we are replenishing them. The largest one, the Ogallala, which covers a vast part of the country from the
John Robbins points out that in the 1980s and 1990s, to conserve water, most of us went to low-flow showerheads. If you take a daily seven-minute shower, he says, and you have a 2-gallon-per-minute low-flow showerhead, you use about 100 gallons of water per week, or 5,200 gallons of water per year. If you had used the old-fashioned 3-gallon-per-minute showerhead, I calculate you would have used 7,644 gallons of water per year. So by going low flow, you saved almost 2,500 gallons of water per year. Wonderful. But by giving up one pound of beef that year, you’d save maybe double that. You’d save more water than you would by not showering at all for six months! And that’s just one of the environmental impacts you’d have.
The modern factory farming system is a prolific consumer of fossil fuel and a prolific producer of poisonous wastes. （現代養殖場使用了大量的石化燃料並且製造了大量的有毒廢氣物）Up to 100,000 animals are herded together on huge feedlots. These animals do not graze on grass, as picture books tell us; they can’t graze at all. Feedlots are crowded, filthy, stinking places with open sewers, unpaved roads and choking air. The animals would not survive at all but for the fact that they are fed huge amounts of antibiotics. （家禽養殖場的環境擁擠骯髒，為了讓家禽在這種環境中生存，於是養殖場給動物打大量的抗生素）It is now conceded that the antibiotics fed to cattle are the main cause of antibiotic resistance in people, as the bacteria constantly in these environments evolve to survive them. The cattle are fed prodigious quantities of corn. At a feedlot of a mere 37,000 cows, 25 tons of corn are dumped every hour. It takes 1.2 gallons of oil to make the fertilizer used for each bushel of that corn. （為了生產餵養大量家禽的穀物，需要用石化原料來製造穀物所需的肥料）Before a cow is slaughtered, she will eat 25 pounds of corn a day; by the time she is slaughtered she will weigh more than 1,200 pounds. In her lifetime she will have consumed, in effect, 284 gallons of oil. Today’s factory-raised cow is not a solar-powered ruminant but another fossil fuel machine. （工廠大量飼養的的牛已經不是自然的、太陽驅動的反芻動物，而是不折不扣的石化機器。）
And she will produce waste. Livestock now produces 130 times the amount of waste that people do. This waste is untreated and unsanitary. It bubbles with chemicals and diseasebearing organisms. （目前家禽所產生的排泄物是人類的130倍之多，這些排泄物都沒有經過處理而且相當不衛生，充滿了許多化學物質和會傳染疾病的微生物）It overpowers nature’s ability to clean it up. It’s poisoning rivers, killing fish and getting into human drinking water. 65% of
There are more environmental impacts. Cattle don’t spend their entire lives in feedlots. When they are young, they graze. Where do they graze? Well, more than two-thirds of the land area of the mountain states are used for grazing. 70% of the lands in western national forests are grazed; 90% of Bureau of Land Management land is grazed. These are public lands, lands that President Clinton didn’t even try to save. These lands are trampled by the cattle, compacting the soil. When it rains, the land doesn’t absorb the water. Instead, it runs off, taking away topsoil, forming deep gullies and damaging streambeds.（許多土地都拿來作為幼牛吃草的放牧之用，牧地的土壤被牛群大量踩踏而密無孔隙，形成了不透水的表面，降雨時，放牧地無法吸收雨水，雨水形成徑流將表土沖走，造成土壤侵蝕並造成河流淤積） The government protects the cattle by killing off any creature that might threaten the livestock. They poison, trap, snare, den, shoot or gun down the wildlife. （為了讓牧地上的牛群不受其他野生動物威脅，政府用盡各種方法來殺害各重野生動物）Denning, by the way, is the practice by federal agents of pouring kerosene into the dens of animals and setting them on fire, burning the young animals alive in their nests. According to Robbins, agents kill badgers, black bear, bobcats, coyotes, gray fox, red fox, mountain lions, opossums, raccoons, skunks, beavers, porcupines, prairie dogs, blackbirds, cattle egrets and starlings using these methods. These activities take place on public lands, which were created in large part to protect the environment! Your tax dollars subsidize these activities.
I’m not done yet. We in the do not get all of our beef from the West. We import more than 200 million pounds of beef from
We humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 25% compared with any other period when humans were on this planet. Most of that has taken place in the last 50 years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, consisting of some of the best scientists in the world, says global warming is a fact. If uncontrolled, we will have ecosystem collapses, crop failures, weather disasters, coastal flooding, the spreading of previously controlled diseases, the death of coral reefs and new insect pests. Some of these things are starting to happen already. Coral reefs are dying. Insect pests are spreading out of their range and killing off new kinds of trees. Weather patterns are changing. Some places have had extreme weather events, with billions of dollars of losses. Some island people have had to abandon their islands because rising seas have salinated their underground aquifers.
Carbon dioxide is largely produced by the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal, and especially our use of inefficient vehicles for transportation. But not often mentioned is the fossil fuel used to raise farm animals. As I said earlier, a factory cow is a fossil fuel machine, not a solar-powered ruminant whose wastes fertilize the fields to produce more grass for the cow to eat. When you eat beans, for example, you use 1/27 the amount of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of energy as you do when you eat beef. You get the same food energy producing only 4% of the carbon dioxide that a person eating beef does. Another fact we don’t talk about: cattle produce almost one fifth of global methane emissions. Cattle fart. Big time. （牛隻是會放屁的，放很多屁！他們製造的的甲烷佔了全球甲烷排放量的五分之一）Their gas is methane. Methane is actually 24 times as potent as carbon dioxide in causing climate chaos.
There’s another major environmental consequence of our factory system of animal raising: that’s the matter of species extinctions. （大量養殖造成另一個的主要環境災害是物種的滅絕） It is true that species die off all the time. Normally, the Earth has lost 10 to 25 species per year. But in the billions of years of life on this Earth, we have had five periods of major extinctions; the last one was 67 million years ago, when, possibly because of a meteor colliding with the Earth, we lost the dinosaurs. But now there’s a sixth extinction, and it is not caused by a meteor, but by human beings. And this is a big one; we are losing several thousand species per year, and maybe tens of thousands. We think of mammals that are endangered, and 25% of mammalian species are endangered. But what’s much more endangered, or wiped out already, are the plants, including varieties of plankton, fungi, bacteria and insects, that are fundamental to all so-called higher forms of life. All life will unravel if these creatures are wiped out.
The driving force behind all these extinctions is the destruction of wildlife habitat, especially the rainforests. The driving force behind the destruction of the rainforests is livestock grazing. The leading cause of species in the being threatened or eliminated is livestock grazing. A 1997 study of endangered species in the southwestern by the Fish and Wildlife Service found that half the species studied were threatened by cattle ranching.
You and I cannot change all this. We are not going to be able to get a bill through Congress outlawing factory farming. Yet EarthSave as an organization believes we can still have a dramatic effect: We believe that you can protect your health and protect the environment one bite at a time.
Let’s review what I’ve said here: By not eating beef– and other farm animals as well–you: （不吃牛肉和其他大量生產的肉類，我們就可以：）
- save massive amounts of water – 3,000 to 5,000 gallons of water for every pound of beef you avoid, （節省大量的用水量）
- avoid polluting our streams and rivers better than any other single recycling effort you do, （避免河川遭到污染，即使做回收也沒有辦法如此有效的保護河川）
- avoid the destruction of topsoil, （避免表土流失）
- avoid the destruction of tropical forest, （讓熱帶雨林免於收到摧毀）
- avoid the production of carbon dioxide. (Your average car produces 3 kg/day of CO2. To clear rainforest to produce beef for one hamburger produces 75 kg of CO2. Eating one pound of hamburger does the same damage as driving your car for more than three weeks); （減少二氧化碳排放）
- reduce the amount of methane gas produced. (I imagine the next bumper sticker: stop farts, don’t eat beef); （減少甲烷排放）
- reduce the destruction of wildlife habitat, and （減少野生動物棲息地所受到的破壞）
- help to save endangered species. （協助保護瀕臨絕種的動物）
That’s a pretty good day’s work, for just what you don’t put in your mouth.
Steve Boyan PhD recently retired from his post as a political science professor at University of Maryland,
