Hear ye hear ye. This is the actual visualization
Source:
seeing this all at once. its a lot. There is so much you can learn about the US just by looking at this. I hate it.
Not a single one of these sections is the correct size. Except maybe the maple syrup and the beer.
Replacing half of the cow pasture with (properly managed) timber would solve the worlds lumber shortage. I’d like to see more bamboo being grown. Its great for any buildings that are 4 stories or less. Or is it 3?
LOOK AT RURAL HIGHWAYS VERSUS TRAINS. FOR FUCKS SAKE.
tbf, a railroad is much more land efficient then highways so I’d expect that number to be pretty small no matter what. Though I suppose you could make the argument that the rural highways number should be zero, which is valid too.
I’m pretty annoyed they don’t have parking lots or suburbs in there. Why are “rural highways” called out, but not the millions of miles of sprawling suburban roads?
Sometimes I feel like dae le epic bacon treat defenders have a number of trenches to fall back to, where one dismisses animals’ right to life, another dismisses animal cruelty, another dismisses industrial waste and environmental damage, and the one behind that dismisses inefficient energy use and the waste of land and resources. Ultimately, all of it amounts to “don’t tell me what to do” with layers of decoration on top.
It’s ok if people don’t care about animals. No one is going to force you to eat meat. I promise. It’s also ok if we don’t use all land everywhere as efficiently as possible to grow the maximum amount of calories so that the earth can support the largest number of people possible. We can have a wealth of variety in our diets that include animal products and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Because America is so short of land…
High land use harm native species and has great environmental consequences as described in the article
There’s more to consider than just how much land is available to humans
basically everyone eats meat. If it’s making meat it’s broadly serving the people.
Deforestation is not serving the people
High GHG emissions is not serving the people
High cruelty to non-human animals is not serving the people
Etc.
Yes. It is. This meat isn’t going into dumpsters. It’s largely sold and people love the cheap prices and do not care about any of that in mass
basically everyone is experiencing record heat waves every summer now
Yeah, and neither deforestation nor meat make a dent in that. If you want to end global warming, end the use of fossil fuels.
The statistics they parrot about nothing emissions are largely bullshit and even if everyone stopped eating meat tomorrow we’d still have all the same problems we do now.
You can’t offset global warming with forests, what humans are doing is an order of magnitude larger than what nature is equipped to handle.
Nor is this even relevant at all, because even fossil fuels serve the average person. There’s a reason we keep using them.
The statistics they parrot
That tells me everything i need to know, you cant be convinced with science.
People who don’t understand that all methane emitted by cows must come from carbon gathered by plants and as a result contributes near net zero to the long-term global warming trend are the people who don’t understand science.
The earth doesnt produce carbon at all, so why do you think things have getting warmer? It matters what form that carbon takes. Carbon in the form of a plant is a solid, and even works to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Carbon in the form of methane has a much stronger greenhouse gas effect than regular carbon dioxide. Which is where those bullshit statistics you hate come from, it’s carbon that was solid and is now a greenhouse gas. Same shit as fossil fuels, its not new carbon being made, its just solid carbon being turned into gas.
The earth doesnt produce carbon at all What?
There are hundreds of fully natural processes that emit carbon that have nothing to do with Humans. Volcanos, Plant Respiration, other mammal respiration, forest fires, lime stone erosion, natural decomposition of organic matter, meteorites burning up in the atomosphere, lightning strikes, etc etc. Where do you think the carbon in the earth came from? God? Well before humans existed there were ice ages and periods of higher carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as well as higher oxygen. That statement by itself shows you don’t’ really have a good grasp of what climate change is, nor what is causing it.
The earth doesnt produce carbon at all, so why do you think things have getting warmer? It matters what form that carbon takes. Carbon in the form of a plant is a solid, and even works to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Carbon in the form of methane has
Jesus Christ you’re ignorant.
The carbon in plants comes out of the atmosphere.
Cows eat those plants and processes in their stomach turn it into methane.
Methane in the atmosphere turns back to carbon within 20 years.
Plants then reabsorb that carbon when they grow to feed the cows.
It’s literally a constrained cycle. You can’t increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere through cows and plants. You have to actually find carbon that is in a stable solid form and then put it into the atmosphere when it otherwise wouldn’t be.
In other words, you have to mine coal or pump oil.
Plants and cows have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Where do you think oil and coal came from?
Most of the US is empty and fertile unlike other parts of the world, land use is not really the biggest issue with meat farming
Empty… to humans but not to native species that living there. Grazing still affects those ecosystems there. From the article
As the cattle graze, they tend to disrupt ecosystems and do a lot of damage to the land. They eat or destroy plants consumed by native species, like turtles, which can lead to biodiversity loss. Their manure pollutes rivers and streams, and as they move about, they erode soil.
[…] analyzed decades of BLM data and found that about half of the acreage it oversees that has been assessed fails to meet the agency’s own land health standards (in Nevada, it’s an alarming 83 percent). PEER points to livestock grazing as the primary source of land degradation.
There’s an opportunity cost in using all that land. If we let land go back to its natural state we can sequester quite large amounts of carbon
A 2020 study published in the journal Nature Sustainability highlights the immense environmental potential of changing how we farm and eat. Researchers found that if all high-income countries shifted to a plant-based diet from 2015 to 2050, they’d free up enough land to sequester 32 gigatons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of removing nine years of all those countries’ fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere. Globally, if we shifted to plant-based diets over that same time period, the land saved could sequester the equivalent of 16 years of global fossil fuel emissions.
What’s the environmental cost of growing all that soy, corn and oats for an US wide vegetarian diet?
A lot less than farming meat which requires all the cost of growing that and ensuring the animals are fed and watered until slaughtering.
From the article
But not all agriculture is equally land-intensive. Meat-heavy diets require far more land than low-meat and vegetarian diets.
But not only that it also requires crop land for plant-based diets. From a different source
If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%.
[…]
If we would shift towards a more plant-based diet we don’t only need less agricultural land overall, we also need less cropland.
Unless fake or lab meat is cheaper or just as expensive, this won’t change. Except maybe if costs go higher than what is considered profitable.
Fake meat is cheaper, it’s just not heavily, heavily, subsidized by your tax dollars.
Maybe we should subsidize the fake meat industry instead.
It kills me that hamburger is half the price of Beyond Burger
Because alot of the price of the real meat burger is paid with subsidies…
Just like oil,
The wheels on the bus go
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“The problems are huge, sprawling, and major,” said Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist and executive director of the Western Watersheds Project (WWP), the group that sued numerous federal agencies for failing to preserve the habitat of the Mojave desert tortoise and 77 other species.
WWP alleges that for decades, the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and other agencies have violated an agreement they signed in 2001 that forbids cattle grazing in a part of Nevada’s Gold Butte National Monument in order to protect the desert tortoise, whose population has plunged since the 1980s.
The permitting program is costing the federal government tens of millions of dollars annually to administer, all while giving cattle ranchers a deep discount on public lands.
Even worse, the federal government spends millions annually on its “Wildlife Services” division, which kills wild animals it deems a threat to grazing livestock.
The programs that subsidize the beef industry represent some of the most striking examples of America’s tradition of “agricultural exceptionalism” — giving farmers and ranchers special treatment, like sweeping exemptions from critical environmental, labor, and animal welfare laws.
Agribusiness also benefits from getting large swathes of the West to itself, illustrating a simple fact of land use in America: Contrary to the famous Woody Guthrie song, much of it isn’t for you and me — it’s for the meat industry.
The original article contains 1,123 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
What a stupid and annoying title, trying to imply that I am on some team that is not the “meat industry” team. I eat meat and I have nothing against ranching.
What?
That’s mainly because you can raise livestock/ruminants on non arable land. But the idea that ranchers should be able to just use any land without proper consideration for the environment is crazy.
My responses to that are:
-
What counts as arable? Can you grow literally nothing on it, or is it just unusable for mass industrial mono-cropping at a scale that competes?
-
IIRC even if ruminant grazing is the most efficient way to produce food on this land, it’s still be a severe environmental net negative as opposed to other non-food uses, namely rewilding. Of course this is true for cash crops as well, and I don’t know how the payoff compares, but a lot of animal agriculture defenders like to use this argument to imply that grazers can just be slotted in on the margins with no downside.
-
Based on the map in the article, a substantial portion of land still goes to farmed livestock feed. Eliminate all of that first and then we can actually see how much of this beef is purely ranched.
Meat eaters do love to champion the most ethical and environmental corners of their supply chain, and I appreciate that, but everyone I know that buys a half cow for their deep freezer from a sustainable local farmer refuses to draw the hard line in the fast food drive-thru. “Conscious” meat exists to justify all meat consumption rather than replace it in the supply chain, from my experience growing up on a small hobby farm trying to produce it.
I wish there was a conscious meat fast food option.
-
I agree, the meat industry should be nationalized along with agriculture and the energy sector.
More like taxed out of existence
Idk man, have you ever seen how poorly run government businesses like the DMV are?
DAE DMV?
Every time I hear someone complain about the DMV, USPS, etc, I assume they’re being difficult to the workers. Every experience I’ve had with these kind of government services, I read up ahead on what I need, organize my shit, and show up prepared with a smile.
When I do that you see a wave of relief over the worker and they return the smile and respect. You can basically extrapolate the verbal abuse they deal with all day long.
With my secret method(being nice and respectful), every USPS worker I’ve interacted with has either been very friendly, or neutral but relieved.
Leave our brave troops alone goddamnit, be nice to them.
Well when you try to run a service that is by definition unprofitable, “like a business,” the only way to hit the financial metrics is to cut salary and headcount. This obviously leads to shitty service. That said in states like New York and Illinois the DMV is actually pretty well run, though the number of locations and hours of operation leaves something to be desired.
