A Delicate Balance: The Truth Page #9

---

was 170 kilos per person

per year in the US.

Today, this figure is 277

kilos per person per year.

In China, meat consumption in

1950 was 4 kilos per person,

while today, it is 77 kilo per person.

This massive increase,

when taking into account

with the ever growing world

population, means that unfathomable

numbers of animals have to be

grown and killed on a daily basis.

In the US alone, it was

estimated that 1 million chickens

were killed every hour in the year 2000.

The worlwide figures for the

number of animals killed every day

to end up in supermarkets, restaurants

and your home is staggering.

Around the world,

about 60 billion animals

are slaughtered every year for food.

That doesn't even include all the

animals that don't make it to slaughter.

In the US alone, more than 10 billion

animals, every year, are killed for food.

If you just compare this to

the population of the Earth,

of humans, are just 6 billion... you

realize that the number is so vast,

that it's hard to conceive of.

Water

In the US, 80% of the fresh

water is used for food production.

It requires about 100 times more water

to produce 1 kilo of animal protein

than to produce 1 kilo of grain protein.

In total, what this means is

that to produce 1 kilo of beef

requires 100,000 liters of water.

We should really be pricing water

properly so that people, farmers,

agriculture, meat producers,

pay the real cost of the water.

(?) And then the market would ???

sort out that what kind of things

it made sense to produce in Australia,

and what sort of things it didn't make

sense to produce without the subsidies

that currently are going to

agriculture because of the...

virtually free water

that they're getting.

This is obviously not sustainable.

Especially with the ever growing

demands for animal based food.

The water required to grow

various plant crops ranges

from 400 to 2000 liters

of water per kilo of crops.

Maneka Gandhi is a member

of the government in India.

Former activist for the environment and

animals, she has written numerous books.

Some of which are law textbooks

in various universities today.

She was the Minister for

Environment and Cultural Affairs.

Most people don't know this.

They think that when they

eat meat is just one chicken.

They don't realize when they've eaten

the chicken, they've eaten the forest,

they've eaten the water, they've

eaten the air, they've eaten the land...

And huge amounts of of it.

Fossil Energy And Animal Agriculture

In the US, 17% of the fossil

energy is used for food production.

This does not include transport

of the various food products.

Oceans

The massive advances in modern

technology have also reached the oceans.

Peter Singer is the bioethics

professor at Princeton University.

He was named one of the most

influential minds in this century.

When people talk about fish you

first have to distinguish between

wild caught fish and farmed fish

and they both have their problems.

With wild caught fish, the major problem

is that, basically, most of the fish

stocks in the oceans that have taken,

perhaps, millions of years to build up,

are being depleted by

modern fishing practices.

Trollers the size of a football

field have scoured the ocean floors,

leaving them as bare

as an 8-lane highway.

The consequence of what this

means to the life in our oceans

and its contribuition to global warming,

has not even been assessed scientificaly.

A lot of people think that fish farming

is a good thing for the oceans because...

we're the producing the fish, we're

not removing fish from the ocean,

so they think it's sustainable.

What they don't realize is that, for

the fish that are generally in demand,

certainly in developed western countries,

fish like salmon, that are farmed,

they are carnivorous fish.

So, in order to feed them in the

fish farms, we have to, actually,

catch other fish, cheaper fish,

less valuable, and grind them up

and feed them to the

fish in the fish farm.

And so, we're actually probably

catching two or three times as many fish

and feeding them to, let's

say, the farmed salmon,

in order to get that highly priced, but

small amount of farmed salmon out of it.

So, in terms of preserving

the ocean, or for that matter,

reducing green house gas emissions, because

these ships have to use oil to travel,

it's really, completely contrary to

any sound conservation principles.

Biodiversity is the multitude of events

and intimate interactions

of various living creatures,

which together maintain a

harmonious balance in nature.

We have so far wiped out some

80% of this harmony in the oceans.

Many fisheries actually

have a huge by-catch,

which means that they catch a lot

of fish that they don't wanna catch,

they call it trash, usually, and

they just throw them overboard, but,

generally they're dead or so

bad injured they can't live.

Some fisheries, I think prawn

fisheries are an example,

the by-catch might be as

much as ten times the...

by volume of the prawns

that they're catching.

Without the fisheries, it

might be two or three times.

So, there's a vast waste of life

and destruction of the ocean ecology.

We as humanity, as a

whole and as individuals,

have come to the edge

of a dangerous precipice.

We Have A Choice

We either behave as rational,

intelligent human beings

who look at the facts and

make the decision to survive...

Or we ignore reason and supress our

intelligent faculties and, as robots,

driven by our desires

for sensual delight,

fueled by addictions

to the food we love,

we continue until death or

diseases force us to let these go.

One of the questions

that has troubled me is

why people get hooked on unhealthy

food. I mean, let's face it...

nobody ever had to race out at 9

o'clock at night to go buy an orange,

but they do wanna get chocolate, or

something sugary, or a cheeseburger,

that sort of thing.

And we now know why it is that

people are drawn to those things,

or at least we have

some pretty good clues,

these foods:
sugar, chocolate,

also cheese and meat,

tend to release opiates within the

brain, and when I say opiates, I mean

brain chemicals that

have a narcotic effect.

And other foods will not do that.

And, so, it helps to think

of these unhealthy foods

really as very much like drugs

and we break the habit

in much the same way.

The choice is in your shopping

basket... and on your plate.

We all need to act while we still can.

Global warming is here and now...

like it or not, it is

something we have to deal with.

Al Gore is right. Together,

we can still save the planet.

But first, you have to save yourself.

Even when we reduce our energy use,

transportation needs,

flying,

recycling and all that

we can and should do,

that is still not enough,

as it takes 100 hundred years for the

carbondioxide to leave the atmosphere.

There is something much more

powerful you can do today...

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes