“If slaughterhouses had glass-walls then everyone would be a vegetarian”
-Anonymous
I think the most frustrating aspects about environmental problems are how convoluted the “solutions” have become. I came into this subject with simple expectations that revolved around the area of individualistic action. However, I have found that solutions that I had come to see as obvious, are actually full of contradictions, and in fact, may not even be real solutions to the problems at hand.
One of the ideologies that I had come to believe, almost as truth is that by being a vegetarian, I was, in fact, doing an environmental duty to the animals and the environment that are constantly being harmed by the meat industry. I had been convinced, through ethical-centered organizations such as PETA, that my individual conscious choice to refrain from consuming animals was actually affecting the industry in a negative way. Less animals were being slaughtered for consumption due to my vegetarian lifestyle…right? And therefore, less land was being utilized for the production of these animals, and this meant that threats to the environment such as deforestation were in fact decreased, all because of me.
Although my initial decision to become a vegetarian was due to a trait that must be, in some way, a characteristic of mine, I had come to believe that this choice was actually making a big difference within society. I would google websites that calculated (1) how many animals I was saving (2) how much CO2 production I was preventing and (3) how much land I was protecting just by choosing to not consume meat. And through this “evidence” I would attempt to convince my family members and friends that choosing to be vegetarian was an incredibly rewarding way to prevent the problems within the meat industry. On many of these websites, you type in the number of years, or months, you have been a vegetarian (or vegan) and press a button and Vuawh-lah! You had a finite answer for all three (or more) of these categories.
This is one of many of these sites:
http://vegetariancalculator.com/
These were the answers that it calculated for me for the entire 16 years that I have been a vegetarian:
How many animals you saved overall: 3,232
How many lbs of meat you didn’t eat overall: 3,120
Lbs of CO2 not released into the atmosphere overall: 25,740
However, by choosing to look at the actual effects that being a vegetarian, or vegan, for my solutions project in ENVS-160 has, I have been forced to open my perspective to the possibility that my individual choice may not actually be as effective as I had thought. In many classes we have focused on the difficult balance and resounding difference between individualistic action and governmental policy. Environmentalists are incredibly divided when it comes to choosing which of the two (individual action or governmental policy) is a more constructive choice.
The problem with individual action, and the problem with believing that the solution to the problems within the meat industry is vegetarianism, is that it puts the weight of the problem onto the consumer. Obviously, if everyone in the world chose to become vegetarian, then there would no longer be a market for the meat industry, and it would be forced to shut down. However, it is an intangible goal and will never, realistically, occur on its own. I mean, I have trouble convincing my friends and family to even consider the possibility that they could go vegetarian or vegan. Even through years of listening to me throw ethical, health and environmental arguments at my family, they are still all very much carnivores. So this leaves me with the question: What actions can we participate in that will effectively put an end to the problems caused by the meat industry?