Evolve or Die

I read a great article by Steve Pavlina today entitled Concious Evolution. You should definitely check it out. It's part of his Meaning of Life Series, which I must add is also excellent.

Anyway, the one part of the article that I totally dug was the part of about vegetarianism. It pretty much summarizes the political reasons to stop eating meat. Here's the good part:

Consider something as simple as diet. The environmental consequences of the Standard American Diet are severe — to say it wastes resources and pollutes the environment is a gross understatement. The U.S. government subsidizes most of it, which hides the true costs. It takes 18 times as much land to grow the food for someone eating the SAD diet compared to someone eating a vegan-plant based diet. If someone eating the SAD diet were to eat vegan for just one day, they’d save more water than they would by not showering for a year. Your decision to eat a burger for dinner is not merely a health choice — it’s an environmental and political one as well. In fact, virtually anything you might do environmentally or politically in your lifetime is irrelevant compared to the simple decision of what to eat each day. You could devote your entire life to Greenpeace, and it will only amount to a puny fraction of what you’d accomplish by living as a resource-guzzling playboy who happens to be vegetarian.

And yet, so few people are aware of the long-range consequences of what they do because their “knowledge” is fed to them by marketers. They buy into the social context instead of thinking for themselves. People make billions off the SAD diet, and it doesn’t hurt them financially if you want to plant a few trees on the side or clean up some trash to feel good about yourself, as long as you keep downing the burgers. But try to attack the diet that makes them rich, and they’ll drown you in marketing until you submit.

SAD, indeed. What's the excuse, then? I figure most people will just tell me, "Well, humans have been eating meat since, like, forever!" Others will just lie to themselves and tell me the facts here are bullshit. Others will just ignore this and continue eating meat, pretending like the problem isn't there. I know, I did all of those things.

The facts still remain. They don't go away. Not because you don't like them. Not because you disagree with them. So, if you're not going to give up meat for your health or for animal rights, maybe you'll do it for the future of humanity?

Just maybe.

PS: Sorry about the extremely overbearing, holier-than-thou tone of this article. I guess all those jokes about me not eating meat have really gotten to me, at least subconsciously. At the same time, I just figure most people haven't heard these statistics. I don't expect any changes because of this information; I heard these stats in August and didn't change my diet until late December.

Still, I don't know, I would just feel inauthentic if I didn't share this.

Thanks for you patience and forgiveness.

As always, namaste.