Op-Ed Argues 'Put Down the Burger' to Protect Earth's Biodiversity

"Earth is in the midst of the worst mass extinction since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago — and this time, the asteroid is us." So says Michael Grunwald, an environmentalist, in an opinion piece for the New York Times. But his larger point is that "biodiversity loss is not that complicated a mystery." The amount of area on planet earth devoted ot agriculture is now more than twice the size of North America. We're destroying and degrading the habitats of other species to grow food for our own. This means the fate of the world's bugs, bunnies and other creatures and critters — and what's left of the forests, wetlands and other habitats they call home — depends more than anything else on what we put in our mouths and how it gets made.... Humanity needs to start shrinking our agricultural footprint and expanding our natural footprint, after thousands of years of doing the reverse. This will be an extraordinary challenge, because we'll also need to produce more than 7.4 quadrillion additional calories every year to feed our growing population, in an era when climate-fueled droughts, heat waves, floods and blights could make it harder to grow food.... If we are serious about cleaning up the mess we're making for less influential species, there are four things individuals as well as nations and corporations can do. The first is to eat less meat, which would be a lot easier if meat weren't so beloved and delicious.... But the inconvenient truth is that when we eat cows, chickens and other livestock, we might as well be eating macaws, jaguars and other endangered species. That's because livestock chew up far more land per calorie than crops. Producing beef is 100 times as land-intensive as cultivating potatoes and 55 times as land-intensive as peas or nuts. Livestock now use nearly 80 percent of agricultural land while producing less than 20 percent of calories. Cattle are the leading driver of deforestation in the Amazon, followed by soybeans, another commodity, which get fed to pigs and chickens.... If Americans continue to average three burgers a week while the developing world starts to follow our path, it's hard to see how the Amazon survives. But it's at least possible that we could shrink agricultural footprints by shifting our diets toward meat made without livestock, like the plant-based substitutes offered by companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat or maybe someday cultured meat grown from animal cells. Grunwald also recommends wasting less food. "About a third of the food grown on Earth is lost or tossed before it reaches our mouths, which means a third of the land (as well as the water, fertilizer and other resources) used to grow that food is also wasted." The third way to ease the global land squeeze "would be to stop using productive farmland for biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel — and to stop burning trees for power." And finally, "farmers will have to supersize their yields enough to make a lot more food with a lot less land.

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