Farnboro John
Well-known member
Just remind me what your degree is in John because you clearly do not understand the science behind energy loss as you move up food chains? Estimated at 90%. This is not a recent discovery: I read papers on it as part of my ecology degree thirty years ago. Several people on my course, gave up eating meat at the time, due to this. Yes biodiversity is higher in mixed farming but the point is less land is needed for farming so more is available for other uses such as conservation. I would be very interested to know which scientific papers support your opinion. Feel free to quote them.
I have no ethical problem at all with eating meat. I do however have an ethical problem with people spouting stuff with no scientific evidence to back it up. Few people I know who chose to eat no/less meat for ecological reasons would want a complete stop to meat farming, just a considerable reduction.
Steve,
it cannot have escaped your notice that the path from vegetable matter growing in the soil to steak on the plate passes through but one change and - for instance - the energy required to cook a steak rare is considerably less than that for even a fairly finely chopped swede. And the fact also remains that a cow in a grass field bounded by hedges is set amid biodiversity whereas a field of whatever drenched in fertilisers and insecticides sets out to - and in a modern farm, as important ecological work tells us, succeeds in - eliminating biodiversity, invertebrate biomass and consequently that of all the wild species that depend upon it.
It is a mistake to depend too much on a single strand of reasoning when dealing with complex interactive systems - which is why the energy loss argument moves me not at all. It is plain that intensive vegetable farming by reducing the complexity of ecosystems to a minimum must be an awful thing.
Better by far to stick to mixed farming and let the human masses starve until there are no more masses - before they have destroyed everything, which they will inevitably do if pandered to by fools who think that it must be possible to feed them all without even defining an "acceptable" limit to the total human population that would then allow conservation and farming planning at the landscape scale.
Instead it seems to be accepted that no limit will ever be placed on human population growth: in which case there is no hope for wildlife and ecosystems now or in any conceivable future. Without immediate powerful population control there is no possible aversion of the climate change emergency or any other aspect of human over-population - emptying the oceans of fish, putting all land under the plough or hoof, eliminating all possible competitors from top predators to invertebrate crop eaters, concreting over the land not farmed for buildings and so on.
So frankly its impossible. Governments can't save the planet because they pander to the people: even the diabolical, inhuman despotism of China has given up on its one child policy, and anywhere that votes count is only concerned to get more of them by promising the earth - literally.....
Get on a jet and go and see it while its there. There's no point bothering with hope for the future. Anthropocentricity has eliminated it.
John