Livestock’s Long Shadow by David Shaw
Editor’s note: David Shaw, a participant in the blog project by Professor Simran Sethi’s Media and the Environment course at the University of Kansas, examines the global impact of livestock production. This post was originally published to the course blog on Tuesday, March 15, 2008.
Recently, I discovered a report from 2006, entitled Livestock’s Long Shadow, which is an assessment of global livestock’s impacts on the environment. The report was produced by the Livestock, Environment and Development (LEAD) Initiative. This is not an animal rights group, or a band of hippie vegans, but rather a sub-committee of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
I’m well aware of many of the report’s findings, but there is much in the report that I never knew. It’s troubling that livestock is rarely addressed by leading environmentalists and environmental groups. Especially because, as the report states, “the livestock sector emerges as one of the most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every scale from local to global.”
Based on recent posts about the impact of food on the environment, I highly recommend at least skimming through the report. Here are a few highlights I’ve taken directly from the report’s executive summary:
(photo: USDA. Waste lagoon at a hog farm in North Carolina)
