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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE SOHM, VISIONS OF AMERICA/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES
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By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT Executive Editor
I was thinking about Brianna Randall’s article for us this week, about cattle ranchers in the Great Plains who are trying to bring fire back to the tall-grass prairie, when I picked up the Sunday Washington Post and read the latest food fight about meat. Nutritious tastiness or planetary menace? Responsible for 23 percent of global greenhouse emissions, as one opinion piece claimed, or merely 14 percent, according to another?
Gentle reader, you decide. Except how can you really?
A few years ago I tried to sort through the tangle, at least for American eaters of beef, of which I am occasionally still one. The reasons for concern about the environmental impact of beef have only increased since.
In the western United States, most of which is in persistent drought and facing a parched future, a third of all consumed water is used to irrigate crops to feed cattle. Air pollution from meat production causes thousands of deaths in the U.S. a year, Sarah Gibbens wrote last week. In Brazil, cattle ranching and soy production for livestock feed are major drivers of Amazon deforestation—just one sign that feeding 9 or 10 billion people an American carnivore’s diet is not going to work. There’s not enough planet for that.
For all those reasons and more—our own health, the welfare of animals—eating less meat is a fine idea.
But I still think that focusing on that as a strategy in the climate fight is a terrible idea, especially in the U.S. First, it’s obviously not working—beef consumption has ticked up over the past few years, in spite of all the talk about it. Second, even it worked, it wouldn’t help climate much: Methane-belching cattle and manure piles and ponds account for just 4 percent of U.S. greenhouse emissions, according to the EPA.
On the other hand, harping on beef is a great way to inflame the culture wars, as Brent Cunningham wrote in the Post, and thus to impede all kinds of progress.
Meanwhile, back in the Great Plains, Randall writes, a bunch of cattle ranchers are doing a good thing for the tall-grass prairie. They’re setting fire to it occasionally, the way Native Americans once did. That’s keeping trees from invading the last remnants of these gorgeous grasslands. “Fire is what keeps the prairie a prairie,” Kansas rancher Bill Sproul told Randall. It also allows him and other ranchers in the Flint Hills to graze more than a million steers on rich grass. (Pictured below, a controlled burn in Oregon.)
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