Call it a conspiracy if you want. But there is a new documentary that tells it like it is. They call it "Cowspiracy". They bring the research and facts together and show, in a powerful film, how animal agriculture is largely responsible for many of the most pressing issues of our time including: climate change, water scarcity and pollution, deforestation and land depletion, rapid loss of species, dead sea zones...you name it, animal agriculture is there.
Why do they call it a conspiracy? Because most of us are in on the secret and don't want to talk about it. Because so many of us are participants in this systemic destruction we tend to do what humans do and deny that the problem exists or we become defiant about our involvement. The strength of this documentary is that it gets into the reasons why the large membership environmental groups won't even talk about the devastation of animal agriculture. In the trailer above Micheal Pollan nails it about why the large environment groups are mum on animal agriculture. He says it's because they are membership organizations who want to grow their membership so they stay away from the subject that might offend prospective members.
Talk about offensive. Check out the impacts of animal agriculture on our planet in the following video:
Impact clips from First Spark Media on Vimeo.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the few large environmental groups who are fighting the good fight and acknowledging the massive contribution of animal agriculture to our major environmental problems including climate change. They include The Center for Biological Diversity, which has launched its "Take Extinction Off Your Plate" campaign and Food and Water Watch, whose work on factory farms and food safety has been stellar. Greenpeace has done an excellent job documenting the causes of Amazon deforestation while The Environmental Working Group did a study of the climate impacts of individual foods.
We are not entirely to blame. We have been used and abused by an economic and political system that functions without adhering to the tenants of the 'common good'. Call it 'common greed' if you want. It's a system that rewards just a few financially while it manipulates the rest of us into contributing to our own destruction. Think of the massive subsidies paid to the corn and soy industries, the majority of their crops used as cheap animal feed and you can see how our corrupt political bribery system contributes to the 'common greed'.
So we have a corporate agricultural system, consolidated, so that there are very few players who reap the rewards while the rest of us pay the hidden externalities of climate change, resource degradation and depletion and the massive contribution of meat and dairy consumption to chronic disease.