Day 24: Plant More Trees

Yes, another post relating back to climate change. Enjoy.

For the longest time, trees have been cleared, to make more room for human "necessities".

The biggest story which happened more recently was that of the forest fire in the Brazil Amazon rainforest. For those of you who don't know, the fire in the rainforest which was home to 20% of our oxygen, was purposefully lit. There was some time when everyone thought it was a natural fire from dryness, then we found out that farmers put fire to the forest. Animal agriculture farmers. They cleared all this land so that they could overproduce cows, which add more pollution to the planet.

The thing with animal agriculture is that not only is so much land cleared for the cows, but there is also so much land cleared for their food. Here are some facts from the documentary Cowspiracy:

Animal agriculture water consumption ranges from 34-76 trillion gallons annually

Growing feed crops for livestock consumes 56% of water in the US.

2,500 gallons of water are needed to produce 1 pound of beef.

477 gallons of water are required to produce 1lb. of eggs; almost 900 gallons of water are needed for 1lb. of cheese.

Livestock covers 45% of the earth’s total land.

Animal agriculture is the leading cause of species extinction, ocean dead zones, water pollution, and habitat destruction.

Every time I bring these facts up, people always have to say "if we didn't eat them, they would overpopulate." No. NO. NOOO. Listen. If we didn't eat cows, people wouldn't be forcing cows to overproduce until they collapse on the floor in fatigue. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be cows on our planet at all. As I've said before, every being has a purpose on our planet. Now you're like yessss... to eat. Not necessarily. Maybe in the beginning, when that's all people knew, was killing animals for food. However, now we have all the resources in the world, we can make plants into anything imaginable. We don't need to kill animals. We don't need to clear forests for our food. Now you're like, what about all the fields which would harvest our fruits and vegetables. Yes, but animal agriculture probably requires triple if not more land.

The reason preserving as much natural land as possible, in this case is because trees, and plants are our oxygen source. Not only that, our trees basically die inside for us, they collect all of our carbon dioxide. All of the bad emissions we put into the planet, our trees take some of it away from the planet. When they are cut down, or burned, this releases all of that carbon dioxide back into the air. (I'm not sourcing this, as I learned about this years ago with multiple educational videos of which I cannot remember for the life of me.) The more trees we plant, the better oxygen quality we have, the less toxic emissions we have killing the planet. The more trees we get rid of, the less oxygen we have, the more emissions killing the planet.

This may be a fashion statement in the time of COVID19, but I most definitely don't want it to be a lifestyle beyond this pandemic.

Thanks y'all for reading today. I hope it was educational, or at least made you think.

Now go on, plant a tree or something.

Kailee