Of the total area that is used by humans (Agriculture, Urban and Built-up Land),
- urban and built-up land is 1m km²,
- agriculture is 48m km²,
so agriculture is 48 of 49 millions km² used, that’s 98%. The remaining 2% are all streets and housing and other infrastructure together.
Most pasture land isn’t suitable as farmland - there’s examples of overlap of course, but you really can’t draw that conclusion from the chart, it leaves out far too much information.
It’s not only pastures. Growing animal feed is vastly less efficient than growing food for humans directly. We could stop farming animals, use some of that land for growing human food, rewild the excess, and rewild the pastures.
Okay, but can we stop using suitable farmland to grow corn cattle feed?
During peacetime, all the corn fields kept operational with subsidy that just create corn which is fed to livestock seem like a waste.
But if China (or anybody else) pulls a fucky-wucky and makes it difficult to get food imported from outside the US, we slaughter the livestock and then have enough corn to feed the whole nation (and a lot of our allies). Without missing a beat.
You really still see yourself as belonging to the nation that protects the world, don’t you? Despite everything.
Allies? Lol.
I’m wholly in support of this plan.
Yep for sure. The food grown to feed livestock (6M2 km) seems like it’s just feeding humans with extra steps. If you cut that out and feed humans directly. You’d still have livestock on grazing pad (32M2 km), just not the whole feedlot situation.
Or go a step further and stop doing animal farming.
Yeah, and those extra steps require more land and more water and more transportation and more harvesting and more processing etc etc. Every extra step makes the whole system less efficient. We’re essentially sacrificing farmland.
We’re not sacrificing it, exactly the opposite; without the demand for plant products generated by animal ag, we wouldn’t be able to exploit all that farmland. You know, for money.
Most of the corn cattle are eating is the stalk and husks. The stuff we’re going to grow regardless and would otherwise throw away.
Near slaughter when they get fattened up on feed lots (called finishing) it’s mostly cracked corn grain, it’s more towards the beggining of life that they’re fed roughage with only a small amount of supporting grain.
This is true. But at the same time, the tradeoff I think more about isn’t pasture versus crop land, but pasture and crop land versus wild land. Personally, I really enjoy eating meat, and have no problem with its production in general. But I also think that we should reserve far more land for nature.
Imo, a good way to strike the balance is via pigouvian taxes. First, of course, a carbon tax. Animal agriculture creates a lot of carbon, so higher prices would drive consumers to lower-carbon alternatives. Then a land value tax - the trick would be deciding how much the intrinsic beauty of nature and access to it by the public is worth - but once we figure out a decent number, the scheme should work quite well. If you want to farm/ranch, you aren’t allowed to use up everyone else’s nature for free. Either generate enough money to pay the public back for using their nature, or bounce. And of course, better rules and oversight for animal welfare - I wanna eat meat, not meat produced with unnecessary suffering.
This combination of approaches would reduce meat consumption and land use in a fair and ethical way, while still not being overbearing or playing favorites by doing things like banning x or y. Unfortunately, this is very much a pipe dream - at least in the US right now, as we have, umm… more pressing issues.
Would you think, “I really enjoy sex with kids,” is a convincing position to take?
I have a genuine question for you. Is your morality “might is right” or something more sophisticated? I don’t mean any offense. Just curious.
Tacking “no offense” and “genuine question” onto what is essentially “Hey is your moral view the most basic possible description of authoritarianism or are you smarter than that?” really doesn’t help it not be offensive or make you sound genuine. If you’re sincere in those statements, I really suggest you rephrase this because right now it reads as extremely patronizing.
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Fuck dude, wake up. That’s two different people you are
talking tosealioning as though they are one.edit: reevaluated the thread.
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Passive aggressive ad hominem.
Either engage directly with the portion of the argument you take issue with, or ask for clarification regarding the comment.
Okay, do you have a more polite way to ask “are you aware that you’re a nihilist?” I was genuinely curious!
Anyway, he said he’s a rule utilitarian. So, the answer is “no.”
Isolate the nihilistic portions of text, quote them, explain why they are nihilistic to all the thread readers and the OP.
Then inquire if the person you’re confronting stands by that or has a different take in it.
Or, be rude and make it more reddit-like.
If your interest is legitimate, then I can explain.
Racism, speciesism, etc. represent contradictions, and formal systems are vulnerable to the principle of explosion (ex falso quadlibet). Basically, if a contradiction is true then anything is true. That’s what makes bigotry “wrong” in the formal sense (ethics is epistemically very similar to mathematics, but that’s another story). All bigots are obligate nihilists. OP is a speciesist. Ergo, he is an obligate nihilist.
Anyway, ethics is highly abstract, like math, and using guesswork to reach moral conclusions is generally ineffective. It’s why we had slavery for 10,000 years and Donald Trump is currently in office. There are lots of reasons why people suck at ethics, but it’s mainly lack of education. We get 12 years to study math in school (and even then most people suck at math) compared to 0 years for ethics.
Thank you. Not really demanding to point out that it’s not a private DM and we aren’t mind readers.
No. I guess if I really had to peg my ethical system down, I would choose rule utilitarianism or something similar. But practically, I just try to be nice to people and to do what I feel is the right thing, which I know via what is revealed to me directly via a lifetime of emotional experiences after interacting with others and making various choices.
But I’m confused - why do you ask?
Well, some of your opinions made me think you were concerned with the suffering of animals (human and non), while others made me think you were not so concerned. This sort of juxtaposition is common, and it made me wonder about the way you see the world.