Letting animals "lead full animal lives" is certainly a laudable goal. The animal rights movement, however, does not appear to take into account the burgeoning population of the world. World population was estimated to be around 1 billion in 1804. It is now over 6 billion, and is estimated to hit 7 billion by 2013. How do all these people eat? The world currently does not produce sufficient food to feed its population enough to avoid malnutrition by large numbers of people. If that is the case now, how will it be the case in 45 years?
Some population factiods:
World population is projected to increase from 6 to 9 billion in the next 50 years.
The world’s population is growing by 200,000 people a day.
Between 1980 and 2030, the population of low- and middle-income countries will more than double -- to 7.0 billion, compared with 1 billion for high-income countries.
In the next 35 years, 2.5 billion people will be added to the current population of 6 billion.
U.S. population has doubled during the past 60 years to 270 million and, at the current growth rate, is projected to possibly double again, to 540 million, in the next 75 years.
Today, more than 3 billion people suffer from malnutrition, the largest number and proportion of the world population in history, according to the World Health Organization. Malnutrition increases the susceptibility to diseases such as diarrhea and malaria.
One reason for the increase in malnutrition is that production of grains per capita has been declining since 1983. Grains provide 80 percent to 90 percent of the world's food. Each additional human further reduces available food per capita.
The reasons for this per capita decrease in food production are a 20 percent decline in cropland per capita, a 15 percent decrease in water for irrigation and a 23 percent drop in the use of fertilizers.
Biotechnology and other technologies apparently have not been implemented fast enough to prevent declines in per capita food production during the past 17 years.
ecofuture.org
The earth has a carrying capacity, and we are exceeding that carrying capacity and are rapidly depleting resources.
See Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, by William Catton (I have not read the book, and have only skimmed the excerpt linked below, but its scary as hell).
dieoff.org
The conclusion of the article is apt:
Viewing contemporary events from a pre-ecological paradigm, we missed their significance. From an ecological paradigm we can see that fewer members of the species Homo colossus than of the species Homo sapiens can be supported by a finite world. The more colossal we become, the greater the difference. What we called "pollution," and regarded at first as either a mere nuisance or an indication of the insensitivity of industrial people to esthetic values, can now be recognized as a signal from the ecosystem. If we had learned to call it "habitat damage," we might have read it as a sign of the danger inherent in becoming colossal. Even if the world were not already overloaded by four billion members of the species Homo sapiens, it does not have room for that many consumers of resources and exuders of extrametabolites on the scale of modern Homo colossus. In short, on a planet no larger than ours, four billion human beings simply cannot all turn into prosthetic giants.
As we move deeper into the post-exuberant age, one of the keen insights of a passionately concerned and unusually popular sociologist, C. Wright Mills, will become increasingly important to us all. It was an insight by which he tried to help his contemporaries read the news of their times perceptively. We will need to be at least as perceptive to avoid misconstruing events that will happen in the years to come.
Although the paradigm from which Mills wrote was pre-ecological, in one of his most earnest books he transcended archaic thoughtways enough to note that only sometimes and in some places do men make history; in other times and places, the minutiae of everyday life can add up to mere "fate." Mills gave us an unusually clear definition of this important word. Infinitesimal actions, if they are numerous and cumulative, can become enormously consequential. Fate, he explained, is shaping history when what happens to us was intended by no one and was the summary outcome of innumerable small decisions about other matters by innumerable people. [17]
In a world that will not accommodate four billion of us if we all become colossal, it is both futile and dangerous to indulge in resentment, as we shall be sorely tempted to do, blaming some person or group whom we suppose must have intended whatever is happening to happen. If we find ourselves beset with circumstances we wish were vastly different, we need to keep in mind that to a very large extent they have come about because of things that were hopefully and innocently done in the past by almost everyone in general, and not just by anyone in particular. If we single out supposed perpetrators of our predicament, resort to anger, and attempt to retaliate, the unforeseen outcomes of our indignant acts will compound fate.
In precisely Mills's sense, the conversion of a marvelous carrying capacity surplus into a competition-aggravating and crash-inflicting deficit was a matter of fate. No compact group of leaders ever decided knowingly to take incautious advantage of enlargment of the scope of applicability of Liebig's law, or subsequently to reduce that scope and leave a swollen load inadequately supported. No one decided deliberately to terminate the Age of Exuberance. No group of leaders conspired knowingly to turn us into detritovores. Using the ecological paradigm to think about human history, we can see instead that the end of exuberance was the summary result of all our separate and innocent decisions to have a baby, to trade a horse for a tractor, to avoid illness by getting vaccinated, to move from a farm to a city, to live in a heated home, to buy a family automobile and not depend on public transit, to specialize, exchange, and thereby prosper.
So, Grainne, longing for a time when animals "led full animal lives" and hoping that by 2050 the majority of the world population will be vegan is, in my opinion, unproductive. There are too many humans on this planet, and the planet does not have the capacity to grow sufficient amounts of grains to feed the world population (recall factoid No 6, above - nearly 1/2 of the world's population suffers from malnutrition, in the estimation of the World Health Organization). There is not enough food to feed everyone, whether plant matter or animal matter. Huge amounts of cropland have been removed from production. This removal of cropland from production is not the result of factory farming, but "a 20 percent decline in cropland per capita, a 15 percent decrease in water for irrigation and a 23 percent drop in the use of fertilizers." Factoids No. 7 and 8, above.
There are just too damn many people living on the planet.
So, can you tell me, how will the world produce sufficient grain and vegetable foodstuffs by 2050 that most people on earth will be vegan?
I don't think it can be done.
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