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Kip Anderson's Criticisms Of 'Cowspiracy'

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Kip Anderson of the movie documentary “Cowspiracy” shares a UN study states that the meat and dairy industries, and factory farming currently taking place on the planet emit more fossil fuels into the atmosphere than our entire transportation sector, including cars, boats, trains, planes. The study claims that as much as 18% of greenhouse gas emissions come from animal agriculture, while transportation exhaust totals 13% of all emissions. These emissions are split between three main contributors: carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide, and methane gases. With each gas, animals emissions comes out as a leading contributors with 51%, 32 billion tons, of CO2, 65% of nitrous oxide, and 26% of methane gas emissions directly or indirectly from our …show more content…

Citing that all life requires death, Fairlie insists that a strictly vegetarian and even vegan diet has its own way of destroying the planet. His main criticisms lie with our poor use of the land we have reserved for agriculture, advocating that the “growing of monocrops…will never be sustainable,” and insisting that the only way sustainability can be achieved is “participation in perennial polycultures.” What does this mean? A controversial topic in itself, monocropping is the cultivation of one single crop year after year on the same soil. Though economically efficient, the controversy emerges with the damage to soil ecology, depletion of the soils’ resources, and leaves the crop defenseless to an invading insect or microorganism, monocropping is the standard method of farming used worldwide. Fairlie wishes that humans would find a way to “draw sustenance from where they live without destroying that place,” as monocropping often does, asserting that knowing where our food is coming from is the step in this

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