By not eating the flesh of other animals we're not just lowering our cholesterol counts and reducing our cancer risks. And we're not just saving farm animals from miserable lives and horrible deaths. We're also helping the environment.
Farm animals produce over two trillion pounds of manure in the U.S. every year.
That's five tons of animal droppings for every human being, much more than can be legitimately used as fertilizer for crops. Factory farms produce huge piles of animal waste, which eventually winds up not only in the soil, but also in the water that people bathe in and drink. Untreated manure is poisoning rivers and wells and making people sick, sometimes killing them. Pollution from factory farms contaminate more miles of U.S. rivers than all other industry sources and municipal sewers combined. By law, human waste must be sanitized.