Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

If there is one crucial environmental metric, it's the amount of land we use to produce our food.
Farming is the greatest cause of loss of terrestrial habitats and biodiversity. Livestock farming - because it needs so much land - is the major driver.
ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

This is also the environmental issue most obscured by myth-making, wishful thinking and junk science. A lot of people really don't want to know that the meat and dairy they eat is devastating the planet. The industry feeds us reassuring falsehoods.
threadreaderapp.com/thread/1145314…

We know that air is important.
We know that water is important.
But for some reason we overlook the other crucial element: land.
The more of it we take for farming, the less of it there is for the rest of the living world.

All farming represents a radical simplification of ecosystems, in order to extract a product we can eat. Only when production rates fall so low that the system hardly qualifies as farming at all is it compatible with rich habitats.

https://twitter.com/georgemonbiot/status/1199615020923011074?lang=en

And even in such cases, humans tend to take the place of the top predators, ensuring that all the fascinating trophic effects they cause are truncated.

To justify livestock farming, we make a mental shift that allows us to see the highly depleted systems on ranches and farms, which are missing their top predators, most of their wild herbivores and many other wild animals and plants, as "natural" or as "mimicking nature".

As this evidence review shows, when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of all groups of wild animals except detritus eaters increases. There are more predators, more wild herbivores, more pollinators.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32369874/

Generally, the more extensive a ranching system is, the more predators are killed to protect the cattle or sheep. The methods, esp in North America, are utterly barbaric, and are applied in most of the places where large predators still live. Sorry, but you need to know.

When ecologicts try to reintroduce large predators to places from which they've been eliminated, general public support is often strong. The opposition comes overwhelmingly from the livestock industry, and it is often decisive.
news.sky.com/story/emmanuel…

Incidentally, at sea the dynamic is very similar. The greatest cause of the destruction of marine ecosystems is industrial fishing. It's causing cascading ecological collapse around the world. And it's the fishing industry that blocks the creation of effective marine reserves.

Why are governments held hostage by these industries? Is it because of their economic power?
No. Livestock and fishing are small economic sectors.
It's because of their cultural power.
And this is something in which we all collaborate.

We give them a free pass because we we have a mythologised view of their practitioners. By comparison to us undeserving drones, they are noble, almost sacred workers.
All people deserve respect. But not adulation. These myths harm the interests of humanity.

So governments pour money, in the form of public subsidies, into two of the most damaging industries on Earth. When farming and fishing lobbyists say "jump!", they ask "off which high building?". The cultural power of these industries insulates them from criticism and regulation.

Apologies for the rethreading. I managed to mishook one of the tweets halfway through.