By Staff Writer, Yeva Mikaelyan

            Something that bothers me more than anything is meat eaters who call themselves environmentalists. You can not be a meat eater and an environmentalist at the same time; that is pretty much the biggest oxymoron ever.
            Sure, you are driving a nice hybrid car, and you are recycling, and you replaced all your old light bulbs with those new swirly ones that are supposed to be more energy efficient. Well, good for you, you are helping. But that is nothing compared to what you could be doing by giving up animal products.
            This is not to say that vegetarians and vegans are perfect little environmental angels. But it is to say that if you want to help the planet, you cannot eat meat. You cannot fight for a cleaner ocean, and eat meat, in turn supporting the amount of animal waste dumped into the ocean every year. That is taking one step forward and two steps backward. Good luck getting to point B.
            Retired political science professor at the University of Maryland Steve Boyan says that greenhouse gasses are mostly produced by burning fossil fuels and using inefficient transportation.
            That is no shocker. You have probably heard this fact and hundreds of others just like it a million times. But then he goes on to say that, “not often mentioned is the fact that fossil fuels are used to raise farm animals; a factory cow is a fossil fuel machine, not a solar-powered ruminant whose wastes fertilize the fields to produce more grass for the cow to eat.”
            Boyan also mentioned that cattle flatulence contributes to one fifth of global methane emissions. And guess what? Methane is 24 times as harmful to the planet as carbon dioxide.
            I am sure that since you are an environmentalist and all, you are also trying to conserve water. You use a low-flow showerhead, which saves about 2,500 gallons of water a year. Yea! Are you an environmentalist now?
            Hardly.
            Why? Because by avoiding just one pound of beef, you would be saving double that amount.
            Try 3,000 to 5,000 gallons. This means that even if you did not shower for six months straight, you would still save less water than by not eating a single pound of beef.
            According to EarthSave.com, by eating beans you would only be using one-twenty-seventh of that quantity and getting the same amount of energy.
            I know what you are thinking. “But, that meat is still going to be out there, so it will not make any difference if I eat it. If I do not, someone else will.”
            Well, not exactly. Companies supply the demand, so the less demand there is, the less they supply. This means fewer cows, which means less methane. Overproduction wastes precious money, after all.
            Producing food takes water. A lot of water. And we are using our water aquifers faster than we are restocking them. Ogallala, the largest one, which extends from the Midwest to the mountain states, is depleting at a rate of 13 trillion gallons a year. Northwest Texas cannot get any more water from its wells because they have already run dry.
            Also, imagine how many people we can feed if everyone in the world stopped eating meat. If we could magically turn every factory farm animal into grain, we would have enough food to end world hunger. Those 12 pound AIDS victims in Africa that we see on charity infomercials could be sent more food, because we would be able to feed everyone here and still have a huge surplus of food left over.
            So before you stuff that burger down your throat, think about how much damage you are doing to the world by doing so. We all affect the planet, be it positively or negatively. Why should humans get to screw the world up more than they already have?        Albert Einstein himself said that, “Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”
            Think, people. I promise you, it has worked in the past.