Meat is the single most significant factor contributing to the destruction of the planet, and it is a factor that we control directly as individuals.
Deforestation and habitat Destruction
Meat causes deforestation in and habitat destruction on multiple levels. Clearing trees to create grazing land is the most obvious, but grazing land is only part of the picture. Most domesticated animals raised for slaughter or for their byproducts are fed grains either as a supplement to grazing or as a replacement. Growing these grains takes space, and when there is a forest in the way of growing grains for animals it has always been the forest that looses. Eating organic doesn't change a thing when it comes to deforestation. The forest of the world are being cut down to make room for burgers and hotdogs, organic and free range as they might be.
The equivalent to seven football fields is destroyed every minute!
In Central America, 40 percent of all the rain forests have been cleared or burned down in the last 40 years, mostly for cattle pasture. In the process, natural ecosystems where a variety of plant and animal species thrive are destroyed and replaced with mono-culture grass. But you know what? Each vegetarian / vegan saves an acre of forest every year! Think about how many years you hope to live from this day. It could easily be 70 or 80 acres of land that you would save in you life time just by making a decision to stop consuming meat.
80% of the agricultural land in the United states is used to raise animals for food. That makes almost 50% of the land mass of the lower 50 states. Environmentalist talk about saving wildlife, but very few are brave enough to say what really needs to be said. The only way to free up land for wildlife is to stop consuming meat. I know I can imagine that you might be thinking that we wouldn't actually free up the land since it would be used to produce vegan / vegetarian food instead, but in fact to produce a pound of meat an animal must consume between 5 and ten times that weight in grains and soy that we humans could have been living on just fine.
Water consumption:
Water experts calculate that currently half of the available fresh water on the planet is being appropriated by humans and nearly half of the total water usage in the United States is used to raise animals for food. Producing food for a meat based diet requires much more water than it does to produce food for a vegan / vegetarian diet. It takes 2500 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat, but only 60 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat. A plant based diet requires a total of 300 gallons of water per day, while a meat based diet requires more than 4000 gallons of water per day.
Pollution and the Meat industry:
Animals raised for food produce 130 times more excrement than the entire human population put together, for a total of 87,000 pounds per second. This enormous quantiy of waste products from livestock production exceeds the capacity of the planet to absorb it. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that livestock waste has polluted more than 27,000 miles of rivers.
Energy Consumption & Global Warming:
It takes far more fossil-fuels to produce and transport meat than to deliver equivalent amounts of protein from plant sources. Of all the raw material and fossil fuels used in the United States more than one third is used to raise animals for food. If you think that by riding your bike instead of driving a car you are excempt think again. It takes more fossil fuel energy for a meat eater to walk to work than it does for a vegan / vegetarian to drive there! (This by no means should be interpreted as an argument for using a car. Bikes are the way to go.)
Disease and Animal Agriculture:
Through out history the vast majority of the epidemics and plagues that have ravaged the human population have come into being through our contact with domesticated animals. In recent years we have begun to see more and more new dangerous microbes evolving through our use of animals. From a scientific standpoint it is not a question of if another plague will hit us, but when.
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