Now, it's not personal! But like it or not, meat-eating is becoming a problem for everyone on the planet.

Ask people where they'd rank meat-eating as an issue of concern to the general public, and most might be surprised to hear you suggest that it's an issue at all. Whether you eat meat or not (or how much) is a private matter, they might say. Maybe it has some implications for your heart, especially if you're overweight. But it's not one of the high-profile public issues you'd expect presidential candidates or senators to be debating--not up there with terrorism, the economy, the war, or "the environment."

Even if you're one of the few who recognize meat-eating as having significant environmental implications, those implications may seem relatively small. Yes, there have been those reports of tropical forest being cut down to accommodate cattle ranchers, and native grassland being destroyed by grazing. But at least until recently, few environmentalists have suggested that meat-eating belongs on the same scale of importance as the kinds of issues that have energized Amazon Watch, or Conservation International, or Greenpeace.

Yet, as environmental science has advanced, it has become apparent that the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future--deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities, and the spread of disease.

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How did such a seemingly small matter of individual consumption move so rapidly from the margins of discussion about sustainability to the center? To begin with, per-capita meat consumption has more than doubled in the past half-century, even as global population has continued to increase. As a result, the overall demand for meat has increased five-fold. That, in turn, has put escalating pressure on the availability of water, land, feed, fertilizer, fuel, waste disposal capacity, and most of the other limited resources of the planet.

To provide an overview of just how central a challenge this once marginal issue has become, we decided to survey the relevance of meat-eating to each of the major categories of environmental impact that have conventionally been regarded as critical to the sustainability of civilization. A brief summary observation for each category is accompanied by quotes from a range of prominent observers, some of whom offer suggestion about how this difficult subject--not everyone who likes pork chops or ribs is going to switch to tofu without a fight--can be addressed.

Deforestation was the first major type of environmental damage caused by the rise of civilization. Large swaths of forest were cleared for agriculture, which included domestication of both edible plants and animals. Farm animals take much more land than crops do to produce a given amount of food energy, but that didn't really matter over the 10 thousand years or so when there was always more land to be found or seized. In 1990, however, the World Hunger Program at Brown University calculated that recent world harvests, if equitably distributed with no diversion of grain to feeding livestock, could provide a vegetarian diet to 6 billion people, whereas a meat-rich diet like that of people in the wealthier nations could support only 2.6 billion. In other words, with a present population over 6 billion, that would mean we are already into deficit consumption of land, with the deficit being made up by hauling more fish from the oceans, which are in turn being rapidly fished out. In the near term, the only way to feed all the world's people, if we continue to eat meat at the same rate or if the population continues to grow as projected, is to clear more forest. From now on, the question of whether we get our protein from animals or plants has direct implications for how much more of the world's remaining forest we have to raze.

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* In Central America, 40 percent of all the rainforests have been cleared or burned down in the last 40 years, mostly for cattle pasture to feed the export market--often for U.S. beef burgers.... Meat is too expensive for the poor in these beef-exporting countries, yet in some cases cattle have ousted highly productive traditional agriculture. --John Revington in World Rainforest Report * The Center for International Forestry Research reports that rapid growth in the sales of Brazilian beef has led to accelerated destruction of the Amazon rainforest. "In a nutshell, cattle ranchers are making mincemeat out of Brazil's Amazon rainforests," says the Center's director-general, David Kaimowitz. --Environmental News Service Grassland destruction followed, as herds of domesticated animals were expanded and the environments on which wild animals such as bison and antelope had thrived were trampled and replanted with monoculture grass for large-scale cattle grazing. In a review of Richard Manning's 1995 book Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer James Risser observes: "Many experience anguish at the wreckage of clear-cut mixed-tree forest, destined to be replaced by a single-species tree farm. Few realize, says Manning, that a waving field of golden wheat is the same thing--a crop monoculture inhabiting what once was a rich and diverse but now 'clear-cut' grassland."

* Grassland covers more land area than any other ecosystem in North America; no other system has suffered such a massive loss of life. --Richard Manning in Grassland * Another solution [to grassland depletion in Africa] would be a shift from cattle grazing toward game ranching. Antelopes, unlike cattle, are adapted to semi-arid lands. They do not need to trek daily to waterholes and so cause less trampling and soil compaction.... Antelope dung comes in the form of small, dry pellets, which retain their nitrogen and efficiently fertilize the soil. Cows, in contrast, produce large, flat, wet...