Rev. Danny Fisher

In a post last month, I recounted a conversation with my friend Phil about the important role vegetarianism can play in dealing with water and sanitation problems in the developing world. In an article published yesterday at CommonDreams.org, Bruce Friedrich writes about a connected global crisis that vegetarianism would also help discontinue:

…the UK’s Environment Agency has acknowledged that humans can significantly help stop global warming by adopting a vegetarian diet.

Of course, the science could not be more clear. When U.N. scientists looked at all the evidence, they declared in a 408-page report titled Livestock’s Long Shadow that raising animals for food is responsible for more greenhouse gases than all vehicles in the world combined. And scientists at the University of Chicago showed that a typical American meat-eater is responsible for nearly 1.5 tons more carbon dioxide a year than a vegan.

But for someone in government to admit this is something special, since even Al Gore refuses to talk about it…

I agree with Friedrich: it is very significant indeed that the Environment Agency has begun to talk to about how vegetarianism can help stop global warming. The truth is, though, that a lot more people need to start talking about this particular issue. That includes us Buddhists.

Let me say a bit more…

The first precept of Buddhism is to refrain from killing. The question of whether or not meat-eating violates this precept has been pondered over by all of the various Buddhist traditions, with most taking the view that it does not. (Chinese Buddhists, who adhere to a strict vegetarian diet, are an especially noteworthy exception.)

But, speaking as a Buddhist, it seems to me that it has gotten to the point where eating meat violates the first precept on so many different levels, there can no longer be any logical excuse for doing it.

A Buddhist buying a chicken breast or a pound of hamburger could say, “I’m not killing the animal myself, so I’m not really breaking the first precept.” On the other hand, though, that same practitioner should ask him- or herself, “By making this purchase, am I not encouraging an industry to kill?” The answer seems to me to be an unequivocal “yes.” Whether or not you kill the animal yourself, eating meat makes killing happen. Ninety-five animal lives are saved each year by one vegetarian. That’s how the meat industry responds to just one vegetarian: it kills ninety-five fewer animals per year. Obviously, one’s diet dictates whether or not quite a few animals live or die.

Furthermore, in the aforementioned post from last month, I explained how crucial vegetarianism is if we are to address the lack of clean water and the problem of inadequate sanitation in the developing world. Among other factors, the exorbitant agricultural costs of meat-eating explain why it is that over one billion people in the world lack access clean water and why it is that a child dies every fifteen seconds from a disease associated with lack of access to safe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene. Clearly, the process that results in meat under cellophane at the grocery contributes greatly to the immense suffering of human beings.

Now, some of the smartest people in the entire world are telling us that the meat production is a major contributor to the killing of the planet. In last month’s post, I quoted from Livestock’s Long Shadow:

[The raising of animals for food is] one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. The findings of this report suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity. Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale…

I’ve meditated on the precepts with all of this information in mind, and I’ve come to conclusion that refraining from killing has to include vegetarianism. It has to. It cannot just be refraining from fly-swatting when in sitting meditation, or being mindful of ants when in walking meditation. It’s bigger than that.

For the sake of the world, may we learn to see the virtues of the practice of vegetarianism.