Comment by etrabroline | Hacker News Reader

Comment by etrabroline | Hacker News Reader

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> Removing grazing animals from the land can allow for reforestation and increase biodiversity and carbon sequestration

Ok. How much land could be reforested that way? Most grazing happens in places that are naturally pasture and were never forest like Texas and Argentina. Northern cali isn't exactly known for beef.

2/3rds of land used for grazing being unsuitable for farming sounds like a lot to me.

EDIT: drooly, HOW MUCH land would become forested if cattle were removed? Because if it's like 1 acre then its not really a good argument for banning all meat. Also I explicitly said I DO think we could survive on an all vegetarian diet I just don't see any reason to do it.

Again, if you read the article you'd be able to answer these questions.

Here's the math:

- 2.89 billion hectares of land is used for pasture, one third of which (870 million hectares) is suitable for growing crops.

- 538 million hectares is used for growing crops to be eaten by animals.

So, by removing meat from our diet we could free up 1.4 billion hectares of land JUST for crop land for human consumption, while allowing the other 2 billion hectares of non arable pasture to reforest - which would have significant impact on carbon sequestration and biodiversity.

Keep in mind that 1 billion hectares of land is the size of North America plus Brazil.

It is estimated that the entire human population would only need 1 billion hectares of land to survive (on an all plant-based diet). This means that ultimately 3 billion hectares of land could be reforested. The reduction in the farming and food shipping industry's carbon emissions would also have significant impact on reversing climate change.

Your point is was that “you can’t do anything else with the land” - which is flat wrong. We can allow it to reforest. Which is doing something.

Your claim that the human population cannot survive on a vegetarian diet is also wrong. The article I linked explains why.

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