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Anonymous
I come from a country with now rainfull and poor soils. Intensive crop farming is disasterous. Thousands of kilometres of land have been lost to creeping erosion and salinity. Even worse, because of the low density vegetation that the land produces, cropland often takes up much, much more room than the equivelent biomass would in an area with good soils and decent rainfall.
With the disappearance of the megafauna, the original inhabitants of this country took up something called 'firestick farming', which used controlled burns to remove the masses of dead, dry, highly explosive oil-filled vegetation in a series of controlled burns, as opposed to a single massive burn that would destroy all life in its path with an insensity of heat that would even sterilise the soil. Unfortunately, with the coming of the white man, that method was lost. Fortunately, white man brought large herbivourous domestic animals that filled the environmental niche left by the disappeance of the megafauna.
So, here I have two choices: one, I can become solely vegetarian and eat a massively destructive product that completely erases habitat and also turns the land into a salt desert, or I can supplement my diet with meta animals that, while of course are still destructive to the environment, still allow for native vegetation to persist and native fauna habitats to exist (albeit in a modified state.)
Environmentalisim and vegetarianism/extreme animal rights are things that should, on paper, get along quite well but almost never do.
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