Much hubbub lately about the conflict between eating meat and attempting to reduce one's carbon footprint.  One speaker making the rounds recently is Nicolette Hahn Niman, a rancher and environmental lawyer who runs the famous Niman Ranch with her husband Bill.  Hahn Niman argues that you can call yourself an environmentalist and eat meat, but only if you eat the right kind of meat.

In an article for the Atlantic, Hahn Niman says that she researched the question of greenhouse gases quite thoroughly for an earlier article with the New York Times.  Her conclusion?  "industrialized meat production is emission-intensive while well managed, non-industrialized is not."

I trust this will not come as a huge surprise to anyone!  The thing is, most of us who have gone vegetarian for ecological reasons are pretty clear on that point.  I have to confess, I ate a really delicious steak at a friend's house a few weeks ago - after he pointed out that it was part of a small herd a few miles away, and that it had been slaughtered and sold locally.  

As it happens, I had often driven past this exact herd of Black Angus cattle and thought, "Now that's how it should be!"  The herd numbers around 30, quartered on a vast grassy field, at least a hundred acres.  Near the road, a holding pen leads to a chute where the cattle are obviously loaded into a truck for slaughter.  The holding pen is open at the far end, and hay is dropped into the pen year-round, so that the cattle are accustomed to the pen as a source of food.  This is obviously done to reduce stress and confusion on the part of the animals.  It's a thoughtful gesture, and every time I drive past, I note it with approval.

Is this land-intensive, pro-animal method of rearing livestock feasible to scale up for the entire nation?  Only if we as a country can drastically reduce our meat consumption.  And you know what?  We totally can.  If people would just put down the Hot Pockets and step away from the McDonalds cheeseburgers, we could easily retool things The Right Way.

From an environmental standpoint, no one is arguing otherwise.  The problem, obviously, is that it's pretty hard to find meat from a rancher who does things The Right Way.  Hahan Niman's ranch does, and so does the farmer near me.  Okay, that's two!  Now where should everyone else eat?

This argument doesn't even touch on the lie of labels like "free range," "grass fed," and "organic.  Unless you have solid evidence to the contrary, these terms are all as uselessly corporatized as "new and improved," "spring fresh," and "great value."

I, too, don't feel that you have to give up all meat regardless of its source.  Maybe we need to come up with a term for "vegetarian who eats only environmentally sustainable meat."  But considering how hard it is to find non-industrial meat, it's effectively the same thing.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user supak