Kathy Freston是一位健康專家，同時也是紐約時報暢銷作家，擁有多本著作。她透過健康飲食、情緒管理，倡導身心靈健康，時常受邀至電視節目、廣播節目或為報紙雜誌撰寫文章。
The Breathtaking Effects Of Cutting Back On Meat
吃素一天 影響驚人
I've written extensively on the consequences of eating meat - on our health, our sense of "right living", and on the environment. It is one of those daily practices that has such a broad and deep effect that I think it merits looking at over and over again, from all the different perspectives. Sometimes, solutions to the world's biggest problems are right in front of us. The following statistics are eye-opening, to say the least.
我曾撰寫許多文章，內容含括肉食對健康，良好生活及環境的影響。讀者只要每天練習，就能造成非常廣泛和深遠的影響，這也是我認為它值得從各種不同的觀點一再闡述的原因。有時候，解決世界上最棘手問題的方法就近在眼前。下面的統計數據真令人大開眼界。
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:
只要每個人都吃素一天，美國將能節省下：
● 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;
●一千億加侖的水，足以供應新英格蘭居民近四個月的住戶用水;
● 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;
●十五億英磅飼料穀物，足以養活新墨西哥州民一年以上;
● 70 million gallons of gas--enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;
●七千萬加侖天然氣，提供加拿大和墨西哥所有汽車的燃料綽綽有餘;
● 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;
●三百萬英畝的土地，相當於德拉瓦州面積的兩倍大小;
● 33 tons of antibiotics.
●三十三噸的抗生素。
If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:
如果每個人都只吃素一天，美國將遏止：
● Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;
●一千兩百萬噸的二氧化碳當量溫室氣體排放，等同於法國所一年的產量;
● 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;
●三百萬噸土壤侵蝕所導致七千萬美元經濟損失;
● 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;
●四百五十萬噸動物糞便;
● Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.
●近七噸氨氮（主要空氣污染物之一）的排放量。
My favorite statistic is this: According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads. See how easy it is to make an impact?
我最喜歡的統計數據是：美國環保協會宣稱，美國人一週少吃一次雞肉，而以素食取代，省下的二氧化碳排放將等同於，減少五十多萬輛行駛中的汽車，要產生重大的影響是多麼容易？
Other points:
其他要點：
Globally, we feed 756 million tons of grain to farmed animals. As Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer notes in his new book, if we fed that grain to the 1.4 billion people who are living in abject poverty, each of them would be provided more than half a ton of grain, or about 3 pounds of grain/day--that's twice the grain they would need to survive. And that doesn't even include the 225 million tons of soy that are produced every year, almost all of which is fed to farmed animals.全球上有七億五千六百萬噸穀物被當作農場動物的飼料。正如普林斯頓大學生物倫理學家彼得辛格在其新書指出，如果我們將這些七億多的穀物糧食分給活在赤貧中的十四億人口，將可供給每人超過半噸的穀物，或一天約三磅的穀物──多於其維生所需的兩倍。甚至還未包括幾乎全用來餵養動物的兩億兩千五百萬噸大豆。
He writes, "The world is not running out of food. The problem is that we--the relatively affluent--have found a way to consume four or five times as much food as would be possible, if we were to eat the crops we grow directly."
他說：「世界並不缺食物。問題是，較富裕的我們正在消耗四或五倍可以直接作無食物的作物。」
A recent United Nations report titled Livestock's Long Shadow concluded that the meat industry causes almost 40% more greenhouse gas emissions than all the world's transportation systems--that's all the cars, trucks, SUVs, planes and ships in the world combined. The report also concluded that factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every level--local and global.
最近，一份聯合國「畜牧業長長的陰影」報告中提出的結論，肉類行業的溫室氣體排放量比世界上所有的運輸系統排放量超過近四成──含括世界上所有汽車，卡車，越野車，飛機和船隻。該報告還指出，工廠化養殖不論在地方或全球各個層面，都是造成嚴重環境問題的元兇之一。
Researchers at the University of Chicago concluded that switching from standard American diet to a vegan diet is more effective in the fight against global warming than switching from a standard American car to a hybrid.
美國芝加哥大學研究人員的結論是，將美國標準飲食轉換成純素食，要比將美國標準汽車轉換成油電混合車，更能有效地對抗全球暖化。
In its report, the U.N. found that the meat industry causes local and global environmental problems even beyond global warming. It said that the meat industry should be a main focus in every discussion of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortages and pollution, and loss of biodiversity.
在其報告中，聯合國發現肉類行業造成的當地和全球環境問題，甚至超越了全球暖化。它說，肉類行業因該是土地退化，氣候變遷和空氣污染，水資源短缺和污染及生物多樣性喪失等議題上最主要的焦點。
Unattributed statistics were calculated from scientific reports by Noam Mohr, a physicist with the New York University Polytechnic Institute.
註:未標明的統計數據是根據紐約大學理工學院物理學家諾姆莫爾學術報告所計算出來的。
【2009/5/5 文：suiis素易 編輯部】原文出處
