The world is so old that it can be hard to get your head around just how long it’s been here. There is the sky and all the creatures which inhabit it; the oceans and their teeming mass of different life forms; the animals and plants which crowd the surface, as well as the ones which burrow and crawl beneath it. We are talking wonder!

One way of getting a handle on the timescale of ‘when’ and ‘how’ and ‘which’ is to reduce the whole of the world’s life to just one year – nearly 5 billion years telescoped down to one. On this reckoning it is now one minute to midnight on 31 December and the world began almost exactly 12 months ago on 1 January.

Using this one year timescale, a few days after the world was born, bacteria came into existence. But it wasn’t until 10 months later, in October, that sponges inhabited the seas. At the start of November, jellyfish began to float around and spiders started to spin their webs. On 25 November there were fish for the first time in water and ferns waved their fronds on the land. Dinosaurs began their rule over the world on 1 December and fifteen days later they disappeared.

Just a quarter-of-an-hour ago, at 15 minutes to midnight, humans came into being. The Industrial Revolution started only two seconds ago, and in that tiny flicker of time, people have caused more damage to the world and the things which live on it than in the whole of the rest of its life. And things are getting worse. For most of the time we have been on the planet – about five million years if you count our early ancestors – we have been vegetarians. We only started hunting about 1.5 million years ago. In the words of Guardian newspaper journalist Colin Spencer, that’s the equivalent in individual terms of an 80-year-old having been a vegetarian until the age of 65.

At first sight, there may not seem to be much connection between meat eating and the huge environmental problems facing the world, such as global warming, spreading deserts, disappearing rain forests, and acid rain. In fact, meat production is at the heart of these and many other global disasters.

The truth is, the world is fast running out of the land needed to feed meat animals. It isn’t just that one-third of the world’s surface is turning to desert but also the fact that the best agricultural land has been farmed so intensively, that it is starting to lose its fertility and won’t grow as many crops. Once, farmers used to ‘rotate’ their fields, growing a different crop each year for three years and during the fourth year growing nothing. They called it leaving the fields ‘fallow’. This method ensured that different nutrients were absorbed by different crops each year and it allowed the soil to recover its fertility.

As the demand for animal feed grew in the years following World War Two, the rotation system began to disappear. Now, farmers often grow the same crops year after year in the same soil. The only way they can do this is to saturate the land with artificial fertilisers and control the weeds and insects with pesticides. Eventually, the structure of the soil begins to break down and it becomes thin and lifeless and easily eroded. A half of all the agricultural land in Britain is now at risk from being washed away by rain or blown away by the wind.

On top of this, enough of Britain’s hedgerows have been torn up to encircle the earth three times. The forests that once covered most of the British Isles have been cut down and less than 2 per cent remain, Over 90 per cent of British ponds, lakes and marsh lands have been drained – all to make bigger fields to grow more crops to feed more animals. The story is much the same all over the world.

Modern fertilisers are nitrogen based and unfortunately not all of the fertiliser used by farmers stays in the soil. Some is washed into streams, rivers and ponds where the nitrogen can cause poisonous ‘blooms’. This occurs when the algae that grows naturally in the water starts feeding on the excess nitrogen. Because it’s been fertilised, the algae quickly grows out of control, shutting out all sunlight from the other plants and animal. These blooms can use up all the oxygen in the water, choking plants and animals alike to death.

Nitrogen also gets into human drinking water. In recent years, it has been linked with cancer and to a disease called blue-baby syndrome which destroys the oxygen-carrying red blood cells in newborn babies, and which can kill them. The British Medical Association reckons that 5 million Britons regularly drink water that contains too much nitrogen.

Pesticides are also a problem. These poisons spread slowly but surely through the food chain, becoming more and more concentrated all the time, and once in the body they tend to stay there. Imagine this: From a field, pesticides are washed by rainfall into a nearby pond and some of the chemicals are absorbed from the water by weeds. Little shrimps eat the weeds and day after day the poison builds up inside them. Then a fish eats lots of the poisoned shrimps and the poison becomes even more concentrated. Finally, a bird eats lots of these fish and poison gets stronger still. So, what started off as a weak solution of pesticide in the pond water can build up through the food chain until it is 80,000 times stronger that its original concentration, according to the British Medical Association.

It’s the same story with farm animals that eat crops which have been sprayed with pesticides. The poison concentrates in the animals’ tissue and then becomes even stronger in the people who eat these animals. In fact most people nowadays carry pesticide residues in their bodies. However, the problem is worse for meat eaters because the levels of pesticide found in meat are about 12 times stronger than the levels found in fruit and vegetables. The UK Pesticides Monitoring Journal accepts that ‘foods of animal origin are the major source of pesticide residues in the diet.’

No one is yet sure what effect these concentrated pesticides have on us but many doctors, including those of the British Medical Association, are extremely worried. They fear that the increasing levels of pesticides stored in people’s bodies may lead to cancers and to a reduction in the body’s ability to fight off disease. The Institute of Comparative Environmental Toxicology in New York reckons that throughout the world over one million people suffer from the pesticide poisoning every year and 20,000 of them die.

Tests on UK beef have shown that two in seven samples contained a chemical called dieldrin at levels above the EU limits. Dieldrin is rated as ‘extremely hazardous’ by the World Health Organisation which believes it can cause birth defects and cancer. The American government admits that dairy products followed by beef are the main source of the highly poisonous organochlorine pesticides now found in humans.

There are other environmental problems, as well. Because so many farm animals in Europe and the USA are kept in sheds, there is now so much manure that no one knows what to do with it all. There is too much to put on the land and it’s too poisonous to pour into the rivers. It is called ‘slurry’ (a nice-sounding name for liquid shit) and stored in ponds called (believe it or not) ‘lagoons’.

In Germany and Holland alone, there are three tons of this stored ‘slurry’ for every member of the population – that’s getting close to 200 million tons of the stuff! Through a complicated series of chemical reactions, acid evaporates from the slurry causing acid rain. In some parts of Europe, slurry is the single biggest cause of acid rain causing enormous environmental destruction – killing trees, making rivers and lakes lifeless, and damaging the soil. Large parts of Germany’s Black Forest are dying, in Sweden some rivers are almost completely dead, and in the Pel region of Holland, 90 per cent of all the trees have died because of acid rain from pig poo.

When you look outside of Europe, the environmental damage caused by animals farmed for meat is even greater. One of the biggest problems is the cutting down of rain forests to create grazing land for beef cattle. Wild forests are turned into cattle pastures and their meat is sold to Europe and the USA for hamburgers and steak. It’s happening wherever rain forests exist but the main countries involved are in Central and South America. We’re not talking a tree here and there, but an area the size of Belgium chopped down every year. Since 1950, half of all the world’s rainforests have been destroyed.

This one of the most short-sighted policies imaginable because a rainforest’s soil is extremely thin and lifeless and needs the protection of its canopy of trees. It has a very short life as pasture. After six or seven years of grazing cattle, the soil won’t even support grass any longer, and turns to dust.

Now you might ask, what good is a rainforest to anyone anyway? Well, these forests are home to half of all the creatures and plants on the planet. They are nature in perfect balance, soaking up water from the rains and recycling every leaf and fallen branch as food. As they grow, the trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air and replace it with oxygen, acting like the planet’s lungs. These magnificent wildernesses provide almost 50 per cent of our medicine and all kinds of discoveries are still being made of new animals and plants.

It seems a crazy way to treat one of the world’s most valuable resources but some people, the landowners, become extremely rich on it. The timber and meat they sell provides big profits and when the land becomes lifeless, they simply move on, chop down more trees and get richer. The tribal people who live in the forest are forced off their land and sometimes even killed. Many finish up in shanty towns where they have almost no means of surviving.

The rain forests are destroyed by a technique called slash and burn. This means that the best trees are chopped down and sold, while the rest is slashed to the ground, piled up and burnt. And this contributes to yet another problem – global warming.

When the sun warms the planet, some of that warmth is held against the earth’s surface by the gases which make up the world’s atmosphere. (It’s a bit like wearing a coat in winter to keep warm.)Without that heat, our planet would be a cold and desolate place. So some warming is a good thing. But too much and everything starts to go haywire. This is what’s called global warming and it happens because some of the gases created by humans float up into the atmosphere and trap even more heat against the earth’s surface.

One of these gases is carbon dioxide (CO2), and one way of producing it is to burn wood. The slashing and burning of rain forests in South America creates fires so big it’s hard to imagine. When astronauts first went into space and looked down at Earth, there was only one artificial structure they could see with their naked eyes – the Great Wall of China. But in the 1980s they saw something else made by humans – great drifting clouds of smoke from the burning Amazon jungle.

As the rainforests burn to make way for cattle ranching, all the CO2 stored by the trees and shrubs, sometimes over hundreds of years, is released and floats upwards to add to global warming. According to the governments around the world, this process alone causes one fifth of the total global warming of the planet.

Once the forests are cleared and the cattle starts grazing, the problem becomes even worse. Because of their digestive processes, cows fart and belch an awful lot. When they do they release methane, a gas which is 25 times more effective at trapping heat than CO2.

If you think a little fart here or there isn’t a problem, think again. There are 1.3 billion cows on the planet and every one of them produces at least 60 litres of methane every day. Between them, this amounts to 100 million tons of methane every year. That is not a little fart! Even the fertilisers sprayed on the land add to global warming by producing nitrous oxide – a gas which is a staggering 270 times more effective at trapping heat than CO2.

No one really knows what the results of all this warming might be. What we do know is that the earth’s temperature is slowly rising, and as it does so the polar ice caps are beginning to melt. In Antarctica, temperatures have risen by an average of 2.5∞C over the last 50 years and 8000 square kilometres of ice shelf have disappeared. In just 50 days in 1995, 1300 square kilometres of ice vanished.

As the ice melts and oceans of the world become warmer, they will expand and rise. There are many predictions about how much the sea will rise, from one metre to five metres, but most scientists now believe it’s inevitable that there will be some rise. It means that many islands around the world such as the Seychelles and Maldives will disappear and large areas of low-lying land and even whole cities such as Bangkok will be flooded. Even large parts of Egypt and Bangladesh will disappear beneath the water.

Britain and Ireland won’t escape either, according to the University of Ulster. There are 25 places at risk of flooding, including Dublin, Aberdeen and the coastlines of Essex, North Kent and large parts of Lincolnshire. Even London isn’t considered totally safe. Millions of people will be forced to flee from their homes and their land – but to where? There is already a shortage of land!

Perhaps the biggest question of all is what will happen at the top and bottom of the world? There are huge areas of frozen land at the north and south poles called ‘tundra’ and they present a very worrying problem. Frozen in their soils are millions of tons of methane gas and as the tundras warm, the methane gas will be released. The more that’s released, the greater the global warming and the warmer the tundras get – and so on and so on. It’s called ‘positive feedback’ and is believed to be unstoppable once it starts. No one has yet predicts what the result will be but it’s unlikely to good.

Unfortunately, that’s not the end of meat as a global destroyer.

Believe it or not, the Sahara desert was once green and lush and grew wheat for the Romans. That has all gone now and the desert is spreading, growing 320 kilometres in some places in just 20 years. The main reason for this is overgrazing by goats, sheep, camels and cows. As the deserts spread, the herds move on, devouring virtually everything as they go.

Once again it’s a vicious circle. As the plants are eaten and the land dries up, weather patterns change and all rain virtually disappears. This ensures that once land has turned into desert it stays that way. Today, all around the globe, one-third of the world’s surface is on the point of turning to desert because of over-grazing, according to the United Nations. It’s a heck of a price to pay for a food we don’t even need.

Unfortunately, meat producers don’t have to pay the costs of clearing up the pollution they cause: no one charges pig breeders for the damage caused by their acid rain or beef producers for the useless land they create. However, the Centre for Science & the Environment, in New Delhi, India, has looked at different foods and put a real value on them, which includes these hidden costs. They reckon the price of a hamburger should be about £140. You’d need a lot of clowns to sell them at that price – and a lot of clowns to buy them!

Most people know very little about the food they eat and the damage mush of it does to the environment. There’s a Native American idea that life is like a spider’s web, each strand made up of different things – animals, trees, rivers, oceans, insects and so on. If we destroy one of the strands we weaken the whole web. And that’s what we have started to do.

So, going back to our evolutionary year, with the clock’s hands pointing to one minute to midnight, a lot depends on the next few seconds. According to many scientists, a timescale as short as this generation’s lifespan will be vital in deciding whether the world as we know it survives or not. It’s scary but we can all do something about it.

‘I don’t see any justification for being a carnivore. I believe that eating meat is tantamount to damning the planet.’
- Heather Small, lead singer of M People