Cattle-Raising: A Philosophical Analysis

Before taking this class, I had a really good understanding on the environment, however I never really thought about it philosophically. Combining philosophical ethics and the environment was not something I thought was practical. This class has proven me wrong. In fact, philosophical ethics go hand in hand when dealing with the environment. When it comes to thinking about the environment philosophically and ethically, three main points really stand out to me. These three points, in my opinion, sum up the majority of environmental problems we are dealing with. Food ethics, climate change and energy policy and environmental justice are the three ideas we talked about the really stuck in my head and are the most important when thinking ethically.

Food production was one part of the environment that I knew pretty well, however this class gave me much more. In the textbook we read, there were two articles that I found most interesting and did a good job of reinforcing my thoughts on food production and the environment. In the article “The World Food Supply: The Damage Done by Cattle-Raising,” Coffin talks about the effects of cattle-raising on the environment. Coffin touches on the amount of water used to raise the cattle, the amount of feed that is needed as well as the greenhouse gasses that are released. When one looks at this issue just as an issue of the environment, it doesn’t seem as bad as when one uses an ethical frame of mind. When you look at the issue of cattle-raising ethically, you see even more wrong. Where is all the water coming from, could that water be used by countries that don’t have clean water? What about all the feed that is needed? Should we instead of growing all this grain for the cows, grow crops for human consumption? All these questions came up once I started to think about this issue ethically. In his article “Vegetarianism and Treading Lightly on the Earth,” Fox talks more about some of the problems with meat production that Coffin talked about along with the issue of meat production as a threat to biodiversity. Fox also gives a solution to this problem of humans being huge meat eaters,

The issue of environmental justice, race, class and gender. Before this class I had no idea that race, class and gender had a connection to the environment. In class we watched a video that gave a great overview of some of the ethical issues of race, class and the environment. The video showed that landfills, toxic factories and other environmentally and humanly harmful things tend to be placed in areas where families of color or lower economic class live. The article by Dan Kaufman in The New York Times “The Fight for Wisconsin’s Soul” goes into depth on an issue of environmental justice pertaining to race right here in Wisconsin. The article talks about how Gogebic Taconite is building a mine in the Penokee Hills the home of the Bad River tribe. This mine will do all sorts of damage to the environment surrounding the tribe as well as being harmful to the tribes health. The Bad River does not have a very loud voice in this decision and this is not the first time Native American tribes have faced environmental injustice. In her article “All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life,” Laduke talks about different environmental injustices Native American tribes have gone through during the course of history. Laduke points out that “reservations have been targeted as sites for 16 proposed nuclear waste dumps and more than 1,000 slag piles and tailings from abandoned uranium sit