Respected Environmentalist on the Side of the Livestock
Author: Stephen Cadogan | January 5, 2017
A respected environmentalist has hit back against the demonisation of beef.
In 2003, Allan Savory won the Banksia award for the person doing the most for the environment on a global scale.
In 2010, the Savory Institute’s sister organisation, the Africa Centre for Holistic Management, won the Buckminster Fuller Challenge for working to solve the world’s most pressing problems.
Now, the Savory Institute is one of 11 finalists in Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Earth Challenge to award scalable and sustainable ways of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
At the recent World Meat Congress in Uruguay, Allan Savory offered more than 700 meat industry leaders from 36 countries hope for their industry, which has been battered by public opinion.
“With livestock out of feedlots, and back on the land, properly managed,” he said, “we have the opportunity to regenerate deteriorating environments and to impact climate change significantly.”
It’s a welcome piece of encouraging news after so many scientists have targeted ruminant livestock as key contributors to global warming, due to their gaseous emissions.
Savory says agriculture has been a major cause of climate change not because of cattle but because the rise of modern, industrial agriculture destroyed soil life and rendered soils far less capable of storing carbon.