"An alien observing earth might conclude that cattle is the dominant animal species in our biosphere."
-David Hamilton Wright, Biologist

Water pollution and global warming, rainforest destruction and collapsing oceans, these are just some of the environmental perils which threaten our children and which rip through the raw beauty of the natural world. Read on, and you will discover that meat carries much of the blame. Our Devour the Earth campaign will feed you the facts the meat industry has tried to hide. It will expose the damage and the suffering which can be linked to livestock farming, it will offer you a healthy sustainable vegetarian alternative.

It takes 10 kilos of vegetable protein to produce just 1 kilo of meat - the most wasteful form of food production ever devised. As 38 per cent of the world's grain is fed to animals, 15 million children die of hunger every year in the developing world. Many of the reasons for this hunger are political but to waste valuable land to feed animals and not people has to be madness.

As the animals eat, nature takes its course and as a result, billions of tons of slurry and gas are produced. Two hundred times more polluting than human waste, slurry is responsible for several thousand serious water pollution incidents in the UK every year. The Netherlands has so many slurry-producing animals that they have been declared a 'manure surplus region' and have actually started shipping their waste to the developing world for disposal. In this crazy system, the poor feed our animals with their grain and then have to dispose of the faeces as we eat the meat.

Ruminant livestock like sheep and cows also damage the atmosphere. Their flatulence results in the release of 80 million tons of methane every year. In the UK the single largest source of this powerful global warming gas is livestock.

Clearing forests for cattle also adds to the greenhouse effect. In Latin America, an area of rainforests the size of Britain is destroyed every year, mostly for cattle. As the ranchers slash and burn the trees they release huge amounts of carbon dioxide - some of their smoke cloude have been visible from space! Since 1970, the cattlemen have destroyed 20 million hectares of rainforest and produced 1.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Every day 50 species of tropical fauna or flora become extinct as the destruction continues.

Our terror has spread to the oceans, where huge trawlers smash through the oceans' eco-systems. Overfishing has sent nine of the world's 17 fisheries into collapse as the other fisheries strain under the relentless onslaught of a fishing industry which doesn't even pay its way - the world spends US$124 billion every year to catch just US$70 billion of fish.

It doesn't have to be this way.

The land is saturated with pesticides and fertilisers to produce feed for animals, not people, and yet a country like Britain would use just 30 per cent of its agricultural land if we were all vegetarian. By becoming vegetarian, you can join millions of others who have had enough of the pollution, the cruelty and the destruction. Vegetarian food is healthier, safer and less costly to our small, blue world. It is also much kinder to animals.

Becoming a vegetarian and supporting the work of organizations such as The Vegetarian Society could make a real difference for the environment - you have the choice.