![Young cattle in Little Stonham, Suffolk, UK. [Credit: Keith Evans, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]](https://macskamoksha.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Young_Cattle_-_geograph.org_.uk_-_2682900.jpg)
Young cattle in Little Stonham, Suffolk, UK. [Credit: Keith Evans, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]
I won’t be wading into any of that today.
My subject here is the environmental impact of animal agriculture. This impact is factual and quantifiable regardless of what one believes about what one should or shouldn’t do or eat. I will be addressing four categories of impact: land use, water use, pollution and climate.
An open range sign along the Interstate 10 (I-10) Frontage Road (AKA: Marsh Station Road) in eastern Pima County, Arizona. The “Three Bridges” area of the Cienega Creek Natural Preserve is in the distance. The Rincon Mountains are in the background. Credit: $1LENCE D00600D, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Only ~2% of beef production in the US is sourced from cows grazed on federal public lands, nearly all of it in the Western states. However, the ecological damage inflicted by the industry on these fragile, arid landscapes is obscenely disproportionate, with profoundly negative impacts on flora, fauna, water, soil and more. Ceasing this harmful practice would arguably benefit the natural environment of the Western US more than any other single action.
I also want to emphasize how few humans benefit from public lands ranching. Economically, its contribution to local communities is trivial and could be redressed through the same legislation that discontinues it. For consumers nationwide, beef availability and prices would be unaffected, so you can be a burger fan and oppose public lands ranching without worry.
In other words, eliminating ranching on public lands in the West would have immensely positive effects for the environment and virtually no negative effects for humans. In that way, it’s a total no-brainer.
Yet the subject flies below the radar, even for most environmentally-minded folks. I get why. I myself was unaware of these issues until 2012, when I read Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West in preparation for a trip to eastern Oregon. (This comprehensive and thoroughly researched book, edited by George Wuerthner, has been out of print for years but is now available as a free download!) We hear much more about other threats to public land like logging, mining and fossil fuel extraction, and I would never minimize those horrendous activities, but the ecological impacts of ranching are more widespread than all of those put together and are sorely under-rated. It’s a big subject, and in a short essay like this I can only summarize a few important points. For those readers wanting to dive deeper, I’ve included some sources at the end.
Shadow, the farm cat, by some Mustard greens I was growing out for seed
Farm or travel? That’s been the choice I’ve made every summer for the last decade or so. The two options are basically mutually exclusive, or as I’ve often said: “Farming is the opposite of traveling.” This year I picked the first one, and I spent the agricultural season in Paonia, a small town on Colorado’s Western Slope.
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Bouquet of weeds: Thistle, Wild Lettuce, Bindweed
Weeding is an essential task in farming and gardening, whether you’re growing vegetables, medicinal herbs, fruit/nut trees or field crops (such as grains and legumes).
The term “weed” is relative, of course. Broadly speaking, a “weed” is any plant that the gardener or farmer doesn’t want in their growing space, but this will vary from person to person and place to place, and sometimes from one period of the growing season to another. The term “weed” is generally used as a pejorative, and while that isn’t entirely fair to the plant species itself—which is after all only following its own nature, and is neither good nor bad in and of itself—I will be using it here for convenience.
I am speaking from my own observations and experiences as a gardener and a farmer and a farmworker. As with virtually every other activity or tradition in our society, I have not participated blindly, and have always striven to retain and sharpen a view from the outside the arena, as much as I have been able. I have always been aware of the fact that—relative to both history and to other contemporary societies—it is just the game imposed on us in this time and place, and its rules are neither sacrosanct nor unquestionable.
On most farms where I’ve helped out, either as a paid worker or a volunteer, weeding is considered an unskilled task that anyone can do. But the more time I’ve spent in agricultural settings, the less I agree with that. First of all there are practical considerations, and I’ll start with those. I have deeper concerns as well, and they follow.
Agricultural field in Colorado
Though I am a lifelong plant lover and gardener, I didn’t come to farming until my mid-30’s. As I told here, my inspiration to scale up my growing efforts was Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I was living in Portland at the time and friends of mine from the herbalist and anarchist communities went to New Orleans to help with the mutual aid activities. They reported that big players like FEMA and the Red Cross were ineffective or even harmful, and that the most successful activities were grassroots and neighborhood-based. The lesson was clear to me: in an era of more frequent crises, it’s up to us to support each other, and to not count on being rescued.
So I took up farming because, well, food is so obviously essential to survival and I enjoy working with plants. I also went into it with the goal of learning more about life and myself, and so a part of me has always been standing aside, observing.
I mention all this because my motivation was not to make profit but to contribute to a greater cause: that of building people power by developing my own skills and knowledge, and also to cultivate awareness in myself. Financial concerns have been important of course, but there’s a difference between getting by and getting greedy. I am sad that our culture here in the US prioritizes the latter, though I’ve also known and been inspired by many people who buck that trend.
Photos by Flo Beck, public domain
If we brought Rachel Carson back from the grave, I’m sure she’d be shocked and dismayed at the increased use of pesticides since her book, “Silent Spring,” was published in 1962. For those who don’t know, “Silent Spring” was all about the dangers of pesticide use to people and planet, and had a profound impact on raising awareness among the public about pesticides and their dangers. The book is credited with the banning of DDT and the launching of the modern environmental movement, which led to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency under the Nixon administration.
Despite those victories, and a few others, the overall situation is much worse now, with worldwide agricultural pesticide use more than doubling since 1990. Since the 1996 introduction of “Roundup Ready” crops (which are genetically modified to tolerate Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Bayer/Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide), Glyphosate usage has gone up 15-fold. I would guess that another factor in the increase of herbicide use over the last couple decades has been the heightening of the war against so-called “invasive” plants, since spraying is such a common method of attempted (and usually failed) eradication, especially (and perversely) in restoration projects. (See: Methods used by land managers to control “invasive” plants at the Conservation Sense & Nonsense website.)
Glyphosate has taken a hit in both the public consciousness and the legal arena, though. When the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer found that Glyphosate was a “probable” carcinogen in humans, the lawsuits started, and Monsanto (at the time recently purchased by Bayer) ended up paying out billions in damages for disease and death by users of their products. Most of the victims were grounds keepers, landscapers and home owners. Thousands of cases are still working their way through the legal system.
In response, Bayer/Monsanto pledged to remove Glyphosate from their consumer products beginning in 2023. Because they were concerned about health? Nope. The report quotes a Bayer statement: “We have taken this action exclusively to manage litigation risk and not because of any safety concerns.” Nonetheless, phasing out Glyphosate sounds like a great idea. Two questions: A) Have they? And B) if so, how?
March in Portland, Oregon, 2017. Photo by Karney Hatch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
“Patriarchy” isn’t a very common word in mainstream US American discourse. When it does come up, it usually refers to the inequities of power between women and men in terms of rights, opportunities and outcomes within our socio-economic system. Such inequities are very real, and issues like access to safe abortion are vitally important.
However, Patriarchy goes deeper than the particular struggles of our time and place. Patriarchy is not only the oppression of women as a class by men as a class—and the resulting abuse of individual women by individual men—but also the suppression of that which is considered feminine by that which is considered masculine. Patriarchy is a framework of values. Everything is gendered—qualities, ideas, objects, living things and even colors—and anything feminine is relegated to secondary status. Competition is elevated over cooperation; authoritarianism over agreement; muscle over emotion.
So, Nature itself—because we perceive it as herself—is debased.
Part 2 of a 3 part series [Read part 1 here]
“Zeus” cherry tomatoes
Agriculture as currently practiced in the United States is, by and large, quite harmful to both the environment and to human health. Yes, there are a handful of people who are trying to be respectful of the greater-than-human world and beneficial to their fellow Homo sapiens, but they are the exception, not the rule. Unfortunately, much of what is labeled “organic” is part of the problem, with the industry’s mechanized practices, utilization of plastic, depleting of soils, killing of wildlife, profligate use of water, and labor abuses, among other issues. As I’ve mentioned before, the single greatest threat to biodiversity worldwide is habitat destruction, and its single biggest driver is agriculture. Further, toxins routinely applied in agriculture have deleterious effects on local and far-flung ecologies and on workers and consumers alike. Agricultural labor is some of the most dangerous in the United States (ranking far ahead of policing; maybe we need one of those black and white American flags with a green stripe in it to show solidarity for those suffering far more than the members of the “thin blue line” for their service to the populace).
All this is without even getting into how agriculture changed human cultures for the worse. We broke our ties of reciprocity with our home ecologies, and became dominators, leading us directly to the multiple environmental crises we are facing today. As well, agricultural society spawned patriarchy, slavery, private property, debt and elevated war to new levels of violence.
In sum, it’s a big mess.
So, in terms of environmental and social collapse, if we are to have a livable planet and healthy societies, one of our central efforts must be to radically change agriculture. For some starting points, see my “Six Things We Must Do So That Farming Is No Longer Massive Ecocide,” in which I spell out that agriculture must be de-monetized, de-corporatized, de-mechanized, re-localized, re-seasonalized, and re-naturalized.
People may be surprised to hear me say this, but, in service of these goals, farmers markets and the market farming that support them are not, in my opinion, all that helpful. Yes, they are local and seasonal by definition. However, many if not most are mechanized, few are naturalized, and all of them are dependent on monetization, which leads to corporatization for the larger operations. Farmers markets are all about income generation, which means bowing to market pressures that are driven by customer expectations, or at least the market farmer’s perception thereof. Which can end up resulting in a heavy focus on crops that are resource-intensive to grow or serve only a minor role in providing calories. Think heirloom tomatoes and fancy salad greens.
Attentive readers may notice that I did not post last week, and that this week’s is late. Fear not, I’m now making up for that with this 3-part series, to be spread out over today, Sunday and Tuesday. My excuse is that that my time was taken up in prepping for a move, which entailed finishing up a paid gig and passing along important info to the person who would be tending the farm beds after my departure. “Wait, what?” you might be asking. “Wasn’t this farm the place you were going to stay all season?” Indeed it was, and more on that later, in part 2.
This installment is a share of garden photos, which I’d been wanting to do all along but hadn’t had time for. Part 2 will detail my reasons for leaving, and part 3 encapsulates my big picture reflections on what I learned and how it applies to what I already knew.
At this farm, a market farm, I had four beds of my own to plant up and harvest from personally. Most of my time was spent on general farm tasks and in setting up beds for the market operation, but these beds were of course my favorite and served as a vital home for my heart as well as being a provider for my stomach. They were a mix of veggies, medicinals and one trial grain crop. I only got to enjoy a small amount of everything because most of it wasn’t ready yet when I left, but I passed the beds along to a friend of mine at the farm, and she will definitely be appreciating it all.
Me with Klip Dagga and friends
Every summer I am torn between farm work and wildtending/foraging. I appreciate the wild/feral experiences because they are all about connecting with ecosystems and their denizens and exploring how to interact with them with reciprocity, in part by observing what not to do: that is, how destructive we civilized humans have been to so many places. I appreciate farm work because I love fresh vegetables, and I am deeply interested in how to cultivate respectful relationships with plants being grown for consumption, which is a challenge that is ignored by most people in our culture, including most farmers.
Hay field as observed from within a wetland reserve, with so-called “invasive” plants in foreground
The other day I went into the nearby town of Sebastapol to do grocery shopping. In no hurry to return to the sweltering heat of the farm, I went to a wetland reserve on the edge of town to seek some shade by water. I found a good spot to enjoy and on the way I stopped to take this photo to share with my readers.
Between the path and border of the reserve is mostly Himalayan Blackberries and Poison Hemlock, both much maligned as “invasive” plants, as well as a collection of other “weedy” plants below them, at least some also categorized that way. Beyond the border is a huge irrigated field of what I assume is a hay crop because it’s grass (or grasses). Beyond that is a line of trees, mostly native Oaks. I don’t know what’s on the other side of the trees, but the landscape of Sonoma County is dominated by agriculture, vineyards more often than not. Indeed, I was surprised to see a crop that wasn’t wine grapes. Oaks also grew along the path, and their branches are hanging down in the top of the photo.
The very first Blackberries were ripening, and no flowers remained. The clusters of berries, resembling loose bunches of grapes, dangled invitingly towards the path, but most were still green, only a few were red, and precious few dark purple. I’m happy to report that I got to enjoy a single, perfect juicy one, sweetened by the sun. I’m looking forward to more!
The Hemlock was past flowering but its fruits were not yet dried into seeds. The foliage was drained of its vibrant green but was not yet desiccated. Given that they are not perennial, I was seeing these plants near the end of their lives, at their peak of maturity, fulfilling their raison d’être: to reproduce.
