The Third Reason

Three classic reasons to go vegetarian:

1) You don't kill sentient beings. This both decreases the overall pain in the world and increases the overall pleasure (the utilitarian perspective)
2) You eat a healthier, more complete diet able to not only sustain but promote your well-being regardless of your age, stage in life, or how much protein your daily activities require.
3) It's better for the environment.

I've mentioned reasons 1 and 2 before, but I don't know how public the third reason is or how much you may know about it. So, here's a video (linked to Live Earth's webpage):



Not pleasant? True, but it happens (no, really, there's a famous quote to back me up on that one). And the fact remains that for one person to go vegetarian, they would singularly have a more positive impact on the environment than if they switched to a hybrid and lived the perfect energy-conservative lifestyle. What the video doesn't do a great job of explaining is the big picture of animal production; consider the massive trucks, machines, buildings, processing, McWrappers, waste product (those parts we don't eat), waste product (which the video showed), etc. that go into transporting and producing one cow's worth of meat.

However, what the video was excellent at was not proposing a large paradigm shift. One day a week, "say...Tuesdays," is all that's necessary to make a huge impact on the environment (and the overall utility of the world and your own health, to boot).