Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World

by Carolyn Steel

Methane is an invisible menace common to all ruminants, estimated by the FAO to account for 5.4 per cent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Yet reducing such emissions isn’t as straightforward as it may at first appear. While removing domestic bovines from the landscape may seem an obvious move, it would also come at an ecological cost. As regenerative ranchers Allan Savory and Tony Lovell have shown, the properly managed grazing of cattle on marginal grasslands can reverse desertification as well as act as an overall carbon sink.81 The removal of all livestock from grassland also raises the question of what would occupy all the abandoned territory. If wild ruminants were to reclaim the world’s 38 million square kilometres of pasture at the rate they’ve re-inhabited parts of the Serengeti, Fairlie reckons, they would produce an estimated 52 million tonnes of methane, five eighths the amount emitted by the current domestic herd.82 While this would clearly represent a major reduction, it raises the question of how, if we were to go vegan, we would handle the wild game that would naturally proliferate on our rewilded farmland. If we decided to hunt and eat the beasts in order to control their numbers, we would find ourselves back where our ancestors started millennia ago. If we chose not to eat the animals on ethical or other grounds, however, we’d be wasting a valuable food resource, for which we’d need to compensate by growing more grains and vegetables, foods t...