> pretty much ensuring those animals don't go extinct.
Sort of, but you have to add some nuance here. None of the animals we commercially farm in mass quantities for food are "natural" animals to begin with. They were bred down (in some cases over many centuries) from their natural ancestors to be a perfect food animal for humans. Some probably wouldn't survive (as a species) in the wild if the humans were gone. The ancestor species in many cases are already lost. More importantly, significant amounts of previously-wild ecosystems are now turned into commercial farming operations just to feed all these artificial animals, robbing habitat from the remaining more-natural animals.
I still eat meat. I just think it's important to not be naive about what's going on here. We've already largely terraformed what used to be the wild Earth into a custom-tailored bio-mechanical ecosystem designed to amplify human population potential. There are, unfortunately, not many great ways to fix it at scale without massively reducing our population first, and it's debatable whether we should even try.
A related notion is that most of what we call environmentalism isn't really about saving the natural state of the Earth (whatever you define that as!), it's about stopping our ecosystem engineering from going off the rails in directions that will ultimately doom us (climate change, massive pollution, etc). The Earth will be fine either way: if we manage to off ourselves through stupidity on environmental issues, nature will just go back to being nature again.
Sort of, but you have to add some nuance here. None of the animals we commercially farm in mass quantities for food are "natural" animals to begin with. They were bred down (in some cases over many centuries) from their natural ancestors to be a perfect food animal for humans. Some probably wouldn't survive (as a species) in the wild if the humans were gone. The ancestor species in many cases are already lost. More importantly, significant amounts of previously-wild ecosystems are now turned into commercial farming operations just to feed all these artificial animals, robbing habitat from the remaining more-natural animals.
I still eat meat. I just think it's important to not be naive about what's going on here. We've already largely terraformed what used to be the wild Earth into a custom-tailored bio-mechanical ecosystem designed to amplify human population potential. There are, unfortunately, not many great ways to fix it at scale without massively reducing our population first, and it's debatable whether we should even try.
A related notion is that most of what we call environmentalism isn't really about saving the natural state of the Earth (whatever you define that as!), it's about stopping our ecosystem engineering from going off the rails in directions that will ultimately doom us (climate change, massive pollution, etc). The Earth will be fine either way: if we manage to off ourselves through stupidity on environmental issues, nature will just go back to being nature again.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1338/