for a vegetarian and only 300 gallons for a vegan. The US livestock industry uses two billion gallons of freshwater per day, an appalling statistic given that at time of writing, the residents of Flint, Michigan, still have to use bottled water for all their basic needs. Not only is factory farm runoff the leading cause of water pollution (culminating in the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico), the filth sickens low-income Americans (who tend to be people of color) because no one wants to live that close to a hog or cattle farm.
Those gallons-per-pound figures seem abstract so long as water still runs freely from your faucets, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore ongoing crises in the Middle East, North Africa, Cape Town, California, and elsewhere, and water-wealthy regions won’t be very far behind. In a report on the environmental effects of industrial agriculture, researchers at the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University explain, “In many parts of the world, irrigation is depleting underground aquifers faster than they can be recharged. In other cases, agriculture depends upon ‘fossil aquifers’ that mostly contain water from the last ice age. These ancient aquifers receive little or no recharge, so any agriculture that depends upon them is inherently unsustainable.” The Ogallala Aquifer—one of the largest in the world, stretching across eight states in the American Midwest—is being depleted at a rate ten thousand times faster than it can replenish itself. Compared to crops raised directly for human consumption, animal agriculture squanders so much water that the World Resources Institute is predicting water shortages for at least 3.5 billion people—half the current world population—by the year 2025. Analysts at the Food Empowerment Project note that “as scarcity increases, water’s value as an economic commodity rises—and multinational conglomerates are only too eager to profit from this deteriorating situation by buying up water rights on every continent.” So, it’s likely we’ll see ongoing armed conflict over control of water sources, and as Dr. Breeze Harper points out in Sistah Vegan, these shortages and any resulting violence will disproportionately affect people of color.
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