Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret Quotes

Howard Lyman: Do what you can do as well as you can do it every day of your life and you will end up dying one of the happiest individuals that ever ever died.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Howard Lyman: You can't be an environmentalist and eat animal products. Period!

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
[last lines] Howard Lyman: You can change the world. You must change the world!

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Kip Andersen: You either live for something or die for nothing.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Kip Andersen: Raising animals for food is responsible for 30 of the world's water consumption, occupies about 45 of the Earth's land, is responsible for up to 91 of Brazilian Amazon destruction, is the leading cause of ocean dead zones, habitat destruction, and species extinction

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Kip Andersen: Animal agriculture produces 65 of the world's nitrous oxide, a gas with a global warming potential 296 times greater that CO2, per pound. Yet all we hear about is fossil fuels.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
David Simon (Author, Meatonomics): When somebody goes into a McDonald's and buys a big mac for four Dollars, there's another seven Dollars of costs that are imposed on society. And I'm paying that, you're paying that, whether you eat meat or not!

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Himself (physician): When you think about it, the purpose of cow's milk - I did most of my growing-up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin - the purpose of cow's milk is to turn a 65 pound calf into a 400 pound cow as rapidly as possible. Cow's milk is baby-calf growth fluid.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Howard Lyman: You can't be an environmentalist and eat animal products. Period. Kid yourself, if you want. If you wanna feed your addiction, so be it. Just don't call yourself an environmentalist.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Kip Andersen: Like so many people, I saw his film, An Inconvenient Truth, about the impacts of global warming, and it scared the emojis out of me.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
[first lines] Himself (Sierra Club): The world's climate scientists tell us that the highest safe level of emissions would be around 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. We are already at 400. They tell us that the sort of savest we could hope to do without having perilous implications - as far as drought, famine, human conflict major, species extinction - would be about 2?C increase in temperature. We're rapidly approaching that, and with all the CO2 that's already in the atmosphere we're easily going exceed that. So, on our watch, we are facing the next major extinction on the Earth, like we haven't seen since the time of the dinosaurs disappearing. You know, when whole countries go under water because of sea-level rise, when whole countries find that there's so much drought that they can no longer feed their population, and as a result they desperately migrate to another country, or invade another country, I mean we're going to have climate-wars.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Kip Andersen: Two environmental specialists at the World Bank Group using the *global* standard for measuring greenhouse gases concluded that animal agriculture was responsible for 51 of human-caused climate change, when the loss of carbon sinks, respiration, and methane are properly accounted for, which the UN study failed to address.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Kip Andersen: Hydraulic fracturing for natural gas uses a staggering amount of water: 100 billion gallons every year in the U.S. But when I compared this with animal agriculture, raising livestock just in the U.S. consumes 34 trillion gallons of water! And, it turns out, the methane emission from both industries are nearly equal.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Herself (Pacific Institute): The average Californian uses about 1500 gallons of water per person per day. About half of that is related to consumption of meat and dairy products.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Kip Andersen: I found out that one quarter-pound hamburger requires about 660 gallons of water to produce. Here I'd been taking these shorter showers, trying to save water, to find out that eating one hamburger is the equivalent of showering two entire months!

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Kip Andersen: So much attention is given to lowering our home water-use, yet domestic use is only 5 of what is consumed in the U.S. vs. 55 for animal agriculture. That's because it takes upwards of 2500 gallons water to produce one pound of beef.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Kip Andersen: Energy-related CO2 emissions are expected to increase 20 by the year 2040, yet emissions from agriculture are predicted to increase 80 by 2050. This devastating figure is mostly due to a projected global increase in meat and dairy consumption.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Kip Andersen: It turns out that, due to land-use, grass-fed beef is even more unsustainable than factory-farming.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Kip Andersen: Cows and other farmed animals produce a substantial amount of methane from their digestive processes. Methane gas from livestock is 86 times more destructive than CO2 from vehicles.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Herself (Natural Resources Defense Council): The *majority* of antibiotics used in the U.S. is administered to healthy livestock.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
David Simon (Author, Meatonomics): If you take the externalized costs, which are about $414 billion- if the meat and dairy-industry would bear these costs themselves, the retail prices of meat and dairy would skyrocket. A $5 cartoon of eggs would go to $13. A $4 big mac would go to $11.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Kip Andersen: So you encourage people to eat less meat, because of the tremendous resources required and the toll on the environment...
Michael Pollan: and the animals...
Kip Andersen: and on the animals...
Michael Pollan: and the workers in the system. It's a brutal system on every level.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Himself (physician): Whether you pour milk onto your cereal as a liquid, whether you clot it into yogurt, whether you ferment it into cheese, whether you freeze it into ice-cream... it's baby-calf growth-fluid.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Himself (physician): Cow's milk is the lactation-secretions of a large bovine mammal who just had a baby. It's for baby-calves. You know, I tell my patients, Go look in a mirror. Do you have big ears? Do you have a tail? Are you a baby-calf? If you're not, don't be eating baby-calf growth-food!

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
William Potter: The animal agriculture industry is one of the most powerful industries on the planet. I think most people in this country are aware of the influence of money and industry on politics, and we really see that clearly on display with this industry in particular. Most people would be shocked to learn that animal rights and environmental activists are the number one domestic terrorism threat according to the FBI.
Kip Andersen: And why is that?
William Potter: It's a difficult question to answer, why these groups are at the top of the FBI's priorities. I think a big part of it is that they, more than really any other social movements today, are directly threatening corporate profits. You know, when we try to find out how factory farms and how animal agriculture is polluting the environment, they try to claim exemptions to that information, either under national security terms or public safety, uh, trademark issues, business - it's a business secret - we've seen all these attempts to keep people in the dark about what they're actually doing. They're one of the largest industries on the planet with the biggest environmental impact, trying to keep us in the dark about how it's operating.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Himself (Sustainability Institute): Quietly and unmistakably, the most powerful thing that someone can do for the environment. Um, no other lifestyle choice has a farther reaching and more profoundly positive impact on the planet and all life on earth than choosing to stop consuming animals and live a vegan lifestyle.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Kip Andersen: I had to come to the full conclusion the only way to sustainably and ethically live on this planet with seven billion other people is to live an entirely plant-based vegan diet. I decided instead of eating others, to eat for others.

Movie: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret