By Gregory Dicum

“Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.”

A PETA newsletter? No — that’s from the New York Times. Last year, in a long article entitled “Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler,” Mark Bittman, a leading food writer for the paper, laid out the environmental case against meat production.

It’s no secret there’s a greenrush going on — a re-evaluation of the way our civilization works in light of certain inconvenient environmental truths. While real change has only just begun, this new perspective is circling us back to the wisdom of some of the oldest concepts around. I’m particularly encouraged to see environmental arguments for vegetarianism becoming part of mainstream conversation, because they are the very reasons I gave up meat nearly ten years ago.

For millennia, vegetarianism has been an ethical matter, based on the idea that living beings deserve to live. In every era, in nearly every part of the world, the idea has percolated: imposing suffering on living creatures diminishes one’s own life. For much of our existence, we’ve had to weigh that truth against the exigencies of living our own lives. Killing an occasional pig, or living by hunting, was the best option for generations of our ancestors.

But our modern civilization has removed many of the constraints we once faced. It has, in effect, provided us with the means to transcend biology — to choose how we want to be in the world. And more urgently, the side effects of this heedless abundance will soon force us to choose: if we keep chewing our way through rainforest burgers, then we won’t have rainforest for long.