Alexis Goings

A single use item I use regularly is coffee cups. I am admittedly a Starbucks junky and typically go five times a week. Recently I purchased a reusable travel cup from Starbucks. This not only helped me limit the amount of cups I was tossing into the trash on a weekly basis but Starbucks also offers a discount for using reusable cups. I admire companies like this. While the discount is only ten cents, it still encourages patrons to make the ecofriendly switch to reusable and more practical cups. 

Currently my diet is adding to the ever-growing impact of deforestation. I eat a very meat-heavy diet and by products from the store imported from areas where forests have been destroyed in order to create more agricultural and land for livestock. To decrease this negative impact I have been contributing to unknowingly, like many others, I can buy local and pay more attention to where products come from and insure that products I do buy come from a sustainable company. Another way is to lower the amount of meet I consume. According to academic journal The Conversation, multiple models have been made to determine the best way to lower deforestation numbers while continuing to feed our growing population. The one model that held the best results was the one focused on how we farm. “The only diet found to work with all future possible scenarios of yield and cropland area, including 100% organic agriculture, was a plant-based one,” (Erb, 2016). Most people do not think of the crop land needed to feed livestock. If the entire world converted to an all vegan diet, we would need much less crop land than we currently use. 

In my opinion, status and accessibility contributes to people in North America eating more meat than any other country. Americans live a very wasteful and wanting life. If we have access to it we use it, to the extreme. We have instilled the idea that each meal needs to include some type of meat, when in reality skipping meat at least once a day can be much more beneficial. Lori author of Groovy Green Living wrote "Every time you eat plant-based, you cut your carbon “foodprint” in half. Did you know that beef generates 20 times more greenhouse gas emissions than beans, per gram of protein.?". Lack of education and tradition are two reasons I believe America is stuck in its meat filled ways. Our values and ways of living are dated and many people do not understand that change is needed. Change is always a hard pill to swallow but the outcomes and future generations are relying on us to change our bad habits and replace them with much more reasonable and practical methods.