Mini Film Review: Cowspiracy

This movie came out in 2014 but it took me a little while to watch this, though I've now watched it a couple of times.  It looks at the impact of animal agriculture on the environment and, perhaps more interestingly, the policies that environmental organisations have on dealing with the issue.

Made my Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn it looks at the impact animal agriculture has on deforestation, water consumption, and pollution, how it produces more greenhouse gases than transportation.  It's the primary cause of rainforest destruction, habitat loss, and ocean dead zones, all of which leads to species extinction.  As Kip found out, you can recycle, save water, be energy efficient, and use public transport as much as you want, but it's what you eat which will have the biggest impact environmentally. 

Despite this, the industry has mostly gone unchallenged and in fact during the filming of this documentary the producers were warned by the industries watchdogs and whistleblowers that carrying on their research could lead to them being arrested and were even risking their lives.

Perhaps the most eye opening part of the documentary is when they were interviewing individuals from environmental organisations they were reluctant to talk about changes to people's diet as a viable solution to the environmental issues we are facing at the moment.  It seems asking people to change this aspect of their lifestyle is seen as going too far despite the positive impact it would have.

I've been aware of the impact the meat industry has on our environment for about 10 years, which is when I first started researching into becoming a vegetarian.  I had thought it would be pretty common knowledge by now but, from the people I've been speaking to, it still isn't clear just how important taking meat out of your diet is.  This is probably connected to the way the animal agriculture industry is using their strengths to 'lean' on the issue, as highlighted in this documentary.  One thing that has changed in the last three years is that environmental organisations have now started talking more about the role meat and dairy can play in helping fight climate change, but it still doesn't seem to be given the level of importance it should.

The two things I got from this documentary film was firstly that there are people trying to fight any of the changes we need to make, making it far more important that we make these decisions on our own, and that taking dairy out of my diet is just as important as removing meat.  I have been removing dairy from my diet any way due to my PCOS, but this has added another reason and has definitely had more of an incentive then the health factor alone.  Over the last few months I've been removing and replacing all the dairy products I use.

You can learn more about the movie and order it (both in DVD and downloadable format) from the website, but you can also get it from Amazon or see it YouTube.  Definitely worth a watch.