A Forest Future?

The other climate benefit of no longer eating meat is that it will make available huge swathes of new land for afforestation—the return of forests to land that has not recently been forested. One consequence of the inverted energy returned on energy invested (EROI) of meat is that we use far more land for farming than we would need if our diet were to be exclusively plant based. In the United States alone, somewhere in the region of 834 million acres could be made available through this strategy, much of it suitable for afforestation. Even the afforestation of land not currently used for farming has the potential to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by nearly one-third. Adding in land currently dedicated to animal grazing and feed crops is a potentially game-changing development in the fight against climate change.