Description

With the world increasingly adopting a diet heavy in animal products, animal agriculture is driving climate change, forest loss, air and water pollution, and the spread of pandemic diseases. Learn about the latest research on animal agriculture’s devastating impact on the environment and discuss what we can do about it.

Presenters:

Mike Hudak,  Director, Vibrant Public Lands, will address how hundreds of wildlife species populations (fish, birds, amphibians, mammals, reptiles, insects) are declining because of subsidized ranching. Learn how we can prevent species extinction, reverse environmental damage, AND help ranchers stop ranching without facing economic hardship.

David Kirby, author of Animal Factory, will address manure mountains, noxious gases, odors, waste lagoons, sprayfields, algae blooms, fish kills, polluted lakes, rivers and aquifers, MRSA, mad-cow, salmonella: these are just some of the “hidden” costs of factory farming to humans and the environment.

Tools, Skills, and Messages Participants Will Take Home:

Mike:

Participants will realize how politics results in methods of food production that have unnecessary environmental impacts. (And the politics can be local if we make the effort.)

David:  Participants will learn how CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) foul the air, water and land around them and introduce multi-drug resistant pathogens and other hazards to human and wildlife well-being into the environment.

About the Presenters:

Mike Hudak is an environmental advocacy journalist, organizer, and author, Sierra Club activist, radio broadcaster, and public speaker concerned with damage to wildlife and the environment inflicted by ranching primarily on western US public land.

David Kirby, a contributor to the Huffington Post since 2005 and journalist for 20 years, wrote for The New York Times for five years and was a correspondent in Latin America from 1986-1990. He has authored three books: Evidence of Harm, Animal Factory and Death at SeaWorld.