Beans or beef?

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

(Genesis 2:8)

I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.

(Rev. 21: 2a)

The rapid urbanization of much of the world has increased the lament for the loss of rural culture and a pastoral way of life. And while it is true that fewer people are living in rural areas, a staggering amount of the world’s land has been transformed for agricultural purposes.

Agricultural land

Since the last ice age, humans have cleared one-third of the world’s forests and two-thirds of wild grasslands. In the last 50,000 years, since humans have settled much of the world, wild mammal biomass has declined by 85 percent. Expanding agriculture has been the biggest driver of the destruction of the world’s wildlands.

But now, after millennia of expansion, the amount of the earth that is being used for agriculture has peaked and is slowly declining. And this is a good thing. It marks a historic moment in humanity’s relationship to the planet, a crucial step in its protection of the world’s ecosystems.

“But,” you might ask, “how can we feed the world without creating more agricultural land?” The fact is that, despite an overall reduction in agricultural land, the world has continued to produce more food due to increasing efficiencies in farming methods. This is true especially for food crops. Thus, the future of food production does not need to follow the destructive path it did in the past. If we manage to continue overall agricultural land reduction, we may be able to restore space for the planet’s wildlands and wildlife. But to do this we are going to have to make some changes to our eating habits. We must especially reduce our consumption of red meat because cattle production is bucking the trend of decreasing our land use for agriculture.

Inefficient beef

The world now consumes three times as much red meat as it did 50 years ago. Almost half of the world’s cropland is used to produce animal feed, primarily for beef cattle. The conversion of crops to meat is highly inefficient. (It takes about 25 calories worth of vegetable feed to produce one calorie of beef.) The expansion of grazing land for beef production is still the leading driver of global deforestation. This is especially so in the tropics that are much richer in biodiversity than other biomes and are also huge carbon sinks that are needed to sequester CO2, a major cause of global warming.

While the story of creation began in a garden (Gen. 1&2), it ends in the creation of a new heaven and earth with a glorious city as its focal point (Rev. 21).

I don’t think a new creation banquet will include a 16-ounce medium rare steak.