George Monbiot at University College London

Hi everyone!

UCL’s Geographical Society invited as their guest lecturer the famous journalist and blogger: George Monbiot. The topic of the talk was ‘Rewilding: the mass restoration of Britain’s ecosystem’ which I found particularly interesting and knowledge enriching in regards to Britain ecosystems.

I thought this would be a great occasion to ask him about what have been writing about for the past few weeks: the desertification debate!

However I did not get the chance to do so as he was only given four questions to answer and as I raised my hand to ask a question, his ‘question time was already’ up.  LLL

After having listened to the talk, I decided to read a bit more on his most recent post and find out if he discussed livestock farming in any of his posts.

I came across an interesting post on animal and dairy production, more precisely on how cow manure was impacting some rivers and streams in Britain. I chose to talk about this today as it will be a topic of discussion my next upcoming posts.

In his talk, Monbiot talked about his passion for hiking and walking amongst Britain nature reserves; However, he noted that the last few months he has experience many expales of a degrading nature. One of them, that is also discussed in his blog, was the increasing pollution of water bodies caused by agriculture and presence of cattle to nearby streams. Some of these impacts are captured in the photos below.

Here, we see the physical and visual impacts of a British dairy farm on different types of water bodies.

In July 2015, the British Environmental Agency published a report (E.A., 2015) on water pollution incidents and showed that the only sector where pollution incident are increasing rather than decreasing like the rest of the trend, is the farming sector. (See figure 1)

Furthermore, in figure 2, we see that the dairy industry has had the most water pollution incidents for three years now, 2012, 2013, 2014.

--> We must not forget that livestock production also includes its bioproducts such as eggs and dairy and have as much as an impact on our environment than beef, poultry farming.