The Impact Of Environmental Justice: The Case Of Factory Farms?

Factory farms have large environmental implications. They are also a huge reason the animal rights movement even exists and especially why it is at the level it is today. Factory farms exist for a reason and have benefits to society. Agriculture has changed a lot over the years to increase production and efficiency, but production and efficiency are not necessarily achieved in ethical ways.
There is no question to whether agriculture is affecting the environment. The environment is bring greatly impacted by both animal and plants farms (Foley, J 2014). Foley suggests that growing human population numbers is demanding more and more food to be produced. To combat the impacts she states that developed nations need to shift their diet away from
Methane is a greenhouse gas, which holds heat in the environment and is commonly attributed to climate change. When huge numbers of these animals are packed together and farmed it has a big impact on the environment. Factory Farms have a wide spread impact, but the local environment receives the biggest impact. Those living around the farms are put at greater risk for developing health problems related to the waste generated by the farms, including increased respiratory difficulty, sore throat, chest tightness, nausea, and eye irritation (Nicole, W. 2013). In the article, “CAFOs and Environmental Justice: The Case of North Carolina”, Nicole makes an argument primarily on environmental justice for those who live directly around concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO). She delves into the social ecology of the issue which is the fact that the CAFOs are placed in poor areas with high minority populations. No one wants to live in areas that are consistently being contaminated by factory farms, but usually the people living in these areas were living on the land before the farms were put in place and cannot afford to leave. She uses a lot of quantitative facts as well specific examples from North Carolina communities to make her argument reputable. Her argument is entirely ethics based, but yet it is very different from Foley’s. Foley makes an ethical argument for the environment
I consider myself an animal rights activist and associate myself most with Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation views. I believe the conditions that animals are subjected to are completely unacceptable, especially after looking at the environment impacts. While searching for reliable sources that are pro CAFOs, I found out that those are pretty much nonexistent. There are too many reasons that CAFO’s are not the right answer to feeding the growing population. In my opinion, we need more good examples of stewardship, like Peter Singer to work on moral extensionism; humans need to think about species that are not our own in order to make ethical decisions. Speciesism and the dominion thesis are the scourge of the animal rights movement and the environment. The dominion thesis allows people to think that we use the earth and other animals however we please. People do not realize this comes back and hurts our health. Pollution from CAFOs cannot be ignored. Our water quality is declining at an alarming rate. I believe that everyone, who is able, should consider a vegan lifestyle. Vegan lifestyles not only protest the unethical treatment of animals in factory farms, but also greatly benefit the environment, by requiring less pollution and greenhouses emitted to produce food and other