You don't have to buy expensive steaks.  We rarely do.  Also, once you're
on a high-meat diet you'll be surprised how much less you eat than you do
when stuffing your face with rice and potatoes and such.

Many "environmentalists" do a lot of distorting of the truth about meat and
other animal products, just as they do a lot of distorting of the truth on
many other issues.  "Environmentalists" who work for "bad companies" are
not particularly worse in this regard than "environmentalists" who make
their living frightening people in order to increase their power and
status, the speaker fees they're able to demand, the number of books they
can sell, and the donations they can get for the organizations they front
for. For some, power and status alone are far more important than money
ever will be.  For others, "environmentalism" is more a religion than a
rational, thoughtful process.  Just because someone says he is an
"environmentalist" or works for an "environmentalist" organization does not
mean he's honest or objective.

The fact is that the plow wreaks far more ecological devastation than
anything else man does.  Period.  Chernobyl is a joke next to what the plow
does (it's also a joke next to the amount of death and destruction wreaked
by a coal-fired electrical plant, but that's another issue).  No matter
what your farming methods, you cannot possibly plow over wild land to plant
crops without decimating wildlife, regardless of how "ecologically
responsible" you try to be.  Every acre of land planted with organically
grown, chemical-free tomatoes or beans is still an acre of land that once
had wildlife on it, and which has to be defended against that wildlife's
return.  No matter how nice you are about it, you have to kill the wildlife
that tries to return to that land.  You can either do that honestly and
kill it outright, or you can just "mercifully" drive it away, so it can go
off and starve to death in misery instead.

Of course there is the problem that most meat is fed on grains these days,
but it's possible to eat a lot more free-range meats, and these are getting
more popular; let's hope that trend continues.  Free-range meats are
probably the -only- food people eat which does -not- do a lot of
environmental damage (although to defend it you still have to control the
predator population).

Meat is also far more efficient than is frequently asserted by ethical
vegetarians.  The human gut cannot digest most plant matter.  Bovines have
four stomachs to process plant foods and are able to digest and utilize it
far more efficiently than we are.  We poop out most of the plant matter we
eat, wasting a tremendous amount of it.  And there's a -great- deal of
plant matter that we simply cannot eat -at all- but which other animals
can.  I recently read materials suggesting that for some meat animals, it
takes only about three pounds of plant material to make one pound of meat,
and that they are about three times more efficient at utilizing plant
matter than we are (see http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/) and that they
eat plant matter we will -never- be able to eat.

I am very interested in the question of ecological sustainability, and I
don't pretend to have all the answers.  In fact this to me is one of the
most important issues, and I'd like to learn a great deal more.  I have
important questions, such as:

1) Is it possible to sustain a large population on gathered foods?  Or to
at least utilize -more- gathered foods in order to utilize -less- farmed
foods?
2) Is it possible to change modern farming methods to be less ecologically
destructive and closer to a biologically diverse ideal?
3) Is "organic" farming -really- less ecologically damaging than using
pesticides and chemical fertilizers?  (N.B.: it may -not- be better to use
"organic" farming methods if you have to plow down more land in order to
make the same amount of food, or if the "natural" pesticides and
fertilizers used are more carcinogenic than the synthetic ones).
4) If it is no longer possible to go back, and we are stuck forever with
the choice between mass starvation or continued ecological devastation with
the plow, is there any way to make things -better- than they are?