The Ecological Hoofprint The Global Burden of Industrial Livestock

About this book

The meat on our plates kills the planet. With global mass production of livestock reaching ever higher levels to feed an exploding world population's demand, mankind's ecological hoofprint reaches critical heights. The Ecological Hoofprint provides a rigorous and eye-opening analysis of global livestock production. Following his previous groundbreaking Zed book The Global Food Economy, Tony Weis shows what this production means for the health of the planet, how it contributes to worsening human inequality and how it constitutes a profound but invisible aspect of the systemic violence. The Ecological Hoofprint explains how the phenomenal growth and industrialization of livestock production is a central part of the accelerating biophysical contradictions of industrial capitalist agriculture and of ongoing and future food crises.

Contents

Preface

1. Population Growth and Unequal Footprints
2. The Other Population Bomb
3. Meat, Modernity, and Global Inequality
4. Reverse Protein Factories
5. Silent Violence: The Commodification of Sentient Beings
6. Towards a More Sustainable, Just, and Humane World

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Biography

Tony Weis is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Western Ontario. His research is broadly located at the intersection of political ecology and agrarian political economy, focusing on two main fronts: how global agrarian change is interacting with the spatial marginality of small farmers, related social and environmental problems, and struggles for land reform; and how the biophysical instability of industrial agriculture relates to the increasing volatility of world food markets. He is the author of The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming (Zed Books, 2007), and his research has also been published in a range of edited books and in academic journals such as the Journal of Agrarian Change, the Journal of Peasant Studies, Capital and Class, Social and Economic Studies, and Global Environmental Change.