This is an environmental movement, for the trail, but there are huge climate issues that the green runners are covering and if you are interested to learn about how bad animal-agricultures climate impact is, just read this one statement below.
Even if we halted fossil fuel use right now, we'd still blow past our climate targets based on the food system alone (due to animal ag).
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
(2020, Science, Clark) - Global food system emissions could preclude achieving the 1.5° and 2°C climate change targets
“We show that even if fossil fuel emissions were immediately halted, current trends in global food systems would prevent the achievement of the 1.5°C target and, by the end of the century, threaten the achievement of the 2°C target.”
Our Wild Places Are Vanishing
Think about a forest you love running through. The tall trees. The bird calls. The moss-covered rocks. The smell of earth after rain.
More than three-quarters of global agricultural land is used for livestock (including grazing land and crops for animal feed), despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of the world's protein and calories.
One of the most disturbing facts is that 91% of Amazon deforestation is for livestock and their food which is then exported around the world to feed the animals that are farmed where we live.
Here in the UK and Wales more specifically, 78% of the entire landmass is made up of animals and their food, that is four fifths of an entire countries landmass, just grass and pasture.
We were once an Atlantic Rainforest, a landmas covered in oak, birch, rowan, ash with wild meadows, peat bogs, wetlands and other varies habitats, all now destroyed and replaced with animals and their food.
Those forests aren't coming back.
When you drink from a stream on a long run, that water is often polluted by runoff from animal agriculture—nutrients, antibiotics, and pathogens. The pure water you thought was safe? Contaminated by the very system that's destroying the forests around you.
And here's the inefficiency that should anger you:
It takes 20 times less land to feed someone on a plant-based diet compared to an animal-based one. We're using massive amounts of precious farmland—land that could be forest, could be wildlife habitat, could be wild—just to inefficiently convert plants into meat.
135 species go extinct every day because of deforestation. That's not abstract. That's real animals, real plants, real ecosystems disappearing while we run through what's left.
The Rewilding Potential
Here's the hopeful part: If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet, we could reduce global land use for agriculture by 75% State of the Sport: Ultrarunning by the Numbers - Jason Koop
If we shift to plant-forward eating, we could rewild up to three quarters of all current farmland.
Imagine that. Three quarters of the land currently used for animal agriculture, turned back into forests, meadows, wildlife habitat, and wild places.
That's not just saving trails. That's creating new ones. That's bringing back the ecosystems we love. That's rewilding the planet.
It starts with what's on your plate.