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Cowspiracy Essay Cowspiracy, a documentation about how factory farming is destroying the Earth’s natural resources, was released in 2014. The position of the film is saying that the agricultural processes the human population goes through is the main cause to global warming and how no one wants to communicate the issue. How does the film progress to show this? In the beginning, the documentary compares different problems (i.e. water consumption, dangerous gases, pollution, etc.) with the products of agriculture. Throughout the film, there are different interviews attended with people who either don’t know the answer/don’t know the issue of agriculture, choose not to talk about it/avoid it or the few who are open to the topic and willingly discuss it. The conclusion of the film brings up the topic about how this subject is like walking on glass, it’s extremely dangerous. It’s brought up multiple times about how people have gotten hurt because they were trying to stop the increase in agriculture and minimize the amount of agricultural facilities in the world. They also concluded that, by decreasing the number of livestock we have as well as increasing the amount of grown food given to people, the effects agriculture has on the environment will shrink and there will be more food for people. Continuing off of that, the amount of food given to animals is enough to feed every person on the planet. Why is the food we’re growing going to animals instead of human beings? Simply because of the fact that there are around 700 billion livestock being raised by humans alone. Raising animals to consume is the leading cause of air pollution and water consumption. Why air pollution? When livestock release gas, they let out a gas known as methane. Methane is 10 times worse than carbon dioxide. So 700 billion farm animals releasing gas is going to be a major problem. Every living organism needs water, livestock and crops are no different. 34 trillion gallons of water are used each year for agriculture alone. That number combined with the 7 billion people and countless other organisms living on this planet increases the risk of water shortage. Another number to add onto this list is the fact that it take 660 gallons of water just to make a ¼ lb. burger. Why do people need this much livestock? Another thing the film does in order to get the audience to support their position, is how they continuously show the interviews of people who won’t answer any of the questions they had about agriculture and how uncomfortable they felt. They also showed their filming studio stop funding their project and people telling him to stop what the narrator is doing. The graphs are always large and overshadow the others whenever they were compared. There also was a scene, although it wasn’t needed, about people slaughtering elephants because of a man who believed it was elephants who were causing global warming. That scene would strike some emotion into the audience, giving them more reason to support the creator of the documentary. However, there were some problems with the film. As stated before, the narrator had mentioned about a burger taking 660 gallons of water to make. But where did those numbers come from? Because there is no mention of where he got this information, the measurements seem exaggerated and there is no way of knowing of they were true or not. Going back to the graphs, they were constantly brought up whenever one of the opposing arguments were brought up. Whether they were during interviews or while searching online, bar

graphs were compared in order to prove them wrong. This was an effective argument tool because it allowed the person to see the comparison and to have some reasoning as to whether or not the narrator is correct. Another technique the movie had used was the choice of music and the different camera angles. In the beginning, for example, the music that was playing was very dramatic while they were in an interview with a member of an environmental group, when suddenly, the music stopped when he had replied to the question. To go into more detail, this specific scene was about the man being asked about how agriculture was affecting the environment and that studies show that agriculture was the leading cause to environmental decline. The man hesitated then simply said how he didn’t understand the question. Another technique used by the group would be, during interviews, how the camera zoomed in on people being questioned. These moments were often with people who felt uncomfortable sharing their knowledge about the agricultural issues or if they had blatantly said they weren’t going to answer any questions like that. Quite suspicious. My opinion on the topic is to agree with the narrator. Something needs to be done about the agricultural industry, however, I can also see how the environmental groups would be hesitant to discuss this topic. It’s a touchy subject, people would lose their farms and some would probably think they were being asked to become completely vegan. But this should be the least of the public’s fears. With the way things are going, giving up animal products as well as farm land is a lot better than giving up an entire planet. People do not need 700 billion livestock for 7 billion people. A single person will not eat 100 billion animals in their lifetime. The water consumption would also lower exponentially and environments would be able to come back. Those large numbers that always seem to be fighting against our goal would recede and allow us a fighting chance to fix our mistakes. Before this film, I knew there were human problems we needed to fix. I never imagined that something like livestock would cause such massive dilemmas to our planet. Once the issues with agriculture are solved, the act on repairing this planet can flourish with a new-found haste.