We can agree to disagree and still be friends, or at least civil adults :)
You can agree to agree, I guess.
I don't mean that in a snide way, I just wonder what exactly you mean. Like, would it be okay under this market system for someone to purchase a large amount of the land where the water originates and construct a huge dam+reservoir? Would adjacent property owners have to go to court to redo the resolution of their competing interest in water that happens to flow across the properties?
But unless I'm mistaken I think you're implying that by removing beef production, you'd have to substitute it with additional vegetable or grain production.
Where I think the pro-vegetarian argument would actually be that by decreasing meat production, you actually recover more vegetable/grain farm capacity since it's much more efficient for people to eat their veggies directly.
Just like it would be much more efficient to eat the 10lbs of sardines it takes to grow 1lb of salmon. (NB. I didn't look that up, but I think it's in the ball-park.)
>But unless I'm mistaken I think you're implying that by removing beef production, you'd have to substitute it with additional vegetable or grain production.
There are a lot of non-simple factors involved for example dairy and meat account for a majority of most people's protein intake, this would mean substitution for increased protein nutrition from plants (limited mostly to soybeans).
>Where I think the pro-vegetarian argument would actually be that by decreasing meat production, you actually recover more vegetable/grain farm capacity since it's much more efficient for people to eat their veggies directly.
This statement is mostly true for using vegetable/grain production land whose produce is used for cattle feed-lots right? What about cattle that get the larger % of their food from grazing?
Also there is a significant difference between human quality/desired food and animal feed. For example a lot more corn is used in animal feed than in human consumption - this is especially effective because maize is a c4 plant and until genetics gets there will continue to completely dominate other cultivatable plants in terms of yield.
p.s. I'm not saying that meat production in the US is ecologically friendly - it definitely is not - feedlot greenhouse gas production is almost entirely unregulated, they cause massive damage to local watersheds etc - but it's possible to do terrible damage to the environment with vegetable growth as well; I'm just arguing for a more or less objective view of the situation (and I don't think meat is evil is the correct answer).
About 80 percent of agricultural production is animal-based while the remaining 20 percent mostly comes from field crops, mostly wheat. Only about 1 percent (1.35 million hectares) of total land is suitable for crops
IMVHO, there are much better reasons to drop meat + dairy from your diet than water. Human taste is a malleable thing - after a while, other things start to taste much more delicious.