Review of Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014) by Sarah C — 06 Feb 2017

Over the past couple decades Americans have been fed a stream of lies, that climate change has been the result of our dependence on traffic and feeding the materialistic society that live in. That the world that we live in is warming rapidly and the way to stop it is to use less water, drive less and recycle. Well this is wrong, in fact if everyone in America stopped driving, recycled and used less water, it would do pretty much nothing because it is not the sole reason why our earth is dying. Our world is dying and America is holding the weapon and it is our agriculture system.

In the documentary "Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret" made in 2014 by Kip Anderson and Keenen Kuhn lifts the curtain and shows viewers the real problem with American and why we will never be able to reach sustainability is we do not admit to agriculture being the main culprit. Throughout the story they constantly show reason after reason why Agriculture is one of the biggest threats to the world health, from animal agriculture to aquaculture Keenen's research shows the deception in America and how Agriculture should be in the spotlight when it comes to sustainability.

Keenen as a child has always been an advocate for environmental sustainability, since he was a teen he always biked, took short showers and recycled. He always thought that the biggest contribution to climate change was fossil fuels and the amount of trash that we produce. But in fact as he found out it is agriculture, more specifically animal agriculture. Animal agriculture is one of the leading causes of pollution in the world! So he began to think " why is this not getting more attention?" how is it that the leading cause of oceanic dead zones, water pollution, and contributor to climate change is not getting more attention?

As he begins to look into this problem trying to talk to huge environmental corporations such as Green Peace or Oceana he either gets denied an interview or when he brings up Animal agriculture most of them completely deny even knowing this problem. Towards the end of his research he abandons the notion of interviewing and started to realize why so many people are unwilling to speak out against agriculture. Towards the end of the movie he starts to realize that animal agriculture cannot be sustainable, the only way that we can begin to be sustainable is to eat a lot less meat to effect and reduce the amount of animals that we being raised for food.

I think that this movie did a good job with getting this issue out into the public and for better recognition with the American public. In my mind this is one of the biggest issues facing America and this movie did a very good job at showing us the facts and the problem because of the way that they showed it. The movie did a very good job at showing all of the facts that was easy to comprehend and towards to end of the movie I started to come to the conclusion that the only way to make meat production is to stop producing meat.

-- Eligh Purvis.