The number of grazers that are needed to maintain a prairie or plains ecosystem is far higher than most people assume, and vast spaces in the US are becoming forested because of lack of wildlands management.
OK, we need a lot of grazers. That still doesn't really help with the fact that 30 million bovines are killed and "restocked" on a yearly basis. If the argument is "we can keep eating meat at the current rate because we need a lot of grazers", I don't think it's a very good one. Whatever carbon sequestering benefits we were supposed to get are almost immediately invalidated. It's the same issue with trees - you don't realize the carbon sequestering benefits of planting trees until they've been alive along enough to offset the input carbon.
dqv|2 years ago