Maggie Q: Fight Climate Change With Diet Change

Actor Maggie Q is turning up the heat on the fight against climate change. You may have seen her signature fighting moves on Nikita, but her greatest attack against one of the largest causes of environmental destruction – the meat industry – is her plant-based diet. There are many proposed solutions to beating climate change, but the most powerful thing that you can do right now is to go vegan.

Maggie has no regrets about giving up meat, and in her bold new PETA ad, shot by iconic photographer Frank Ockenfels, she’s asking other people to do the same. “I know that when I’m eating that I’m not hurting the planet, I’m not hurting other people on this planet, I’m not hurting animals … and I’m not hurting nature”, she explains.

Raising animals for food damages the environment at every stage of production. According to a recent UN report, the meat industry is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global”, and the UN has concluded that a global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change. A study published last October by the European Commission found that switching to a vegetarian diet results in twice the carbon emissions savings of switching to an electric car.

In addition, the billions of animals raised on factory farms are kept in terrible, stressful conditions, often crammed into spaces barely bigger than their bodies. They are fed drugs to make them grow at an unnatural rate before they are transported to slaughterhouses, where they will die slowly and painfully.

So thank you, Maggie, for baring all to remind us to take responsibility for what we eat – for the sake of animals and the Earth.