2. Deforestation
In the United States alone, over 260 million acres of forest have been cleared to make room for crop fields, most of which are used to exclusively grow livestock feed. This is not a practice that only occurs in the U.S., land clearing in Brazil to grow chicken feed is responsible for the destruction of about 3 million acres of rainforest. And these numbers only account for land cleared to feed animals. Clearing land to grow soybeans in the Amazon rainforest is responsible for clearing over 100 million hectares of forest, releasing enough carbon into the atmosphere to increase the rate of global warming by 50 percent.