Tobacco industry

[Damien]

I turned vegan a month ago. I'm surprised how well I'm doing. But... I'm a smoker. So my question is: What influence on environment has tobacco industry?

 

[rogerjolly]

Hi Damien and welcome to the forum.

I have never bothered to research the effect of the tobacco industry on the environment but I do know that it has a great impact on your wallet and an even greater one on your lungs and heart!

Roger.

 

[Plant Muncher]

I guess tobacco crops use acreage that could be used for food. I don't have any statistics on how much acreage that entails but it has to be a lot. As an aside, my mother and my sister both smokers, both died of lung cancer in the last 10 years. I can tell you this. I worked my way through college as an orderly in a large hospital where I often worked on the oncology floor. I saw a lot of people die from all types of cancers in my time there. I never saw any of them suffer as much as my mother and my sister when they were dying from their cancers. Your only two choices when dying from lung cancer are to suffer excruciating pain or to dope yourself into unconsciousness until you die. The only saving grace for my mother and sister was that lung cancer tends to kill you within a few short months. You are still young enough to reverse the damage. Please consider quitting. Good luck.

 

[Christine]

There are intensive methods of agriculture involved in producing tobacco; the biggest environmental damage issue apparent is ironically one of the worst side-effects the raising of massive cattle herds bred for the meat industry creates: deforestation.

That said, the latter is inherent in farming many, many other raw products such as soya, which are often sown on land formally used for ranching in the Amazon, and make the land all but useless at recovering in the aftermath. As a whole, we humans are simply awful at creating big business with minimal impact on the planet's lungs! -_-

Incidentally I quit smoking cold turkey at the beginning of July. It was actually one of the principle factors that made up my mind when I considered going vegan again. I felt I owed my body something positive (not that I don't still stuff my face with popcorn!) I won't tell you to quit because I sure as hell never listened when others told me the same, but I will say that taking the leap, when you do... it's actually ok over here: it is doable.

 

[Alex_M]

Off the cuff I am pretty sure tobacco is a heavy user of pesticides (ironically, nicotine is produced by the plant to act as it's own insecticide type defense), herbicides, fungicides and the like. Maybe even GMO. All the above are certainly poisonous to the Earth in multiple ways. Tobacco companies are of course unethical when it comes to peoples health and their advertising, i'm pretty sure the same mentality gets applied to the Earth.

I didn't read much of it but here's a link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultivation_of_tobacco#Problems_in_Tobacco_Production

Good luck to you!!

 

[Kava]

I used to live in Kentucky, a major tobacco growing state, and part of our farm had a tobacco base. The plant itself while pretty to look at, is unusually harsh on the soil in that it takes up a lot of nitrogen and phosphorus too if I remember right. Tobacco farmers (the smart one) have to do an awful lot of supplementing or crop rotation to save the soil for future crops.