Last year, as I sat on my couch, drinking out of my reusable water bottle, everything I thought I knew about climate change came to a screeching halt.

I was watching a documentary called "Cowspiracy," which hammers home the undeniable link between livestock agriculture and climate change.

In that moment, I decided to stop eating beef. And because I stopped eating beef, I know that my single action is saving 1,100 gallons of water, 45 pounds of grain, 30 square feet of forests, 10 pounds of carbon dioxide, and, oh yeah, one animal's life.

Every day.

If these things matter to you, here's why you might want to give the same thing a try.

Research by the environmental research organization WorldWatch Institute, says that if you were to subtract oil and gas, electricity and fossil fuels from the climate equation, scientists predict we'll still exceed our maximum carbon greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 -- all from the raising and eating of livestock.

Consider this:

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Even so, Pennsylvania Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding

And the more I read, the more I found that the effects of animal agriculture dwarf that of the things our legislators -- well some of them anyway -- spend their time yakking about.

The booming natural gas industry, including Pennsylvania's, uses an estimated 100 billion gallons of water every year. But that seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the 34 trillion gallons that raising livestock requires each year. And that's in the United States alone.

That's a lot of water. What to do about it? How can you play a part?

Some among us might rise to this challenge by limiting our showers to less than five minutes.

But think about this: To produce that one cheeseburger you ate last week uses as much water as a shower that lasts for two months straight.

So as much as we'd like to think that reining in our water use will do the trick, it does nothing to address that 55 percent of water used in the U.S. is for the keeping and killing of livestock.

The USDA also says that nearly half of the continental U.S. is devoted to land for pastures, grazing or crops. And the International Livestock Research Institute says livestock covers 45 percent of the earth's total land.

Common sense would tell us that, as our population of meat-eaters steadily grows, so will the amount of land needed to sustain so many hungry carnivores.

Agriculture is one of Pennsylvania's biggest industries. So, obviosuly I'm not suggesting we get rid of farms. But what if we thought about agriculture differently? What if we thought about a new kind of eating?

Maybe our idea of farming should become one where we try to put back into the soil and the fields at least some of the nutrients that we repeatedly extract from it. Maybe, we could think about replenishing the fields that cattle graze on before we charge on to the next one.

We are privileged to live in a world where the switch magically turns on the light and our food wondrously shows up on our plates and in our stores -- without so much a second thought as to where it comes from.

But, there's still time to restore the broken link to our surrounding ecosystem.

We're serial depleters. But we don't have to be.

We've cleared forests to make room for grazing. We've decimated species that pose a threat to our livestock populations. We've filled our rivers and streams with animal waste and polluted our atmosphere with the harmful effects of their byproducts.

I suggest we stop and ask ourselves: How much of our planet are we comfortable losing to beef?

I'm aware that suggesting you need to drastically change your daily and well-loved diet is not exactly a political winner. Still, we could work to fix the problem of climate change that we created for ourselves -- without expensive ventures or lengthy pieces of legislation.

And we could do it by making the decision to eat more vegetables than T-bone steaks. And maybe we could, gasp, try a veggie burger instead of that double baconator for lunch today.

To the extent that some of you might care about protecting this planet, not just for yourselves, but for future generations, this might be the answer.

We can continue to carpool to work and drink out of reusable water bottles, but until we decide that our planet matters more than our Wednesday night sirloin specials, these efforts will continue to ring hollow.

Becky Kimmel, a senior at Messiah College in Lower Allen Township, is a PennLive/Patriot-News spring intern.