Our world is made of matter. This includes everything we can see, macroscopic and even microscopic using man-made tools. This includes the air we breathe, the water we drink, and more.

Air is a mixture of various gases, primarily nitrogen and oxygen, along with smaller amounts of other gases, and particles like dust and water vapor. Even though gas molecules in the air are spread out, the space between them is not truly empty.

The Vegan Digest invites you to think of the air within our planet’s ozone layer and even beyond through to the exosphere, where space is considered to gradually begin, as a type of “ocean” simply primarily comprised of gas rather than water.

The ozone layer is the layer within earth’s atmosphere that primarily protects humans from harmful sun rays and protects our ecosystem.  If we think of our atmosphere as an “ocean,” then we don’t want bad stuff mixing in our waters nor do we want less usable water in the “oceans.” The burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas pollutes our atmosphere with trapped heat and radiation creating a greenhouse effect.

The greenhouse effect is, in summary, a harmful warming of earth’s surface and an increasingly worsening ratio of oxygen that is good for humans versus other harmful gases to humans. As of 2025, “Britannica.com” published that our very brief Industrial Revolution through the year 2000 has seen the amount of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere increased by 30% and 100% respectively.

Fossil fuels such as coal, petroleum oil, and natural gas are derived from carbon. They are nonrenewable because it takes millions of years for them to accumulate from dead organic matter. We use fossil fuel resources to enable transportation, heat and cool our homes, generate electricity, produce plastics, and more. Fossil fuels are also a major part of humans’ food production systems.

Beyond the carbon dioxide and methane released from burning of fossil fuels, the depletion of these accumulated fossil fuels poses a risk to the availability of their benefits. Humans need renewable energy innovations with practical use applications that can replace the immense benefits of burning fossil fuels, if humans aspire to exist as long as dinosaurs did and as long as plants have.

The Vegan Digest believes that it is important to remember that all organic matter is carbon-based and that the planet doesn’t require humans in order to function. Some examples of carbon-based organic matter include humans, other animals, fish, and plants. Carbon deposits have accumulated over billions of years, since pre-dinosaur eras. Some carbon deposits include dinosaur decomposition.

The carbon cycle is important in order to allow Earth to be habitable for human life. It regulates Earth’s temperature because it balances carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere. Rock and sediment basins trap carbon dioxide in layers and help form bodies of water to foster diverse life. This includes plant life.

Plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis. Humans need more plants as we continue to rely on the burning of fossil fuels for our current quality of human life, yet there is deforestation across Earth. Deforestation also impacts the world’s largest forest, Amazon rainforest, located in South America. Even the quality-of-life benefits from fossil fuel burning and deforestation aren’t evenly distributed across earth’s population.

Deforestation leads to extinction of many species and a depletion of the plants that we know are helpful to humans on earth. It’s obvious that the millions of square miles used to feed livestock and to farm crops could be used to grow sustainable sources of plant-based delicious nutritional content for humans. This is possible without the need for animals that never see freedom or animals that eat more pounds of food than they eventually provide.

Further, since current deforestation practices are significantly used for agriculture and farming expansion, we humans are able to choose to preserve these terrains that help protect human life. These forests take decades and even centuries to form.