LOSE THOSE LAST 10 pounds. Spend more time with the children. Call Mom every weekend. Sound familiar? These are New Year’s resolutions: Those commitments we make to ourselves at the beginning of each New Year to improve either the quality of life or that of someone we love.

Someone else out there is at least as needy and deserving as you, your child, your mom. That someone is your planet. The North Pole is melting, dangerously volatile weather is commonplace, and one animal species after another is disappearing because of humanity’s disregard of its most precious resource. Yes, the Earth is crying for some TLC.

Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth brought conversations about global warming into the mainstream. But the Oscar- and Nobel Peace Prize-winner has close ties to the cattle industry, and as he travels the globe speaking about the fragility of our planet, he omits any discussion of meat production.

It’s a glaring omission, indeed, since agribusiness is a primary culprit in the warming of the Earth. Absolutely, as we become Earth’s stewards, it’s imperative to do all that we can to lighten our footprint.

Take cloth totebags to the grocery. Use energy-efficient lightbulbs, and turn them off when they’re not in use. Turn down the thermostat. Drive less. Purchase less. Yet these and other green habits combined pale in comparison to the impact of going vegetarian.

While it is impossible to convey the devastation wrought by agribusiness — the growing and killing of 10-plus billion animals every year in this country alone, and 60-plus billion worldwide — in a single essay, a few cogent examples shed some light on scale the problem.

First, its impact on our water supply is overwhelming. As communities worry about the availability of water, they should note that it takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, but 100 times that amount to produce a pound of beef. Indeed, half of America’s water usage is for livestock and its feed.

According to the EPA, hog, chicken and cattle waste has polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states and contaminated groundwater in nearly as many. Given that U.S. livestock produces 250,000 pounds of untreated waste per second — or 20 times as much as the entire human population — these numbers are hardly surprising.

Regarding land use, the picture is equally disturbing. We’re decimating the Amazon rainforest, so critical to the planet’s ecological balance, to make room to grow cows or the grains that they consume. (Livestock pastures account for 70 percent of the deforestation in that region.) Farm fields lose five pounds of topsoil for each pound of red meat, poultry, eggs and dairy produced. A full third of our raw materials — metal, wood, chemicals, electricity, fossil fuels and the like — are used for meat production, while only 2 percent would be required if America went vegetarian.

Scientists also attribute much of the astonishing loss of our biodiversity to agribusiness. Each year, an estimated 670 million wild birds are exposed to pesticides in the United States, and 10 percent die from that exposure. A full third of the world’s fresh water fish are extinct, endangered, or threatened because of the impact of agriculture.

Even our predators and our songbirds are impacted. According to the USDA, 100,000 bears, wolves, mountain lions and others are killed annually to protect livestock, and our songbirds have fewer places to feed and nest as we convert grassland to pasture for growing cattle feed.

Finally, what of air, arguably our most precious resource of all? A report released by the United Nations in November 2006 told us all we needed to know when it revealed that agribusiness contributes more of the greenhouse gases that are rapidly cooking our planet than all transportation combined.

The devastation wrought by agribusiness doesn’t end with the Earth. Agribusiness is also poisoning us. Five meat recalls, largely suppressed by the mainstream press, have occurred in the last seven months, one so large — nearly 25 million pounds of meat — that it forced the closure of a New Jersey meat-packing plant.

Commercially-raised meat and dairy products contain growth hormones, antibiotics, steroids, and pesticides, and meat-eaters are far more likely to develop many forms of cancer, stroke, diabetes, heart attack and many degenerative diseases. They’re also far likelier to be obese.

While the standard, largely unquestioned assumption is that humans are designed to eat meat, a growing minority of researchers, nutritionists, and physicians believe otherwise, and are guiding their patients towards healthy vegetarian lifestyles through which many of their chronic health concerns disappear.

The assumption that industrialized nations — particularly the United States — that we could produce and consume whatever we wanted without grave consequence has proven calamitous. Scientists believe that unless we radically alter our behavior within the next three to five years, Earth as we know it will not survive.

As we turn away in larger numbers from meat consumption, the Earth will thank us. So go ahead and resolve to lose those 10 pounds — and then do so! But remember the Earth as well. Reduce, reuse, recycle — and pledge to go veg.

Kathy Stevens is founder of the Catskill Animal Sanctuary, in upstate New York. She is author of Where the Blind Horse Sings (Skyhorse Publishing, 2007).