Vegan?

I have been a vegan for 1.5 years now and I am glad I made the decision. My reasons for being vegan are the following (not in any particular order): (1) It is good for my health, (2) it is good for the environment and (3) it is nice to animals. The more I learn about eating animal products, the more I feel I made the right decision. People sometimes suggest that being vegan is extreme. I don't feel it is extreme for me. So many things I do are bad for the environment (driving, trash, energy use), bad for my health (sitting in a chair most of the day, being exposed to toxins in the environment), and bad for animals (pollution, all those animals I ate in the past). Being vegan is a small contribution compared to that.

If you are interested in learning about being vegan, here are some good books to consider reading:
-China Study: lots and lots of good info, but not the most concise
-Skinny B**ch: Very entertaining and covers most important points concisely
-Eating Animals: Very informative and entertaining (and disturbing) book about the animal industry
-Kind Diet: good information and some recipies

Some things to consider:
-Being vegan doesn't guarantee that you will eat healthy, you still need to stay away from junk. From what I have read, you also need to take a vitamin B12 suppliment.
-Being vegan makes it easier to be healthy in direct ways (I think avoiding animal products is healthy). Even when I don't exercise I don't gain weight or fat.
-It is also healthy in indirect ways because it helps me avoid junk food (People at my office seem to bring junk to work every day. It is always someone's birthday or some holiday or someone being nice just decides to bring donuts. In the past it was hard to avoid all the junk, but now I don't have a problem avoiding it since it almost all non-vegan)
-Being vegan is a little hard at the beginning, but once you come up with some recipies, figure out where to shop and where to eat, it is not too bad

I know a lot of vegans "think" they are being good for the environment, check out this book it might give you at least a balanced look at the truth.

http://lierrekeith.com/vegmyth.htm

I've been a vegan for about a month now, i was a vegetarian for a decade about a decade ago. I'm not a moral vegan, i honestly could care less if you eat bessie or not. I'm a vegan for environmental reason and this book you mentioned is basically asking for us to go back to a hunter/gather lifestyle, which with 7 billion people on the planet just isn't possible, let alone logical!!! He's talking about the evils of agriculture, and about the natural life cycle of cows and grass plains. His thoughts are so out of touch with the actual reality of the world we live in, i was actually laughing out loud. As if we could stop/change our world's heavy reliance on agriculture is just humorous! It's not possible or logical for the whole planet to go vegan. I think a lot of us who turn vegan for environmental reason do so because it's one big thing we can do within our little life to lessen our personal impact on the environment.