I CAN SEE MYSELF GOING COMPLETELY VEGGIE SOON

colossal growth of the meat industry, and the harrowing predictions of its effect on our planet’s climate and resources.

On her travels, she meets characters on all sides of the debate and takes to the skies above the Amazon rainforest where zoologists are urgently trying to save rare animal and plant species whose habitat is being cleared for cattle.

The latter was a real eye-opener for Liz.

“I didn’t really fully understand just how important that particular rainforest is for our survival, period. Case closed. There’s no kind of debate about that.

“It’s the lungs of the planet, it’s a carbon store!” she relays, passionately.

“Each tree draws up 1,000 litres a day to create what the indigenous people call ‘flying rivers’ over the treetops, which is a mist that then contributes to the rain cycle of our planet.

“They call it the beating heart, the circulatory system of the planet, and at the research stage, at my desk with my big mug of tea, what I relish is getting stuck in to all that stuff,” she continues.

“(There), I began to understand the role that the Amazon plays to our health, every single one of us, so by the time I was in that plane, it’s hard to put into words the harrowing realisation of what each of us is responsible for.”

Asked how the show has affected her own meat consumption, Liz reveals that she was already eating a very little amount of meat and that she’s stopped eating red meat altogether. “It wasn’t even a stage of going ‘I must’, I just naturally have lost the taste for it at the moment,” she reveals. “I saw these pigs in the barns and that was it for me.

“To be honest with you, I can see myself getting into complete vegetarianism very soon. It’s just a natural progression.”

Liz continues: “As the latest scientific research is saying, if we reduce to two portions (of meat) a week we could mitigate some of those impacts – that’s the information and after that it’s each and everybody’s personal choice.”

Of the aim of the film, Liz says: “What we set out to make, and I hope what we achieved, is to inform and to educate about what exactly meat production does to the environment.

“From that there will be lots of tangential, hopefully, talks, more discussions and hopefully more programmes,” she finishes.

“Did we achieve the brief?” she wonders. “I hope we did.”

Meat: A Threat To Our Planet? airs on BBC1 on Monday at 9pm.

WHEN hard-hitting BBC1 documentary Drowning In Plastic aired last autumn, Liz Bonnin had no idea of the reaction it would cause. The ground-breaking film – which highlighted the devastating global impact of plastic on our oceans and marine wildlife – drove viewers to take to social media, first to express their dismay, and more importantly to pledge change. And change, albeit slowly, is happening. Today, one year on, Liz, 43, says she has her comrade to thank for paving the way. “It was Blue Planet II and Sir David Attenborough who really had the impact with plastic,” she insists, her film picking up where the devastating final episode of that series left off, “that’s why we called it ‘the Blue Planet effect’. Our job was to further investigate the impact of plastics on the ocean, but we played a role in helping to further the conversation.” That she did, and she hopes to do the same with her next BBC project, too: Meat: A Threat To Our Planet? With the UN recently branding meat “the world’s most urgent problem”, stating that our excessive consumption is pushing us to a climate catastrophe, the wildlife biologist (a meat-eater herself) embarks on an ambitious mission to uncover the true extent of this environmental “crisis”. Taking her search far and wide, the 60-minute film sees the Paris-born star, who moved to Ireland when she was nine, learning about the

Liz Bonnin in an intensive pig shed on a farm in the US