Hey hey hey, we’ve done it, Homo sapiens! 🍻In 2025, as of today, we have extracted an entire year’s worth of what our planet can replenish. The rest of the “resources” we take to suit our annual need and greed now enters deficit mode.
Continue reading here. Wishing a creatively uncomfortable Overshoot Day to all…
Terminus, the Roman god of borders and boundary stones, had a motto: I Yield to No One. In the old days, lambs and piglets died in blood sacrifices for Terminus. Today, nations sacrifice human lives in homage to their borderlines.
The most recent sacrifices include the due process rights of 200+ Venezuelans, sent to a sprawling pit in El Salvador from which nobody gets out alive, where warehoused human beings eat with their hands and sleep under lights, on bare metal racks. Meanwhile, Trump walks free, touting meme coins and flying to golf outings.
And then comes Bernie…
Continue reading the full piece, new today on CounterPunch.
Can we use the F word to describe the subordination of nonhuman animals by humanity?
Feel free to add your thoughts to mine, friends.
Isn’t it a beautiful thing that the sun shines equally for all living beings? Celebrate the Solstice today.
However we all might be voting in the current election, one thing I think is undeniable. It’s a horrific crisis our politicians have forced us to pay for.
Everyone killed by the military forces we’re funding was somebody’s baby or parent, defender, teacher, or muse. All, no doubt, would have liked the chance to flourish on this planet for a while. Who among us consents to anyone raiding our accounts to fund the annhilation of bodies, minds, and spirits?
So, what’s happening to Palestine and Lebanon at this moment, happens against my will. As do the attacks on Iran, Syria, and Yemen. And the living beings within all these beaten and scorched territories.
We could be different. We could define ourselves as the tribe of humanity. We could define ourselves as a biological community within a tapestry of many living communities.
Why is this not a goal for us? Isn’t it what life is all about?
The trauma we create in each other through prejudice, war, and ethnic violence corresponds with the trauma we inflict on other-than-human beings. Vanquishing living communities—human and other—and usurping untamed places, the colonial mindset menaces every living community on Earth.
The displacement of indigenous communities and the crushing of biodiversity for domesticating other animals has created the Anthropocene epoch. As Earthly beings we’ve deprived nature and ourselves of biological diversity.
Presently, the body mass of mammals known to inhabit Earth is “overwhelmingly dominated by livestock and humans.” Meanwhile, loss of habitat contributes to rising temperatures that imperil most living beings on this planet.
Prominent vegans, back in the 1940s and 1950s when the word vegan was new, declared themselves conscientious objectors to war. They defined themselves through vocal, steadfast resistance to the human war on other living communities—which includes the human ones.
And they resisted half-measures. Dominion needed to be let go of, not administered more carefully. Veganism is the antithesis of the so-called stewardship mode that claims to preserve patches of the nature we subjugate. Veganism would resist stuff like “deer management” (stalking, baiting, killing). There are “so many deer” because humans are so keen on displacing their natural predators. Who needs to be controlled?
How did humanity lose the concept of nature as its own real steward, the expert of its own patterns and balances?
CNN published an interview piece this week that included someone who drove a bulldozer over human beings, both dead and alive. The driver now can’t look at meat because it’s a reminder of the bodies. Yes, slaughter is slaughter—for any victim.
Climate crisis will only exacerbate the competition for territory, the displacement of cultures, and the destruction of those who are animalized.
We humans must change course. The othering needs to stop. Those who set out to beat others into submission need to be stopped. The cycle needs to break. Caring for the well-being of anyone alive on Earth, and respecting their ability to live on their terms, nurtures our collective humanity. It’s high time we pursued real priorities.
Love and liberation,
Lee.
Photo source: Aia Fernandez, via Flickr (CC-BY SA 2.0 Generic).
Free-living animals become competitors to subdue and erase. In their place, we produce tame animals that accommodate our desires. Is this peace?
I know better, now. Peace is lying under a lamppost, watching bats flutter in the evening. Peace is meeting a coyote’s gaze at dawn. Or pausing to watch deer cross a snowy meadow. It’s in the silent moments when we’re awed to have been born on such a planet…
Painting by Edward Hicks. Image source: Dick A. Ramsay Fund, Brooklyn Museum.
When someone asks me about the key resolutions to make in this time of environmental crisis, I say be vegan. That relates to everything. Every other commitment that’s mindful of the living planet emerges from that.
Resist the subjugation of other species by ours.
For a day, carry a notepad. Jot down any instances of subjugation you find in a single day. Note the forms of systematic bullying or erasure of others which exist as ordinary realities. Try this, talk about this. Let these notes inform personal, integrated, minute-by-minute thoughts, words, actions.
Work for all aspects of justice at the root. It’s the same root.
To liberation,
Lee.
The law fails to do what people aren’t ready to do. Yet Earth’s living communities can’t wait. They urgently need us to change. Whether we, the ultimate crafters of social hierarchies, acknowledge it or not, we can never alienate ourselves from the nature we destroy. So, what are we doing to reconcile ourselves to it?
Published in CounterPunch today. Read more here.
This weekend’s edition of CounterPunch included my piece on the topic of feeding cats. It’s my commentary on a study done through Winchester University that asserts a vegan diet is good for cats.
Catriona Gold says:
I hope my fellow vegans will read Lee’s piece and consider where our energy is best spent: On debating the merits of vegan pet food? Or on challenging petkeeping itself? Discussion about the former risks obscuring the latter, dividing us and making us easy targets for ridicule. We can do better. ✊
And on a related note, Patricia Fairey spotted this cartoon…
Cartoon by Mike Ellis (commenting on the Winchester University study by Andrew Knight et al. which asserts that cats thrive on vegan diets). ALT: Drawing shows cat telling dog `Yes, I eat the prof’s veggie bits then nip out the catflap to snaffle a quick bluetit!’
Vegan Place 