For-profit companies and charities alike are jumping onto the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (#SDGs). We all want to self-identify as sustainable people. But most want to hang onto that good-ole biblical prerogative: human dominion…
The human quest to dominate the planet and its conscious beings caused our sustainability crisis. If we really want to address the crisis, animal-liberation thinking must inform our discussions of life on Earth.
Maybe we need to refer to the species as Ammo sapiens. Because if there’s one thing humans are endlessly resourceful about, it’s making and using weapons.
The NRA and the 2nd Amendment are evidence of the corruption and the loneliness of our kind. The person buying weapons, vowing they’re just for hunting, or the President who says the deer aren’t wearing Kevlar vests so, hey, we can live without military-style machine guns and keep the rest…They are still supporting the weapon makers.
Whether it’s a deer, a bear, or a human ape in the crosshairs, whether it’s semi-automatic or not, violence is violence, and human aggression is our problem.
We could be so much better, so much stronger, so much more aware of the meaning of every moment in another being’s life.
_____
Photo source: Stephen Andrews, via Pexels.
In 2022, I drove approximately 2,000 miles. This was by design. I have a self-imposed 2,000 mile cap on my annual driving.
The average U.S. adult drives 14,000 miles annually, says a quick internet search. If so, then I spared the atmosphere about 12,000 driving miles (and did not fly).
Eating an animal-free diet equates to a savings of 8,100 miles (not) driven annually.*
In comparison with the typical U.S. adult, I’m sparing the atmosphere about 20,000 driving miles a year.
This is a defiant stance. A serious load of CO2 not emitted, representing many times the petroleum sector could have taken my dollars, and did not. In suburbia, it involves some sacrifices; but it feels good, because I’m an ape and my ancestors moved on their feet.
Is this defiance (or conversing about it to others) a virtue signal? Some will take it that way, likely because they don’t wish to take it as a cue.
I so often hear that climate concerns are just signals and not meaningful action.
“The problem is too big!”
“People aren’t going to change.”
“One person can’t do anything about this!”
Those statements have a way of becoming excuses for complacency.
It’s my job to let people know: We can all “march” to divest from emissions. Many of us can walk to the grocery store, tend a garden, bike to a hike, Zoom into meetings, and take the train to conferences—and, indeed, to climate marches. If our infrastructure makes this dangerous or practically impossible, we can agitate for pedestrian-friendly routes and better public transit and remote meetings. And we can press for the in-person meetings to apply vegan-by-default policies.
I let people know: I’m striving to make my life a climate march. I invite them to join me. To live defiantly. To live in harmony with our real nature.
Love and liberation,
Lee.
PS: And I can do better. This will be my last car—of any kind. Selling capitalism as “green” is a lot like marketing animal agribusiness as humane.
______
*Source of figures for diet and emission reduction: Jason Czarnezki, EVERYDAY ENVIRONMENTALISM, which puts the figure at an equivalent of 1,160 miles saved daily through a “protein shift” from animal products to plant-derived meals.
Photo credit: Porapak Apichodilok.
FRIDAY, 22 JULY 2022, 8-11 PM (EDT: the New York/Toronto time zone).
Let’s converse about the diet-climate connection and go deeper still. Why do we assign ourselves the right to displace habitat with systems that are not only massive emitters, but also massively aggressive to the natural web of life?
Human domination of the planet is the big issue we need to address. It’s also the most entrenched problem humanity has ever had to face.
But we cannot go on living as we are. We need to rethink our identity as a species on a living planet.
Please come to the Second Annual Vegan Climate Summit if you can. It would be great to see you there.
Event co-ordinator Kyle Luzynski of Project Animal Freedom is a patron of the Art of Animal Liberation. Project Animal Freedom has a very gutsy goal: cultivating a fully vegan Midwestern U.S. by 2056 through a strategic, chapter-based system.
Tesla’s “semi-sentient” cars cannot replace the sentient life their infrastructure overruns. Animals can’t defend themselves from lithium extraction. Fragile ecosystems have little recourse against Tesla—or “green” tech’s cheap access to sensitive lands in general.
Meanwhile, Musk continues to craft ecological and social justifications to burrow into key facets of modern life. Now the Teslaspreading is taking up all of Twitter.
Read more on CounterPunch today.
Our challenges can seem overwhelming sometimes. Heather Steel, a vegan from Calgary, Alberta, notes that the little things make a day sweet.
“Of course, we are vegan because of our beliefs about animals”, Heather writes.
“But then there are these little side benefits which come out of it. Like an acquaintance who lives in a rural area was telling me last winter how glad he is to be vegan when we get snowed in, and the neighbours start panicking about running out of milk and meat, but he just goes and cooks some beans, makes some soymilk and tofu, bakes some bread etc.”
Right on!
For nearly five years, until December 2019, I worked in a grocery store. People practically stampede over themselves to clear out every last carton of milk and eggs when they hear a storm forecast. Some are outraged when all these sad items are gone.
And I’d be saying: “Why don’t you bring home some delicious lentil soup? In fact, why don’t you bring home lentils? You can make tacos, or soup, or a delicious salad…” I was glad when some of these people would look at me like they’ve never considered a lentil before, but maybe this was the time.
Well, what are the little things to love about being vegan other than not getting into a milk and eggs frenzy before a storm?
Violife. Violife cheeses are so good. Miyoko’s and other vegan cheeses are now models for store-label plant-based cheeses. Stores that used to shun us are now trying to compete with us. But the point is, mm. These cheeses really are luxurious.
Back when I first became a vegan, in the last century,😂 there were none of the “vegan foods” we look for in grocery stores now. No non-animal cheeses or deli meats. No nut milks. There was stuff in a box you could mix and form sausages out of (called “Sosmix”)… dreadful stuff, but we’d eat it. And was anyone else here vegan back in the days of “Soymage”? I thought someone from animal ag was deliberately sabotaging our cause with that product!
Well, that was part of going vegan then. You had to make a serious dietary shift and a lot of people looked at it as deprivation. But I very quickly discovered Hindu food. I learned how to shop for it, and how to cook it. And it was very good.
Would I have sought out that experience if I weren’t a vegan? Probably not.
These days, vegans are whipping up aquafaba meringue, and fermenting their own cheeses. I find vegans really enjoy learning about and experimenting with a wide variety of culinary techniques. They are inventive, skilled, and generous with what they create.
Another great thing? Because vegans all share the same dietary perspective but have different tastes and interests, it can be fun getting together with other vegans and trying out something they like. I’ve enjoyed sitting around a table into the wee hours playing board games with my vegan friends. One even designed a game around a rescue theme, and made sure to include foxes on the landscape. ♡
I also treasure the moment an animal in nature spots me. It’s a spark that connects a human soul to the whole universe. It’s the beauty in finding an animal free – and knowing we wouldn’t have things any other way.
_________
Photo credit: Kabir Cheema, on Unsplash.
They say “free range” and “pasture raised” is better. Try telling that to Harold Brown.
Harold grew up on a spacious family farm in Michigan, raising cows, pigs, goats and rabbits for their flesh. Like any farm kid, Harold learned to relate to farm animals in the expected way. Parents and family, church, Future Farmers of America, the local 4-H Club, ag courses at land-grant colleges and TV commercials all told kids the same thing. Eating animals and animal products is normal. Animal flesh, dairy and eggs are basic human wants and needs.
Yet as a child, Harold knew cow herds as communities, and cows as individuals who mourned when one of the group was shot by a deer hunter, or when cows were separated from their calves. Harold also saw them play.
“And I watched a lot of kids cry when they auctioned off their animals at the county fairs,” says Harold. Growing up involved putting away childish feelings. In adulthood, Harold went on occasional hunting trips and took a three-year job at a dairy.
At 18, Harold had a heart attack. A few years later, after an injury at the dairy, a connection clicked. The union doctor went over Harold’s blood work and predicted bypass surgery.
After studying the literature on diet and disease, Harold resolved to stop eating animal flesh and ice cream by the tub. And that’s when a form of post-traumatic stress seeped into the ex-farmer’s mind—a sudden horror at having driven and castrated and dehorned and butchered bulls and cows. Switching to plants for protein and nutrients had tripped a new switch—from a health quest to a journey of awareness, of caring, of love cut short in childhood.
It’s painful to begin the vegan journey, and perhaps that’s why many don’t. To become aware of having done harm is to take a difficult step. Harm to other animals. Harm to human beings who were forced to repress their empathy and inflict such harm.
I think of the activism that aims to punish slaughter workers. Harold could have been interchangeable with the killing floor worker dismissed from a job, or possibly subjected to criminal charges or deportation. Punishment is not an epiphany. Those who think slaughterers and stalkers of animals are beyond redemption must not know Harold Brown.
Now, as a vegan, Harold makes connections by telling others what the younger Harold had needed to hear. It starts with taking a walk with another person. Befriending another person. Planting seeds, and cultivating them. Harold is a low-key advocate and a long-term friend.
Some say they could never become vegan. “What do you have to lose?” Harold asks. “Try eating this way for one year. Let me help.” Harold bets their bodies will flourish and they’ll stick with it.
But Harold adds: “We cannot expect these things from other people or society unless we sow the seeds and nurture them.” I like this a lot. The point of vegan advocacy, I think, is neither to shame nor intimidate others, nor to manipulate emotions, but to learn and to inform, to be open and receptive and trustworthy. We’re all in this together.
Harold thinks the animal protection movement (Harold now wryly refers to it as the animal husbandry reform movement) is too focused on scoring minor victories in the world of animal ag, and not enough on nurturing people and helping them change their lives. As for those so-called victories, Harold flatly states: “There is no such thing as a humane animal product or farming practice, humane transport or humane slaughter.” Those are marketing taglines.
Wherever animal products are made, what needs to be reformed is the farmer, not the farm.
Harold appeared in Tribe of Heart’s film Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home. It’s about Harold and other farmers and rescue workers who came to share an understanding. And Harold has found that we create the peaceable kingdom in our inner lives.
Veganism is an ethic of unlimited empathy, Harold says, an ethic of unconditional caring and love. It encompasses our health and our mental being. It leads to respect for all elements of Earth’s intricate biological community. It is our journey home. Read further.
A very happy birthday to Harold on June 28th, and many more.
Banner photo: Harold Brown (L) with Vinnie Straub and the Self Love Vegan food truck at the American Vegan Society in Malaga, New Jersey.
Though I’m vaccinated, I freely admit to vaccine hesitance. I’m not very interested in the conflicting Covid vaccine theories. But I am concerned about the trafficking of primates, mice, and other nonhuman animals to be used in vaccine testing.
Seems we’re using dogs to detect Covid now, too. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Durham University worked with a business called Medical Detection Dogs to learn whether dogs can sniff out Covid-19 infections. According to media sources, the preliminary results of “using dogs as a tool” for diagnosis are encouraging. Labrador, Golden Retriever and Cocker Spaniel breeds have been selected to detect Covid and might be used to dissuade infected people from going into in high-traffic spaces.
Unless new vaccines are approved and marketed for dogs, the virus endangers the sniffing dogs, too.
We use dogs to perform a lot of work; I object to all of it. So the dog issue isn’t really a vaccine-specific thing. But canine Covid-sniffing is an example of exploitation of animals to address a disease we got from… exploiting animals. Our interference with other animals created the virus. This is so, whether Covid developed in lab bats, bat soup, or animals confined at food markets.
Do we really think vaccines will free us from the infections that perennially plague us? I’m not saying the vaccine doesn’t work; it does. But it only deals with one group of viruses: Covid-19 and some variants. There will be others.
Infections change with the climate. Zoonotic diseases arise as we invade and exploit untamed areas of the Earth. Knowing the habits of human apes, the next catastrophe awaits us any day now. Fights over where the virus emerged or who is using it for political gain are not as important as the root cause: our incessant refusal to live as respectful Homo sapiens within an interconnected biological community.
Let me be clear. We need to stop invading nature. We need to let the oceans and forests be. We need to end the “habituation” of nonhuman animals to attract eco-tourists. We need to stop nosing into the lives and spaces of other living communities. We as vegans need to be communicating from this principle.
I explained that I oppose animal experimentation; this is part of my vegan ethic. The doctor pointed out that vaccination, as a public health matter, cannot be understood as strictly individual. Vaccinated people can protect others who might be more vulnerable to the worst ravages of the illness.
The decision, for me, was hard. I told the doctor that as vegans we must abstain from animal use as far as possible and practicable. This public health crisis would be one of the rare instances when I’d need to accept my failure to apply the principle.
I felt a little better because my first jab was a leftover dose. (A nurse who had extra vaccines at the end of a Saturday came out of a medical building and pulled me off a running trail.) But I’d have taken the vaccine ultimately, in any case.
I carried out a duty to other human beings. On another level I ignored the mice and monkeys. Knowingly, I acted for self-protection and the protection of my tribe. After my second jab, I felt relieved and disoriented. Lucky and privileged. Ambivalent. I was glad my friends and I could be safe. A part of me was lonelier than usual.
Given the way we act now, I suppose we’ll keep needing vaccines until diseases learn to beat us. And one day they might, if our unhinged climate doesn’t beat us first. And to be deep-down honest maybe they ought to, because we can’t seem to get our act together and treat our Earth and its living beings with r-e-s-p-e-c-t.
I’ll keep striving, asking: Can we ever transcend our sense of human superiority and entitlement? Do we want to learn how?
Because lasting resilience in the face of health and environmental crises must involve asking deep questions, ethical questions among them, about why these crises emerge.
Love and liberation,
Lee.
Photo by Corinne Sleeking on Unsplash. This piece is dedicated to Chris Kelly, Lois Baum and Deb Thompson.
It’s the night of the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. Joe Biden just got vaccinated, and Britain is on the verge of increased lockdown measures because of a new Covid-19 variant discovered in London.
Vaccines will curb Covid-19, but they clearly can’t end it, as they do not address its root causes. And we face still more pervasive emergencies:
Vegans stepped up to avert these emergencies well before Covid-19. To be vegan is to reject the belief that other life on the surface of this planet is suitable for Homo sapiens to move or manipulate. Without systematic animal confinement, Covid wouldn’t exist.
To quote Kirsti and Vinnie of SelfLoveVegan, once we begin to love all sentient beings, we begin to love ourselves. Nothing less will spare us, and every other biological community on Earth, from an endless string of gradually or abruptly worsening emergencies.
Nothing less than love will do, and love means a transformation of our human identity. Instead of feeling entitled to control other life, we find ourselves compelled to respect it. In a profound sense, vegan advocacy might just be the most essential work in the human world.
Special solstice post inspired by patrons and supporters. Photo: Harold and Vinnie beside the SelfLoveVegan food truck at the 2018 American Vegan Society annual general meeting and garden party, by Lee.
Absolutely, stop the wet markets. But unless you happen to be vegan, don’t forget to take the log out of your own eye.
Read the full article at CounterPunch.
Vegan Place 