Tag Archives: sustainable farming

Ego, Eco, and More Ego?

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I’ve being seeing a lot of this graphic👇of a pyramid and circle, each full of silhouettes of living beings, superimposed on a grassy landscape and blue sky:

Note the difference between the grassy version above and 👇 this image, spotted on the One Terrene International website:

Given the language on its website, One Terrene International could be the origin of the EGO->ECO design concept.

OK, back to the bright-blue-sky-and-green-grass version of the graphic. Why does it include cows and other domesticated animals—not just in the hierarchical EGO-pyramid, but even on the ECO-circle side of the graphic?

The One Terrene (natural, muted design) version appears to show ECO as free-living, not controlled. (There’s a cat, but it could be Felis silvestris lybica, a member of the small wildcat communities of Africa, India, and China).

Darach Croft: Animal Husbandry as Preservation

I found Darach Croft, the possible source of the grass-and-sky graphic design, on Twitter.

I tweeted:

I see your EGO-ECO graphic (and other versions) often, @DarachCroft. I don’t understand your version placing dogs and farm animals on the ECO side of the image. Purpose-breeding strikes me as a clear case of EGO.

Darach Croft responded:

Hiya, I think the point is there are exactly the same animals and plants on both sides of the image and that it is the way that we interact with the animals that differentiates the EGO-ECO relationship. But certainly purpose breeding that is detrimental to animals would be EGO.

And I replied:

I’ll include your answer and I appreciate it. I’d say purpose-breeding is detrimental per se. It twists and thwarts evolution, takes land and water that could have been the habitat of free-living wildcats and wolves et al., respected, living on their terms, not chased off on ours.

Darach Croft is a Scottish animal farm (a croft is a sort of micro farm) based on regenerative animal farming methods, whose members sell flesh, eggs, honey, wool, and wool fat soaps.

That would explain the placement of human-controlled, purpose-bred animals in an image supposedly telling us how to subvert our egos for the sake of the planet. This is a subtle form of hogwash—suggesting that exploiting the other beings of the Earth can be sustainable, eco-friendly, and exemplary.

Questioning the Stewardship Trope

To my mind, it’s hugely important to question this suggestion—when we find it in public presentations, and when we find it in our own minds. For example, if we are committed to animal liberation, respecting our rescued pet or farm animals involves questioning their position of dependence on Homo sapiens—a dependence the other animals cannot outgrow, a dependence we engraved in their Earthly experience through selective breeding, a dependence that made them individually vulnerable to lifelong use and abuse of just about every imaginable kind.

And no matter how gently treated these animals might be, we are not bestowing a benefit on animals by bringing them into an exploitive system that need not exist. 

Some people will avoid a vegan commitment if, at least from time to time, they can find animal products marketed as natural, humane, biodynamic, local, sustainable, or the now-popular regenerative. We can understand the psychology here. Haven’t we all, at some point back in the day, asked: Is there anything wrong with eating eggs if the chickens are allowed to live natural lives? If I look for the free-range label? If the farmers are good stewards of the land? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I’m not “calling out” anyone in any way I haven’t called myself out. 

The Power to Change This Structure

An enormous segment of the human economy is based on taking advantage of conscious life, yet each one of us has the power to change this structure, and we constantly encounter other people with this same potential. We’re all in this together.

When ego gives into an eco-aware human identity, we won’t be “stewards” who justify breeding others for our own ends. We’ll have regained our lost sense of awe and excitement in living among the members of Earth’s great biological community—not according to some ideal we imagine. Not by some process we control. But as they evolve, on their terms.

Love and liberation,

Lee.

Banner photo: People’s Climate March, Melbourne, Australia (21 Sep. 2014). Originally posted by John Englart (Takver) at https://flickr.com/photos/81043308@N00/15120960559 (archive) and licensed under cc-by-sa-2.0; via Wikimedia Commons.

Climate and Vegetarian Summerfest 2016

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On Thursday 7 July in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, I’ll be offering a talk named Climate Change: How the Public Conversation Is Shifting and How Vegetarian Voices Can Be Heard. (The North American Vegetarian Society presentation summary includes a description: “This session will provide updates on farming and climate, and also involve some easy, memorable, and valid points to raise—whether in ordinary conversations or at the policy level. Attorney Lee Hall holds a specialist’s degree in environmental law with a focus on climate change, and will facilitate discussion, including new findings and vital points not raised in most discussions of climate and diet.”)

Some VeganPlace readers might ask: Wait—vegetarian voices should be heard? Don’t vegetarians consume cow products, which are obviously connected to methane and general climate-wrecking?

No. Real vegetarians don’t eat dairy. The ovo-lacto take on vegetarianism has been ruled out by the North American Vegetarian Society for twenty years. The five-day menu at Summerfest is not ovo-lacto-; it’s pure vegetarian. Sometimes vegans rail against the shortfalls of vegetarians, but in my opinion the vegan movement needs to tip its hat to vegetarians taking their mission seriously. Respect to NAVS for encouraging its membership to strive for an authentic vegetarianism and to learn why animal agribusiness is not climate-friendly.

And now, yes, the public conversation about climate change has shifted. It has to. We’re not stronger than the climate system. It’s having the last word in every debate. No lifestyle, no matter how rich or famous, is exempt.

Nor is any place on Earth untouched; we now know that levels of Antarctic CO2 have reached 400 parts per million. For the first time in 4 million years.

The roadways on which we burn so much fossil-fuel energy seem to be bucking us off.

And yet a poll six months ago showed half of U.S. society thinking climate change isn’t a very serious problem.

2014-summerfest-patreon-cropNothing could be more serious. Everything depends on climate. Plants are losing the conditions that support them. By 2100, some tropical regions are predicted to have 200 fewer growing days a year. Let that sink in.

And then think about what is happening to untamed animal communities when native plants stop growing where they live.

We keep on releasing stored carbon dioxide (by burning oil and gas) and disrupting Earth’s capacity to store it (by cutting down trees). We’re releasing methane into the atmosphere from our landfills, through fracking, and from domesticated animals, mostly cows. We’re polluting the atmosphere with nitrous oxide through our use of manure too.

And getting our proteins though animals raises costs. If your shopping bag is loaded with flesh products, including the bodies of marine animals, your receipt total is going to come out pretty high, compared to that of the shopper with a bag full of horseradish hummus, red and green cabbage, red pepper and ciabatta, sweet potatoes, etc. When we use cows, pigs, goats, rabbits, birds and other animals to funnel our protein through, we are not advancing culture so much as advancing business. I will use the term animal agribusiness when talking about animal farming and its attendant feed industries, and reserve the word agriculture for the growers who produce food.

Free-range is really another form of sprawl

It’s been ten years since the United Nations published Livestock’s Long Shadow, explaining the enormity of damage done through animal agribusiness. But the U.N. never suggested we stop farming animals or consuming the products (which many of us could do overnight). Its key recommendation? Greater intensification. In other words, consolidate and contain animals into high-volume operations. In situations of intense confinement, animals (along with their emissions and waste) can be more strictly contained; and with animals not moving as much, less feed is consumed.

What we learn from environmental science does not lead us to support any of this:Slide44

The above scenes are evidence of a spreading-out of the environmental problems we need to move beyond.

And the warmer the planet gets, the more intensively animals will be raised, for reasons such as temperature control. Overheated dairy cows aren’t efficient producers of milk. When the Union of Concerned Scientists, in their booklet Climate Change in Pennsylvania: Impacts and Solutions for the Keystone State, say that cows are going to need fans and water sprays to cool them as the hot days multiply (cows drink four times as much liquid as they produce in summertime), they too are indicating that factory-style farming is the way of the future. (Look at page 8 in this PDF.)

Nowadays it’s popular to say that “factory farming” is inhumane. Yet we have environmental scientists communicating some important realities about how “cage-free” systems just spread the emissions around and use up more feed to raise roaming animals. With animal agribusiness, you can’t win.

A better recommendation comes Vegan Environmental Party of Ontario when it calls on the government to divest from animal agribusiness by halting the subsidies.

Consider that we reserve about 20 million acres of land for alfalfa alone. (And it must be irrigated.) Virtually all of it is used as feed.

That is in addition to the imposition of the domesticated animals themselves on the land. We need not continue this overbearing way of living on our planet.

For reasons that are many and interconnected, we need to be creating animal-free meals. Seekers of pure vegetarian cuisine miss nothing and conserve so much.

Make reservations at Vedge in Philadelphia or Plant in Asheville if you want to go gourmet. Most cities now have such offerings. Want to learn to prepare food like a pro in your own kitchen? You can learn. Try a subscription to a home delivery service with recipes and instructions from a professional chef such as Trish Sebben-Krupka at VegTable.

“But I just eat fish!”

That’s another sector of animal agribusiness, and not a sustainable one. The people at Greenpeace say “sustainable seafood” is within reach. They want us to demand better labels on the bodies of marine animals in the grocery aisle so we can tell if codfish are being scraped off the Norwegian Arctic seafloor with massive trawlers. Why do they take this position when they could do better? If we can afford to get food from a grocery store, we can get pure vegetarian food and make it great. And for the climate’s sake, we should.

The personal and political 

Recently a study was published in the journal Climatic Change involving 60,000 “meat-eaters, fish-eaters, vegetarians, and vegans” in Britain. Remarkably, the study found dietary greenhouse gas emissions from the participating omnivores about twice as high as those from vegans. If we have the power to bring our emissions down so low, but we decline to use it, aren’t we committing malpractice as human beings?

By being vegan we can also alleviate social stress. The 2007-2010 Syrian drought, which forced rural people to move in droves to urban areas, culminating in one of the most severe conflicts of today, for example, was driven by climate factors.

What’s to come? We all know, if we read the papers, that 2016 has already shown record global temperatures, month after month after month. The New York Times offers regular reports on this, accompanied by  simplistic, incomplete advice. The Times acknowledges that the problem is complex and can feel overwhelming: “We get it.” 

But they don’t.

They mention “reducing meat” as one item in a list of things to do. They do point to animal agribusiness as the worst segment of agribusiness for the climate. The science would back the Times up on that one.  Slide36

The Times tells us in particular that “some methods of cattle production” demand a lot of land. Now, wait. “Some”? All of it does, and all cows create manure and methane, whether out on the range or within walls.

The Times urges “switching from beef to pork and chicken” and suggests that chicken farming is the least harmful kind.

Let’s not even get into the harmful health ramifications of the “eat pork” advice. Pig manure is still manure and what the world needs now isn’t more of it. And you don’t help the climate even by buying local eggs and chicken or pig flesh. To do so means you’re really relying on a massive feed industry—a serious fuel guzzler. “Local” animal farming isn’t local—because animal feed is routinely shipped many miles for mixing and packaging, and shipped again in distribution.

The huge feed requirements arise in fish farming too. Farmed fish really are “chickens of the sea”; aquaculture is tied into the global grain and feed market and it’s expected to double in size by 2050. Why contribute to that?

Instead, groups such as WWF should be funding vegan festivals.

Slide40

 

WWF’s so-called sustainable seafood standards are pressing small, family businesses, which once used by-products as feed, to enter the global feed market.

Before the pressure to adopt environmental standards like those of WWF’s Aquaculture Stewardship Council, catfish farmers used home-made feeds that included farm by-products. No more. Now the local farmers of the world have to vie for the labels that the affluent populations want to see in the grocery store.

Slide42Is it the height of irony that WWF would expose the “hidden soy” in animal products after pushing this same market?

People listen to the WWF and the New York Times when what they really need is no-nonsense information, and a key part of that information needs to come from those of us who’ve already divested from animal agribusiness in our own lives and can help others to do it.

This is not to say that being vegan is all we need to do. I’m starting to notice a lot of people picking out one kind of change that they like and claiming it as their part. I’ve heard people who bring their own bags back to the supermarket overstate the goodness of this good deed by claiming to be “saving the world, one bag at a time” (regardless of what products are in their re-used bags). Vegans need to be careful that we don’t fall into the trap of thinking we’re doing so much by being vegan that we ourselves needn’t make deep changes in our mindsets and actions.

I’ll also talk about the influence of religious doctrine and of education on people’s attitudes and understanding of climate change. I expect a lot of informed comments and feedback at Summerfest on Thursday the 7th. Join us in the Scholar’s Room if you can.

Meanwhile I’d like to conclude with a thought question. Should we use “the war on” language when we talk about climate? This language is meant to indicate a serious approach to climate change, which of course is well past due.

Slide50

But are we really in combat?

And should we be “arming” ourselves against the hordes of invaders coming in when climatic zones shift because of our own conduct?

Is warring against a natural system’s response to overload what we need to be doing? Is this the best mindset for the work we must do to put ourselves in good stead with our planet?

Let’s talk about this.

Coming Soon…New Book on Animal Liberation

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Readers of VeganPlace and my fellow bloggers will, I hope, be excited to know that I’m making a debut as an “indie” by way of Kindle Direct Publishing. The new work, for which VeganPlace will become a discussion platform, is just days away from publication. This week, I’ll announce the Kindle link, price, and so forth. It might be free for the first five days, and in any case it will be under a tenner.

And COVER jpg fileI’d love for you to read it and review it. Writing a review will be the single most helpful thing you can do to support this work, beyond reading it. Keep in mind that this is a book by an indie vegan author, not an e-pub ninja; so don’t expect technical perfection on the first go. The e-publication phase has been much more difficult than I’d expected. The information technology-loving Cathy Burt has stepped up at the eleventh hour to work out a few glitches, although, given our time limitations, a paragon of production is not a reasonable goal. We’re learning as we go.

As for the substance, you might well ask what makes this new book worth your time. I believe the concept of animal liberation has never been more relevant, but…that concept is due for renovation. On Their Own Terms: Animal Liberation for the 21st Century updates the idea of animal liberation, as it explores the hits and misses of animal-rights and environmental advocacy, and presents a brief guide to the burgeoning vegan movement.

And why would I say a new animal-liberation philosophy is so important? Look at the way world leaders are now reacting to weather and climate dynamics. Finally they are reacting, but that’s basically to figure out how we can keep doing what we’ve been doing in supposedly “sustainable” ways. Until we redefine our role within Earth’s great biological community, the changes we find ourselves forced to accept will mean coping with one emergency after another.

Animal liberation should come to the fore during discussions of “sustainable” gatherings and products. Promoters of sustainable animal agribusiness or sustainable meals made with local vegetables and flesh of pigs, cows, or fish purchased from small farms or local waters don’t usually want to talk about animal liberation. It is important to meet these organizers where they are: to acknowledge their concern about a topic of great importance, and then to direct their attention to the question of whether their unspoken ethic of human dominion is sustainable.

On Their Own Terms: Animal Liberation for the 21st Century offers ways of uncovering our personal connections with the current climate and extinction crises. It explores the human potential to fit our own habitat, while allowing nonhuman communities to thrive in theirs.

Consider that a transformation of our human identity will spare us, and every other biological community on Earth, from enduring an endless string of gradually or abruptly worsening emergencies whose roots we fail to address. Consider, if you will, relinquishing the human assumption that the Earth is ours…

 

“I believe Lee Hall is one of the most interesting and insightful writers working in animal rights. This book gets all the thumbs-up.”

— Jonathan Hussain, rescuer and campaigner, Grass Valley, California

“In On Their Own Terms: Animal Liberation for the 21st Century, Lee Hall reclaims the concepts of animal liberation, animal rights and animal welfare, and compels us to reimagine what it means to be an animal activist.”

— Sangamithra Iyer, Satya Magazine

Factory Farming, Farm Sprawl, or a Genuine Humane Response?

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Conversation with Caryn Hartglass

Caryn Hartglass has given reprint permission for this 2014 interview with me on the show It’s All About Food. This transcript is proofed and edited for Vegan Place. Original podcast and transcript, titled Animals, Environment, and the Law, appears on the REAL Radio site.

INTRO:

Lee Hall speaking on climate

Lee Hall, an author who’s taken on subjects from anti-terrorism law to vegan cooking, wrote the “Vegetarianism” entry in the Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice. Lee has taught Animal Law and Immigration and Refugee Law, and is today working on a second law degree—a legal masters in Environmental Law with a focus on climate change from Vermont Law School. Lee’s work is a bridge between environmentalism and our personal relationships with agriculture, confronting the way animal farming usurps habitat. For years, animal-rights advocates have operated under the belief that at least pasture-based or organic ranching represents a “step” in the humane direction—but only looking at how domesticated animals seem to be affected. Lee champions the animal communities displaced by farm sprawl, and explains how our chosen cookbooks can offer a genuine humane response for all animals, reduce greenhouse emissions, and even stop extinctions.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Lee Hall, Welcome to It’s All About Food.

Lee Hall: Thank you, Caryn. It seems to be perfect timing given that you’re the Lone Vegan ready to speak with two hundred cattle ranchers.

Caryn Hartglass: I know, I was hoping that you would give me some really good tips for Saturday.

Lee Hall:  I am imagining that we are going to have quite a good conversation given that we are both studying the same thing right now.

Caryn Hartglass: I know. And the first thing I wanted to ask you, I’ve been following you and your work for a long time and it’s incredible and the thing that I know about you is your intensity, your passion, how principled you are.

Lee Hall:  Thank you.

Caryn Hartglass: And I wondered were you born that way, or was there something that happened in your life that made that happen, or was it a slow process, or none of the above.

Lee Hall: Well, I wasn’t born that way. I actually saw a bullfight when I was a child and it didn’t change me. I look back on it—and maybe it did, ultimately. I look back on it and I think why didn’t that change me, witnessing a bullfight; I mean, the bull was killed. This was in Mexico. My parents worked there they got free tickets from a business associate. Right, so we went and saw the novicios, who are the people that are learning to do bullfights. Which I understand is more difficult to watch. I wouldn’t know; I’ve only seen this particular instance. And I was—I hid myself in the bathroom for over a day. I wouldn’t come out after it. And what I guess I thought was weirdest—as terrible as this was, as traumatic as it was to see and hear people standing up and cheering for the slow death of an animal, not to mention what the horses were going through in the ring—of all of the horrific feelings of this the very worst was that I was surrounded by hundreds of people that were cheering.

Caryn Hartglass:  Yeah.

Lee Hall: And so here I am locking myself in the bathroom and I remember trying to make a soap carving for hours and I heard my mother trying to get me out of the bathroom, saying “It’s all right, the meat, the flesh of the bull will go to the poor children of Mexico.” My mother knew I was very concerned about poverty; I did have a feeling of social justice as a little kid, as I think most little kids do. But, I think back and the tie: right there, my mother telling me. Of course that didn’t help me feel better that they were going to eat the bull. But: why didn’t I connect as a child? What didn’t I connect? And I know people who see an animal killed and immediately they put it all together.

Caryn Hartglass:  Most don’t.

Lee Hall: Most don’t. It takes—I  don’t know what happens. I don’t know how. If I knew how to make this all work, I would tell you. But, I was 21 and I met Robin Lane who is now the co-facilitator/founder of the London Vegan Festival, the longest running vegan festival anywhere in the world. It is the one that inspired all the vegan festivals to come. This was long before that had been started.

Robin Lane in London had been vegan for 1 year and met me. As far we know, I am Robin’s longest running protégé.  It was a leaflet. It was all the ways we use animals. And I considered myself a feminist—it was one of the areas I was reading about myself; and something just clicked then and there. It was: How can I think about oppression and want to get over oppression and want to transcend that in my life and get over that in my life and be working so hard mentally to transcend differences and hierarchies—and how have I not noticed this before? Then of course the bullfight came back to me. But, I just said, that will be it! So I’m one of the weird people that did decide to go vegan all at once.

Caryn Hartglass:  Yeah, for the weird people. Let’s hear it for socially peculiar. Yeah! Making the world a better place.

Lee Hall:  So that was 31 years ago.

Caryn Hartglass:  Yeah. Good for you. I just wonder, because I want to think that we all have the potential to not exploit to not cause pain and suffering; I want to believe that. And I want to believe that we are not born with one kind of DNA that makes us more compassionate then others. I want to think that we are all flexible and once the veil is lifted we can move on and do better.

Lee Hall: Well, I think that is true, Caryn. I was that person until I was 21 and I knew and I didn’t change. So look at other people as people who could change any day.  You have had Harold Brown on the show?

Caryn Hartglass: Yeah.

Lee Hall: That is a wonderful example. Harold came from a dairy and beef farming family and would have been a successful dairy and beef farmer today and had been doing that for many, many years, and a light bulb—this is also somebody that had been hunting regularly.

Caryn Hartglass:  Yes. You are in environmental law now. I want to talk more about animals and the environment. And one of the things we are hearing about is people that care about the environment and seem to have more compassion for animals. They want to go for the—quote—more humane ways of raising animals for food, pasture grazing; and I am doing my studying for this climate change talk. There is this guy on the panel that believes in animal agriculture intensification because unfortunately we have learned that animal agriculture intensification is—quote—more efficient and produces less greenhouse gases when you are cramming this animals in small space and feeding them the wrong foods. But nobody talks about the things that are wrong with it. But it’s encouraging this horror instead of the other way around. And let’s just talk about how all these other things affect the environment.

Lee Hall: Let’s talk about that. It’s a very interesting sort of squeeze that you bring up. You mentioned that the intensify of farming can be controlled in a way that it is less of an emitter of greenhouse gases, that it takes up less space environmentally, these kinds of things. That is a very significant point to bring up. I think a lot of advocates want to think that everything about factory farms is wrong and that’s the answer and we just say that. Just say factory farms. We are saying something that of course everyone understands. Of course it is all kinds of animal farms, the problem we are dealing with. It’s animal farming; it’s not factory farming, certainly not factory farming per se.  It’s animal farming: any kind of animal farming has its problems. We, as animal advocates or environmental advocates, we understand sprawl. We understand sprawl and yet we don’t see it when it is happening with farms that are being spread out. We’ll say: `Well, that is a step in the right direction.` Well, how can that be, if we in the United States are outnumbered by farmland animals, 5 to 1? So, how could it be that the problem is intensive farming? That it is a step in the right direction to have the pasture-based farms when walking around, three hundred million of us in this country, and we are outnumbered 5 to 1, and that is just the land farm animals? So the problem isn’t the factory. The problem is both. If you have concentrated farms you have dense runoff, you have emissions—you do have emissions, and they may be controlling them to some extent but they are still there—you still have ruminant animals, and they are emitting methane. There is fine particulate matter that goes up to the air, and all the things that lead to acid rain.

Caryn Hartglass: And they still make manure, piles of it.

Lee Hall: No matter how they are raised. If you’ve got farm expansion…

Caryn Hartglass: The shit continues.

Lee Hall: It’s in either one. When you’ve got the expanded farms, the pasture-based, the grass-fed, you’ve got other situations. The destruction, and of course, with the intensive farm you have all the humane questions—the whole idea that humanity would treat animals as things to put into tiny boxes that is there—but when you have expansion, at the end we kill them, so it is a myth that it can be humane, because they are being slaughtered at the end. But there is more: when you expand the farm you are fragmenting habitat. You are setting the stage for systematic predator control, followed by a cascade of consequences.

Caryn Hartglass: Wait a minute. What is systematic predator control?

Felis silvestris

Bobcat. On pastures, “free-range” farm animals are captive targets of undomesticated predators; in turn, the predators become persecuted by your local animal farmers and their supporting agencies.

Lee Hall: Well, for example, coyotes and foxes are the animals who are normally targeted.With coyotes in pastures, they are irritating to farmers. Obviously. A coyote, bobcat, fox, a grizzly bear is going to be tempted, understandably, to eat an animal; so the more free-range the farm is, the more vulnerable they are…Shooting coyotes is legal in most places; coyotes can be shot from aircraft; there are forms of poison. The very first coyote synthetic attractant, a lure to attract and kill them, debuted in 1973 and was made from the fatty acids of rhesus monkeys’ vaginal secretions. Since then we have come up with all kinds of traps and lures to attract coyotes and foxes. One infamous one called Compound 1080 goes into predacide collars, and those are strapped to free-range goats and lambs. So here is this poison: it will not save the goat or the lamb; the point is the coyote goes to the animal and if the coyote bites the neck of that farm animal that coyote is about to enter Hell. The poison takes somewhere between 3 and 15 hours to kill. Then there are the traps, the snares, the M44—another lure.  Wildlife Services, our federal government, helps the ranchers. These poisons are often picked up by pets, bald eagles, turkey vultures, wolves—unintended animals. Migratory birds, porcupines, mountain lions. So all these things are happening out there with these free-range farms. To say “Well, stop factory farming” totally ignores that.

Caryn Hartglass:  Wow, and who thinks up these things? Who thinks up these poisons and these traps? The thing I was wondering about is who are these scientists, these educated scientists that invent these incredible killing materials? The minds that come up with these things …Yes. So there are all these “compassionate” people, who want to get humanely-raised animals and go for pastures. But there are all these issues with that. Of course, there are the intensified farms and there are all animal farms and when we look at it from an environmental point of view the winner is the one no one is looking at, which is feeding plants to people directly.

Shirt created by nonviolenceunited.org

The winner. Design by nonviolenceunited.org

Lee Hall: Exactly. People are looking at it, just maybe not in a way that connects it directly to their plate. I am in school now studying with scientists and lawyers. I am seeing that the people in environment law course are aware. For example: There is a study by Christopher Weber and Scott Matthews at Carnegie Mellon and they have done calculations of greenhouse gas emissions and they have said a “protein shift”—and that is their word for it, when you get protein and nutrients directly from plants instead of feeding it to animals and getting all the nutrients through them—when you do this protein shift one day a week it would be like driving 1,160 miles less every year. What they are talking about is sort of like a vegan Monday. They are saying: Replace meat and dairy and this is what would happen 1,160 less miles a year. So that suggests that animal agribusiness per se is non-local…

If you cut it out even one day it would be more than a thousand miles saved driving so right there they are getting somewhere. So this is what I bring up when we are having these conversations: Wait a minute! That means a 7-day-a-week shift is more than eight thousand miles as though you were not driving every year, more than eight thousand miles. If you have that kind of power that a vegan diet can have, and anyone can have that kind of power, and they can have it a dinnertime, they could decide right now, why not? Being vegan in North America is not a real big difficulty, and it would decrease all of this harm all of these climate chaos caused by the taking away of habitat of other animals. It’s ranching: taking away the other animals’ habitat is what it does. In the last five hundred years more animals have gone extinct in the US, more than any other place; we are wrecking this land and water for ranching.

Caryn Hartglass: You know this show is called It’s All About Food but it’s really all about money, and the animal food industry is a 160-billion-dollar-a-year industry in the US, and I think I am going to be talking to these cattle producers and telling them we need to reduce or eliminate animal livestock, and I am getting right to the heart of their livelihood. What do we tell people like that?

Lee Hall: Right. There has always been forms of livelihood that the economy has depended on that we had to say: There is a problem with this. We need to transcend this, and start acting differently. You can think of three or four examples right now. The chocolate slavery is not okay. It comes from massive chocolate companies and they are selling loads and loads of chocolate at the expense of people on the Ivory Coast that are selling their children into slavery. It’s not okay.

Caryn Hartglass: It’s not okay. But you know most people don’t know about it. It has taken a long time to get Hershey’s Chocolate to budge.

Lee Hall:  Yes. And when you are out there talking to two hundred cattle ranchers, you have people that are talking to many, many more. … A lot of people, including  environmentalists, need to know this it is not just the cattle ranchers that you are informing, that you are having these conversations with; you are talking about getting to a tipping point. And because climate change is upon us, we may be right about at the tipping point.

Caryn Hartglass:  There are plenty of people, and there is one guy on the panel that I will be talking to is a climate change denier. And doesn’t believe it is happening.

Lee Hall: Yes. Who is now connected to the Food and Agriculture representing the UN.

Caryn Hartglass: And it is really hard to know. We live in a very complex world. There is a lot of information on the Internet but it takes a lot to figure out what is credible and what is not; I can’t go into every lab and see what they are doing. When I read things in a study, that I think are interesting. I will go to the original source and read all I can when the study was done and see if I think it was good or not if it is something that I want to repeat. Most people don’t do that. But still I can’t see everything….

Lee Hall: We do know that the carbon dioxide level in our atmosphere is at the highest point in more than 600 thousand years. We do know that global average temperatures, even though they fluctuate madly, are higher than they have been over ten thousand years.

Caryn Hartglass: There are people that do not believe that. I have seen that data and I believe it. But some people see it and still say they do not believe it.

Lee Hall: Well, it is becoming a part of policy.

Caryn Hartglass: There are—95% of climate change scientists that think the climate is changing.

Lee Hall: It becomes: how much it is from animal farming? And the consensus seems to be about 1/5 but as you know specialists from the world bank including Robert Goodland, who unfortunately passed away recently, had said more like 51% is attributable to animal agribusiness. So Mark Bittman invited Robert Goodland to do a blog on Mark Bittman’s column for the New York Times, and Robert Goodland wrote: One might expect the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to work objectively to determine whether the true figure is 1/5 or 51%. Instead, Mittloehner, known for the claiming that the 1/5th is too big of a figure to use in the US, was announced as chair of a new partnership between the meat industry and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. So Mark Bittman titled that guest blog FAO Yields to Meat Industry Pressure on Climate Change; it is very frightening .

Caryn Hartglass: It is frightening. We are going to have to talk about this more another time because we are out of time. Can you believe it?

Lee Hall: No.

Caryn Hartglass: I know. I am going to have to have you back and dig more into this, especially after I am on this panel with Frank Mittloehner and see what he has to say.  Lee, thank you so much for joining us for this have hour as for all the work you are doing some time soon and we can have some delicious food vegan food the best.

Lee Hall:  Wonderful Idea. Meanwhile, I am rooting for the Lone Vegan.

Caryn Hartglass: We have come to the end of It’s All About Food.  Thank you for joining me.  I am Caryn, and remember: Please have a delicious week.

Caryn Hartglass

Caryn Hartglass

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Cancer survivor and vegan activist Caryn Hartglass founded Responsible Eating And Living (REAL) as a 501(c)3 not-for-profit corporation. For 9 years Hartglass served as Executive Director of the nonprofit EarthSave International, founded by John Robbins. Hartglass has appeared on Dr. Oz, Geraldo At Large, 20-20 and CNN and is the host of It’s All About Food on the Progressive Radio Network. Caryn Hartglass can multitask, showing your group how to make healthy, delicious foods, while inspiring you to do so. Have Caryn Hartglass speak at your next event. For more information send email to info@RealMeals.org or call 657- I M 4 REAL (657-464-7325).