“I won’t eat animals,” little girl tells her mother. Zada’s mind is made up.

Another important dispatch from The Greanville Post. Be sure to share it widely.


Patrice Greanville


[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ittle Zada below does not know it, but she is already immersed in one of the most monumental and maligned struggles in the history of this planet.

Her moving words, however, show us that even a toddler can have instinctive empathy for the pain of other beings. It is testimony to the fact that our insensitivity to massive animal suffering is a cultural acquisition, implanted in most of us at birth, as the "way things are."  But traditions, as we have seen at least in the last two centuries, have a lot of very dark corners and things to answer for. The fact that a custom (or ideology) is embraced by umpteen millions doesn't make it right. In our own home turf, the history of suffering in our own species, for millennia slavery was regarded as "natural" and many even thought it harmless and imperative to "civilisation". In part because of such attitudes, traditions are often enormously hard to break or eliminate. Pious southern ministers and other opinion leaders in the US Confederacy rarely if ever rose to denounce slavery. And we all know that it took a veritable bloodbath—the death of more than 620,000 soldiers— to break the "peculiar institution" in the American South, and even with the South defeated, African Americans did not exactly gain equal rights or actual freedom at the moment of their much awaited formal emancipation. A very long and painful and ugly slog lay ahead, one with many heroes and martyrs, and it's obvious that more than 150 years after the war between the states ended, much of African America is still partially in chains.


Reem Makhoul
First published on Sep 1, 2016
Realising, to her horror, that meat is made from animals, five-year-old Zada tells her mother she's a vegetarian. And her mind is made up.


Bad traditions and customs die hard
The American experience with slavery is a harsh reminder that no matter how awful a custom may be, whether political, religious or economic (always a reflection of the political and vice versa), or one whose origins are lost in the mist of history, it takes a great deal of effort and pain to eliminate it. Humans are animals of habit. And often the problem is deeply embedded in the culture because a strong or dominant segment benefits directly from it. The history of humanity's evolution and pursuit of freedom from various forms of oppression—slavery, feudalism, capitalism, sexism, racism, male chauvinism, etc.—shows that victories, such as they are, are hard, and that even when an evil has been largely unmasked and uprooted, many remnants stay behind, sometimes adopting new forms and still making life miserable for countless victims.

Human slavery is one of the oldest and most persistent and diverse evils in history, and it's clear the American south had plenty of breathtakingly ugly and brutal models to draw upon. In this context, the Spartans stand out for their studied cruelty toward their slaves (the Helots), whom they employed, as all "master races" do, to do all sorts of grueling and dangerous work in their society, from growing food, to taking care of construction jobs, and even serving as human shields to Spartan warriors in various battles. Owing to their own numerical inferiority— there were about 7 helots to one Spartan— Spartans were always preoccupied with the fear of a helot revolt. The ephors (Spartan magistrates) each year on entering office declared war on the helots so that they might be murdered at any time without violating religious scruples. During these massacres, which for younger Spartans became a coming of age ritual, they concentrated on murdering the youngest and strongest among the captive population.

There are different accounts of how this horrid relationship ended. Some chroniclers claim that after a particularly ferocious revolt which took the Spartans more than a decade to put down, the Spartans—standing on a very tenuous victory—agreed to a truce—and freedom for the helots, provided the latter accepted banishment to Sicily. Another version, advanced by revisionist historians, notes that after several intermittent revolts starting c. 660 BC, and after two or three attempts over 300 years, the helots finally succeeded in defeating and disbanding the Spartans, thereby wiping out Sparta from the map as a feared Peloponnesian power. This is supposed to have happened c. 464 BC.  Whichever version we choose, it's irrefutable that the slave revolts weakened Sparta considerably and made it vulnerable to conquest by rival powers among Greece's city states. Sparta's defeat by Thebes in the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC ended Sparta's prominent role in Greece.

The struggle for any form of liberation usually raises moral consciousness. Every great social revolution seeking to expand the rights of the oppressed has had an inherently superior moral component fueling much of the struggle. There have been no exceptions to this rule. Thus the fight to overcome ancient slavery, feudalism, serfdom, capitalism, colonialism (a form of racism in action), male domination, malignant imperialism, and these days even speciesism—the subjection of all living nature to the cruel whims of humans—all have been and are animated by successively broader and deeper ambits of moral lucidity. Assuming we manage to overcome the fascio-capitalist monster and its cancerous imperialism, along with its plethora of social vices and still very much alive different strains of human oppression, all in time to turn things around to spare the world an ecological implosion or a nuclear catastrophe, the struggle against speciesism may be the last of the great battles in the moral history of our species. —PG

 

This post is part of a series on humans' destruction of the natural world.


About the Author
Patrice Greanville is The Greanville Post's founding editor.



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The Russian Peace Threat examines Russophobia, American Exceptionalism and other urgent topics




The Wolf: a Corporate Roadblock

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HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

We share this planet; we do not own it.
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR THE ANIMALS TODAY?


Prior to de-listing in 2012, I and others were of the opinion that the majority of Minnesotans had reconciled themselves to wolves. I recall reading a commentary by the editor of a well read “hook and bullet” newspaper. In this commentary, the editor mused about a sports writer’s convention in Montana and the fears and paranoia from his counter parts in the western mountain states about the havoc wolves would inflict on game populations and livestock. He wrote of how we have always had wolves and how their numbers and range had expanded, yet Minnesota was having the best deer hunting in recorded history and how livestock depredation was so minimal that it wasn’t on anyone’s radar screen. The upshot of his message was wolves are no big deal or threat. Ostensibly Minnesotans had not only reconciled themselves to wolves, they had become iconic to us.

Upon de-listing in 2012 a Pandora’s Boxes opened and out of this box a black pall of ignorance and ancient hatred escaped and pervaded the thinking of political parties and environmental groups. The wolf reverted from being an icon to being a political and economic issue. Seemingly all the years of rehabilitation in the minds of Minnesotans was ignored by both political parties, deer hunters, livestock men and even many environmental groups. Yes, I said environmental groups. Many environmentalists responded that the wolf did not need “endangered” or “threatened” status or that a hunt would be just fine, or that by embracing the wolf would endanger their relationship with legislators from wolf country and not allow them to get pet legislation passed.

The net result of delisting from the hunts of 2012, 13 and 14 were over 1750 wolves killed in Minnesota by hunter/trappers, livestock complaints and private land owners and this number does not include all the wolves that were killed by poachers.


A gift from the courts in December of 2014

While wolf advocates were protesting the hunt, testifying in state and federal government, trying to influence the MN DNR, writing letters to editors and doing anything they felt would persuade those in power to stop the killing of wolves, the Humane Society of the United States and the Center for Biological Diversity were quietly suing the federal USFWS (Interior Department) when in December of 2014 U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that the wolf would be put back on the ESA. This came as a most welcome and Christmas gift. Almost immediately the USFWS, sportsmen and Livestock groups appealed this decision. On August 1st  2017, the “U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia agreed the gray wolf in the Great Lakes and Wyoming should remain on the federal Endangered Species List.

Essentially, the federal appeals court has ruled against the Interior Department’s 2011 decision to delist the gray wolf under the Endangered Species Act. The court said, “Because the government failed to reasonably analyze or consider two significant aspects of the rule—the impacts of partial delisting and of historical range loss on the already-listed species—we affirm the judgment of the district court vacating the 2011 Rule.”

All this is good news but the real threat still lies within Congress. Thus far there have been well over a dozen attempts by Congress to de-list the wolf and have thus far failed but the greatest threat is looming over us now. Two identical bills exist now in the House and the Senate that would not only de-list the wolf but would forever remove the courts as a course for us to try to stop threats to the health of the Earth. For decades environmentalists have relied on courts to sue or appeal decisions concerning environmental issues from oil pipelines, sulfide and other mining projects, endangered species, protecting wilderness and many other assaults on the environment. In a government that is ruled by corporations and special interests, the courts are the only recourse we have left as a people and now that may be taken from us. And this is not just right-wing Republicans but is rather being led by Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY). Representative Rick Nolan (D-MN) is leading the charge in the House. In Minnesota we have eight Representatives and our two Senators. Of the ten elected officials from Minnesota in Washington, we only have two who are on our side and that is Rep. Betty McCollum of St. Paul and Rep. Keith Ellison of Minneapolis yet a 2012 survey by the MN DNR had 79% of respondents opposing a wolf hunt and a poll taken a year later by Lakeland Research Polling which had 80% of Minnesotans wanting wolves protected.

The wolf is being used by politicians of both parties to eradicate or weaken the Endangered and Threatened Species Act of 1973 so that dangerous polluting projects like sulfide mines, oil pipelines and development projects can go forward. The wolf and ESA are standing in the way of the proposed Polymet mine and Twin Metals sulfur/copper mines so these proposals can go forward in the watersheds of the BWCA and Lake Superior, both are pet projects of Amy Klobuchar and Rick Nolan of Minnesota. Senator Amy Klobuchar authored the bill in the Senate to sell Forest Service land in Superior National Forest to Polymet and Rep. Rick Nolan is working with Trumpites to reverse the United States Forest Service ruling to place a moratorium on mining within the 250,000 acre buffer zone around the BWCA wilderness that truly is a national treasure.

I remember hearing a story of an old Minnesota wolf trapper who found a large and beautiful wolf in one of his leg hold traps. The wolfs beauty struck him and as he gazed on the trapped animal, he felt the notion to free him but thought of how he needed the money so he shot the wolf. Many years later I had an Ojibwe friend told me of an account that a native friend of his had in Viet Nam; this friend found himself behind enemy lines in an extreme fire fight and recognized the grave predicament he was in and realized that this will likely be the end of him when something caught his attention. Upon looking up he saw a wolf standing and looking at him. Knowing that wolves do not exist in Viet Nam, he was at first puzzled  and the wolf turned and started to walk away, then stopped and looked back, over his shoulder and the Ojibwe man took it a sign to follow him, which he did and found the wolf had led him through enemy lines and back to safety. I have never doubted this story as this individual believed it happened and that was good enough for me.

In 2009 as I was sojourning through the late winter woods on snowshoes with my dog, we came upon the rib cage of a deer that had been pulled down by wolves earlier that winter. My dog got to it first and was keenly scenting the bones.  As I approached I saw fresh wolf tracks in the snow and a line of bright yellow urine across the bones and realized that the urine was as yet unfrozen. I then noticed my dogs’ attention was drawn across the trail to the south, off the trail. I stood up and looked that direction to see what attracted her attention and saw two wolves standing in single file fashion, one behind the other, silhouetted against the low winter sun. They seemed relaxed and curiously interested in us then turned and disappeared into the forest. I have had many similar wolf encounters over the years and feel deep within my soul that if this woods or state was wolf-less, it would so dramatically change the character of the land that I could no longer reside here – but then where would there be wolves? We have accrued a great debt towards the wolf with compounded interest in a cosmic and moral sense. The only way we can pay this moral debt off is to stop killing wolves. The first step to take when finding one’s self in a hole is to stop digging.

As with all fights to save what’s really important to the Earth and all its interconnectedness always falls to us common ordinary citizens. We are often ignored by mainstream media and despised by politicians. We lose far more than we win but forging on has become an existential thing – we do it because we could not live with ourselves if we did not. For us, we believe if we can’t get it right with the wolf, what can we get it right with?

“…quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and the beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

— Aldo Leopold 


About the Author
 Barry Babcock, environmental activist and wolf advocate from northern Minnesota, will speak about his experience with wolves, Native American spiritual beliefs in regard to the wolf, and the wolf's impact on ecosystems. Barry founded the Jackpine Coalition, which worked to limit ATV access in Minnesota wilderness.


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uza2-zombienationPrior to de-listing in 2012, I and others were of the opinion that the majority of Minnesotans had reconciled themselves to wolves. I recall reading a commentary by the editor of a well read “hook and bullet” newspaper. In this commentary, the editor mused about a sports writer’s convention in Montana and the fears and paranoia from his counter parts in the western mountain states about the havoc wolves would inflict on game populations and livestock. He wrote of how we have always had wolves and how their numbers and range had expanded, yet Minnesota was having the best deer hunting in recorded history


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BOOKS: The Conservative Belief in Human Supremacy Is Destroying Our Planet

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London enveloped in thick smog. Photo by David Holt London

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By Derrick Jensen / Seven Stories Press

The air around the world has recently been declared to be as carcinogenic as second hand smoke.

The following is an excerpt from the new book The Myth of Human Supremacy by Derrick Jensen (Seven Stories Press, 2016): 

“The modern conservative [and, I would say, the human supremacist] is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” —John Kenneth Galbraith

I’m sitting by a pond, in sunlight that has the slant and color of early fall. Wind blows through the tops of second-growth redwood, cedar, fir, alder, willow. Breezes make their way down to sedges, rushes, grasses, who nod their heads this way and that. Spider silk glistens. A dragonfly floats a few inches above the water, then suddenly climbs to perch atop a rush.

A family of jays talks among themselves.

Derrick Jensen-MythOfHumanSupremacyI smell the unmistakable, slightly sharp scent of redwood duff, and then smell also the equally unmistakable and also slightly sharp, though entirely different, smell of my own animal body.

A small songbird, I don’t know who, hops on two legs just above the waterline. She stops, cocks her head, then pecks at the ground.

Movement catches my eye, and I see a twig of redwood needles fall gently to the ground. It helped the tree. Now it will help the soil.

Someday I am going to die. Someday so are you. Someday both you and I will feed—even more than we do now, through our sloughed skin, through our excretions, through other means—those communities who now feed us. And right now, amidst all this beauty, all this life, all these others—sedge, willow, dragonfly, redwood, spider, soil, water, sky, wind, clouds—it seems not only ungenerous, but ungrateful to begrudge the present and future gift of my own life to these others without whom neither I nor this place would be who we are, without whom neither I nor this place would even be.

Likewise, in this most beautiful place on Earth—and you do know, don’t you, that each wild and living place on Earth is the most beautiful place on Earth—I can never understand how members of the dominant culture could destroy life on this planet. I can never understand how they could destroy even one place.

BOOK PRECIS  
In this impassioned polemic, radical environmental philosopher Derrick Jensen debunks the near-universal belief in a hierarchy of nature and the superiority of humans. Vast and underappreciated complexities of nonhuman life are explored in detail—from the cultures of pigs and prairie dogs, to the creative use of tools by elephants and fish, to the acumen of caterpillars and fungi. The paralysis of the scientific establishment on moral and ethical issues is confronted and a radical new framework for assessing the intelligence and sentience of nonhuman life is put forth.

Jensen attacks mainstream environmental journalism, which too often limits discussions to how ecological changes affect humans or the economy—with little or no regard for nonhuman life. With his signature compassionate logic, he argues that when we separate ourselves from the rest of nature, we in fact orient ourselves against nature, taking an unjust and, in the long run, impossible position. 

***

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast year someone from Nature [sic] online journal interviewed me by phone. I include the sic because the journal has far more to do with promoting human supremacism—the belief that humans are separate from and superior to everyone else on the planet—than it has to do with the real world. Here is one of the interviewer’s “questions”: “Surely nature can only be appreciated by humans. If nature were to cease to exist, nature itself would not notice, as it is not conscious (at least in the case of most animals and plants, with the possible exception of the great apes and cetaceans) and, other than through life’s drive for homeostasis, is indifferent to its own existence. Nature thus only achieves worth through our consciously valuing it.”


SIDEBAR
The company of our animal fellows is one of the most wonderful gifts we could possibly receive in our lives, and yet far too many humans fail to appreciate that simple fact, and act as brutal exploiters and destroyers of this patrimony. Below, animal lives, punctuated by innocence and —surprisingly, through human intervention—by hope. 

Humans lend a compassionate hand to a terribly hurt kitten.

(Published on Aug 14, 2016)

MILO arrived in SHOCK, practically dead. HEAD TRAUMA, MULTIPLE SKULL FRACTURES, DIFFERENT JAW FRACTURES, INFECTION, INFLAMMATION…. TERRIBLE!!

milo-wounded

The rescuers knew his life would never be normal, but at least Milo got a second chance. 



REGULAR ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t the precise moment he said this to me, I was watching through my window a mother bear lying on her back in the tall grass, her two children playing on her belly, the three of them clearly enjoying each other and the grass and the sunshine. I responded, “How dare you say these others do not appreciate life!” He insisted they don’t.

I asked him if he knew any bears personally. He thought the question absurd.

This is why the world is being murdered.

***

Unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of any culture. A central unquestioned belief of this culture is that humans are superior to and separate from everyone else. Human supremacism is part of the foundation of much of this culture’s religion,  science, economics, philosophy, art, epistemology, and so on.

Human supremacism is killing the planet. Human supremacists—at this point, almost everyone in this culture—have shown time and again that the maintenance of their belief in their own superiority, and the entitlement that springs from this belief, are more important to them than the well-being or existences of everyone else. Indeed, they’ve shown that the maintenance of this self-perception and entitlement are more important than the continuation of life on the planet.

Until this supremacism is questioned and dismantled, the self-perceived entitlement that flows from this supremacism guarantees that every attempt to stop this culture from killing the planet will fail, in great measure because these attempts will be informed and limited by this supremacism, and thus will at best be ways to slightly mitigate harm, with the primary point being to make certain to never in any way question or otherwise endanger the supremacism or entitlement.

In short, people protect what’s important to them, and human supremacists have shown time and again that their sense of superiority and the tangible benefits they receive because of their refusal to perceive others as anything other than inferiors or resources to be exploited is more important to them than not destroying the capacity of this planet to support life, including, ironically, their own.

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(cc) Photo by leocub

Especially because human supremacism is killing the planet, but also on its own terms, human supremacism is morally indefensible. It is also intellectually indefensible. Neither of which seems to stop a lot of people from trying to defend it.

“Human supremacism is killing the planet. Human supremacists—at this point, almost everyone in this culture—have shown time and again that the maintenance of their belief in their own superiority, and the entitlement that springs from this belief, are more important to them than the well-being or existences of everyone else.”

The first line of defense of human supremacism is no defense at all, literally. This is true for most forms of supremacism, as unquestioned assumptions form the most common base for any form of bigotry: Of course humans (men, whites, the civilized) are superior, why do you ask? Or more precisely: How could you possibly ask? Or even more precisely: What the hell are you talking about, you crazy person? Or more precisely yet, an awkward silence while everyone politely forgets you said anything at all.

Think about it: if you were on a bus or in a shopping mall or in a church or in the halls of Congress, and you asked the people around you if they think humans are more intelligent than or are otherwise superior to cows or willows or rivers or mushrooms or stones (“stupid as a box of rocks”), what do you think people would answer? If you said to them that trees told you they don’t want to be cut down and made into 2x4s, what would happen to your credibility? Contrast that with the credibility given to those who state publicly that you can have infinite economic (or human population) growth on a finite planet, or who argue that the world consists of resources to be exploited. If you said to people in this culture that oceans don’t want to be murdered, would these humans listen? If you said that prairie dogs are in no way inferior to (or less intelligent than) humans, and you said this specifically to those humans who have passed laws requiring landowners to kill prairie dogs, would they be more likely to laugh at you or agree with you? Or do you think they’d be more likely to get mad at you? And just think how mad they’d get if you told them that land doesn’t want to be owned (most especially by them). If you told them there was a choice between electricity from dams and the continued existence of salmon, lampreys, sturgeon, and mussels, which would they choose? Why? What are they already choosing?

***

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is too abstract. Here is human supremacism. Right now in Africa, humans are placing cyanide wastes from gold mines on salt licks and in ponds. This cyanide poisons all who come there, from elephants to lions to hyenas to the vultures who eat the dead. The humans do this in part to dump the mine wastes, but mainly so they can sell the ivory from the murdered elephants.

Right now a human is wrapping endangered ploughshares tortoises in cellophane and cramming them into roller bags to try to smuggle them out of Madagascar and into Asia for the pet trade. There are fewer than 400 of these tortoises left in the wild.

Right now in China, humans keep bears in tiny cages, iron vests around the bears’ abdomens to facilitate the extraction of bile from the bears’ gall bladders. The bears are painfully “milked” daily. The vests also serve to keep the bears from killing themselves by punching themselves in the chest.  (See below.  Chinese Bear Bile Farms An extract from the gallbladder of bears is believed to have medicinal benefits, but animal welfare advocates aim to convince Chinese consumers of the barbarity of bile farming. China disgraces herself by permitting these practices. pinterest.com)

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Right now there are fewer than 500 Amani flatwing damselflies left in the world. They live along one stream in Tanzania. The rest of their home has been destroyed by human agriculture.

This year has seen a complete collapse of monarch butterfly populations in the United States and Canada. Their homes have been destroyed by agriculture.

Right now humans are plowing under and poisoning prairies. Right now humans are clearcutting forests. Right now humans are erecting mega-dams. Right now because of dams, 25 percent of all rivers no longer reach the ocean.

And most humans couldn’t care less.

Derrick Jensen-as-world-burnsRight now the University of Michigan Wolverines football team is hosting the Minnesota Golden Gophers. More than 100,000 humans are attending this football game. More than 100,000 humans have attended every Michigan home football game since 1975. There used to be real wolverines in Michigan. One was sighted there in 2004, the first time in 200 years. That wolverine died in 2010.

More people in Michigan—“The Wolverine State”—care about the Michigan Wolverines football team than care about real wolverines.

This is human supremacism.

***

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] just got a note from a friend who was visiting her son. She writes, “Yesterday morning when I emptied the compost bucket, the guy next door called out to ask if that was ‘garbage’ I was putting on the pile. I told him it was ‘compost.’ We went back and forth a couple of times. Then he said, ‘We don’t want no [sic] animals around here. I saw a raccoon out there. There were never any animals around here before.’ What better statement of human supremacism?”

***

Recently, scientists discovered that some species of mice love to sing. They “fill the air with trills so high-pitched that most humans can’t even hear them.” If “the melody is sweet enough, at least to the ears of a female mouse, the vocalist soon finds himself with a companion.”

Mice, like songbirds, have to be taught how to sing. This is culture, passed from generation to generation. If they aren’t taught, they can’t sing.

So, what is the response by scientists to these mice, who love to sing, who teach each other how to sing, who sing for their lovers, who have been compared to “opera singers”?

Given what the ideology of human supremacism does to people who otherwise seem sane, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the scientists wanted to find out what would happen if they surgically deafened these mice. And we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the mice could no longer sing their operas, their love songs. The deafened mice could no longer sing at all. Instead, they screamed.

And who could blame them? This is human supremacism.

***

Or there’s this. Just yesterday I spoke with Con Slobodchikoff, who has been studying prairie dog language for more than thirty years. Through observing prairie dogs non-intrusively in the field, he has learned of the complexity of their language and social lives. But he has done so, he said, without the aid of grants. Time and again he was told that if he wanted to receive money for his research—and if he wanted to do “real science” instead of “just” observing nature—he would have to capture some prairie dogs, deafen them, and then see how these social creatures with their complex auditory language and communal relationships responded to their loss of hearing. Of course he refused. Of course he didn’t receive the grants.

This is human supremacism.

***

And then today I got an email from a botanist friend who has worked for various federal agencies. His work has included identifying previously unknown species of plants. He said this work has not been supported by the agencies, because the existence of rare plants would interfere with their management plans, including the mass spraying of herbicides. His discoveries have been made on his own time and on his own dime.

It’s a good thing science is value free, isn’t it?

I told him Slobodchikoff had said to me that the scientific establishment makes it very difficult for people to manifest their love of the world. Slobodchikoff said this as someone who loves the earth very much.

My botanist friend agreed. “Science makes it very hard to love the world. Most scientists want the world to fit nice, clear, linear equations, and anything that doesn’t fit is ignored, unless you can get a publication out of it. Love isn’t a concept that would even come to mind concerning the natural world. The natural world is just a means to an end. A thing to be dissected, so they can get tenure. I was talking to a local botany professor, about how geology can drive speciation/change, and he was actually surprised to consider anything outside of genetic mechanisms. I was surprised at his surprise: his view just seemed so limited. A plant to him is an isolated, discrete entity, rather than the expression of the complex interactions and relationships between all the entities/factors in the environment going back 3.5 billion years.”

***

Or there’s this. I just saw a snuff video of scientists pouring molten aluminum into an anthill to reveal the shape of the tunnels. Then the scientists marveled at the beauty of the shape of the anthill they just massacred to the last ant.

This is human supremacism.

***

Or there’s this. The air around the world has recently been declared to be as carcinogenic as second hand smoke. The leading cause of lung cancer is now industrial pollution.

This is human supremacism.



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NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Derrick JensenActivist, philosopher, small farmer, teacher, leading voice of uncompromising dissent, Derrick Jensen holds degrees in creative writing and mineral engineering physics. His books include DreamsEndgame, Volumes 1 and 2As the World Burns, with Stephanie McMillanA Language Older Than WordsThe Culture of Make BelieveWhat We Leave Behind, with Aric McBayThe Derrick Jensen Reader, with Lierre Keith; and Deep Green Resistance, with Aric McBay and Lierre Keith.

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Peter Singer interviewed on BBC’s Hard Talk: discusses human and animal life, stresses equality of interests

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Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

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Why a “Humane Economy” Must Be a Veg Economy

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BY WOLF GORDON CLIFTON | ANIMAL PEOPLE FORUM


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(Featured image: free-roaming pigs in India. Credit Kim Bartlett – Animal People, Inc.)

Last week, I took the opportunity to represent the Animal People Forum at the Humane Society of the United States’ annual Expo conference in Las Vegas. While I have very mixed feelings about the location in which it was held – a surreal hybrid of Sodom & Gomorrah, Disneyland, and Dante’s Inferno – the conference itself was excellent, with many valuable sessions and plenty of great opportunities for networking.

During the welcome session, HSUS President and CEO Wayne Pacelle gave a talk promoting his new book, The Humane Economy. He presented numerous examples of how public concern for non-human animals, and outrage over cruelty and neglect, has driven companies in various industries to reform their treatment of other species. These range from Ringling Bros. Circus agreeing to retire its performing elephants, to numerous airlines refusing to transport hunting trophies out of Africa following mass outcry over Cecil the lion’s illegal killing.

Pacelle’s distinctly pro-capitalist approach to animal protection will undoubtedly rankle more radical activists, who see capitalism not as a potential ally, but as an intrinsically exploitative system and one of the foremost obstacles to meaningful change for animals…

Pacelle’s thesis, further elaborated in his book, is twofold: that activists can best promote animal protection by leveraging market forces as a catalyst for change, and that companies act in their own best interests by taking consumers’ ethical demands seriously. He summarized this thesis in his talk by declaring,

“Animal protection shouldn’t be a sacrifice. It should be an opportunity.”

Pacelle’s distinctly pro-capitalist approach to animal protection will undoubtedly rankle more radical activists, who see capitalism not as a potential ally, but as an intrinsically exploitative system and one of the foremost obstacles to meaningful change for animals. While I do not myself dispute the use of economic incentives as a tactic to advance animal welfare in certain situations, such as those cited in The Humane Economy, I am nonetheless extremely wary of any approach that conflates moral principles with business pursuits. In some cases, defending animals may present economic opportunities; but in others, it may indeed require sacrifice. Either way, compassion for all sentient beings must remain our highest value and foremost priority, and be pursued regardless of the profit or cost it may bring corporate interests.

'The Humane Economy' by Wayne Pacelle

‘The Humane Economy’ by Wayne Pacelle

That said, accepting Pacelle’s thesis for the sake of argument, another important issue arises. When it comes to eating animals, Pacelle offered in his talk multiple examples of companies in the food industry working to make their practices more “humane:” pork producers agreeing to phase out gestation crates for pigs, and restaurants and grocery outlets committing to sell only eggs from “cage free” chickens. Yet he gave no mention at all to the production of high-quality alternatives to meat, eggs, and dairy – now a thriving industry whose products herald a possible end to animals’ exploitation and slaughter for food altogether. Despite being vegan himself, he didn’t even mention the words “vegetarian” or “vegan” once.

Why the omission? In his book, Pacelle actually does devote considerable attention to the creation of veg alternatives to meat, eggs, and dairy. The Humane Economy describes both plant-based substitutes, such as Beyond Meat, Gardein, and Hampton Creek’s Just Mayo, and projects like Maastricht University’s Cultured Beef, which grows animal protein directly from stem cells rather than by harming living animals. (This article will bypass the philosophical debate over whether in vitro meat is technically vegetarian or vegan, as the end result in sparing animals is effectively the same.)

There is no disputing either the profitability of such enterprises, or their massive potential to benefit animals. According to Pacelle’s book, Gardein products are now available in 22,000 stores, and in 2014 the company that produces them was bought by Pinnacle Foods for $174 million. The Humane Economy quotes Josh Balk, cofounder of Hampton Creek, as stating that if just a single line of pasta produced by Michael Foods were to switch to his company’s vegan egg replacer, it would spare 115,000 hens from miserable lives in battery cages.

From the perspective of animals raised for food, the manufacture of veg alternatives to meat, eggs, and dairy is infinitely preferable to the adoption of slightly less cruel farming standards. “Humane” certification programs may curtail some of the worst abuses, but still permit branding, castration without anesthesia, unnatural crowding, require little if any access to the outdoors, and ultimately consign animals to die – usually in the same industrial slaughterhouses as their more cruelly raised brethren. Veg foods remove animal exploitation from the equation altogether.

Conditions inside a "free range" chicken farm (photo credit: steve p2008, used under CC BY 2.0)

Conditions inside a “free range” chicken farm (photo credit: steve p2008, used under CC BY 2.0)

From an economic viewpoint, such products are also far more sustainable in the long term than are meat, dairy, or eggs produced by animals under any conditions. The United Nations has recognized emissions from animal agriculture as one of the leading causes of climate change, rivaling or exceeding all transportation combined. According to a recently leaked report commissioned by Nestlé, if meat production continues at current rates, a third of the human population will face water shortages by 2025, with “catastrophic” global consequences by 2050. Given that factory farming has prevailed due to its relative efficiency in utilizing resources of food, water, and space, adopting more “humane,” resource-intensive forms of agriculture will only hasten the catastrophe – and an end to corporate profits – unless demand for animal products is drastically reduced at the same time.

By contrast, it takes 99% less water, and produces 78-95% fewer greenhouse emissions, to produce a pound of grain protein than a pound of animal protein. Oxford University estimates that growing meat directly from stem cells would require 99% less land, 96% less water, and produce 96% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than raising and slaughtering animals for it.

That Pacelle evidently knows these facts, touching on most of them in The Humane Economy, only makes his omission of them in public talks all the more striking. In a guest appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher, he doesn’t mention vegetarianism at all, except in the context of congratulating Seaworld (!) for agreeing to offer more plant-based food options at their parks in addition to “humanely” produced meat. In an interview with Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, he even dismisses it, saying,

“Animals jammed into cages and crates cannot wait for the world to go vegan. I’m quite sure they want out of this unyielding life of privation right now, and once that question is settled, then sensible people can debate whether they should be raised for the plate at all.”

That even at HSUS’ own conference, preaching to a choir of animal protection activists with no risk of backlash for advocating a vegetarian or vegan diet, Pacelle chose to promote “humane” meat and not veg alternatives is extremely bewildering. Moreover, it entirely contradicts the logic of his own argument, that “Animal protection shouldn’t be a sacrifice. It should be an opportunity.”

On the one hand, encouraging consumers to eat “humane” meat, eggs, and dairy sacrifices the overall welfare of animals. It may prevent a few particularly egregious forms of cruelty, but leaves the overall system of brutal exploitation and killing intact, now sanitized in the public eye through the endorsement of high-profile animal welfare organizations like HSUS. (it is worth noting that S 820, which HSUS lobbied unsuccessfully to include in the 2014 Farm Bill, would have implemented larger cages for laying hens nationwide yet also prohibit further reforms in the future, preserving the egg industry in perpetuity in the name of animal welfare.) And if such a “reformed” industry is to be sustainable, it demands sacrifice on the part of the consumer as well, for it is only by drastically reducing their consumption of meat and animal products that animal agriculture can continue without causing global environmental devastation. In the long term, “humane” farming of animals is a lose-lose for everyone concerned.

Vegan cheeseburger made with Gardein's Beefless Burger, Hampton Creek's Just Mayo, and Field Roast's Chao cheese slices.

Vegan cheeseburger made with Gardein’s Beefless Burger, Hampton Creek’s Just Mayo, and Field Roast’s Chao cheese slices.

On the other, vegan meat alternatives and lab-grown in vitro meat can be made without farming or slaughtering animals at all, eliminating their suffering entirely. And as their production becomes more and more advanced, such products will become indistinguishable from animal meat in taste, texture, nutrition, and even their basic biochemical structure. By choosing non-violent alternatives to meat, eggs, and dairy, consumers can continue to enjoy their favorite dishes in the same quantities as before, without exploiting animals or placing unbearable stress upon the Earth’s environment. Nothing, and no one, is sacrificed, and everyone wins – humans, animals, and the planet alike.

Admittedly, promoting meat alternatives to people used to eating slaughtered animals may be more difficult than simply offering “humane” versions of the same product. But animal protection organizations like HSUS owe it to the animals to seek the greatest good, not the path of least resistance… particularly if the short-term gains they achieve serve to perpetuate dietary choices that cause immense unnecessary suffering, and will ultimately devastate the planet and civilization with it. If Wayne Pacelle and HSUS can plug “humane” meat in the New York Times, and even sponsor tours for foodies to eat meat at humane-certified restaurants, think what the same time, energy, and resources could accomplish if used to support projects like Beyond Meat, Gardein, and Cultured Beef instead.

If we are to accept Wayne Pacelle’s capitalist approach to animal protection, the logical conclusion is clear: a “humane economy” must by definition be a veg economy. That he so adamantly seeks to evade this conclusion is mystifying and disturbing.



About the author

Wolf-clifton75%Born and raised within the animal rights movement, Wolf Gordon Clifton, currently serving as Executive Director of Animal People Inc, publisher of the Animal People Forum (animalpeopleforum.org) has always felt strongly connected to other creatures and concerned for their well-being. Beginning in childhood he contributed drawings of animals for publication in Animal People News, and traveled with his parents to attend conferences and visit animal projects all over the world. During high school he began writing for the newspaper and contributing in various additional ways around the Animal People office. His first solo trip overseas, to film a promotional video for the Bali Street Dog Foundation in Indonesia, led him to create the animated film Yudisthira's Dog, retelling the story of an ancient Hindu king famed for his loyalty to a street dog. It also inspired lifelong interests in animation and world religion, which he went on to study for college at Vanderbilt University. Wolf graduated in 2013 with a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies and minors in Film Studies and Astronomy. In 2015, he received a Master of Arts in Museology and Graduate Certificate in Astrobiology from the University of Washington. His thesis project, the online exhibit Beyond Human: Animals, Aliens, and Artificial Intelligence, brings together animal rights, astrobiology, and AI research to explore the ethics of humans' relationships with other sentient beings, and can be viewed on the Animal People Forum. His diverse training and life experiences enable him to research and write about a wide variety of animal-related issues, in a global context and across the humanities, arts, and sciences. In his spare time, he does paleontological work for the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, and writes for the community blog Neon Observatory.