Category: animal rights

Solastalgia In The Late Anthropo Scene

By the mid 70s, I had harbored a belief that frenetic societal norms were approaching a tipping point. Unfortunately, I did not turn that gnawing Angst into a Greta Thunberg moment. Since that time, generational thieves continue to place the young closest to the brink. The wealthiest of the most privileged draw up CYA plans, such as keeping a pilot on call and insuring that the bunkers stay well stocked and well armed.

Solastalgia: a form of mental or existential distress caused by environmental change.

An item from today’s (28 May 2019) New York Times:

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science

Everyday ecologies slip away every day and every where. My particular “where” is in a fly-over State, the point where Ohio and Kentucky meet Indiana.

What I saw a generation ago, that I do not (or very seldom) see now:

  • fire flies,
  • grubs,
  • moles,
  • mole hills,
  • ants crawling up a tree,
  • skunks,
  • inch worms,
  • bag worms,
  • bees,
  • native flora,
  • native-blossoming trees,
  • diverse wild birds,
  • earthworms in puddles,
  • butterflies,
  • moths,
  • groundhog colonies,
  • snakes,
  • water bugs,
  • locusts,
  • praying mantises

Cicadas flew by the billions here in 2004. Will they hatch in 2021?

Plastic molecules form islands in every ocean, plastics permeate lungs and digestive tracts, they extend to the peak of Everest (see photo below) and drop into the Marianna Trench. Sea life ingests those products manufactured using fossil fuels, transported with fossil fuels. Furious resource-extraction teams purchase ice-breaking ships to the Arctic for rare minerals needed in throwaway electronics.

An urgent suggestion: stop eating fish — and all other sentient things. Industrial nets extending 75 miles behind enormous tankers cull sea life efficiently enough to shorten the intervals between individual eco-extinctions.

Did you know that Greta Thunberg is vegan? She confronts eco-criminals with action plans that address the root of the problem. It’s not Climate Change, it’s not Climate Crisis, it’s nothing less than a Climate Emergency.

Go Vegan like there’s no tomorrow.

Take “Scale Mt Everest” off your plastic-bucket list.

Bad ideas:

  • Accumulating crap,
  • wasting lives by consuming them,
  • trashing lives for folly, fashion, fad, or geopolitical advantage,
  • frenzied shopping experiences,
  • joining traffic jams on the highways if avoidable,
  • frenetic frequent flying,
  • idling your ass in a drive-thru for the In and Out of it all,
  • ingesting the toxins that dwell in fast food,
  • tossing single-use plastic utensils and drinking straws,
  • salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, secret sauce, soy, sugar… packets into an environment already fulsomely (my favorite word) thick with them.

Thanks for reading.

Veganism: Motives Matter

A repost from There’s an Elephant in the Room — “Veganism; do motives matter?”

This is an essential article — a clear and sustaining statement that maintains its focus. It quite simply dispels facile, self-serving, soothing delusions that keep the inconceivably evil nihilist machinery profitable and unstoppable. Motives matter enormously.

“Underpinned by the decision to stop the deep injustice of creating victims, no checklist is needed to determine which species deserve to be respected; it’s ALL of them. This is what veganism actually is and once an individual has acknowledged that this is their choice, it is unshakeable. It becomes completely unthinkable to even consider going back on that decision; it becomes an integral part, even the defining part of who we are as individuals.”

https://theresanelephantintheroomblog.wordpress.com/2019/05/18/veganism-do-motives-matter/
Image by Tras los Muros / Aitor Garmendia

Thanks for reading.

The Cow in the Room

from The Vegan Society: 3 May 2019

The cow is on the table, she takes on roles to disguise her guise, she must assume names that soothe the savage sapiens who seek satiety. A “meat” cookbook is a collection of vignettes for social occasions and celebration. Let’s look at just one: veal medallions — carefully crated cow-boys separated from their mothers at birth and slaughtered at youth, at the exact moment when their flesh is optimally tender to the tongue and teeth. The name ‘medallions’ evokes an honor bestowed upon the diner, esteeming the favor of their palate. Vegan diets are healthy for children and other living things.

The Jungle opened a section of curtain to reveal where the cow body parts on your plate originated. The best minds of inhumane capitalism hire the most devious among us to serve man. Capitalism wretches souls that way. It’s for dinner.

Sinclair Lewis had already predicted the vicious horror that a body politic driven by greed and wanton power could unleash. He did a damned good take on a fictitious character who possessed certain skills and ambitions, including a despotic trumpish draw.

The Jungle’s heart-wrenching critique of industrial capitalism was lost on readers more worried about the rat faeces that, according to Sinclair, contaminated their sausage. Sinclair later observed: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.

Sinclair Lewis THE JUNGLE 1906

Mr. T took on fifteen fellow Republiconnivers and finished them off with considerable ease in 2016. Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here, revealing that every brick of its heavy foundation had already been kilned.

Artificial intelligence is approaching the capability of moving its not-so-invisible finger, in a curiously recursive way, to write robust robotic code to compile algorithms of cruel but profitable intention. A perfection of agency commanded by global geopolitical intention without the slightest sliver of morality. Let there be slaughterhouses, and there were slaughterhouses.

The turkey is also in the room

Thanks for reading.

Vegetarianism and veganism. What gives?

A vegetarian ingests an animal’s personal effects by consuming merely eggs, milk and/or cheese — highly addictive substances that keep addicts coming back for more. It takes commitment and some patience while your body excretes toxins, but it’s also enormously rewarding. Immeasurably if you have genuine compassion for animals and remember that we ain’t nothing but mammals.

Learning to Think in the Anthropocene

Calfs get separated from their mothers at birth. Her breast milk is diverted to a marketplace. Oddly enough, a cow’s milk is designed for her offspring. Imagine if you can. There is no weaning process, just immediate separation of mother and calf.

Sir, would you please direct me to the supermarket’s breast-milk cooler?

Unfortunately, a vegetarian ends up causing more cruelty than a “meat” eater who eats only meat. When chickens and cows can no longer produce the goods for the dairy industry they are shipped to a slaughter houses for marginal return on investment.

As a veganist, I advocate formal legal recognition of the inalienable rights of all sentient animals to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Animals are not a necessary “resource” for a becoming life. We become inured our entire lives to the unspeakable violence that attends denial of these rights — multiple times per day for most non-vegan humans.

Look at a chart of “cuts” in a butcher shop. Connect the dots to Grey’s Anatomy. We share virtually the same vital organs, virtually the same body systems: from head to toe and wrapped in the largest organ of all, the skin. Skin keeps the organs protected from the elements. You are what you eat.

A rodent living a matter of inches below scorched Earth was the mother of all mammals.

Humans once lived in harmony with this planet — some time after the fifth extinction event ended reptilian species that evolved over 200,000,000 years. By comparison, human have evolved for only 200,000 years. That should humble us, but I don’t think we are terribly modest in our self-estimation. Having an extinction event named after ourselves — The Anthropocene — is not a cause for celebration.

A rodent living a matter of inches below scorched Earth was the mother of all mammals. Who knows what might follow an Anthropocene?

Thanks for reading.