Required Reading
In “Nuggets and Hummers and fish sticks, oh my!”, recently published in the online environmental magazine Grist, Bruce Friedrich accessibly summarizes the environmental reasons for going vegan. Now a Veep at PETA, my pal Bruce was a longtime social justice activist with radical Catholic peace and anti-poverty projects when he first went vegan for environmental and social justice reasons.
This article is required reading for anyone who doesn’t know all of the ways that the production and consumption of animal products deplete and pollute the planet that is our only source of sustenance. If you’re an environmentalist — or even if you believe that global warming is a real threat — and you’re not (yet) vegan, read this article to make sure that you’re making an informed choice. Follow the links in the article if you mistrust his facts. (I’ve researched the issue thoroughly myself and can vouch for them too.) If, after reading the article, you don’t plan to eliminate or at least sharply reduce your consumption of animal products, please come back here and tell me why. Seriously, I need to understand your reasoning.
Vegans, you’re not off the hook. Read the article as a model of how to talk about this issue in an accessible yet informed manner. More importantly, pass the link along to any meat-eating environmentalists you know. Ask them to come and tell me about their thinking if, after reading the article, they still don’t intend to embrace or at least move toward veganism. I’m at the beginning of a research project about this and I need to understand the thinking of environmentalists who know why they ought to be vegan but don’t make that choice. Also, remember that being vegan isn’t the be-all and end-all of environmental responsibility. If we want folks to change their diets to save the planet, we ought to be willing to make similarly significant changes in our own consumption patterns by, for example, sharply reducing fuel use and purchases of new consumer goods. Check out other articles on the Grist site if you’re not yet hip to environmental issues other than those involving animals.
September 30th, 2007 at 9:04 am
Dunno if it’s relevant, but I’m a vegan who thinks the reasons in your post for being vegan are bullshit. See a post on my blog titled Against Veganism As Individual Boycott for details as to why - http://anarchia.wordpress.com/2007/06/18/against-veganism-as-individual-boycott/
I’ll get around to writing part two of that post at some stage soon, hopefully…
Cheers,
Asher
September 30th, 2007 at 10:00 am
I read your post, Asher, and I would say I respectfully disagree, but you’ve opened the door to disrespect by calling someone else’s deeply-held ethical choices “bullshit.” However, I have no wish to flame you in response.
So, I will just say you’ve got some major logical inconsistencies in your blog entry, such as basing your primary argument upon the assumption that all vegans are New Age, consumerist “gee let’s all see the light guys” pollyannas who believe that their singular actions are enough to end the obscenity of creating, torturing, and murdering other animals for a bite of food. I strongly suggest you resolve your inconsistencies, perhaps by educating yourself about the reality of many vegans and our beliefs/actions/attitudes/plans/coalitions etc.
September 30th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Asher, I didn’t give any reasons for going vegan in my post; I just directed folks to an article about the environmental reasons why one ought to be vegan, which I believe to be valid on their own, regardless of other considerations. What I mean is that, if there was something I was doing that was not otherwise ethically objectionable and I learned that it was wreaking the kind of environmental havoc that meat-milk-egg consumption causes, I hope that I would quit doing that thing, especially if I could do so as easily as one can go vegan. So, it seems to me that environmentalists who may not agree with me that exploitation of animals is inherently objectionable still ought to be at least thinking about going vegan. I want to know — and, in the context of the escalating climate change emergency, we all need to know — why they are not.
Maybe you don’t agree with that. Maybe you don’t think global warming is an emergency or maybe you don’t accept the UN-FAO statistics concerning the contributions of what they call “livestock” to that emergency. I can’t tell from your comment. So let me risk sounding like the college teacher I am and point out that calling somebody’s arguments “bullshit” is not only disrespectfully rude but also extremely ineffective rhetoric.
I don’t believe that I’ve promoted veganism as individual boycott, especially since I find the notion of individual boycott to be a contradiction in terms. Boycotts are, by definition, collective acts. Also, boycotts are temporary measures, to be called off when those aims have been achieved. So, in addition to the absurdity of the idea of an “individual boycott,” I cannot see veganism as boycott because it is not a temporary measure. When UFW called for a boycott of California grapes, they did so with the hope of inducing grape-growers to improve their treatment of workers and reduce their use of harmful chemicals. Grapes themselves were not the problem. In contrast, meat-milk-eggs-etc are inherently objectionable to me. On the environmental tip, the pollution/depletion associated with eating animals also is inherent. So, I can’t imagine why you would think I was promoting veganism as individual boycott. Again, confining your critique to the word “bullshit” makes it difficult for me to engage in dialogue with you.
But — just a reminder — on this particular issue I am not so much interested in hearing from vegans as hearing from non-vegans who know the environmental costs of their diets but have elected not to change them.
October 1st, 2007 at 6:41 am
Hi again,
First up, if my using the term bullshit offended, I apologise to both of you - that certainly wasn’t my intent.
Charlotte - “the assumption that all vegans are New Age, consumerist “gee let’s all see the light guys†pollyannas”
I never said all - I said “For many, perhaps most vegans”, and I don’t think your interpretation of what I said is in any way an accurate representation.
I also never said that many/most “believe that their singular actions are enough to end the obscenity of creating, torturing, and murdering other animals for a bite of food”, but rather that “by being vegan, one is not responsible for the death of millions of broiler hens, factory farmed pigs or skinned minks each year, or the torture of millions of dairy cows & battery hens in fields & sheds all over the world”.
There is a big difference between those two - between stopping something, and merely absolving oneself of the guilt for it continuing, and, essentially, that is the crux of my post.
Despite your last line, I feel no need to educate myself “about the reality of many vegans and our beliefs/actions/attitudes/plans/coalitions etc” - whether through animal rights/liberation groups/campaigns, or through social networks, I have met a large number of the vegans across Aotearoa/New Zealand.
In fact, I wrote my post shortly after returning home from a fundraiser for the Vegetarian Society of NZ, which took the form of a quiz night. Over a dozen times during the night, I heard questions like “how many lives does the average vegan save per year?” and statements like “being vegan is the only way to ensure you aren’t responsible for the murder of dozens of animals every year.” It is this complete fallacy that I sought to argue against in my post. I’m going to quote the last paragraph in my post here, “My veganism does not hurt the meat, dairy, egg, leather or fur industries. Their level of production did not change one iota when, around 18 months ago, I decided to go vegan, and nor did I ever expect it to. My veganism is simply a personal choice, albeit one with a political logic, similar to my choice not to vote, which most certainly will not hurt the state in and of itself in any way.”
pattrice - I am certainly incredibly concerned about climate change, and am more than aware of the effect of modern agriculture and farming practices on the climate - coming from Aotearoa, where we have (AFAIK) the highest percentage in the world of our total emissions coming from agriculture (including farming), its hard to miss it.
The problem here isn’t with people who eat meat, or eggs, or drink milk. Just like with sweatshop clothing, the problem isn’t with those who wear it, or like how the problem with capitalism isn’t those who take menial jobs. The focus needs to get back to where it used to be (before the 60’s), on the point of production, not the point of consumption.
Someone who goes into a factory farm (for instance), and rescues 20 battery hens, is having a far more positive effect on those animals than someone who stops eating battery eggs. If you and I and Charlotte all remain vegan for the rest of our lives, that in and of itself will NOT lower the rates of production of battery eggs, or the number of cows raped for their milk, not one iota.
Hope that clarifies my position a little.
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Asher, let me introduce you to the squeeze strategy, which meat industry flacks love to quote me about so I know they’re scared of it. The key point to remember is that meat production is a for-profit business. They’re not doing it because they like making meat. They’re doing it for the profits. Decrease their rate of return below a certain point and they’ll get out of the business just as quickly as producers of hula hoops did once their production became unprofitable.
How do we do that? By attacking from both ends, by driving down demand for the product at the same time as we do everything we can to raise the cost of production. Direct action is one way to raise the cost of production and, when that action includes animal rescue, also saves a small number of animals directly. Other kinds of direct action include monkeywrenching of all sorts. Other ways to raise the costs of production include labor regulations, environmental regulations, animal welfare regulations, decreased price supports for feed (their highest cost), and the like. Promotion of veganism, whether for ethical, health, or environmental reasons, drives down demand. Over time, the combination of higher production costs and reduced demand decreases the return on investment, making the business less profitable.
Now, to your assertion that individual choices make not one iota of difference in all of this. I’d say that individual choices make just about an iota of difference. Added together, millions of individual choices change markets. Changes in markets force changes in production. If that weren’t true, factories would still be churning out corsets even though women don’t wear them any more.
If you don’t believe that this is true regarding meat, look at the trends in U.S. per capita meat consumption since 1950, which are provided as visual aids for my 2003 talk called Get Real: Facing Reality and Crafting Strategies Accordingly. You can see a sharp decline in beef consumption at the time that the news about “red meat” and heart disease became widely known. Unfortunately, this was accompanied by a corresponding upsurge in poultry consumption, so it wasn’t a net gain for the animals but it does prove that production shifts according to consumer preference. More hopeful for us is the sharp and evidently permanent decline in veal consumption, which appears to be pegged to consumer awareness of the specific cruelties involved in veal production.
Now, it’s true that capitalist businesses don’t go down without a fight. We’ve seen this with cigarettes. Faced with sharp declines in tobacco consumption in the USA, the cigarette companies set about promoting smoking in developing countries. The same thing is now happening concerning meat consumption. If you look at the chart on worldwide meat production, you’ll see that while production is relatively flat in developed countries, it is booming in developing countries. That reflects the fact that demand for meat, while high, is relatively flat in affluent countries but surging in developing countries. This is a result, in part, of a deliberate strategy by the livestock industries to promote the consumption of animal products by people who previously have consumed predominantly plant-based diets.
That means that, in addition to increasing costs via various means and driving down demand via vegan education in wealthy countries, we’ve also got to be taking action against the globalization of the western patterns of meat production and consumption.
All of which is to say that, while I share your dismay with feel-good veganism in the context of the current crisis, I cannot agree that efforts to reduce consumption (of meat or any other ethically or environmentally problematic product) are futile. They aren’t enough on their own but they are a necessary component of any strategy to end meat production. As the failed “war on drugs” has shown, people will find a way to make and ship the things that people want. If US defoliation of coca plantations doesn’t stop cocaine production, activist direct action against slaughterhouses certainly won’t stop meat production all by itself.
We all need to learn to see our efforts as part of a multifaceted strategy and, unless something that somebody else is doing can be proved to hamper what we’re trying to do, quit hating on people who work on different aspects of the problem using different tactics than we do. The sooner we do that, the better able we will be to coordinate our efforts and have productive rather than destructive dialogues about our differences.
October 3rd, 2007 at 10:45 pm
I also am vegan because it’s the right thing to do.
I do believe that my actions - in terms of consumption choices, advocacy, and so forth - make a difference (all those vegan products on shelves didn’t spring forth spontaneously), but I would be vegan regardless because I feel it’s wrong to inflict easily avoidable harm, and it’s wrong to exploit sentient beings for pleasure and profit.
October 23rd, 2007 at 12:56 pm
[...] on animals and then pulling together coalitions in opposition to destructive treaties. Check out this recent comment, the “go global” section of this 2003 speech on promoting veganism widely and [...]