Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.
There's an Elephant in the Room blog
December
2018
Today, as 2018 slips away, I have a new and excruciating awareness of the climate catastrophe that is breaking in slow motion.
So this year, because it’s all I know, I’m just going to keep on writing about veganism, keep on defending our trillions of annual victims, and keep on pleading with my species to wake up and realise what’s happening. I don’t know what it will take to make humanity sit up and take notice, but I have to keep trying.
I usually do a blog at this time of year – it’s an apt time to reflect on
the changes that have taken place and a chance to evaluate the slow but
steady progress that we’re making towards a vegan world. However this year I
found my thoughts being drawn in an altogether different direction from
usual; something has irrevocably changed since I last sat down to write my
New Year thoughts.
Humans – facing up to what we do
In 2012, I became vegan in recognition of the brutal injustice that we are
inflicting on every species on the planet by the unending ways that we
ignore their vital interests in favour of our own trivial and frivolous
preferences. Today, as 2018 slips away, I have a new and excruciating
awareness of the climate catastrophe that is breaking in slow motion like a
wave over this beautiful world, and we are running out of time to fix it.
Let’s face it, our causative role in the atrocity, and our resulting peril
as a species, are not even being acknowledged yet, at a time when we ALL
need to be working on – and close to – the solution.
We hack and butcher our vicious way through the gentle and innocent
creatures whose world this also is, ‘farming’ and mutilating them,
violating, impregnating, breaking up their families and pumping out their
breast milk, genetically altering them to increase egg production,
slaughtering, sawing, dismembering and flaying the sweet individuals who
face our slavering appetite for gore in uncomprehending bewilderment while
we kill them by the trillions each year. We devour, excrete, wear,
experiment on, and are ‘entertained’ by the pitiful ways that our despairing
victims try to please us, their desperate attempts to make us stop hurting
them. None of it works, despite the fact that none of what we do is
necessary.
We are a species drunk on delusions of grandeur.
It’s real. We’re in big trouble
Be assured, there are charlatans who will say otherwise because the status
quo of nonhuman exploitation is making vast sums of money for them, but as
the old year slips away, the environmental and health related science
against our use of others is continuing to pile up and the clamour for
action to save the world grows louder. This year we all must surely be
beginning to realise that humanity, and humanity alone, has brought our
beloved planet, and all who travel through the black depths of space on this
irreplaceable blue green orb, to the very brink of disaster. We are
teetering now on the edge of the abyss.
It’s too late to complain about corporations and industries. It’s too late
to carry on as before and blame everyone but ourselves for the disasters
that afflict our world with increasing severity. We are consumers and it is
our cash that is creating the demand that continues to drive vast
agricultural industries; it is our cash that funds all the industries and
practices that are wrecking our global home and depriving our children and
grandchildren of a future. We are depriving them of a habitable world on
which to even have a future. It’s time to take responsibility as individuals
because if we don’t, we are condemning our loved ones to a world from our
nightmares. We may be dead and gone, but our legacy of senseless corruption
will remain as long as our species lasts – which isn’t likely to be very
long at all as things are.
Global warming – the cosy myth of climate change
I know when I was younger, the term ‘global warming’ was occasionally
mentioned, and here in the bitter cold of a Scottish winter, people smiled
and nodded and agreed that a wee bit of warmth wouldn’t be a bad thing. How
little I understood the mechanisms behind the idea of the ‘warmth’ that we
all crave here.
I had no idea about the man-made build-up of greenhouse gasses that in turn
was heating the planet, changing climates, bringing extreme weather events
with increasing frequency and severity. I didn’t think about indigenous
crops and species no longer being able to survive as their environment
becomes increasingly hostile; the land, oceans and waterways clogged with
effluent and assorted and non-biodegradable waste. I had no concept of
melting icecaps raising sea levels and releasing even more greenhouses gas
into an already seething atmosphere. To my younger self, the world seemed so
unchanging, so unaffected by the life forms who swarm its surface. Earth
seemed unbreakable.
Climate change – the consequences
Yet here we are as the year 2019 looms, well on our way to quite literally
eating, using, and poisoning our planet to death. We are in it up to our
necks, persisting in our brutal use of all other species while the very
survival of our own is on the line as a direct result. New scientific
reports support this view almost every week. All this devastation has been
created in the recent past by a species whose technological burgeoning,
enslaving, modifying, despoiling and displacing every other species and
every environment to our own ends, while disregarding the tragic
consequences of our indulgence.
As if all that wasn’t bad enough, we sanctimoniously delude ourselves 1)
that we care about other animals and ‘nature’, and 2) that we can claim
superiority amongst the millions of other species in the world; millions
whose number falls daily as a result of our actions in what is known and
recognised as the 6th Mass Extinction event. Google it.
I recently wrote a blog that highlighted a recent report that we had 12
years left to change our ways [Twelve years. Twelve.]. Oh, I know humanity won’t disappear in 12
years; our doomed species is likely to struggle on for a considerable while
after that point is reached. But the science is clear that by then – or even
earlier according to some – it will be too late for us to avoid the
consequences of our desecration of our fellow creatures and the planet we
all share. And the effective word that our children and grandchildren will
get to know too well for any of us to feel good about, is ‘struggle’. Life
will become an increasingly hard struggle for them in ways we find difficult
to imagine, and it won’t be just in terms of the occasional storm or flood
that they’ll get used to dealing with.
How would I know about this ‘struggle’?
In what feels increasingly like a past life, I worked in the related areas
of ‘Disaster Planning’ and ‘Business Continuity’ in local government.
Because effective planning made it essential for me to understand the
realities of what might be faced, I am only too well aware of the speed with
which the veneer of ‘civilisation’ falls away in the event of even a
relatively localised catastrophe such as a disease pandemic, or extreme
climatic event such as an earthquake or flood.
For the most part, we live in a world where our every daily requirement
relies on a largely unrecognised network of interdependent services; people
going to work to create supplies, transporting these supplies to where they
need to be to keep the population fed, clothed and moving. Supporting the
population we have health and emergency services, schools, refuse
collection, and such unrecognised essentials as crematoria – all with staff
who need transport to get to work. All these services work in an
equilibrium.
These systems are more fragile than we suppose and here in the UK we can see
just how little it takes to upset that balance. In Scotland, all shops close
on New Year’s Day and many on 2 January, and in the days leading up to this
planned closure, we see panic buying that strips the shelves of vast
supermarkets. That’s for a planned and short-term closure – imagine an
unplanned one.
All it takes is an interruption in any part of the service network and it’s
like a house of cards. Once transport links fail, fuel supplies fail and
food supplies fail because whatever is available cannot be distributed.
Without transport, power stations, hospitals and schools can’t be staffed.
Any available medical provision starts to be overwhelmed. Roads and
infrastructure are impaired, but there’s no fuel at the filling stations
anyway, people have to stay home to look after their children and no one can
get to work to earn money. With nothing to eat and no way to feed their
families, desperation takes hold. Public services are prioritised in
increasingly futile efforts to cover the bare essentials. I could go on.
I have been employed to plan for eventualities such as these but even I can
scarcely imagine this sort of scenario on a planetary scale. However I am
convinced that our children – that’s yours and mine – may well become aware
of it as an everyday reality. Disaster Planning will become a new and vital
career choice. My heart breaks to realise that this is the world that my
generation is bequeathing to our children; those children we love more than
anyone else may find themselves living hand to mouth as they fight for
survival on a dying planet.
Plant based consumption – it’s a start
Along with so many self-interested and scathing dismissals of the
scientifically proven need for plant based consumption, are the same old
calls for yet more laws, yet more regulations, yet more support for
small-scale ‘farmers’ of animal-derived substances, the same old calls to
penalise large-scale animal substance producers and so on. Now apart from
the fact that the concept of penalising large-scale producers for meeting
large-scale demand (see the obvious problem there?) demonstrates a woeful
lack of a grasp on the basic mechanics of supply and demand, basically here
we have a call for the same old, same old. These tired, worn, and
desperately weary suggestions have shown no sign of working in the decades
that they have been buzzing around, but making a big thing about calling for
them to be implemented/enforced seeks to give the appearance of concern
while indicating that the individual does not intend to take personal
responsibility for their own actions. All the problems arising from those
actions are conveniently the fault of ‘someone else’ who now apparently has
responsibility for putting things right using the same tried and tested
measures that have spectacularly failed animals for hundreds of years.
Without a widespread commitment to action, such pie-in-the-sky measures to
regulate animal substance use are now physically impossible to achieve while
the human population (currently 7.7 billion) spirals upwards, carrying with
it the increased consumer demand for our fellow species to be used as
inappropriate ‘food’ on a planet with dwindling resources.
We are out of time. Really.
What do we need? Action! When do we need it? Now!
As pointed out so eloquently by climate activist Greta Thunberg, the climate
crisis should be the emergency first priority of every government and every
one of us. Despite this, many are still in denial and in this world of
sensationalised gossip-mongering that masquerades as journalism, denialists
continue to find a ready platform for their anti-science opinions. However
any one of us who has lived more than a decade or two can see clearly
evidenced in the changing landscape, the disappearance of insect life, and
the terrifyingly increasing incidence of extreme events, the torment of a
planet entering its death throes.
Some appear to be sitting on the metaphorical fence. Waiting to be
convinced. Thinking that ‘there’s time’; thinking it’s all bullshit but
hell, if it is real, we can always take steps in the future if we’re
absolutely forced into it. Sadly that is not the case. The time to act is
now. By the time the doubters and deniers are beginning to wake from their
torpor and believe what the scientists have been trying to tell us about for
decades, it will be well beyond too late. We couldn’t backtrack, any more
than we could stuff a bullet back in a gun once the trigger has been pulled.
Start with veganism
So this year, because it’s all I know, I’m just going to keep on writing
about veganism, keep on defending our trillions of annual victims, and keep
on pleading with my species to wake up and realise what’s happening. I don’t
know what it will take to make humanity sit up and take notice, but I have
to keep trying.
But now, as the bells of 2019 begin, the thing we need most is the thing
that every single one of us should be working for, day and night, with every
fibre of our being. A miracle.
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