Yes, we know. Mice and other small animals lose their spaces to make way for our homes. Our crops use land that might have been habitat. Even the gentlest gardener dispaces a few snails or worms. Vegans try to challenge the idea of humanity as Commander-in-Chief over Earth’s living beings. We’d like to transcend all those thousands of years of playing the master role. We’ll never be perfect but that’s not the point.
Photo source: krzysztofniewolny, via Pixabay
Yes, we know. Mice and other small animals lose their spaces to make way
for our homes. Our crops use land that might have been habitat. Even the
gentlest gardener dispaces a few snails or worms.
Plus, most vegans I know use cars. Roads mean deforestation and
fragmentation. Toads, deer, and many others can’t get from their birthplaces
to their lifetime habitats. This is changing the course of evolution as well
as displacing living communities. And what about the oil runoff?
And so on.
Maybe we’ll make changes as our discomfort with this reality grows. Yet even
bike components and book glues are not always vegan; the list is long.
We’re serious about opting out of deliberate exploitation, in any case. And
we needn’t accept the domestication of wolves, wildcats, ferrets, fish, and
rabbits or the breeding and breaking of horses. Veganism means we strive as
diligently as possible to avoid harming and manipulating conscious life, and
we do the best we can to ensure other living beings are enabled to thrive in
their ways.
We never said it was easy. (And if we did, maybe we need to rethink that.)
We are making a difference in the world. A vegan spares more animals a year
than most any sanctuary in the world can take in! If the sanctuary is doing
something real by helping animals in a hands-on way, then the vegan is also
accomplishing something real—and working at the very roots of the troubles
that force animals to need rescue.
All the while, we’re human. Yes, we vegans harm animals too. It’s part of
the structure humans have built for more than ten thousand years, a
structure which we inherited.
I ask myself: In what ways can I tread more lightly on Earth, buy less,
waste less, use less, keep it local and get more into nature’s scheme of
things? Gotta list the changes will I make. Gotta keep adding to the list.
Meanwhile, a note to those who seem to think we should throw up our hands
because perfection isn’t achievable. Please understand that vegans try to
challenge the idea of humanity as Commander-in-Chief over Earth’s living
beings. We’d like to transcend all those thousands of years of playing the
master role. We’ll never be perfect but that’s not the point.
Could a transformed human identity release us, and every other community
still evolving on Earth, from a spiral of ever-worsening emergencies? That’s
the key question for us today. The time we live in cries out for a paradigm
shift. I’d love to find out what veganism can do.
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