An Environmental Article from All-Creatures.org

The Great Debate: Open letter, invitation to Al Gore and Bill McKibben

From The Million Vegan Grandmothers
June 2023

Open letter, invitation to Al Gore and Bill McKibben: We have tentatively secured the dates of Sept. 18 or 19, 2023 for the event: “Animal Agriculture is the Leading Cause of Climate Change” at the Apollo theater in New York City.

June 14, 2023

The Honorable Al Gore
Office of the Former Vice President
2100 West End Avenue, Suite 620
Nashville, TN 37203-5200

Bill McKibben
c/o Henry Holt and Company
120 Broadway, 23rd Floor
New York, NY 10271

Dear Mr. Gore and Mr. McKibben,

Several of us with the Million Vegan Grandmothers have been huge fans of your work for decades and have been trained as Climate Reality Leaders and participate or manage Third Act working groups. We deeply appreciate the environmentally conscious communities that you have fostered through the organizations: The Climate Reality Project, 350.org and Third Act. We would like to invite you to enhance our clarity and understanding on our path forward towards a viable future.

We propose to host an Oxford style debate on the proposition “Animal Agriculture is the Leading Cause of Climate Change” at the Apollo theater in New York City. We have tentatively secured the dates of Sept. 18 or 19, 2023 for the event. Dr. Sailesh Rao, founder and Executive Director of Climate Healers, and Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop, former Principal Scientist for the Government of Queensland in Australia, have agreed to speak on behalf of the proposition. We are inviting the journalist, George Monbiot and former CNN Headline News anchor, Jane Velez-Mitchell, to moderate the debate. We are also inviting Mayor Eric Adams to introduce the event. Now we would like to invite you both to speak against the proposition and defend your exclusive focus on eliminating fossil-fuel usage to solve climate change.

We will arrange to have high-school students from Harlem in the audience to judge the winners of the debate. If your side wins, a generous philanthropist has offered to donate ONE MILLION DOLLARS to be divided among the non-profit organizations of your choice.

The Million Vegan Grandmothers have come together out of a fierce love not just for our own children and grandchildren, but for the children and grandchildren of all species. Our primary purpose as an organization is to spread awareness of the connection between what we consume and the health of our planet so that future generations have a future.

We believe that our work is part of a transformative and sorely needed shift in consciousness that is fundamental towards healing the earth’s climate, and we resonate with Mr. Gore’s observation in Earth in the Balance: “The more deeply I search for the roots of our environmental crisis, the more I am convinced that it is an outer manifestation of an inner crisis that is spiritual.”

For us, one of the deepest symptoms of our inner spiritual crisis as a culture is our complicity in animal agriculture’s industrial-level, profit-making exploitation of animals leading to massive deforestation, annihilation of biodiversity, dangerous levels of greenhouse gas emissions and the commodification of sentient beings.

Given this connection, we are puzzled by the almost exclusive focus on reducing fossil fuel usage that characterizes the efforts of The Climate Reality Project, 350.org and Third Act. In contrast, the Climate Healers Animal Agriculture position paper states that “we need to transition to a plant-based economy first …. eliminating fossil fuel usage first will accelerate the warming of the planet.”

Since the planet has already warmed by 1.2 degrees C from pre-industrial levels, and any acceleration of warming through a misplaced priority in implementing climate solutions might tip the world over the critical 1.5 degrees C global-warming threshold, we are writing this open letter appealing to you to help us resolve the conundrum presented by your exclusive focus on eliminating fossil fuel usage to solve climate change.

We need a response to this invitation by June 30th so that we can jointly finalize arrangements for the event. Given the enormous stake at hand—the continued viability of all life on earth—we eagerly anticipate your favorable reply to this invitation.

With Kindest Regards,

The Million Vegan Grandmothers
Climate Healers
3145 E Chandler Blvd #110-233
Phoenix, AZ 85048
t: +1-732-809-3526
e: [email protected]
w: millionvegangrandmothers.org

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