“Panel Issues Bleak Report on Climate Change”
“Save the Planet? It’s Now or Never, Warns landmark UN report”
“Humans Living Far Beyond Planet’s Means”
“Earth Can’t Sustain Humans”
In just 10,000 years, a millisecond of geological time, Homo sapiens civilization, embodied by the repulsively rapacious paradigm of Western speciesist capitalism and anthropocentrism has managed to push the planet to the brink of ecological collapse. Droughts, violent hurricanes, melting ice caps, drowning polar bears, increasing hunger, food riots, diminishing supplies of potable water, species of plants and animals disappearing at an alarming rate, and a host of other frightening events are unfolding more quickly that scientists can even document. Scientists throughout the world are warning of a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity for averting a catastrophic level of climate change, and NASA scientist James Hansen warned newly elected President Obama that he has “four years to save Earth” through a radical shift in US energy policies or face the real potential of ecological breakdown reaching a crucial tipping point.[36]
We don’t deny that widespread veganism would go a long way toward mitigating the planet’s dire problems with climate change, rainforest destruction, water pollution, desertification, resource scarcity, hunger, social conflicts, and species extinction. But considering the facts that the concept of veganism emerged in 1944 and in 65 years no more than 2% of the human population has embraced veganism,[37] and that world flesh consumption has increased five-fold from 1950 to 1997, the singular devotion to vegan education (and its resultant sweeping dismissal of myriad other potential strategies) is clearly a tactical dead-end and losing strategy.[38] Raging flesh consumption is shredding the vegan paradigm, and despite some gains the vegan and animal rights cause is rapidly losing ground and hemorrhaging badly. Emerging capitalist entities with huge populations, like China and India, are driving the demand for rotting animal corpses and other animal-derived products through the roof as the disease of consumerism –stoked by Madison Avenue advertising — whets the appetites of the populace for hamburgers, bacon, fried chicken, eggs, and milk shakes, all conveniently provided by the scourge of fast-food outlets and the globalization of the animal-industrial complex.
In a February 17, 2009 interview, Mia MacDonald of Brighter Green, a non-profit environmental think tank based in New York, discussed her case study of China’s runaway demand for animal-derived food products:
Since 1980, meat consumption in China has risen four-fold. It’s now about 119 pounds per person a year, just over half the average American’s per capita annual meat consumption of 220 pounds.
In 2007, China raised and slaughtered 700 million pigs. That’s about 10 times the number in the U.S., although pork is China’s most popular meat and China’s population is more than four times as large as the U.S.’s, dairy consumption is rising even faster; the dairy industry in China has grown 20 percent a year over the past decade, and consumption of milk products in China has risen three times since 2000.[39]
As Mark Bittman writes, “Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year (dairy and eggs are separate, and hardly insignificant), an increase of 50 pounds per person from 50 years ago.” There is a shocking spike in global flesh consumption as well: “The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050.”[40]
Whilst Hall and Francionites cling to their messianic faith in pacifistic veganism, the systemic savagery of capitalism that they rarely, if ever, address escalates its violent assault on nature, human animals, and nonhuman animals. Corporate overlords like Don Tyson aren’t concerned that human activity is creating an increasingly disturbing dystopia and mutating the Earth into a lifeless and barren asteroid. As Hall dedicates herself to converting white middle to upper class liberal Americans to veganism at an annual growth rate of about .03% per year, Tyson Foods, Inc is preparing to globalize its special brand of institutionalized violence, thereby positioning itself to enable billions of new dead animal flesh addicts around the world. The November 2, 2008 edition of USA Today reports that:
Tyson plans to duplicate his company’s domination of the U.S. livestock industry, but on a global scale. “Our company, as I would view it today, is in kind of a consolidation stage, getting ready for our growth overseas,” Tyson said in a rare and extensive interview with The Associated Press. If the strategy succeeds, it could do far more than deliver profits to the company and its shareholders. As Tyson Foods Inc. replicates its uniquely American model of corporate meat production throughout the developing world, the company could fundamentally transform rural economies in nations like India, Brazil and China.[41]
Make no mistake about it. Don Tyson and a host of ruthless hardcore exploiters are slavering over the tremendous profits to be had in China and other emerging capitalist nations with mammoth populations. For every dollar that we put into vegan education, they put a million into advertising, lobbying, and campaign donations that buttress the twenty first century’s “peculiar institution” that the USA Today euphemistically refers to as a “uniquely American model of corporate meat production.” Going head to head with the likes of Tyson without hammering them with every guerrilla tactic at our disposal is idiocy. It is the passive dark side of the public face of aggressive vegan outreach campaigns. And like it or not, if we want to end the animal holocaust, we have no choice but to take on the exploiters and the system that facilitates their loathsome existence in a much more varied, dynamic, and – when necessary – confrontational and militant form.
Hall envisions a “one person at a time” vegan revolution achieving “a critical mass” when there are billions of dollars driving capitalist exploiters to resist said revolution with all their considerable might and billions of newly minted consumerists poised to devour ton upon ton of factory “farmed” animal flesh. So we simply hand out vegan pamphlets in hopes that people will accept them, create a vegan cookbooks to sell at hip independent bookstores, and advertise a dinner with a speaker at the vegan café in the Village, debate welfarists on podcasts, and maybe the number of vegans will rise to 5 or possibly 10 % of the human population within the next 100 years? But by 2050, the human population is projected to jump from 6 to 9 billion people, and these teeming billions will consume flesh at twice the already disastrous current rates. Whatever the percentage of plant-eating converts in 50 years, we can be fairly sure that the vegan tugboat will continue to lose ground to the flesh-eating cruiser and that if vegan education means anything it has to break through the glass ceiling of Western white privilege and begin to build bridges and alliances in their neighborhoods and nations, across barriers of race, gender, age, culture, religion, language, race, country, class, and continents to forever dispel the justly-deserved widespread view that vegans and animal rights advocates care “only” about nonhuman animals and indifferent to the plight of other people.
Borrowing a phrase from Carol Adams, China – and the ecocrisis as a whole – is the “absent referent” in the work of Francione, Hall, and countless other vegan advocates. It boggles the mind: why don’t they acknowledge these alarming statistics and make them a central part of their analysis and critique of speciesism, flesh consumption, and capitalism? The answer is clear: to recognize the reality of the global ecocrisis is to understand its emergency nature; this in turn forces one to admit that the single-issue vegan education glacial model of change tactics are completely inadequate to the task and that more varied, alliance-oriented, and radical actions are necessary.
This opens the door to actions such as sabotage which pacifists want to lock up in the basement like a vicious, terrifying monster. It destroys the complacency that asks us to be infinitely patient and disable any number of effective tactics in obedience to a party line that is increasingly out of touch with reality and the true severity of the planetary crisis. And it forces us to think outside the single issue box, to explore commonalities of oppression (beyond the vague gestures of Francione and Hall), and to begin building bridges with other social movements in a global anti-capitalist multiracial politics that challenges hierarchies of all kind, very much including that of human over nonhuman animals and the natural world.
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