Is it last orders for our environment?

 A personal reflection

When I was a child in the 1960s, I asked my parents what happened to the rubbish after the binmen had collected it. They explained landfill to me, so I then asked what happened when they ran out space. They told me it would never happen, but I do remember that I wasn't entirely convinced by their answer. In my teens, I became concerned about how we were using plastic, especially when I learnt how long it would take to break down. Even then I envisaged landfill sites being filled for centuries to come with a material that had perhaps been used just once.

As a student in the mid-1970s, I remember reading in a science magazine about the how the greenhouse gases we were mass-producing would, if unchecked, lead to a general warming of the atmosphere with severe consequences for all life on Earth, humans, animals and plants alike. My first awareness of the Greenhouse Effect was thus around 45 years ago.

I am not claiming any special gift of prescience. On the contrary, I am simply stating that knowledge of the situation into which we are being inexorably sucked is not new. If a child could surmise that profligate disposal of unrecyclable rubbish was not permanently sustainable, although those were not the terms I used at the time, I can see no sensible reason for the apparent ignorance or indifference of national leaders all over the world. If scientists' warnings about global warming were available to everyone nearly half a century ago, there really is no good reason why the world didn't begin to act decades before now.

I do understand that many politicians are either incapable or unwilling to take the long-term view, perhaps for electoral reasons, or because it doesn't fit in with their own agendas, which can be self-aggrandisement as with Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro or Lukashenko, or cost-cutting, even though the costs of tackling pollution and climate change become hugely more expensive the longer you leave it. Unless we get our act together, at some point the question will be whether action on climate change is unaffordable or - perhaps worse - pointless because we're too late and it has become irreversible. It's my opinion that the human race may face that dilemma within the lifetime of our current younger generations.

Another obstacle is the problem that too many people have only a basic understanding of what constitutes a fact. Early in the Trump presidency, when faced with information the administration didn't accept, a government spokesperson responded, “We have alternative facts.” This is a ridiculous statement because, logically, something is either a fact or it isn't, but it seems to me that people increasingly decide what they want to believe in and then seek out anything that seems to corroborate their chosen preconception, a mindset that has been greatly enabled by the internet. This has led to the erroneous conclusion that climate change is a matter of opinion even though the scientific conclusions are undeniable: there is always some populist chancer on the internet who will propound a wholly unsubstantiated alternative view, often plausibly presented but wholly lacking in any real evidential rigour.

Trump's approach to climate change is a dangerous example of such thinking, which is partly determined by a reluctance to commit time, energy and money to actions that would not bear fruit until long after his presidency would have ended, even if he had won a second term, and partly by the fact that he is an unintelligent, vain man who sees himself as a genius and values his own gut reactions and guesses accordingly, such as disinfectant as a treatment for COVID-19.

Anyone who is aged in their 50s upwards will have noticed the effects of global warning. To give just one example: as a child and young adult, I can remember standing by bonfires on 5th November with my front warm as toast and my back freezing. Nowadays, the month of November is never that cold and I rarely have to wrap up in the way I used to.

In the 1980s, I decided to subscribe to Greenpeace, my longest continuous subscription after my trade union and CND, but sometimes it feels no more than a gesture, probably because like a lot of people I find the challenges that we face daunting. It is dispiriting to realise that there has never been anything to stop the human race collectively taking action much sooner: the information has been out there for a long time and arguments of cost fail because they will multiply massively the longer we leave it.

To make a comparison to a house: a few tiles slipping on your roof can be fixed without too much expense, but the longer you leave it, the hole gets bigger, the damage spreads to the beams underneath and then the ceilings until finally the whole roof caves in. The Earth is way past the few tiles stage but we are not at the total collapse stage – not just yet anyway.

Neville Grundy
ARMS Mersey

Veganism

My name is Lynn and I identify myself as an activist and a vegan, who is politically aware and a strong supporter of the trade union movement. What is an activist? Well I believe an activist is someone who actively wants to stimulate a change in the world. We all know that pointing fingers and trying to change others is an endless job. We create the world we live in. If we want to change what we don’t like in the world, we must start by changing what we don’t like about ourselves. 

We are in the midst of a global crisis, most people still don’t realise this, and that we are causing the crisis. Many of us who are aware that we are causing the crisis don’t know what to do about it. I believe we have to strive to live harmoniously with the earth and, with this shift in consciousness we have the potential to save our planet.

In my childhood like so many others I lived at home with my family and ate what was put in front of me. When I became active in my first trade union branch I realised that I couldn’t strive to improve the lot of just humans because other living sentient beings were also being abused.

I loved animals and I was against animal cruelty yet on the other hand I paid to have animals mutilated, tortured and killed. I was told and thought that I needed meat for protein and cow’s milk for calcium. I had even been taken in by the marketing material that animals were treated “humanely” before they became a neatly wrapped package on the supermarket shelf. I wondered what was cruel about eating dairy or eggs.

After reading a lot about the subject and talking to other animal rights activists I went vegetarian, I was 18 and I couldn’t justify killing and eating animals for health reasons. I wondered why we allowed this to happen as a society and when I couldn’t find a better reason than taste, I knew I could never go back to contributing to such unnecessary violence against innocent beings. Then I learned that there was at least as much cruelty in dairy, eggs and other animal products. I knew being vegetarian wasn’t enough and I needed to be vegan. 

You probably think vegans are extreme. Yet when you discover, as I did, that we can be far healthier and are likely to live longer lives without eating animal products you realise it’s not the truth that we need to eat animals and animal products to survive.

Billions of animals are killed every year for human consumption after living confined in horrible conditions on farms and factory farms and enduring untold extremes of suffering. This fact alone is good reason for any compassionate person to become a vegan. Meanwhile , from the individual health perspective, a vegan diet has been proven to prevent serious illnesses. Also the terrible toll that eating meat, fish and dairy takes on our planet’s air, water, soil and whole ecosystem is another very good reason to be vegan.

I now look at an animal and see a person, a non-human person, who has their own life, desires, thoughts and feelings, just like I do. It has enriched my view of life on this world.

I also feel much healthier, and have more energy than I did before. I have perfect blood test results, and haven't even had as much as a sore throat in four years. I feel better every day knowing I am walking a far more peaceful path than the one I was on before. But I wanted to do more than just change my own life – I wanted to raise awareness of animal rights and lead others towards their own vegan journey. I have learned a lot during my vegan life, firstly that animals aren’t voiceless. They scream and cry, but most people don’t listen. We live in a world that has conditioned us to only care about a few species, while ignoring, or even worse, justifying and contributing to the suffering of others.

Animals are not ours to use for food, clothing, laboratory experimentation, entertainment, or any other exploitative purpose. Some may say a vegan diet is difficult to follow. What does difficult mean?

How difficult is it to suffer and die from heart disease caused by a diet of high unsaturated fats and cholesterol? Still, many people would choose to go through invasive bypass surgery or have a breast, colon, or rectum removed and take powerful pharmaceutical drugs for the rest of their lives rather than change their diets because they think veganism is drastic and extreme.

How difficult is it for the beings who suffer degrading confinement and cruel slaughter, dying for our dining convenience? How difficult is it for all of us to be confronted with the effects of global warming, deforestation, species extinction, water, soil, and air pollution that are a direct result of raising confined animals for food.

How difficult is it for us to endure being hurt and abused, being lied to, worrying about money and security, experiencing mental and physical illnesses and not knowing what is in store for us next?

We are disconnected from war, destruction of the environment, extinction of species, global warming, and even domestic violence. You can only abuse and exploit others if you feel disconnected from them and have no idea about the potency inherent in your own actions. If you feel connected, you know that it’s you, as well as other living things, who will suffer from the suffering you inflict.

The choices we make about what to eat are political and economic decisions that affect our mental and physical health. It is an indisputable fact that a vegan diet causes less harm to ourselves, to animals, to plants, and to the earth. To say that what you choose to eat is nobody else’s business is to belittle yourself and deny the impact that your actions have upon the lives of others.

The biggest consumer of fresh water is the meat and dairy industry. It is also responsible for most of the water pollution. The livestock industry is the single biggest contributor to global warming, as it creates far more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined. There are more cows, most hidden from our view, in the United States than there are human beings. By enslaving these animals and abusing them through lifelong torture and degradation, we deprive them of their freedom and happiness.

How can we ourselves hope to be free or happy when our own lives are rooted in depriving others of the very thing we value most in life - the freedom to pursue happiness? If you want to bring more peace and happiness into your own life, the way to do so is to stop causing violence and unhappiness in the lives of others. All life is scared, all life is connected, how we behave towards others and our environment reveals more than anything else our inner state of mind.

Would you say you harbour destructive emotions like hate, anger or the desire to do violence - no - so do you cultivate the opposite state of mind? In that case you will want to stop the abuse and as you now realise the truth and the reality of the choices you make. I hope you feel compassion and the willingness to change for all our sakes.

I end with a quote which I love:

The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. Humans have it within their means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter. Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out of conscience, thus helping to bring the collective consciousness to life.

Norman Cousins, journalist and peace activist.

Lynn Killoran
ARMS Mersey