Happy 40th Birthday, Environmental Protection Agency!

Veganism Is Direct Action:

During the ’80s, I was a huge Smiths fan. I’ve got nearly all their cassettes, but missed the opportunity to see them in concert in 1986. Their 1985 album, Meat is Murder, was on college radio stations everywhere. In an era when rock and pop seemed swamped in causes, the Smiths added their weight to (lead singer) Morrissey’s support for animal rights.

“I think as long as human beings are so violent towards animals, there will be war,” he argued. “It might sound absurd, but if you really think about the situation it all makes sense. When there’s this absolute lack of sensitivity where life is concerned, there will always be war.”

In 1985, Morrissey struggled to articulate a dualistic persona with a classic example of verbal doublethink: “Personally, I’m an incurably peaceable character. But where does that get you? Nowhere. You have to be violent…It seems to me now that when you try to change things in a peaceable manner, you’re actually wasting your time and you’re laughed out of court,” he argued. “…the only way we can get rid of such things as the meat industry, and other things like nuclear weapons, is by giving people a taste of their own medicine.”

Ask Morrissey about the terrorist bombing of butcher shops in England, and he still coldly replies: “One dead butcher isn’t such a great loss.”

Peter Singer warned about this kind of thinking in Animal Liberation: “We may be convinced that a person who is abusing animals is entirely callous and insensitive; but we lower ourselves to that level if we physically harm or threaten physical harm to that person. Violence can only breed more violence…The strength of the case for Animal Liberation is its ethical commitment. We occupy the high moral ground and to abandon it is to play into the hands of those who would oppose us.”

A vegetarian since 1982, I attended my first anti-vivisection protest in the spring of 1985, as anti-apartheid demonstrations rocked the UC San Diego campus. I first became interested in promoting vegetarianism in mainstream society after reading John Robbins’ Diet for a New America (1987). Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, it makes veganism seem as reasonable and mainstream as recycling.

Half the water consumed in the U.S. goes to irrigate land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water wash away their excrement. U.S. livestock produce 20 times as much excrement as does the entire human population; creating sewage which is 10 to several hundred times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage. Animal wastes cause 10 times more water pollution than does the U.S. human population; the meat industry causes three times as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation’s industries combined. Meat producers, the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contribute to half the water pollution in the United States.

Joanna Macy, author of Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, depicts the advantages of America moving towards a vegan diet in her foreword to Diet for a New America:

“The effects on our physical health are immediate. The incidence of cancer and heart attack, the nation’s biggest killers, drops precipitously. So do many other diseases now demonstrably and causally linked to consumption of animal proteins and fats, such as osteoporosis…

“The social, ecological, and economic consequences, as we Americans turn away from animal food products, are equally remarkable. We find that the grain we previously fed to fatten livestock can now feed five times the U.S. population; so we have become able to alleviate malnutrition and hunger on a worldwide scale…

“The great forests of the world, that we had been decimating for grazing purposes, begin to grow again. Oxygen-producing trees are no longer sacrificed for cholesterol-producing steaks.

“The water crisis eases. As we stop raising and grinding up cattle for hamburgers, we discover that ranching and farm factories had been the major drain on our water resources. The amount now available for irrigation and hydroelectric power doubles. Meanwhile, the change in diet frees over 90% of the fossil fuel previously used to produce food. With this liberation of water energy and fossil fuel energy, our reliance on oil imports declines, as does the rationale for building nuclear power plants…”

Joanna Macy admits, “This scenario is…clearly the way we are meant to live, built to live.” What could possibly make it a reality? “It is this very book!”

When I first read Diet for a New America, I felt it could have the same kind of impact on mainstream American society that Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet had in the ’70s.

In writing his expose on the meat industry, John Robbins has been compared to Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader and other whistleblowers. In Diet for a New America, he demonstrates how all the various causes that concern the left: healthcare, a sustainable energy policy, hunger, malnutrition, etc. are all taken care of in one fell swoop by a vegan diet. I had the opportunity to meet John Robbins, in September 1988. It was one of the most inspirational moments of my life!

He was heir to the Baskin-Robbins fortune. He renounced it at a young age. He traveled to India, opened a yoga ashram in Canada, etc. He spoke of Gandhi and nonviolence. His son Ocean Robbins founded Youth for Environmental Sanity (YES!) and is also dedicated to promoting veganism. I asked John if he would try and get the American Left to support animal rights. He told me that he had sent a copy of his book to Mother Jones, a left-liberal periodical published in San Francisco.

Many on the Left are beginning to take a stand in favor of animal rights. Joanna Macy spoke at the San Francisco Green Festival, in November 2005. In his 1990 updated and revised edition of Animal Liberation, Australian philosopher Peter Singer writes that many of the political parties leaning towards the “Green” end of the political spectrum in Europe were beginning to oppose animal experimentation.

John Robbins spoke before the United Nations in 1994, where he received a standing ovation.

For those of us who are veg for ethical reasons, the nutritional debates over soy, etc. aren’t even an issue. The health advantages of going veg are just a pleasant side effect of a nonviolent philosophy. And meat and dairy analogs provide us with familiar tastes—without the cruelty.

Would it hurt to refrain from taking the lives of our fellow creatures? I had the opportunity to hear John Robbins, author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet for a New America, speak at a Unitarian church here in Oakland, CA in 2001. The church was PACKED.

John writes in The Food Revolution (2001):

“The revolution sweeping our relationship to our food and our world, I believe, is part of an historical imperative. This is what happens when the human spirit is activated. One hundred and fifty years ago, slavery was legal in the United States. One hundred years ago, women could not vote in most states. Eighty years ago, there were no laws in the United States against any form of child abuse. Fifty years ago, we had no Civil Rights Act, no Clean Air or Clean Water legislation, no Endangered Species Act. Today, millions of people are refusing to buy clothes and shoes made in sweatshops and are seeking to live healthier and more Earth-friendly lifestyles. In the last fifteen years alone, as people in the United States have realized how cruelly veal calves are treated, veal consumption has dropped 62 percent.”

Peter Singer concludes in Animal Liberation that “by ceasing to rear and kill animals for food, we can make extra food available for humans that, properly distributed, it would eliminate starvation and malnutrition from this planet. Animal Liberation is Human Liberation, too.”