The Politics of the Pasture

James McWilliams writes:

Green Mountain College, from the founding of Cerridwen Farm in 1997 to its decision to kill Bill and Lou in 2012, was seeking to do what it genuinely thought best to do: farm in a way that modeled an environmentally sound alternative to industrial agriculture. The school loved the idea. The students loved the idea. The media loved the idea. It was extremely popular in every progressive corner. Replacing industrial agriculture with sustainable agriculture has become one of the most inspiring goals of the twenty-first century. GMC, through 22 acres known as Cerridwen Farm, aimed to play a direct role in this emerging revolution. ...

When animal advocates seized upon a controversy — the decision to kill and eat Bill and Lou — to argue that GMC’s pursuit of “sustainable agriculture” obscured basic moral consideration for animals, an unusually high-profile debate unfolded. That debate explored something that has, for the most part, enjoyed a free pass through an otherwise bramble-ridden landscape of agrarian discourse: the intensifying role of animal exploitation in “sustainable agriculture.” This book has tried to sketch out and analyze the depth and breath of that debate. As I hope has been made clear, animal advocates have made a strong case for not raising animals to slaughter and eat. They have effectively highlighted the ethical problem of killing sentient beings for unnecessary purposes. Repeatedly, and with varying levels of respect, they have demanded, sometimes forthrightly, that this quandary be acknowledged and explained by the advocates of small-scale animal agriculture at GMC.

In response, GMC never provided a serious answer. Ever. They provided excuses, but never did they make a sufficient ethical case in favor of killing the animals they supposedly loved for food they merely wanted rather than needed. More often than not, their primary battle tactic was to hyperbolize a few incendiary comments made by a few hotheads in the animal rights movement and deem themselves the innocent and helpless victim of vicious intimidation. I don’t buy for a moment that anyone at GMC ever felt truly in danger, but, as we’ll see, they put on an Oscar-worthy performance promoting their own victimhood.

As an advocate for animal rights and social justice, I’ve come to believe something very strongly: when a group seeking to reform an oppressive institution (in this case industrial agriculture) does so by relying on the exploitation of other sentient beings (in this case, two oxen), that group will eventually assume the tactics of the oppressors. They will, in other words, take the low road to perdition despite their articulated intentions to elevate themselves in the name of a nobler mission. To put a finer point on it, when a group of agricultural reformers seeks to dismantle industrial agriculture and its state sponsorship while simultaneously encouraging the single most important habit required to sustain industrial agriculture — eating animals — that group will find itself aligned, in the end, with the oppression of industrial agriculture.

Well, we’re at the end. And, in ways that could not be more affirmative of my thesis had I scripted them, GMC, in the wake of Lou’s death and the resulting vituperation that followed, has explicitly and implicitly aligned itself with American agribusiness. Indeed, GMC and Big Beef hopped in bed, divided the world into those who did and did not eat animals, and proceeded to do what those who exploit animals for a living do so very well: they consolidated their power and exploited the weakest.

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism, Vermont, anarchism, ecoanarchism

Doublethink in the promotion and defense of wind power

Doublethink is an aspect of Newspeak, the language used in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four to simplify and control thought, not only of the general public (the "proles"), but also of the very bureaucrats running the state. Doublethink acknowledges cognitive dissonance betweeen what the state says and what it does and simply asserts that they are the same. This is exemplified in the slogans: "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength." This is the kind of language that is called "Orwellian".

"Ignorance is Strength": This doublethink concept is the basis of modern propaganda (and marketing), in which simple lies are propagated and those who question them or recognize them as such are marginalized as "conspiracy theorists", kooks, Luddites, flat-earthers, Nimbys, sockpuppets, "virulent", "vitriolic", "opportunist", "terrorist".

Large-scale industrial wind power, marketed as "green energy", must use such smear and doublethink to avoid the undeniable fact that it is not "green" in the slightest. Recently, for example, complaints of adverse health effects and examination of that issue have been attacked as a campaign to harm the industry: "Wind farms don’t harm human health, anti-wind campaigners do." The victims and those who listen to them are blamed for the ill health obviously caused by wind turbines. The aggressor is the victim.

Health is Disease. Ignorance is Health. Effect is Cause. Noise is Silence.
Wind industry flacks have achieved the level of doublespeak that distinguishes the Ingsoc bureaucrats of Orwell's Oceania, seemingly believing as true what they nonetheless know to be false. In addition to turning the table on health effects, they use doublespeak to deny or rationalize wind power's adverse environmental effects, lack of fossil fuel reduction, dependence on subsidies, and unreliability:

Development is Conservation.
Blight is Beauty.
Add is Subtract.
Poverty is Wealth.
Dear is Cheap.
Wayward is Sure.
Update, May 9, 2013:  "Wind Watch" posted the following (and suggested a couple of corrections made here) on Facebook:

Is it significant that the most vehement hatred of those who question any aspect of industrial wind power comes from that part of the world called Oceania, which is what George Orwell also called the English superstate in Nineteen Eighty-Four? Often it seems that the industry and its committed defenders take their guidance from Orwell's (presciently) dystopian government. They use "doublespeak" to call industrial development green, to describe the industry as victimized by those it harms, to insist that killing birds is actually beneficial, and so on. Comment forums transform into "Two Minute Hates" when someone challenges the party line. And the busiest attackers are in present-day Oceania: anti-tobacco activist Simon Chapman, IBM employee Mike Barnard (from Ontario), and Infigen employee Ketan Joshi. The work of this triumvirate readily suggests three of the four ministries of Oceania: respectively, the Ministry of Love, the Ministry of Truth, and the Ministry of Plenty. The Ministry of Peace is of course represented by the wind industry itself.

Addenda, May 12, 2013:  “The common Fluency of Speech in many Men and [...] Women is owing to a Scarcity of Matter, and Scarcity of Words; for whoever is a Master of Language, and hath a Mind full of Ideas, will be apt in speaking to hesitate upon the Choice of both; whereas common Speakers have only one Set of Ideas, and one Set of Words to cloath them in; and these are always ready at the Mouth.” —Jonathan Swift

“Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” —George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism

Hasta la victoria siempre!

“Men and women of the new age: you have arisen to do battle for the race! . . . There is no easy victory before us.

“This night is a beginning. This battle that is coming, this battle that rushes upon us to-night, is only a beginning. All your lives, it may be, you must fight. Take no thought though I am beaten, though I am utterly overthrown. I think I may be overthrown.

“I come out of the past to you, with the memory of an age that hoped. My age was an age of dreams — of beginnings, an age of noble hopes; throughout the world we had made an end of slavery; throughout the world we had spread the desire and anticipation that wars might cease, that all men and women might live nobly, in freedom and peace. . . . So we hoped in the days that are past. And what of those hopes? How is it with man after two hundred years?

“Great cities, vast powers, a collective greatness beyond our dreams. For that we did not work, and that has come. But how is it with the little lives that make up this greater life? How is it with the common lives? As it has ever been — sorrow and labour, lives cramped and unfulfilled, lives tempted by power, tempted by wealth, and gone to waste and folly. The old faiths have faded and changed, the new faith—. Is there a new faith?

“Charity and mercy; beauty and the love of beautiful things — effort and devotion! Give yourselves as I would give myself — as Christ gave Himself upon the Cross. It does not matter if you understand. It does not matter if you seem to fail. You know — in the core of your hearts you know. There is no promise, there is no security — nothing to go upon but Faith. There is no faith but faith — faith which is courage. . . .”

—The Sleeper Awakes, H. G. Wells, 1899

anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Ironic Times - April 29, 2013

U. S. NEWS
	Congress Quickly Allocates Funds to End Airport Delays Just before booking flights home for one week vacation.
	New Poll: Obama’s Approval Ratings Same as G.W. Bush’s Obama's policies same as G.W. Bush's.

Ironic Times - April 22, 2013

U. S. NEWS
	Senate Blocks Background Checks for Gun Buyers Keeps them for voters.
	Boy Scouts Will Consider Allowing Gay Scouts Just as long as they're not atheists.

Tofurky claims to be, but is not, "wind powered"

As a devoted Tofurky fan, I was upset to notice on a package of Tofurky Deli Slices that you claim to be "100% wind powered".

Unless you have your own on-site wind turbines without backup and without connection to the grid, that is obviously not true. You are no more wind powered than your neighbors who get the same power from the same grid.

In fact, the accounting trick with which you claim to be "wind powered" was invented by Enron, who convinced regulators that renewable energy could actually be sold twice: once as energy, and once as "environmental benefit".

So your purchase of "green tags" that allow you to claim to be "wind powered" simply represents the purchase of the right to claim the wind power that is actually going to everyone on the grid, perhaps not even the grid you are on.

It's as if meat-eaters could "offset" their burgers and drumsticks by purchasing Tofurky packaging, thereby purchasing the right to call themselves vegan, with actual vegans thereby losing that right.

If you feel strongly about supporting wind energy development (and there are many reasons to be dubious, with its addition of industrial harm to our environment, particularly in previously undeveloped areas, with little or nothing to show in corresponding reduction of fossil and nuclear fuel use), then please limit your claim to that: You offset your electricity use by helping to subsidize the expansion of wind energy on the grid.

For the animals,
~~~

============================

Thanks for your interest in Tofurky. I wouldn’t [sic] be interested in where you see this claim made because as far as I know we do not claim anywhere that we are 100% wind powered. We are however committed to making an environmental difference and have been for the past 31 years. We currently purchase wind power through our local utility and by purchasing Blue Sky Power in the last year we have reduced our own emissions by 3,842,657 pounds of C02 [sic].

Thanks,
Wes Braun
Customer Service/Marketing/Design
Turtle Island Foods
541-386-7766 ex. 19

============================

But you haven't reduced your emissions at all. You're getting exactly the same electricity you would get if you did not purchase Blue Sky Power. ~~~

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism

Wind industry wants to silence inquiry

Editor of the Reformer:

Charlene Ellis and Fred Taylor (letter, April 6) write that "Only with a concerned effort by all of us to formulate renewable energy policies based on science, rather than propaganda, will be able to protect the Vermont landscape we cherish." Yet they ignore that call and only defend their smearing of those fighting to protect Vermont's ridgelines from energy development with smearing them some more.

Despite their call for science, they simply ignore the possibility, let alone the clear evidence, that giant wind turbines erected on sensitive ridgelines do more harm than good. Instead, they accuse anyone who questions such industrial development as dupes of fossil fuel, as if the biggest wind developer in the U.S. isn't coal giant Florida Power and Light (aka Nextera), as if the biggest turbine manufacturer isn't nuclear and gas plant (and military weaponry) giant General Electric, as if Enron and George W. Bush weren't the ones who more than anyone created the modern U.S. wind industry.

Science rather than propaganda seems to be precisely what Ellis and Taylor do not want, as they cite only pro-wind hype and demonize all who disagree with them. One is reminded of Joseph McCarthy more than Rachel Carson, of an enthusiasm for censorship and slander more than honest discussion.

Their need to explain it as an "ultra-conservative" plot hatched last year in Washington also apparently prevents them from learning much about their neighbors fighting big wind in Vermont, particularly that the fight goes back more than 10 years, from the seeds planted with the erection of 11 Zond turbines (bought by Enron the next year, then by GE in 2002) in Searsburg in 1996. The statewide advocacy group Energize Vermont arose from the fight to protect the ridges west of Rutland which began at least 5 years ago. They build on the work of the Kingdom Commons Group, the Glebe Mountain Group, Ridge Protectors, and many others that have brought Vermonters of every political leaning together in common cause. And there are countless other such groups around the world, from Oaxaca (where Reporters Without Borders last week condemned international companies and the state for the harassment, arrests, and physical abuse of journalists covering wind energy development on Zapoteca land) to Denmark (where virtually no new onshore wind capacity has been added since 2002), New Zealand to Germany, India to Ireland.

The fight to protect our landscapes from poorly considered, profit-driven, big energy development that does such clear harm to the environment, to human and other animal habitats, has always represented — and does so still — a concerted effort by informed citizens to use science guided by the heart rather than profit or tribal dogma.

The provision of S.30 that most scared industry was for greater involvement of host and affected neighboring communities in the permitting process. Informed citizens thinking for themselves seem to be exactly what they don't want, or more cynically, can't afford.

• Opinion piece: What's the origin of Vermont's anti-wind sentiment? Fred Taylor and Charlene Ellis, Brattleboro Reformer, March 15, 2013.
• Response letter: Not a Koch Bros. flack. Sally Warren, Brattleboro Reformer, March 18, 2013.
• Response to response: Beware of 'wind warriors'. Charlene Ellis and Fred Taylor, April 6, 2013.
• Two responses to that response: April 16, 2013

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, Vermont