For Lou, from Miriam

Miriam Jones of VINE Sanctuary writes:

[Factory “farmers”] are honest enough to own their desires, and so they don’t have to create elaborate mental mazes to contain them. They want a paycheck – they want to grill something out in their backyards and it ain’t tofu – and they don’t give a shit about the environment or global climate change or sustainability.

They want what they want, and they’re honest about it. ...

While some of us recognize this destructive phenomenon for what it is, and seek to correct it, happy meat “farmers” deny they’re human supremacists. They like to say they honor and respect all of life while they trample upon it. Because they can’t bear to give up those tasty little morsels of flesh in their mouths – or because they can’t bear to find another job – these “farmers” talk a good talk about holding to a level of environmentalism that exceeds everyone else’s. They claim to love life on the one hand while they bring it to an end on the other. They profess that there exists such a thing as humane murder.

In short, they’re liars. They lie to themselves and they lie to everyone else. ...

Factory “farmers” tend to be more honest about their motivations for doing the things they do than happy meat “farmers,” even though they all do the same thing: use and murder animals.

Because they are lying to themselves, these small producers need to include you in that same lie. They need you to believe that you’re doing something good. You are righteous, you are smart, you are helping the environment. You are better than those (poor, unethical, working class) people who eat factory farmed flesh. You are actively helping the planet by eating flesh, eggs and milk from small-scale animal “production.”

They tell you these things and they need you to believe them. But they are lies.

Click here to read the complete essay.
Click here to read “For Lou, from pattrice”

Lou, who never knew how it feels to be free

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

Fear and Loathing in Poultney

Continuing evidence of Green Mountain College's paranoiac lashing out, Steven Wise writes:

Thank you to the thousands who made your position known, loud and clear, that the Green Mountain College’s plan to slaughter and eat their old friends, Bill and Lou was morally unacceptable.

You may have believed no one was listening. Oh, they were. Closely. Those who would slaughter and eat their friends are capable of anything. And so Green Mountain College President Paul J. Fonteyn (a cross between Machiavelli’s Prince and a Keystone Kop) sent an ugly email in which he tried to get one of you in trouble with your boss.

Into my mailbox it pinged, dated November 1, 2012. Alas, thin-skinned President Fonteyn zipped it to a business 900 miles and four states away from the brave emailer.

From: Paul Fonteyn [mailto:fonteynp@greenmtn.edu]
Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2012 11:03 AM
To: [DELETED]
Subject: Employee of your company

Dear [DELETED]

I am writing to you because I believe the individual sending these emails to Green Mountain College is an employee of your company. I have two questions: If she is, do these uncivil and hostile emails reflect well on your company? Would you embrace this level of activity by an agent if this was occurring in Cincinnati? Please note every email has been sent during the workday hours.

Please note that the Governor of VT and the Secretary of Agriculture have publically supported the position of the college that [DELETED] is so against.

Paul J. Fonteyn

I immediately warned President Fonteyn he should consult a lawyer before he sent emails to the employers of his critics. On Sunday, he finally took my advice. Well, part of it. He consulted a lawyer, who promptly warned me not to communicate with President Fonteyn again.

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

Request for Common Cause from Philip Ackerman-Leist, Director of Green Mountain College’s Farm & Food Project

“The challenge we are now facing is not one of a philosophical perspective that we find inappropriate but rather of an extreme activist agenda that is divisive and destructive. The end goal is the abolition of livestock agriculture, whereas our college is invested in the transformation of livestock agriculture.”

In fact, the letter below is a desperate plea for the preservation of “livestock” agriculture without the scrutiny of “outsiders”. It expresses an apparent persecution complex driving him to seek support for his Lord of the Flies project from the entire state (remember the “Take Back Vermont” movement to “preserve” marriage?). But the pleas to retire the working oxen Bill and Lou had nothing to do with the college’s animal farming. It is perfectly normal practice to retire working animals. One offer of sanctuary was from a rancher, another from a dairy farm. Many other animal farmers expressed disgust. Green Mountain College’s refusal to act in a normal (let alone humane) manner, to ignore all offers and insist that “processing” the oxen into dog food was essential to the college’s chest-thumping sense of “sustainability”, was the only reason for worldwide outrage from vegans and carnivores alike.

Ackerman-Leist’s delusional paranoia (“under the cover of darkness and with complex security plans in place, we had to euthanize Lou and bury him in an undisclosed location”) speaks more to unresolved issues of his own conscience (as a beef farmer himself, looking forward to a lucrative contract with the college, as orchestrated by himself?) than to reality.

Source:  https://www.facebook.com/notes/carl-b-russell/request-for-common-cause-from-philip-ackerman-leist-director-of-the-green-mounta/10151360898823804

November 11, 2012

Dear Colleague in Food and Agriculture,

I am writing to request both your attention to and support in an issue that impacts farms of all sizes, the ability of livestock-based businesses and educational farms to function without the threat of harassment or harm from outside special interests, and the possibility for communities to determine the future of their regional food systems.

As you may have heard or read, the Green Mountain College community followed a decade-long tradition of discussing the fate of livestock on the college’s Cerridwen Farm before deciding to send our two longstanding oxen to slaughter. Bill and Lou have been central elements of the college farm since their arrival ten years ago, but Lou injured his leg this past summer and is no longer able to work or even to walk any significant distance without experiencing obvious pain. Therefore, in an open community forum this fall, about eighty students decided to send the much admired pair to slaughter and processing, with the meat to be used in the college dining hall, as we have done with sheep, poultry, swine, and cattle in the past.

However, an extremist animal rights organization, VINE (Veganism is the Next Evolution) Sanctuary, turned our community-based decision into an international advocacy and fundraising effort. VINE recently set up its new sanctuary and education/advocacy center in Springfield, Vermont in order to take on everything from backyard poultry to small-scale livestock production to the iconic Vermont dairy industry. They allow for no distinction between any form of livestock agriculture. As a case in point, one of the founders of VINE states the following:

“Another issue we face is that Vermont is a big ‘happy meat’ place. The happy meat people are convinced the animals are treated well. It is just a myth, and regardless, any farmed animal on a factory farm or a ‘happy meat’ farm, can’t get away from ending up dead.”

Another VINE blog makes the point even more explicit:

“Despite the blather about respecting the bedrock of one of Vermont’s primary industries, and despite the inane lies pitched in almost hysterical fashion by ‘happy meat and milk’ farmers, cows are nothing more than potential money-making machines to people. That’s what they’re there for, after all.”

The Green Mountain College oxen case seemed to have been the perfect target for VINE’s efforts, quickly supported by Farm Sanctuary and PETA. Why focus on our college farm and not a “factory farm” or some other farm with questionable livestock management practices? Perhaps we find ourselves in this situation because the college has long been transparent about our community-based discussions regarding the fate of the livestock on our college farm—it is a vital part of our educational program here. It could also be that we have been targeted because we are not only teaching and advocating for sustainable livestock farming, but some of our graduates are seeding the local landscape with these kinds of farms.

Unfortunately, this issue is not just about the fate of Bill and Lou or the intense local and international pressures faced by a small but diverse college community that opted for transparency, truth, and accountability in its own food system. If the extremist elements in this activist agenda succeed in forcing our college to choose a course not of our own making in this issue, then they will have the power and the confidence to do it again—perhaps next time to a smaller and less resourceful community or farm or even to a bigger institution or initiative. Such an outcome would be inconvenient to some and perhaps tragic to others. And it flies directly in the face of Vermont’s innovative efforts to develop community-based food systems, envisioned on a grand and courageous scale through our nationally-acclaimed Farm to Plate Initiative, a strategic ten-year plan to build the vision of interlinked local and sustainable food systems that can build thriving communities even in the most rural reaches of our state.

Imagine the pressures our college has faced in recent weeks and consider how other communities placed under such pressure might fare:

• Numerous petition drives, with tens of thousands of signees from all over the world—people who know nothing of Bill and Lou’s conditions, much less the accountability and transparency we have built into our college food system
• Action alerts that have generated email assaults (at least one staff person received almost 1000 emails in a single day) and switchboard and voicemail overloads of our campus phone system
• One cyber-attack generated 3.9 million emails filtered in a period of several days—all from a single domain
• Harassment and threats of physical violence to students, faculty, staff, and administrators
• Constant surveillance of our college farm by stealthy intrusions, video cameras, and Facebook reports of our daily activities
• Driving a livestock trailer to the edge of campus and barging into our administrative offices demanding that Bill and Lou be turned over
• Dishonest and highly abusive postings on the college’s social media sites, requiring around-the-clock monitoring and editing
• Attempts at widespread defamation of character of faculty, staff, and administrators through letters, emails, websites, and social media channels
• Threats of continued negative publicity campaigns unless we turned Bill and Lou over to VINE Sanctuary
• Online discussion of whether to give Bill and Lou medications that would render their meat unsafe and inedible
• Slaughterhouses throughout Vermont and New York were threatened with protests, harassment, and potential violence if they agreed to work with the college, ultimately eliminating virtually all such possibilities for us, including our scheduled date at a local Animal Welfare Approved facility

Throughout it all, we have attempted to avoid a polarization among parties. After all, our student body is comprised of approximately 70% meat-eaters and 30% vegetarians and vegans. One of my colleagues in helping our students to think critically about these livestock decisions is Dr. Steven Fesmire, a philosopher and a vegetarian. For ten years, he and I have tried to model open and civil discourse about dietary choices and related animal issues through forums, joint classes, and guest lectures. We are unaccustomed to diatribe replacing dialogue, and our students tend to be open to a diversity of ideas and respectful of differences in opinion. Our community finds it odd that certain extremists have opted to try and make us out as villains when one of our stated goals is to become the first college or university in the United States with a major food service provider to eliminate all animal products that are not humanely raised and slaughtered.

Our college honors different dietary choices and encourages a diversity of philosophical perspectives related to agriculture and animal ethics. Were that not the case, we would not have a higher than average population of students who are vegetarians and vegans. We teach animal rights perspectives in our classes, as we believe that these philosophical ideas can help to illuminate the path toward more humane and sustainable livestock agriculture. The challenge we are now facing is not one of a philosophical perspective that we find inappropriate but rather of an extreme activist agenda that is divisive and destructive. The end goal is the abolition of livestock agriculture, whereas our college is invested in the transformation of livestock agriculture.

What happens next in this situation may have ramifications far beyond our campus community. If VINE, Farm Sanctuary, and PETA succeed in harassing and threatening not only us but also our regional livestock businesses to the point at which we succumb to their abolitionist desires, then they will march forward with their activist agenda and wreak havoc not only on the rebuilding of community-based food systems but also on the longstanding efforts in our region to create increasingly humane and ecologically appropriate livestock production and processing.

It is time for more organizations and individuals to come forward to denounce the intrusive and unethical bullying orchestrated by these organizations. Their tactics do not promote discourse, diversity, or democracy. Ultimately, they impede animal welfare reform by putting backyard poultry on the same level as a poorly managed “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation” (CAFO). You may or may not agree with our community’s decisions regarding Bill and Lou. We recognize that people can come to different conclusions in what is the best alternative for each of these animals, and these discussions can be civil and frank. Regardless of your opinion in this particular matter, it is important to recognize that the extreme bullying tactics employed by these groups need to be countered with the courage, reason, and civility of people and organizations that believe in the transformation of livestock agriculture, not its abolition.

During the early morning hours of November 11th, under the cover of darkness and with complex security plans in place, we had to euthanize Lou and bury him in an undisclosed location, as outlined in a statement to our community by President Paul Fonteyn. It was a difficult and complex decision. President Fonteyn offered these words regarding Bill: “Bill will not be sent to a sanctuary but will stay on Cerridwen Farm and will be cared for in a manner that follows sustainable, humane livestock practices, as is the case with all of our animals. We take responsibility for our animals on the farm--it is an obligation we will not ask others to bear.”

Please make your voice heard on this issue, whether it be through letters to the editor, calls and emails to your elected officials, or by appropriate direct action through your organization. Green Mountain College has decided to stand up against the bullying directed at us while also standing up for farmers, businesses, educational farms, local food systems, and burgeoning farm-to-institution programs—in Vermont and elsewhere in the country. It is our ardent hope that reason and civility will prevail and perhaps save some other farm or organization from the onslaught that our college has opted to engage, oppose, and defeat.

Sincerely,
~~~
Philip Ackerman-Leist
Director of the GMC Farm & Food Project
Director of the Masters in Sustainable Food Systems (MSFS)
Associate Professor of Environmental Studies

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

Lou was reportedly killed this morning

According to an e-mail reportedly sent today by Green Mountain College President Paul Fonteyn,* the ox named Lou was killed early this morning.

Let us hope that Lou's partner, Bill, can be saved from such cowardly and self-serving "love".

*From that message: "Bill will not be sent to a sanctuary but will stay on [GMC's on-campus] Cerridwen Farm and will be cared for in a manner that follows sustainable, humane livestock practices, as is the case with all of our animals." In other words, as soon as they get a chance, they will sell him for dog food.

The message:

From: President Paul J. Fonteyn
To: GMC Community
Date: November 11, 2012
RE: Oxen Update

Green Mountain College and our senior team of oxen have been much in the news lately: their lives as working animals on the GMC farm, our recent community decision to slaughter them, and the national and international attention that has come our way as a result of our collaborative and rational decision.

As reported in my October 31 email to the community, our original timetable was disrupted by outside organizations seeking to appropriate the images of the oxen for their extremist agendas, including the abolition of animal agriculture. Without shame, these groups harassed and threatened local slaughterhouses, making it impossible for them to accept our animals, and therefore for us to carry out our decision expeditiously. Despite our attempts to use the most humane and local options available, one of the only Animal Welfare Approved [sic] slaughterhouses in the area was forced to cancel our appointment as a result of these hostile threats. Some individuals associated with these efforts have even discussed giving drugs to our animals, which would render the meat unacceptable for human consumption.

In the meantime, Lou's overall physical condition continued to deteriorate. Medication made him more comfortable, but even walking from pasture to pasture has now become an arduous and painful process. Close consultations with several veterinarians over the course of the summer and fall have consistently indicated that Lou's condition would not improve and that his quality of life would only continue to diminish--as has held true. The arrival of cold temperatures and icy conditions are certain to increase his suffering, and we have concurred with our veterinarians' judgment that it not humane for him to suffer further. Therefore, I authorized euthanization, which took place this morning.

Bill will not be sent to a sanctuary but will stay on Cerridwen Farm and will be cared for in a manner that follows sustainable, humane livestock practices, as is the case with all of our animals. We take responsibility for our animals on the farm--it is an obligation we will not ask others to bear.

I know at times the attention has been harsh and unfair, but it has also provided a platform to present some of the best aspects of Green Mountain College: our intellectual courage to squarely examine moral dilemmas, our values of sustainability, and our commitment to discourse over doctrine. I am proud of how GMC students have engaged with colleagues and with people outside our community in mature, thoughtful, and civil ways. Outside scrutiny can be an unwelcome distraction--I urge you not to allow online discussions, which can become volatile and unconstructive, to interfere with your wider educational endeavors at GMC. I consider your safety and your educational progress my top priorities. If you believe you are a victim of any abusive behavior, please do not hesitate to contact the Office of Student Affairs.

[Top photo of Lou with students Alison Putnam and Meiko Lunetta by Caleb Kenna for the Boston Globe. Bottom photos of President Paul Fonteyn (left) and Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs (also Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies) Bill Throop (right) from Green Mountain College, Poultney, Vt.]

“Part of being honest about your place in an ecosystem is accounting for the full cost of food production, which is what we're trying to do here.” —Emily McCoy (GMC student, pictured here, Oct. 30, 2012, apparently satisfied that she has explained to Bill that he is too expensive and no longer useful alive; photo from Facebook)

[ Signs meant for demonstration on day before Lou was killed ]

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

COMPASSION IS SUSTAINABLE

Demonstrations at the corner of Main and Depot, Poultney, Vermont
Friday (Nov. 9) 1pm and Sat (Nov. 10) 12pm
Everyone knows about our beloved Bill and Lou by now, but they don’t all see the boys as special and deserving of sanctuary after all their years of hard work — and people want to eat them [actually they would probably be used for dog food, the college receiving more edible meat in return]. We are going to change that! Invite non-students too and be there Friday and Saturday.
Our new cheer: SAVE BILL AND LOU — IT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO!

Only 3 main points — EASY:
— It’s the right thing to do!
— Save Bill and Lou from slaughter
— Give Bill and Lou to sanctuary.

Facebook event page.

Read Bill and Lou’s story here.


View Larger Map


View Larger Map
environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, Vermont, ecoanarchism

Freaking Out!

Robin Beck of Moveon.org is "freaking out":

I'm freaking out. Despite President Obama and Vice President Biden dominating the past few debates, the race is still incredibly close. ... It's scary. And I'm not sleeping much any more. This whole election is coming down to which side can turn out the most voters. And the only thought that helps me fall asleep—rather than staying up worrying—is that I know I can count on MoveOn members like you, ——, to step up and help us win.

Relax, Robin.

First, it's a close "race" because it's bogus. The "contest" is set up and reported (shaped) to be close so that real differences are not possible.

Second, it's close because the only difference is that one party and its candidate represents Wall Street and the Military with lip service (but not too much!) to so-called liberals and the other party and its candidate represents Wall Street and the Military with lip service to so-called conservatives). To win, each also has to pay lip service to the other group as well. That's what fighting for the center means. And that's why it's necessarily always "close". It is a system designed not to challenge the hegemony of Wall Street and the Military.

And relax, all of you who receive these Moveon.org or similar e-mails. They are fundraising devices, nothing more. Moveon.org is part of the whole machine that requires this "fight" for the center so that they can foment fear among "liberals" just as the tea party foments fear among "conservatives". Meanwhile, Bush expanded Clinton's security state and submission to the banksters, Obama expanded Bush's, and Romney would only expand Obama's.

The threat of fascism is real, but it is already here, it started in a concerted way 30 years ago with the election of Ronald Reagan, and it continued to grow without slowing under every Republican and Democratic administration, Congress, and Supreme Court since.

So relax about the election. It's a charade.

There's plenty of real stuff to freak out about.

anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

The Montpelier Manifesto

Petition of Grievances

We, citizens of this American land, haunted by the nihilism of separation, meaninglessness, and powerlessness, subsumed by political elites who use corporate, state, and military power to manipulate our lives, pawns of a global system of dominance and deceit in which transnational megacompanies and big government control us through money, markets, and media, sapping our political will, civil liberties, collective memory, traditional cultures, sustainability, and independence, and as victims of affluenza, technomania, cybermania, globalism, and imperialism, do issue and proclaim this:

Document of Grievances and Abuses

Governance

1. A government too big, too centralized, too undemocratic, too unjust, too powerful, too intrusive, and too unresponsive to the needs of individual citizens and small communities.
2. One that is too big and corrupt to be fixed or reformed, certainly not by such fantasies as campaign finance reform or corporate-personhood amendments.
3. One that has lost its moral authority, is corrupt to the core, and is owned, operated and controlled by Wall Street, Corporate America, and their political lackeys.
4. One run by a single brain-dead national political party on life-support systems, sustained by national and Congressional elections that are sold to the highest bidder, disguised as a genuine two-party system.
5. One that relies on and fosters the illusion that only the U.S. government can solve all or our problems all of the time, in the face of the fact that it is the U.S. government that is the problem.

Economy

1. A collapsing economy, with a moribund housing market and a staggering number of mortgage foreclosures, and high unemployment because of jobs lost to China, India, and elsewhere over the past three decades of globalism.
2. Stagnant real incomes for all but the super-rich, resulting in an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor and an increasing rate of poverty, homelessness, and inadequate insurance.
3. A $15-plus trillion national debt and unfunded mandate obligations of $43 trillion, a staggering burden only added to by stimulus spending, tax cuts, and “quantitative easing” (printing money), none of which is restoring economic growth but does make us increasingly and dangerously dependent on China, Japan, and other foreign countries buying our treasury bonds.
4. A central bank which has, by monetizing the growing national debt and providing cheap credit to bail out banks, increased the money supply to the point where the future value of the dollar and the rate of inflation are highly uncertain.
5. A financial system based on “tricks and traps” rather than customer service and a financial regulatory system which favors predatory and ruthless Wall Street mega-banks at the expense of ordinary citizens.
6. An economic system absolutely dependent for survival on consumption and affluenza (the illusion that the accumulation of more stuff, provided by big-box stores fostered by government globalization policies, can provide meaning to life), despite the knowledge that unrestrained growth in a world of finite resources is unsustainable and unworthy of pursuit.
7. Public and private sector labor unions which have been under open attack by the government since the Reagan administration, by hostile anti-union private employers such as Wal-Mart, and more recently by some Republican governors.
8. Corporate-owned, government-subsidized agriculture with its use of toxic pesticides and fertilizers, anti-biotics, genetically-engineered seeds, systematic animal cruelty, and virtual absence of food safety regulations creating a menace to public health, the environment, and small farmers.

Foreign Policy

1. An immoral, often clandestine and illegal, imperial system based on full-spectrum dominance, military overstretch, might-makes-right, and the proposition that the world wants to be just like us, leading us to provide support to dictators and authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere in the world.
2. A dependence on military might, based on a multi-trillion dollar budget, 1.6 million American troops stationed at over 1,000 bases in 153 countries (including 80,000 in Europe, 36,000 in Japan, and 30,000 in Korea), Special Operations strike forces (Seals, Delta Forces, Rangers, Green Berets) deployed in 120 countries, and a proliferation of pilotless drone aircraft worldwide for reconnaissance and stealth attacks, sometimes killing civilians, including Americans.
3. Immoral, illegal, undeclared wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and (via Israel) Palestine, the threat of war with Iran based on our deliberate acts of provocation, and the endless “war” on terror largely aimed with racial overtones at Muslims.
4. The hammerlock hold of the Israeli Lobby over American foreign policy that forces us to support an Israeli-inspired war on terror against Muslims and keeps us from any real commitment to an Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
5. The Cuban embargo.

Civil Liberties

1. The highly intrusive, inept, ever-growing, money-guzzling Department of Homeland Security, together with other intelligence agencies, using the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, the Detainee Security Provision of the National Defense Administration Act of 2011, and other covers for citizen surveillance and suppression of civil liberties.
2. The disgraceful (and expensive and useless) Guantanamo Prison, prisoner abuse and torture, and the illegal rendition of terrorist suspects.
3. A president who can order the assassination of anyone, anywhere, anytime (including U.S. citizens) whose name happens to appear on the White House “kill list.”

Criminal Justice

1. Six million people under “correctional supervision” (more than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin), including more black men than were in slavery in 1860 and 50,000 men in solitary confinement in “supermax” prisons.
2. A failed international war on drugs that costs billions, ruins more lives than it saves, has spawned corruption and violence, an entrenched bureaucracy, and which has had no impact on drug use in the United States.

Social Services

1. The most expensive health care system in the world, driven by fear of death on the demand side and greed on the supply side, that ranks 37th in the world according to the World Health Organization, now tied to Obamacare, which remains fatally attached to a private health care system that is in a death-spiral of rising costs and declining health outcomes.
2. An education system dominated by the Federal government, committed to a one-size-fits-all corporate model, to the dumbing-down of America, and to a race to the bottom, which is why it ranks 18th in the industrial world, according to the OECD.
3. A higher education system that is becoming so expensive that only the rich will be able to attend college; all others look forward to debt slavery.
4. A social-welfare net that, despite being enormously expensive, is woefully inadequate to those it serves and has proven incapable of serious reform.

Infrastructure

1. A widespread aging and collapsing infrastructure, including highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, dams, levees, and public water systems, now costing America $129 billion a year, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, and will take an expenditure of $206 billion a year for the next 20 years to fix, sums which are simply unavailable.
2. Transportation crises, including the obsolete and inadequate air-traffic-control systems and railroad passenger train systems, and a Federal highway system now 60 years old falling into disrepair across the country.

Redress of Grievances

“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive … it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government … as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness,” says the Declaration of Independence. Alteration and abolishment include the right to disband, or subdivide, or withdraw, or create a new government.

Let us therefore consider ways peaceably to withdraw from the American Empire by (1) regaining control of our lives from big government, big business, big cities, big schools, and big computer networks; (2) relearning how to take care of ourselves by decentralizing, downsizing, localizing, demilitarizing, simplifying, and humanizing our lives; and (3) providing democratic and human-scale self-government at those local and regional levels most likely to effect our safety and happiness.

Citizens, lend your name to this manifesto and join in the honorable task of rejecting the immoral, corrupt, decaying, dying, failing American Empire and seeking its rapid and peaceful dissolution before it takes us all down with it.

By Thomas H. Naylor, Kirkpatrick Sale, James Starkey, and Charles Keil
September 4, 2012

To be presented at the Third Statewide Convention on Vermont Self-Determination on September 14, 2012, to be held in the Vermont State House in Montpelier.

human rights, Vermont, anarchism, ecoanarchism

Post Cold War

Thought for the day:

The victor of "The Cold War" between totalitarian communism and democratic capitalism has proved to be totalitarian capitalism.

During the cold war, each system fought within itself as well as against each other: totalitarianism versus communist ideals, democratic ideals versus capitalism. Each system defined itself to a great extent by the other. They attempted to reconcile the opposite pulls within their own systems: totalitarians justifying themselves as essential to communism, capitalists as essential to democracy. But still, because of the presence of the other system, the ideals, communism and democracy, had meaning.

After the collapse of both systems, the worst elements of both systems were free to discard those ideals, and totalitarian capitalism has become the dominant world system.

Broadly speaking, only in South America does there remain hope for something better: a democratic socialism.

anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Ridden by the Wind

The story of industrial-scale wind energy, that is, large wind turbines connected to supply the electric grid, is the same old tale of exploitative industry, of predatory capitalism, of consumerism run riot over the concerns of nature and humanity.

Wind energy does not represent change from a consumption-driven quest of continuing dividends for the investor class. It is a change of brand, nothing more. The same people behind digging up the tar sands of Alberta, drilling in the Arctic, blasting off mountaintops for coal, fracking the ground beneath our feet for methane, mowing down the rain forests, are industrializing rural and wild landscapes with the sprawling tax shelters called wind “farms”.

Like American politics, where choice is limited to which waiter you prefer to serve you from the same Wall Street kitchen (as Huey Long described it), energy policy around the world is “all-of-the-above” with politicians pretending to position themselves against one or another source to flatter different diners. Wind energy operates entirely within that game. As the realities of large-scale wind development — the decimation of habitat, birds, bats, health of human neighbors, and more — have made it harder to sell as “green”, the industry lobby group American Wind Energy Association has strategized: “We need to create a space for the wind energy industry without defining it as an alternative to fossil fuels and coal and that goes beyond being one of many ‘renewables’” (Leadership Council and Board of Directors Meeting, Carlsbad, Calif., Nov. 2, 2011). The reality is that a consumption-based economy dependent on continued “growth” doesn't need alternatives, only more choices: all of the above, whether it works or not. And that imperative excuses all.

As Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe said on June 4, 2012, at the AWEA’s annual convention in Atlanta, “Anyone standing in the way of this industry, frankly, they’re un-American.”

Because there are “important” people making a lot of money in wind, and the opening up of previously undeveloped land will enrich them well beyond wind.

Enron invented the modern wind industry by buying the support of environmental groups for large-scale “alternative” energy and all that makes it profitable: tax avoidance schemes, public grants and loan guarantees, artificial markets for “green credits”, and laws requiring its purchase. Texas Governor George W. Bush was instrumental in getting the first of these implemented at the national level on behalf of his friend Ken Lay, Enron's CEO. Texas is the USA’s leader in wind energy development, not because of some environmentalist vision, but because of the opposite: Wind energy is just one more extractive industry, and with the collaboration of Enron's environmentalists it opens up land normally off limits to such development.

The twisted rationalizations of former environmentalists to excuse the obvious adverse impacts of industrial development in the form of wind “farms” are a study in madness, akin to the military “logic” of having to destroy a village to save it. The typical refrain from the likes of the Audubon Society or Sierra Club — when they acknowledge adverse impacts at all — is that wind energy, by its theoretical and never documented reduction of carbon emissions from other electricity sources, saves more birds etc than it kills. They cling to this even as only the latter is increasingly documented and the former is increasingly clearly not. They further flaunt their moral bankruptcy by dismissing the adverse effects as a drop in the bucket compared to all the other killers of birds etc. And they join the reactionary chorus of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in presenting their plea to shovel more public money to big energy investors as one for (“American”) jobs (at any [public] cost).

At the same time, neighbors of giant wind turbines who suffer adverse health effects are derided as hysterical or mendacious. The unsurprising acoustic effects of jumbo-jet-size turbine blades cutting through vertical air spaces of almost 2 acres are simply denied. Wind's apologists reverse cause and effect and blame the victims for publicizing noise problems even as ever larger blades are increasingly documented to generate intrusive throbbing and low-frequency noise, both of which not only disturb sleep and raise stress but are increasingly tied to direct adverse physiological and psychological effects. Yet the industry fights all efforts to set even inadequate minimum distances between turbines and homes or noise limits. The CEO of Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas, Ditlev Engel, wrote to the Danish Environment Minister on June 29, 2011, against such limits: “At this point you may have asked yourself why it is that Vestas does not just make changes to the wind turbines so that they produce less noise? The simple answer is that at the moment it is not technically possible to do so.” Especially because, as he goes on to note, they are planning even larger machines.

And if human neighbors are treated with such naked contempt in the mad logic of corporate profit growth, pity the wildlife whose last refuges are invaded, divided, and destroyed by big wind (and now big solar as well) — all with the blessing of many environmental groups.

Invaded, divided, and destroyed — nineteenth-century colonialism and twentieth-century globalism are now openly revived against our own communities. Just as the Spanish company Iberdrola steals farmland from the Zapotecas of Oaxaca, and the Indian company Suzlon steals forest from the Adivasis, wind developers in more “developed” countries — in Europe, North America, Australia — prey on their rural populations, pitting paid-off landowners against their neighbors, leaving bitterness and discord, a blighted landscape, shattered peace and quiet, an industrial waste land from which the limited liability companies extract what profit they can and then move on to the next marks.

Industrial wind development may not be the worst scourge on the planet, but that does not excuse it. Big wind is not separate from the rest of exploitative and extractive industry. It is not separate from the persistent efforts of the investor class to hoard for themselves more of the public wealth. It is, however, particularly evil because it presents itself as the opposite of what it is. It is not even an alternative evil: To add insult to injury, wind is not even a good way to generate electricity for the grid: Since it does not blow according to customer demand, it still has to be 100% backed up by other sources.

Break the spell! End the charade!

See the swindle for what it is. Big wind is an enemy of the planet, its animal and plant life, its people. It is a new brand in an old game whose rules were written to ensure one winner only, and it isn't you.

—Eric Rosenbloom

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, Vermont, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

You have only yourself to blame

A friend writes:

Friedman is at it again: Average is Over, Part 2. Jesus, this guy is dumb. And scary. Who wants to live in the world he envisions; a fascist hell on earth — in fact this hell is already here in the US, with corporations pulling all the strings and calling all the shots, and shipping jobs overseas to slaves, or importing PhDs in from India, etc.... People are told again and again that they need so much "education" to survive well now, and then get stuck with an obscene amount of debt that in many cases forever stunts their lives, often can't even find work, it's just a horrible scam. Education should be free.

Education is important, but not the kind Friedman and most Americans think of. Friedman, and a lot of dumb Americans, think it's perfectly okay to tailor our lives to what the corporations want, they don't even question the whole notion of hyper-competitiveness and cut-throat workaholic get-ahead-ism. No, when corporations say "jump" it's our duty as foot-soldiers in the brave new world of fascist America to ask "how high."

A truly good education would give us the power and courage to say "fuck off" to these corporate monsters, not how can I deform myself enough to get you to hire me. Also a truly good education would move Americans to say goodbye to the government we have — a revolution is desperately needed, a real one and a revolution in thinking, but people seem so willing to go along with these fascist fantasies of the Friedmans of the world.

There are some good comments to the essay, but not many and out of the hundreds of comments thus far, most are lame and insipid, merely pointing fingers at parents for not being good enough re education, or kids being lazy, blah blah blah. No real questioning of the system, of it being driven by malevolent forces, and what is life for anyway, just to work like hell for a corporate master until you drop??!! Here is the ONLY unique and thoughtful comment out of hundreds (actually there was one other really good one but this one really gets it — it didn't get many recommends, no surprise):

The future will hopefully hold out for something other than science and technology. The concerns of this article arouse feelings that seem very very "old hat." What has been forgotten is the rape of planet Earth, mostly committed by the hyper-competitive hedonistic cohort that Friedman is championing here. It is hoped that the future will be won by those wise enough and courageous enough to see that business as usual must end, that the future demands an enlightened citizen, one who cares about the Earth and about universal sustainability. Someone who cares deeply about the many other species who share the planet, who cares about the unique cultural contributions of peoples everywhere, a citizen who doesn't measure worth in money, power, prestige — one who doesn't insist upon having more of everything than the next guy. If we're going to survive on this planet, have any future at all, we must stop this race to nowhere, come together across all continents to save the world from hyper-competitiveness, exploitation, greed and the wrong-headedness that has brought us to this frightful impasse. —Susan R., Honolulu

environment, environmentalism, human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

A Good Life for Fellow Creatures

While our fellow creatures are put behind bars or held captive in the camouflaged cages of modern zoos, where they are stared at and poked by the young, the curious and the idle, our consciences should continue to disturb us. So long as animal hunting and fishing licenses are issued by the million, permitting the holders to trap or shoot our fellow creatures for sport or as a business, we cannot rest content. While our fellow creatures are bred and raised by tens of millions to be butchered in cold blood, their bodies hung up or laid out for sale in public markets and finally cooked and eaten, cannibal fashion, those of us who are radicals in our interpretation of the precept “thou shalt not kill” must continue to agitate and organize on behalf of these myriad victims of artificially stimulated and jaded human appetites.

Restraint does not cease to be imprisonment when it is applied to our fellow creatures. Nor is a form of sport tolerable which maims its victims or deprives them of their lives. Deliberate killing is murder whether the object of the attack is a human being or a fellow creature.

Violations of fellow creature rights take many forms: trapping and shooting wild life for food or sport; saturation spraying and dusting of poisons which destroy birds, mammals and insects; raising and slaughtering creatures for food; torturing and killing fellow creatures for educational, diversional or experimental purposes; the use of fellow creatures as “work animals”; shearing the wool from sheep, goats, camels, rabbits; using the fur of wild or domestic animals; the incarceration of fellow creatures in circus and zoo cages; the maintenance, in permanent servitude, of domestic pets who would not know how to care for themselves if released, who “enjoy their servitude,” “love their masters,” and who, if released, would return voluntarily to live parasitical lives.

There was a time, not too long ago, in the United States or elsewhere, when human beings were hunted and eaten, bred, bought and sold as chattels. For the most part, this form of slavery is a thing of the past. The enslavement, torturing, imprisonment and killing of animal, bird and insect fellow creatures to satisfy human fancy. whim, habit or assumed need is still practiced, on a larger scale than elsewhere, in highly industrialized and civilized communities, where mass slaughter, mass chemical poisoning, mass experimentation with fellow creatures, and mass incarceration behind barbed wire and other restraining means are matters of every day occurrence.

Restraints, incarceration, exploitation, torture and murder of fellow creatures attracts no more attention and arouses no more comment in the leading civilized countries of today than the like treatment of human slaves aroused in the leading civilized countries of previous centuries. Humanity has passed through periods of cannibalism and of chattel slavery. In the course of its evolution, it will surely reach a point at which the greatest good to the greatest number of living creatures will be accepted and applied with equal rigor to humanity’s fellows and neighbors.

If there is a “right” to the demand for security, for dignity and for life itself, that right must apply with equal force to all living things. We humans, as trustees for the planet and its inhabitants are duty bound to recognize and uphold such rights and to protest against their denial, no matter who or what the victims of the denial may be.

(from Chapter VI, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)

Buy a copy of the book directly from The Good Life Center, Harborside, Maine.

[Click here for all more excerpts.]

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, ecoanarchism

USDA advocates, then denounces, vegetarian diet

As Mark Bittman reports in the New York Times, an internal newsletter at the USDA (“Greening Headquarters Update”, July 23, 2012) promoted not only “meatless Mondays” but even vegetarianism:

One simple way to reduce your environmental impact while dining at our cafeterias is to participate in the “Meatless Monday” initiative http://www.meatlessmonday.com/. This international effort, as the name implies, encourages people not to eat meat on Mondays. Meatless Monday is an initiative of The Monday Campaign Inc. in association with the John Hopkins School of Public Health.

How will going meatless one day of the week help the environment? The production of meat, especially beef (and dairy as well), has a large environmental impact. According to the U.N., animal agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gases and climate change. It also wastes resources. It takes 7,000 kg of grain to make 1,000 kg of beef. In addition, beef production requires a lot of water, fertilizer, fossil fuels, and pesticides. In addition there are many health concerns related to the excessive consumption of meat. While a vegetarian diet could have a beneficial impact on a person’s health and the environment, many people are not ready to make that commitment. Because Meatless Monday involves only one day a week, it is a small change that could produce big results.

Cowed by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the USDA has renounced those facts and suppressed the newsletter. The NCBA complained that the USDA “does not understand the efforts being made in rural America to produce food and fiber for a growing global population in a very sustainable way”. Bittman notes

that meat is not fiber, that its industrial-style production is not sustainable by any normal definition, and that “agriculture” produces the food “Meatless Monday” advocates eat, too.

The only possible good that might come of the USDA's brief airing of the truth, if not their subsequent caving to corporatist pressure, is that reactionaries like Senator Charles Grassley and Representative Steve King, both of Iowa, have promised to hasten their own demises by doubling down on their corpse consumption every Monday.

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, anarchism, ecoanarchism

Diggers 2012: towards a new Magna Carta

George Monbiot writes in The Guardian:

To be young in the post-industrial nations today is to be excluded. Excluded from the comforts enjoyed by preceding generations; excluded from jobs; excluded from hopes of a better world; excluded from self-ownership.

Those with degrees are owned by the banks before they leave college. Housing benefit is being choked off. Landlords now demand rents so high that only those with the better jobs can pay. Work has been sliced up and outsourced into a series of mindless repetitive tasks, whose practitioners are interchangeable. Through globalization and standardization, through unemployment and the erosion of collective bargaining and employment laws, big business now asserts a control over its workforce almost unprecedented in the age of universal suffrage.

The promise the old hold out to the young is a lifetime of rent, debt and insecurity.

diggers2012.wordpress.com

human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism

‘Dominion’: Judeo-Christian justification for meat-eating?

And God said: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he them. And God blessed them; and God said unto them: Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth.

And God said: Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed — to you it shall be for food; and to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is a living soul, every green herb for food.

The last word above is rendered as “meat” in the King James and many other translations. The original Hebrew word, AKLH, in fact means simply “food” or “eating”. The translation used here is that of the Jewish Publication Society of America (1917).

Regarding “dominion”, compare “rule”:

And God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; and the stars. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness.

The words are also different in the original Hebrew. Whereas the sun, moon, and stars provide guiding lights to and define day and night, man simply dominates the rest of creation as the conscious embodiment of the creator, as a trustee of the creator. In the next section describing food, the word dominion is not used.

There is nothing here to justify destructive exploitation of the earth's resources or harassment, enslavement, and consumption of animals, human or otherwise.

As for the commandment to “subdue” the earth, following the command to “replenish” the earth it clearly refers to a nurturing agriculture. Indeed, God plants a garden in Eden and puts man in charge:

And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

But this is a prelapsarian idyll and hardly applicable to the realities of later life. Because, of course, the overseers eventually took what was meant for only the boss, who readily sensed they were hiding something and expelled them:

Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread ...

Still nothing about exploitation and consumption of animals.

Alas, by chapter 4 of Genesis, “the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering” of “the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof”, even to the extent of not respecting Cain and Cain's offering of “the fruit of the ground”. The writers are already rationalizing their way of life, which was rather different from what God (called “ALHYM” in the first 3 chapters) commanded Adam and Eve, even to now represent the thoughts of God (now called “YHVH”) as simply reflecting their own.

Which is exactly where we still are today, where vegetarians are cursed as Cain and the only moral demand in slaughtering animals is that it be done with “respect”, which doesn't change anything. A being killed without respect is as dead as one killed with. It means nothing to talk about acting “humanely” when the result is the same as without such talk.

Latter-day apologists of the killing and eating of animals are as degraded as the priests writing Genesis 4, shaping morality to fit their habits and appetites and prejudices rather than the other way around. Making the effort to make sure your victim is healthy and happy, and/or taking the time to pray over your act, is not acting morally, but rather psychotically.

And there is nothing nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing whereof it is said: See this is new? — it hath been already, in the ages which were before us.

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, ecoanarchism

Sanders voted yes

Alexander Cockburn wrote in The Golden Age Is In Us (1995), entry from September 6, 1994:

I thought the point of having an independent socialist in Congress was precisely that: to be an independent and a socialist. Instead of which we have Bernie Sanders (supposedly the ‘independent socialist’ from Vermont), hack Democrat. He voted for Clinton’s budget, and now he’s voted for the crime bill, a milepost in the development of the repressive corporate state.

This summer we passed, for the first time, the million mark for people in US prisons (not counting city and county jails). Steve Whitman of the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown calculates that the imprisonment rate for blacks is now 1,534 per 100,000, compared with a white rate of 197. The central aim of the crime bill, passed on August 25, is to lock up even more black people. ...

People designated as gang members can have their sentence for certain offenses (even those unconnected with gang membership) increased by up to ten years. ... There's no medical or scientific distinction between the two substances, but poor people use crack and rich people use powder. ... Get five years for first-time possession of more than five grams of crack; get no jail time for possession of the same amount of coke powder. The crime bill did nothing to alter such inequities.

This is to pass over the rest of the fascist panorama of the bill: the three-strikes provision, the enhanced mandatory sentencing, the stripping of federal judges of their power to enforce constitutional rights of prisoners, the ending of Pell grants which provide funding for prisoners to get higher education, the car searches, the hysterical and unjust treatment of sex offenders, and on and on, through the expansion of the death penalty to cover more than fifty crimes.

... Sanders voted yes. I asked him why and he faxed me four paragraphs of pitiful blather — almost all other ‘Progressives’ had voted yes; rejection of this bill would have meant a worse one down the road ...; there was money in the bill for cities and towns and for battered women's shelters.

For over a decade I've listened to the rap from Sanders and the Progressive Coalition in Vermont about the need for an alternative to the two-party system. Some alternative! Sanders’ record is scarcely more liberal than that of Vermont’s Republican senator, Jim Jeffords. To their everlasting shame, not one squeak, so far as I can ascertain, was raised by the Vermont Pwogwessives abut Sanders’ crime bill vote. I suppose the money for battered women’s shelters caused them not to notice one of the most rabid expressions of racism in the nation’s legislative history.

human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism, Vermont

Coercive Harmony

Alexander Cockburn wrote in The Golden Age Is In Us (1995), entry from September 9, 1993:

These days we have the numbing rituals of consensus formation, a collective act of brainwashing dictated, as always, by the most unstable participant, exercising the tyranny of the hysteric, the unhinged, anybody whom sensible people in the group decide it’s not worth the trouble to upset. So there's consensus, since these more-or-less stable participants realize that their concerted objective is to please this weakest member, who obviously agrees.

Laura Nader, professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley, gave a striking interview in the San Francisco Examiner the other day in which she noted the growth of ‘coercive harmony’, a process she recognized from methods of pacification introduced by European missionaries during the colonial period to control indigenous villagers.

According to the article, ‘Alternative dispute resolution’, she said, ‘was a response to the confrontation and litigiousness of the 1960s civil rights movement.’ Spearheaded by former US Chief Justice Warren Burger, it aimed to free courts of cases that could be settled through mediation or arbitration. But in the pursuit of compromise, justice often has been forgotten ... and the pursuit itself has carried far beyond the justice system.

‘It's basically a movement against the contentious in anything, and it has very strange bedfellows, from people with various psychiatric therapy movements, Christian fundamentalists, corporations sick of paying lawyers, activists who believe we should love each other ... and it’s spread into different parts of American life.

‘We are talking about coercive harmony — an ideology that says if you disagree, you should really keep your mouth shut.’

[These days we have the corporatist development of coercive harmony and consensus formation in ‘community consultation’ to find the ‘win-win’ solution, that is, what does the developer need to pay to get the community to support its own destruction. The developer representing the most unhinged of society, the most sociopathic participant. Because the only purpose of these ‘consultations’ is to bless the developer's plans.]

human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism

Noisy village

I can only assume there is a "noisiest village" contest today, which I did not know about.

Or perhaps it's national weed-whacker day? To celebrate what is perhaps the ultimate symbol of rude, lazy, and wasteful?

I felt quite antisocial and unpatriotic quietly scything the dog pen amidst the roar of gas engines near and far.

environment, environmentalism, Vermont, anarchism, ecoanarchism, "Guns, Gas Engines, and Jesus"™

Omnivores?

Today, the New York Times Magazine published the winning essay in their Ethicist contest for the ethical justification of eating meat. As expected, it is lame.

And in a strange fit, the Times “Public Editor”, Arthur Brisbane, decries the contest for making meat-eaters uncomfortable (which strongly suggests that the ethics of meat eating is indeed elusive).

He cites, apparently as reasonable critique, a blog post by Lisa Henderson, a sophomore at Kansas State University, on the Pork Network: “I believe that humans are omnivores and that meat provides protein and other things that are essential for health. Animals utilize the grass. Animals help us utilize more of the earth. I am not anti-vegetarian, but they seem to be anti-meat, and they seem to want to take that choice away from me.”

The omnivore argument actually justifies a vegetarian diet, because, especially since the invention of cooking, humans can thrive in a large variety of environments without meat. Furthermore, while meat-eaters insist that the imperative of being omnivorous drives their eating habits, they are not in fact omnivorous. Do they eat other humans? Do they (at least the majority in the U.S.) eat horses and dogs? The fact is, they too make ethical and cultural decisions about their diet and do just fine.

It is also telling that meat-eaters always feel threatened by the mere existence of a vegetarian diet. That response suggests that the only justification is indeed cultural in that vegetarians are seen as apostates or traitors.

Brisbane then solicits a comment from Calvin Trillin, which again he cites as apparently meaningful: “If they had a chance, they would eat us.”

Those vicious cows and chickens: terrorists in our midst!

Finally, Brisbane had also noted evocations by animal experimenter Linda Cork of life on the Arctic tundra and arid plains, where she sees fishing and herding to be essential to survival. But that only underscores that animal flesh is not essential to survival in Stanford, California. (Science researchers like Cork, for all their avowed objectivity, generally sugarcoat the fate of their victims as “sacrifice”.)

[[[[ ]]]]
So to the winning essay, by former vegetarian Jay Bost, who, like Linda Cork, apparently saw that life in the Arizona desert would be difficult without eating animals and that therefore it’s OK to eat them in North Carolina and Hawaii, too.

In what Brisbane derides as “awfully complicated”, Bost lays down three conditions (not necessity, not imperative) to feel OK about eating the corpses of other animals: 1) accept that death begets life, that all life is just solar energy temporarily stored in an impermanent form; 2) invoke compassion to choose ethically raised food, vegetable, grain, and/or meat; 3) give thanks.

Bost defines “ethical” as “living in the most ecologically benign way”. He compares boutique organic beef to monoculture/pesticide agriculture and — quel surprise! — concludes that not eating meat may be unethical. He compares the “best” situation on one side (we're not even getting into the horrors of “organic” dairy) to the worst situation on the other. Of course, meat eaters also eat plants, since healthy life without plants is a lot more unlikely than life without meat. They are implicated in both sides.

But let us consider cannibalism again. Since the greatest burden on the earth’s ecology is in fact the burgeoning human population, why wouldn’t it be ethical, by Bost’s definition, to eat other humans? In fact, one might conclude from his argument that not eating humans may be unethical. After all, if grazing animals help the land, it would be unethical to kill them. Whereas the Gospel of John in the Christian testament notes at 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son”. In the ritual of the eucharist (i.e., “thanks”, Bost’s final condition), believers consume the flesh of Jesus (”just solar energy temporarily stored in an impermanent form”), not a sheep or chicken.

[[[[ ]]]]
Which leads me to my own (unsent) entry, imagining the only possible ethical argument, namely, the circular one of religion:

Meat: An Ethical Imperative

In the Book of Genesis, Cain slew Abel, because Abel was a meat-eater and thereby found greater favor with G-D. Having distanced himself from the ways of G-D by foregoing meat, Cain’s ethics had deteriorated to the point that his envy turned to murder. After that, he kept to cities, where a greater variety of sin is possible. But as the mark of his crime faded, his envy rose again, and so today urban vegetarians righteously condemn the diet that has sustained humans for millenia. They denounce meat-eaters as cruel, but instead of being cruel to animals, vegetarians must be cruel to other humans, just as Cain was toward Abel.

Violence and murder are a part of the human psyche. If we don’t regularly kill animals — respectfully, gratefully incorporating their spirits into our own — we end up killing other humans, even loved ones, as Cain killed his own brother. To advocate a vegetarian diet is ultimately to advocate murder. To eat humanely raised and slaughtered animals is to promote peace among men, which is why sacrificial meals are at the core of every religion and community.

As the essential bond of society, shared murder is its ethical basis.

To maintain civilization, if we are to avoid human sacrifice, the crime of Cain, we must slay animals and, to honor them as worthy gifts to the gods, eat them.

In choosing a nonviolent diet, vegetarians deny that ethical necessity. In continuing to eat meat, even to our own and the planet’s harm, we recognize the necessary sacrifice that ethical living demands. We must bear the burden of Cain by emulating Abel.

—o—
Update, April 7, 2013:  Chris Grattan of Brockport, N.Y., writes: “In paleolithic hunting cultures, the rites connected with the killing of game were oriented toward an expression of gratitude to the animal for having given its life and the belief that its spirit would return in another body. In neolithic horticultural and agricultural societies the rites to promote the fecundity of the land were often gruesomely bloody, often in the form of human sacrifice. I try to keep this in mind when being subjected to vegetarian sanctimony.”

Get thee behind me Cain, ye ferking vegetarian!

[[[[ ]]]]
But, back in reality, as omnivores we can choose what we eat. For most people most of the time, there is no need to eat animals. To choose to eat animals is to choose killing and suffering, and ethical justification for that choice — when it is a choice — is impossible.

As I have quipped before, meat-eaters claim to be omnivores, but they can’t swallow the truth.

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, anarchism, ecoanarchism

Arbeit macht nicht frei

“My wife has the occasion, as you know, to campaign on her own and also with me, and she reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy and getting good jobs for their kids and for themselves. They are concerned about gasoline prices, the cost of getting to and from work, taking their kids to school or to practice and so forth after school. That is what women care about in this country and my vision is to get America working again.”

That's what Mitt Romney said in a speech on April 4 to the Newspaper Association of America.

Here's what Hilary Rosen said on CNN on April 11:

"What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, 'Well, you know my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues and when I listen to my wife that's what I'm hearing.' Guess what? His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and why do we worry about their future."

The rest is history, with most people revealing that they have thrown away their humanity in picking what political team they root for.

Mitt Romney and Hilary Rosen are saying the same thing. They deny the other's right to say it, because they are both expressing false concern. And both are wielding their comments as a weapon against the other.

What this whole stand-off illustrates is the false divide in U.S. politics.

Hilary Rosen is a right-wing corporate flack, famous for leading the Recording Industry Association of America's campaign against people sharing the music they've bought with friends. She still advises Obama on the issue. After quitting that job, for a short time she was interim director of Human Rights Campaign, which awarded their 2011 Workplace Equality Innovation Award to Goldman Sachs. While working at the Huffington Post, she was outed as a consultant for BP.

Ann Romney is married to one of the predatory capitalists that Rosen serves. They may not have anything in common in personal style and beliefs, but they both serve the same master.

At least Ann Romney only raised a few children and supported her husband on behalf of that system, whereas Hilary Rosen has actively contributed to its evil. Her dismissal of Ann Romney appears to be because the latter has only listened to women on the campaign trail, without a history of actively working to maintain their economic misery.

Many "liberal" commenters on this issue have expressed a hatred for women who choose to stay at home as a betrayal of feminism, as if feminism is only about a few women getting to the top of the exploitative pyramid and everyone else being forced to toil in "service" jobs as somehow liberating.

Rosen's strong support of Obama and the Democratic Party is clear evidence that the only difference between the parties is that one is slightly more tolerant of gays.

That's certainly a good to be counted, but it does nothing for the 99% of the people, women and men, gay and otherwise, who are not striving to triumph in a cut-throat system. It's good that Goldman Sachs extends benefits to gay partners, but that hardly makes it a benign force in the world. Human rights are rather a broader issue.

What is work for? Actively raising a family should not be the privilege only of the rich. Is either Mitt or Hilary suggesting an economic system that makes raising a family easier for everyone (as in many European countries)? They are both against women, against men, against families, against humanity.

Arbeit macht nicht frei. Work does not make you free.

human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Silence Is a Commons

From remarks by Ivan Illich at the "Asahi Symposium Science and Man - The Computer-Managed Society," Tokyo, Japan, March 21, 1982:

On the same boat on which I arrived in 1926, the first loudspeaker was landed on the island. Few people there had ever heard of such a thing. Up to that day, all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change. Henceforth the access to the microphone would determine whose voice shall be magnified. Silence now ceased to be in the commons; it became a resource for which loudspeakers compete. Language itself was transformed thereby from a local commons into a national resource for communication. As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep, so the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced.

Just as the commons of space are vulnerable, and can be destroyed by the motorization of traffic, so the commons of speech are vulnerable, and can easily be destroyed by the encroachment of modem means of communication.

The issue which I propose for discussion should therefore be clear: how to counter the encroachment of new, electronic devices and systems upon commons that are more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads - commons that are at least as valuable as silence. Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.

Such a transformation of the environment from a commons to a productive resource constitutes the most fundamental form of environmental degradation. This degradation has a long history, which coincides with the history of capitalism but can in no way just be reduced to it. Unfortunately the importance of this transformation has been overlooked or belittled by political ecology so far. It needs to be recognized if we are to organize defense movements of what remains of the commons. This defense constitutes the crucial public task for political action during the eighties. The task must be undertaken urgently because commons can exist without police, but resources cannot. Just as traffic does, computers call for police, and for ever more of them, and in ever more subtle forms.

By definition, resources call for defense by police. Once they are defended, their recovery as commons becomes increasingly difficult. This is a special reason for urgency.

human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism