Archive for December, 2024

“Consider your origin: you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.”

—Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno (ca 1321)

“Our food system is undermining our ability to feed humanity now and into the future… It is no exaggeration to say that what happens in the next five years will determine the future of life on Earth.”

—WWF, Living Planet Report 2024: A System in Peril

“The low retail cost of industrialized food can obscure its very high environmental price tag.”

—United Nations Environment Programme

 “We depend on land for our survival. Yet we treat it like dirt.”

—UN Secretary-General António Guterres

The UN biodiversity summit, the UN climate summit, the UN desertification summit and the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations this autumn all ended in disappointing and far fewer positive negotiations than life on Earth can tolerate. 

But are individuals doing any better than governments to protect Nature? The over-50s have failed to live up to their potential to facilitate meaningful positive change for life on Earth. Younger generations, if they are to survive, urgently need to forge on past those global north entitled generations and get on with making Earth an equitable place. 

The following scenario is a microcosm of how we are failing as older adults: a festive group of enthusiasts go out into the “great outdoors” around Christmas with the aim of socializing and communing with wildlife—observing and recording the migratory birds passing over, and others that overwinter in the area. A good feeling of solidarity permeates the tribe, proud that they can be thought of as participating citizen scientists. In this time of increasing ecological uncertainty this group of acquaintances will probably be passing on their data from this outing to help scientists who study birds. Good work from dedicated conservationists! 

A celebration is called for. How about a delicious organic vegan meal that honours the group and the rest of Nature, and recognizes the connection and continuum of all life on the planet? 

But no, the opposite happens. Favouring cheap food packaged to be easy to hand out, the group choose instead the flesh of tortured birds who have spent their short lives crammed into the factory farms that contaminate the rivers, air and soil with their effluent and accelerate wildlife extinction. (Besides the harm they perpetrate on the planet, these establishments pay terrible wages. No rural community wants them nearby because of the odours and air pollution and the negative effect on house prices.)

It would be fair to ask whether these Christmas revellers are oblivious to the impact their choice has on wildlife, human health and even Indigenous justice issues related to deforestation and climate when buying this celebratory supper. But, as in so many instances, this is far from being the case. Despite knowing full well about the misery and devastation caused by the demand for factory farms, they go ahead and decide to eat antibiotic-laden birds—and even declare that after the meal they will be “doing their bit” by taking the toxic bones to compost!

Some of them might try to justify their choice by pointing out that there are codes of practice in the agri-food industry that afford protection to chickens. But adhering to the Codes of Practice proposed by the National Farm Animal Care Council is voluntary and is not enforced by the Québec government. Unbelievably, the industry is policing itself. And animal welfare is not a priority. Profits are. People hoping to assuage their guilt for contributing to the suffering at these factory farms by mentioning these mercurial ‘Codes of Practice’ cannot disregard their own culpability. 

Anyone who really cares protecting birds would not wish to indulge in a meal consisting of factory-farmed chickens. 

Does this ignorance come down to a great psychological barrier reinforced over the last several hundred years by capitalist cultures that humans are not part of Nature, and that although we may profess some empathy for non-human species, they are there principally to be consumed?

Ecocide and Indigenous genocide go hand and hand with that global north mindset. 

In a paper titled ‘The Ordinary Acts that Contribute to Ecocide,” criminologist Robert Agnew endeavours to explain “why individuals and small groups engage in a range of ‘ordinary’ acts that contribute to the destruction of the natural environment.” Agnew explains that leading crime theories have much to say about why individuals engage in ordinary harms that contribute to ecocide, even though these harms represent conformist behaviour, and concludes by reminding readers why the application of leading crime theories to ordinary harms is important. The discussion on “crimes of denial” is spoken of but also how capitalism sets the stage to give free rein to these ordinary and local crimes. In our above story, what influences this conformist group is the dirt-cheap price for the unethical meal as well as a notion of individual entitlement inculcated by capitalism and exceptionalism. See https://tinyurl.com/green-criminality

Chicken factory farms are always problematic for communities to accept because they impinge on the right of citizens to clean air and water. What looks like a regionally raised chicken is often being made possible by the existence of a vast network of cheap industrially grown feedstock located in deforested tropical areas, which in turn has direct consequences for Indigenous people’s ability to live in those places. “Local” becomes just a dimension of international ecocide. Indigenous environmental victimization is suddenly played out over a well-meaning group’s contaminating chicken meal.

The Center for Biological Diversity has this to say in a fact sheet about the environmental costs of eating poultry:“Factory farms often have multiple industrial-scale sheds, each as large as 36,000 square feet, containing hundreds of thousands of birds in total. Manure application and feed production further expand the footprint of chicken production. Throughout the ‘Broiler Belt’ region, chicken production has destroyed natural habitat for native wildlife.” https://tinyurl.com/chicken-facts

In 2018, 71% of all bird biomass globally consisted of poultry, while wild birds made up just 21%. That gap is increasing. https://tinyurl.com/bird-biomass

WWF’s 2024 Living Planet Report details an average 73% decline in wildlife populations since 1970. The report warns that, as the Earth approaches dangerous tipping points posing grave threats to humanity, a huge collective effort will be required to tackle the dual climate and Nature crises.

Our mindset can change. If some of those people who decided on a supper menu were young and had read the Living Planet Report 2024 Youth Edition, there is no way they would have chosen to eat factory-farmed birds. https://tinyurl.com/report-youth-edition

Adults can revise their opinions by making an effort to gain scientific knowledge about wildlife and extinction through reading the Living Planet Report for adults. https://tinyurl.com/planet-adult-edition

The Center for Biological Diversity offers some tips for a wildlife-friendly diet: “Every meal is an opportunity to help protect wildlife by taking extinction off your plate. Replace chicken in traditional dishes by trying chicken-free veggie pot pies, fajitas, alfredo pasta, pad thai and burritos.” https://tinyurl.com/chicken-alternatives

“Anyone who develops deep knowledge of other species by living alongside them for years realizes something both obvious and essential: we are not the only lives that matter.”

—Melanie Challenger, ‘Animals in the Room’, Emergence Magazine, August 2023