Saving our Earth or Defending our Right to Eat Animal Products?

It sounds like a very 'managed' environmental conference and 'managed' environmental conferences generally turn into entertainment festivals with sponsors, professional speakers or speakers from outside the community, and only very general environmental messages, so as not to discourage immigration, property development, big garden stores and supermarkets by allowing locals to have a voice.

Menkit has a political position which is different from mine but we are a long way away from a head-on collision.
My political position says that, vegan or (less) meat-eating, if our economy is organised centrally and distantly, we are doomed to biological, economic and social impoverishment and slavery.

I think we are on the road to insufficient calories per capita on a global level because we are destroying our soils and water, and the fossil fuels to make our industrial food production and distribution systems work are becoming scarcer, but we have already arrived at ambient malnutrition and pockets of starvation in many places. If we distributed food according to need, rather than according to capacity to pay, probably no-one would go hungry ... for a while. In North America, Australia, Canada and Europe, and even among the elite of some third world countries, some people are having fat sucked out of them via machines (liposuction) whereas the poor of the world do not get enough fat to eat.

This situation coincided, however, with internationalisation of economies, where local power to produce food and participate politically in an effective manner, and to adjust population to the local carrying capacity, were abrogated and confused by the removal of power and production to distant places and large industrially based systems.

I am worried that a plan to feed the world using grains would run into the same problem of internationalised, profit-based economies. I imagine, for instance, corporations destroying all the wild biodiversity in the richest regions in order to produce the grain to 'feed the world'.

What would then happen to the marginal lands, where you cannot grow crops? My understanding is that farmers will always grow crops where they can because they can get a far higher return for them. On marginal lands they run grazing animals because those animals can move over a very wide area to sustain themselves.

So what would happen to people who live in marginal areas, if we all went vegan? I don't think they would be able to produce enough food for themselves. Perhaps then, we should abandon the marginal lands and only live where crops and food trees can be grown?

Would that mean that more of us would crowd into the hot biodiversity spots (that occur on the richest land)?

One would hope that big business would not stop us, as it tries to now, from allowing our populations to diminish to adjust to more biodiversity and socially friendly small-scale societies.

One would hope that big business would not stop us from occupying those rich areas in small populations, harmonious with the local fauna, as it is trying to do now because it wants to develop those areas for real-estate and crop-growing.

Another thing in Menkit's speech was the statement that we would all die in four years if bees became extinct. Is she allowing for the transport of pollen by flower wasps and other insects and animals, which might take over the task if bees were not around? What about the fact that most members of the grass family (including wheat, barley, rye, rice, bamboo and corn) are wind pollinated and non-dependant on bees? See, for instance, Pollination and Reproductive Behavior of Crop Plants, by Dr. C Kameswara Rao. I feel a bit bad about using Dr Kameswara's article because it appears on a biotech industry blog which informs an industry that wants to take over more biodiverse land to produce crops on an industrial scale using artificial methods, with the excuse of 'feeding the world'.

I have read that the grass family feeds, directly or indirectly over 90% of the World's population. Statements in this
Encarta source would support that view.

The problem of grain-cropping marginal or range lands (which, merging with hot desert, comprise 75% of Australian land) is raised in this article, Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler.

"Another suggestion is a return to grazing beef, a very real alternative as long as you accept the psychologically difficult and politically unpopular notion of eating less of it. That’s because grazing could never produce as many cattle as feedlots do. Still, said Michael Pollan, author of the recent book “In Defense of Food,” “In places where you can’t grow grain, fattening cows on grass is always going to make more sense.”"

The statement appears in an article on a Prout website. Prout is an organisation with a non-denominational religious base that promotes, "Economy of the People, For the People and By the People! Put Economic Power in the Hands of the People!"

The article is interesting because it shows an awareness that human social organisation on a local scale permits a variety of lifestyles in tune with much lower carrying capacity. One such lifestyle is the semi-nomadic one of following grazing animals around their range. (When the Somalis still supplemented local grain economies with semi-nomadic herding economies, they had stable populations that could survive droughts. When they got wells and turned to intensified agriculture, their societies produced landless people who could not survive droughts. That's what western 'food-aid and agriculture' does.)

The Prout article also makes this statement:

"Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States."

The use of grain to feed cattle on the scale it happens in America is a recent development.

The economics professor's use of the term 'efficiency' is skewed here to mean 'most direct route to human stomachs'. Biological efficiency would mean allowing the world to return to a functionally biodiverse state and that would certainly not mean a population of 6.6 or 9 or 11 billion humans. Financial efficiency simply means cornering the most production for paying humans, meanwhile throwing us socially and ecologically into chaos - half of us starving and the rest of us needing liposuction. So many questions arise. For instance, why would we increase crop production just to feed more humans when we already have enough food to feed them? There is an even greater need to question the belief that human populations must continue to grow when humans, on a local basis, had long been able to control their populations down to the local carrying capacity, well before the invention of the pill.

Another big question of our time is, why do we see so often versions of this statement, also by Dr Dr. C Kameswara Rao, "I am not a scientist, but rummage around in the scientific research about GM and a clear picture emerges: if we want to reduce starvation and “feed the world”, as Sir Bob Geldof et al tell us every Christmas, we must go GM. The argument in favour of GM crops begins with a simple one: the world is growing fast."

The answer that comes to my mind is that GM and agriculture with and without GM are big business and big business does not like local economic and political empowerment because the case for massive GM crop production does not exist in local economies run well within their local carrying capacity. Global GM mass crop production for profit needs run-away population growth to survive. The human population could survive quite well without GM as long as it did not continue to grow or to provide massive profits for a few shareholders in a globalised economy.

So, for me, the problems of preserving rich plant and animal biodiversity, reducing carbon gas emissions, decreasing wealth and increasing political empowerment seem to lie in the relocalisation of our economies. That may give people the choice of eating vegan in some societies but not in others. I am open to argument here.

The Prout organisation put out a film some while back about Venezuela. It was done by the same person who made No Woolies in Maleny. I found the organisation's use of religion interesting because, as I recollect, it was felt that it is easier to communicate ideas as beliefs than as systems to be learned... maybe we need an article by Prout here. On a local level when the religion itself is local and functions to preserve the environment and local working systems, religion seems to work. Where a religion is generalised into an overarching abstract set of rules and applied over a wide variety of locations, peoples and systems, then it dictates absurd behaviour and prevents people from acting on their own behalf from local information - in much the same way as does the global economic growth economy - which, come to think of it, is really a religion.

The arguments Menkit alludes to about cruelty to animals are particularly convincing when you look at our industrial processing of other species as food. The scale of cruelty, of deprivation of liberty far exceeds, but ressembles in its systematic pseudo-efficiency (to feed the world) the nazi concentration camp system.

This is yet another argument for relocalisation with view to allowing our populations to reduce naturally.

Would the quality of food available to most of us in our industrialised overdrawn system be adequate to lead vegan lifestyles, especially if we don't have access to land to grow our own food on? The rate of obesity seems indicative of some decline in food vitality. Menkit, in her Essential Oils cookbook (which communicates fabulous recipes and useful technologies), talks as if finely ground flour can cause diabetes. Although I do not know her source for this, I do know that there is a lot of evidence that many people cannot cope with low GI foods and that the introduction of flour and sugar to Australian aborigines and other indigenous people coincided with high rates of diabetes and obesity. But low GI industrially produced foods are more and more the only ones available to many people. And big business and a government near you are pushing for this situation to expand.

In conclusion, I don't think that all of Menkit's claims were right, but I don't think that she should be stopped from talking at a conservation festival. James Sinnamon, who comments on this article as well, often makes the point that so many political rallies, including conservation festivals, consist of talking heads standing up there as if they were the ultimate authority. Audiences are allowed a short 'question period', when really a discussion should open, involving all those with something to say.

I note that Menkit previously spoke every year. Perhaps the problem is, once again, partly due to the breaking down of the local society where she lives, in favour of bringing in outside 'authorities'. In a localised society of comfortable size, everyone gets a voice and no-one is a comprehensive expert.

Cut the Menkits from a small town and suddenly you have a bunch of newcomer ignoramuses racing cars through national parks and building blocks of flats on local farmland with the rest of the population completely sidelined like so many suburbanites in Sydney or Melbourne, sitting in front of t.v. watching the 'real people'.

None of us is a complete authority when you get right down to it. But big populations hierarchialise and specialise, creating illusions of authority either through credentialism, professional politics, religion, and big bucks. So, if you have a professorship or a profession, you can get up there and make claims about kangaroo populations and a judge or a politician will take your claims seriously even if they are wrong. Likewise, if you have a lot of money, you can get up and say what you like about growing our population being a good thing. The recently deceased Mr Richard Pratt's self-serving performance at the Melbourne Population summit of 2002 was an example of this.

For me the big issue is that big societies remove the choice of going vegan or not to some decision way above our individual heads. And that decision is likely to be made by someone whose reasons would not stand up on a local basis but who we will never be able to question.

Sheila Newman, population sociologist
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