ISSUE 7 EDITORIAL
By Claudette Vaughan
Who really is terrorizing the Earth? The filthiest polluters in the world today are the oil, chemical, timber, mining and agribusiness multinationals, each united by a common greenhouse gas contributory thread. In this issue we have collected a range of diverse activist and professional voices willing to talk against the biggest polluters in the world today and centre the culprit squarely on the shoulders of a meat-centered diet.
Conspicuous by its absence from the main name players in the mainstream global climate change debate are the effects of intensive industrial factory farming and their dire consequences for the planet, animals and human health coupled with the significant role it plays in the global warming debate.
In the special double issue of Earthsave news under the title “Skip The Steak” reprinted from Time: “The Global Warming Survival Guide” they ask: Which is responsible for more global warming: your BMW or your Big Mac? Believe it or not, it’s the burger.
This isn’t news to a vegan but what you might find surprising is what we found while researching this issue and that’s there exists a collusion of silence everywhere from mainstream writers, greenhouse gas effects scientists, journalists, environmentalists including many from within the green movement itself and politicians on meat- based diets as being undeniably responsible for roughly 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions on the planet today.
Our thoughts on the silence itself are based upon another link and that’s Bush, Blair and Howard’s time in politics had similarities in that all three of them believed there existed a conspiracy to bring down the capitalist system. One of the ways this was being achieved, they believed, was through the green movement. Peculiar to American politics, this environmental paranoia was additionally wrapped up in messianic religious tendencies and right-wing corporate cronyism as never before witnessed on such a scale in human history.
Perversely it’s capitalism itself, as it stands, that has failed a majority people around the world economically. Environmentally it’s been disastrous.
The silence is based around a frenetic need to keep the cattle culture going (men must eat meat), the porn industry going and the “Posh Spice” and Paris Hilton capitalist consumerism fantasies going. It provides the illusion that capitalism truly works yet the reality is western capitalism is neither just, democratic or equal. What’s confused the Left in the past is not that this is occurring, but it’s occurring deliberately and not haphazardly as previously thought. After-all, it doesn’t even work on their terms! How is this being achieved? By slowing down the First World in plundering its wealth and bringing up the Third World slightly makes it even more easier to control.
Global corporate repression under the guise of “capitalism” is the way they want it to go forward. After-all lessons were learnt from the Communist days. Don’t call it communism or high level authoritarianism; just practice the same under the “capitalist” tag.
We found several books indispensable while researching this issue and one of the stand-outs was Robert F. Kennedy’s Crimes Against Nature: Standing Up To Bush and the Kyoto Killers Who Are Cashing In On Our World. From this book alone Kennedy has a counterculture following with young people and it’s a reputation well deserved. He is what Peter Garrett used to be to young adult voters before his defection to the Labor Party.
Crimes of Nature shows how multinationals like the organisation, Wise Use, (wise = owl, the owl being the symbol for the American Skull and Bones fraternity worship and included in that congregation is both Presidents Bush sn and Bush jr) was set up to, using the words of its founder, “Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement”.
From it’s inception, Kennedy tells us, the Heritage Foundation is another that has urged its followers to “strangle the environmental movement” which it declared “ the greatest single threat to the American economy” dismissing global warming, acid rain and other environmental crisis’s as “henny pennys”.
Kennedy is one of the very few taking on the large industrial factory-farm polluters in his 20 years of environmental advocacy. He’s been involved in litigation against those who continue to defend dangerous industry practices including pesticide usage, the use of deadly chemicals and greenhouse gases. He has spoken out against industrial farms dumping millions of tonnes of untreated fecal and toxic waste onto the land and into the air and water and all of this when from others of his genre there has been nothing but silence.
Pam Rice’s 101 Reasons Why I’m a Vegetarian is a hidden treasure wanting to be known. Is there nothing this woman doesn’t cover from factory farm runoff and odor, mad cows disease, meat marketing and the pushing to kids, illegal fishing and the platter of poisons in fish, mass grinding and pooling of carcasses, perverse reproduction practices on the farm, meat laborers exploited, slaughterhouse sludge, water and fossil energy depletion, farmed animals go unprotected and the flu pandemic, to name just a few. It’s a professional work from a vegan animal rights activist.
John Robbin’s The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life And The World has forever his finger on the pulse. This is a classic important work covering the Great American Diet roller coaster with chapters on the dangers of factory farming and eating with conscience. Robbin’s formidable reputation is at the forefront of this book. He conveys a message of hope and change in a Crisis! What Crisis? environment.
Scorcher The Dirty Politics of Climate Change by Clive Hamilton is a fascinating look at insider politics and who’s really running the Lodge in Canberra. Green groups have been no match for what Hamilton refers to as “The Greenhouse Mafia” whom he tells us, has unrivalled access to internal Government processes. Those companies are Rio Tinto, Edison Mission Energy, BHP-Billiton, Alcoa, Energex, Origin Energy, Boral and Orica – the major fossil fuel companies in Australia today that are besides themselves with the thought that the renewables industry might possibly set an agenda that would suit Australians down to the ground.
And let us not forget those people who have died or been killed under mysterious circumstances when they went up against the uranium industry – the anti-nuclear activists. We dedicate this issue to Karen Silkwood, the late Deirdre Sainsbury, a 1984 Greenham Common UK activist, the Rainbow Warrior activists who died in a bomb blast in New Zealand and to Hilda Murrell who was murdered in 1984. Hilda Murrell, had an extraordinary life. After reading a government White Paper on nuclear waste went on and read massively on the subject. She attended university classes on nuclear physics and made a number of contacts within government and academic circles. Through the winter of 1983-84, Hilda Murrell worked continuously on her paper and three days before she died she told friends she has completed the Sizewell paper. At the end of February that year she made a telephone call to work colleague concerned about her personal safety. In the conversation Murrell said: “If they don’t get me first I want the world to know that one old woman has seen through their lies”. Her body was found but her murderers were not to this day. The Sizewell paper she wrote was eventually published though. It’s been described as an intelligent and well ordered attack on the British government’s White paper on Radioactive Waste Management. In her report Murrell pointed out: “There is now a quarter of a ton of plutonium in the Irish Sea. It has been thought permissible to throw this stuff into the living environment without any proper scientific examination of the results of such action.” Hilda Murrell paid with her life because she criticized the nuclear industry. (1)
We recommend Australian activist David Bradbury’s “A Hard Rain” for a detailed analysis of what’s going on in Australia and around the world currently regarding uranium and mining for todays’ activists.
Geoff Russell from Animal Liberation SA has also done some terrific work on a published paper recently “Dietary Impacts on Global Warming” (see Animal Liberation SA website for the paper).
1.The Eco Wars A Layman’s Guide to the Ecology Movement by David Day. Published by Harrap, London. 1989.
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Patty Mark’s New Vegan Abolition Blog – a must see for Abolitionists
Patty Mark is always relevant and refreshing and her new blog is no exception. It’s based on the importance and significance of Openrescue, veganism and animal liberation. Catch her at: www.govegan.com.au/patty
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From No Kill Solutions and Redemption author, Nathan Winograd.
PETA's Grisliest Year Ever
In 2006, an official report from People for The Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) shows that they took in 3,043 animals, of which 1,960 were cats, 1,030 were dogs, 52 were other companion animals, and 1 was a chicken. Of these, they killed the chicken, killed 1,942 cats, 988 dogs, and 50 classified as "other companion animals." They found homes for only 2 cats, 8 dogs and 2 of the other companion animals.
By the numbers:
* PETA killed 1,942 of the 1,960 cats, finding homes for only 2.
* PETA killed 988 of the 1,030 dogs finding homes for only 8.
* PETA killed 50 of the 52 other companion animals (rabbits, guinea pigs, etc.), finding homes for only 2.
* PETA killed the chicken they took in.
That's a 97% kill rate. Despite $30 million in revenues, they found homes for only 12 animals. An additional 21 cats and 25 dogs were transferred to another agency (likely a kill shelter since PETA has a "policy against No Kill shelters.") The rest were put to death.
Why is anyone still listening to PETA?
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2009 International Conference in Newcastle
Please see below an email from Rod Bennison, a lecturer at the University of Newcastle and the convener of the 2009 International Academic and Community Conference on Animals and Society. The conference features a number internationally renowned animal protection theorists. If you'd like more information on the conference, please email Rod at rod.bennison@newcastle.edu.au
On the phone Rod told the Abolitionist-Online that their website will be up in the first week of February, 2008. Check out on 1ST Feb then: www.mindinganimals.com
Post-conference there’s also lecture conferences happening.
Dear Colleagues,
I am writing to inform you of a momentous event in the study of human nonhuman animal interrelationships. The University of Newcastle and the Animals in Society (Australia) Study Group are about to announce their hosting of the 2009 International Academic and Community Conference on Animals and Society. Subtitled Minding Animals, the Conference is bound to be a benchmark event in the study and interpretation of human nonhuman animal interrelationships. It will be held between 13 and 19 July, 2009.
The 2009 Minding Animals Conference will bring together a broad range of academic disciplines and representatives from universities, non- government organisations and the community, industry and government from across the planet. Conference delegates will examine the interrelationships between human and nonhuman animals from a cultural, historical, geographical, environmental, moral, legal and political perspectives.
Further, the conference will bring together an unheralded number of leading scientists, philosophers and social theorists, academics and community leaders, all committed to animal protection and welfare, but never having all met at the one event.
Our confirmed dinner and plenary speakers alone (alphabetical order, and the number is not yet exhausted) will provide you with an idea of breadth of knowledge and importance of this conference:
• Professor Carol Adams
• Professor Emeritus Marc Bekoff
• Professor J Baird Callicott
• Nobel Laureate Professor JM Coetzee
• Professor Dale Jamieson
• Professor Val Plumwood
• Professor Emeritus Tom Regan
• Distinguished Professor Bernard Rollin
• Dr Andrew Rowan
• Professor James Serpell
• Professor Peter Singer (to be finally confirmed)
• Professor Emeritus Michael Soulé
• Professor Paul Waldau
• Professor Jennifer Wolch
The conference will have six major themes and objectives:
• To reassess the relationship between the animal and environmental movements in light of climate change and other jointly-held threats and concerns
• To examine how humans identify and represent nonhuman animals in art, literature, music, science, and in the media and on film
• How, throughout history, the objectification of nonhuman animals and nature in science and society, religion and philosophy, has led to the abuse of nonhuman animals and how this has since been interpreted and evaluated
• To examine how the lives of humans and companion and domesticated nonhuman animals are intertwined, and how science, human and veterinary medicine utilise these important connections
• How the study of animals and society can better inform both the scientific study of animals and community activism and advocacy
• And how science and community activism and advocacy can inform the study of nonhuman animals and society
An extensive list of subjects is being developed that will be allotted concurrent sessions. These subject will greatly expand on our conference themes. This will be announced in January.
Planning for the conference is well advanced. Our website will also be launched at the end of January 2008 and will be advertised widely. The website is currently under construction. I will send a further email to this e-list when it has been launched.
At that time you will be able to either register or at least complete our 'Expression of Interest in Attending' form. In the meantime, if you are interested in receiving further information or express an interest in attending, please email me directly at:
rod.bennison@newcastle.edu.au
Or, please feel free to call me anytime (Australian Eastern Summer Time) on +61-(0)41-491-4040 to discuss the conference.
Thank you and I look forward to receiving your e2009 International Academic and Community Conference on Animals and Society
School of Environmental and Life Sciences
University of Newcastle
University Drive
Callaghan NSW 2308
AUSTRALIA
Email: rod.bennison@newcastle.edu.au
Phone: +61-41-491-4040
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The Abolitionist would like to acknowledge and thank Friends of Animals for their financial contribution as well as Coral Hull.
We would like to thank Noah Hannibal for his exquisite work on the website, Ann Paterson for her Bella in the Wheelchair graphic, Soulmama for use of their graphic – Veganism It’s Us or Them and to all our amazing contributors to whom we are indebted.
As always, this site is dedicated to Barry Horne, Jill Phipps, Mike Hill, Tom Worby, the Australian Diana Simpson and Ronnie Lee, the General.
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