Straha wrote:
you wrote:
I think that plants are as capable of feeling and communicating as most animals, and making yourself a vegan is to preferentially choose less anthropomorphic victims of your need to consume as an animal for essentially emotional rather than ethical reasons... Straha's veganism is... part of an animal supremacist ideology
That seems pretty unequivocal.
Yes, but it was just a facet of a broader critique I then elaborated on, after apologising for the first statement. I will continue to elaborate, of course.
I think that's an overly primitivist view of human life, and a fetishization of the environment.
I think human life is intensely primitive and that modern developments have largely served to produce neuroses. Ah, but if only I could find the mouse (or was it rat?) study that showed how population density literally drives human dysfunction. It helped make me a rural agrarianist, though. I grew up eight miles out of town in the middle of nowhere in the foothills, and some time in 2009 or 2010 I do believe I just started crying driving along the state highway in the floodplain near my home, looking around at the Cascade foothills and realizing that I was born by them, I'd grown up by them, and I was going to live my life where the mountains meet the sea, and I loved the thought of that--and that was my /motherland/, the soil I was born into, and it was more important than anything else. That, alas, is not an experience I can convey to you... Or something you can take from me.
Even if I were to spot you your premises, I think that there are no claims to environmental legitimacy in the first world. To limit myself to just the United States: the strip clearing of trees in the North East in the 1600s, the mass extinction of the Buffalo herds of the Mid-West, the prolific irrigation and water consumption of the South West all so fundamentally altered the environment so as to make it an expression, in large part, of unsustainable human desires.
Oh, there is going to be a very great correction of first world practices, but I think by my philosophy of deep ecology it is
already happening. I don't believe that the decline in birth rate is a result of human decisions so much as it is a biological response to human overpopulation throughout the western world. Note how it breaks down by ethnic groups with radically different practices (the Maori/English New Zealander split for instance). I think the culture is expressing the environment there and that human population levels will naturally return to stable levels in the west. For a variety of socio-cultural reasons the population of France seemed to follow a healthier trend until the second half of the 20th century and I expect that broadly the industrialized world needs to lose about 40% of its population based on that example to stabilize at a healthy level.
Moreover, I think the environment is not a process that pre-exists the living inhabitants but a creation of a multitude of different beings moving and shaping the world, and that a healthy relationship with other beings is realizing when we've pushed and shape these processes to only favor us. I have a broader critique of the environment, especially because I think the abstraction can end up being used to justify just about anything, but I'll save that for another time and merely say that the environmental systems that we do engage with are broken in large part because of processes like animal agriculture and until we shift away from it en masse sustainability is an impossible pipedream (see: Livestock's Long Shadow for that in action.)
I don't think animal agriculture is the problem, but rather that over-concentration of animals is attendant to overconcentration of humans. The best thing to do would be to require each animal to exist within the limits of its evolved niche within our society; Goats are raised and used to the extent of the highland grazing we have; sheep or cattle (which I don't eat at all out of religious respect reasons) to the extent of lowland grazing; chickens are fed on scraps and waste and hogs the same. Traditional aquaculture like that practiced in Hawai'i is permitted, but intensive fish farming is not. Harvesting of wild animals is set to carrying limits. The intent of the ecology is honoured, in short.
As for violence, again we don't disagree. I do think that violence against the Other is an inevitable part of existence and has historically been a far larger role in existence. My issue comes from you equivocating inevitable or traditional with inherently good. Just because we had to do it doesn't mean that we shouldn't reduce the process as much as possible. I deal with this more directly below, but it's essentially the same question I asked above: What makes this morally good?
What makes anything morally good? I see it as an inevitability, not a good, that the principles of deep ecology be adhered to--and like I said, see population collapse in the western world and Japan as a corrective of the ecological connections of life that is already being applied. I don't think humans can effectively judge moral good and so have to rely on signs from the world around us as to a rough approximation of what it is; thus my support for traditionalism.
That's an argument I don't buy when there are other more environmentally friendly substitutes in existence that allow us to shift away from unnecessary harm of living life. I also find the claim that just because something was part of the evolutionary process that it must, therefor, be good to be incredibly problematic. Cases in point: A number of evolutionary biologists make the direct claim that the human phallus is designed for engaging in rape, and a number have claimed immensely high rates of rape in early human development. Does this mean rape is something that should be protected? Slavery also seems endemic to human existence up until the modern age. Does the fact that it's played a fundamental role in human evolutionary and historical development protect it from attack? Where's the brightline?
Force change. Then see what the new equilibrium is. But you cannot avoid equilibrium. My objection is trying to keep the oscillations continuing indefinitely, which seems to be a human function. I suspect people like you will succeed enough to end factory farming--and then you will be ignored until you go away. This will serve the purposes of the environmental balance, and the environmental pressures on cultural mimetics are what are driving you. Broadly my belief is that, again, we can only dimly discern morality from how our surroundings organise themselves over a long period of time.
My argument, point blank, is that animal agriculture and consumption is one of those processes that are primarily historical and that once we have the ability to exist without it we ought exist without it.
(This leaves aside the thornier epistemological issue of how we determine what is and isn't a part of evolutionary development and what is an expression of cultural development which is what drove me away from any ability to cling to an idea of intelligible evolutionary development in the first place.)
And my response is that animal herding and grazing practices and fish/shellfish aquaculture will be practiced where they work best and abandoned where they do not, and that attempts to spread them contrary to the environment of a region will ultimately see an envirocultural pushback which will influence that society back into equilibrium with its environment.
What is your objection to the claim that we should do the least amount of harm possible to the other?
My objection isn't to that statement, but rather to the belief that is possible for humans to know what the least amount of harm actually is. I think the ecosystem itself determines that, and drives us into a balanced state--by causing mass death and destruction among humans if necessary, other times by much more subtle methods. The Mayan and the inhabitants of Easter Isle didn't die out. They were just made to conform with the situation on the ground. We will be, also.
Do you honestly think that Nebraska can support two million people with animal flesh as a regular part of the diet without being radically destructive?
It depends on how you define regular. My rate of animal consumption is about 1/20th of the average American; but it still forms an important part of the life of many people in terms of nutrition and other factors. But yes, certainly Nebraska can if managed properly provide the same level of meat consumption as say Ukrainian peasants had in the 16th century.
More importantly, why is it good for the people and environmental processes of Nebraska to engage in such consumption? Are there any benefits beyond human entertainment?
The benefits are unknowable. The only quantifiable trait of an ecoregion is that we know that the native Americans who originally lived there hunted buffalo and that with higher population densities the Ukrainians on similar ecoregions with our cultural heritage herded. So we go with that, and see where the different factors ultimately come into balance over the centuries. Human arrogance is in assuming that exact morality is a knowable trait.
Mostly agreed. I think transportation and certain mechanization processes of plant agriculture are probably good and should be protected as being the least environmentally harmful option (and even beneficial at times), but local consumption is something I support with caveats (I am by no means a 'localvore', usually quite the opposite.)
I only really favour trade in the smallest of dried commodities, since it seems by far the most sustainable -- spices, etc.
Why does the ecoregion need us to kill other beings? That's a very tenative claim at best, and I doubt it follows through to actual sustainability, especially on the scale of human population in present day North America.
I don't know the answer to that question, but humans living in nearly all ecoregions engaged in hunting, and I think that humans living in an ecoregion and doing something that wasn't useful to its balance over a long enough period of time would suffer a corrective and cease to do it. The Mayan stopped building cities except for a few small ceremonial cities around lakes and the inhabitants of Easter Island stopped raising statues. But they both still ate meat. I think if the meat eating was disadvantageous on a large scale, then social collapses as a result of its consumption would have occurred in many cultures over history.
(I will grant that there might be exceptions, deer overpopulation in the North East of the United States being an example of that. The reasons that would make that true, however, come out of human destruction and reconstruction of local environments which would then seem to undercut your broader point that humans are products of, instead of joint producers of, the environment.) Moreover, I'm curious what other system you would propose using besides a question of morality/ethics to judge our engagement with others?
A system of imitating accrued experience for a given area.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. Could you elaborate?
They were driven to adapt to eat meat, if an ecoregion promotes us in eating meat in it, we should accept that also.
I am highly skeptical of claims that 'harmonious' evolution with other groups can involve regular, systemic, brutal violence. I am more curious how you think modern first world culture evolved with, say, the North East corridor. Because that seems to be an ahistorical reading of our relation to other species over the past four hundred years. Perhaps you could define what it means to be harmonious with a group, because right now I think a case could be made based on the way you're phrasing it that European civilization had a harmonious relationship with Jewish groups in the Middle Ages.
I'm referring to harmony with the ecoregion as a collectivity, not necessarily the species themselves, which may be in strife and conflict--Spotted Owls may for instance be driven extinct, but the Owl species taking their place will be driven to behave in similar ways to them, taking their place in the ecoregion.
It pushed me traditionalist too for a while, but it made me look a lot more at power relations which ended up with me engaging directly with Foucault and Agamben, then with a number of other theorists which eventually made me realize the inherent mass violence that is coupled with traditional power structures and turned me into whatever I am today.
Foucault just cemented an anti-modernist belief set in me. Probably because I'm willing to accept the spectacle and paegentry of traditional punishment and regard violence as normative in state organisation without any real reason to criticize it, just as we don't criticize violence between wolf and deer; whereas, to me, the modern Panoptical surveillance apparatus is troubling, even fundamentally terrifying at the core of my being.
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