What One Does in the Dark

Progress

When one considers the social progress that has been made in the course of human history, there is a great deal to be grateful for. We used to live in societies where women and non-whites were subjugated, where sexual expression was repressed, where healthcare and education were rudimentary and hardly available to the lower classes. However, over the course of centuries, progress has been made. The evolution of more democratic forms of government seems to have facilitated the improvement of health and education services. Many forms of discrimination have been abolished or legislated against, generally as the result of a mass movement. Ideas previously overlooked, such as animal rights, have also seen progress – the Great Ape Project, founded in 1993, aims to have non-human great apes granted several basic rights.

Reflecting upon this, it seems that there is some sort of path that human civilisation is on. This path leads to a society that is characterised by greater equality and respect for all of its members. Whether or not there is some ‘city on the hill’ where all conceivable social progress has been made, or whether it is an endless journey, there is no doubt that humanity as a whole is more than just it has historically been. While recent developments in the context of global terrorism have seen these rights violated in some instances, this situation of human social progress, can be thought of like a ratchet, such that each step, once made, is almost irreversible, and that a right or recognition, once granted, is now available for all humans.

This sort of advancement can also be seen in humanity’s attitude towards the environment. While it is true that human environmental destruction is greater than it ever has been, even to the point of threatening current civilisation, our awareness of the vulnerability of the environment seems to be more acute than ever, no doubt partly motivated by a selfish awareness that environmental destruction will spell our own demise. The banning of CFCs, in terms of environmental protection, is comparable to other developments in social progress: there was something wrong, laws and attitudes changed, and now humanity is in a better place than it was. Personally, I see a lot of hope in this regard. Opportunities to help the environment abound more than ever, and people are taking advantage of these. On a recent trip to Melbourne, I was able to bus to and from the airport. I took a bus back to Adelaide and offset my emissions. The camp I attended had an ‘Environmental Sustainability Officer’, who had overseen revegetation projects and the installation of rainwater tanks, which supplied water for showering or gardening. A friend who put me up for a night or two had an awe-inspiring vegetable garden. Her organic waste went into a compost for this garden and other waste was recycled as much as possible. In South Australia, a ban on plastic bags has been introduced and, once it takes effect, customers will have to use the re-usable ‘green bags’ that are the obvious solution to the problem of disposable bags. In addition to this, the state has met its target of 20% energy from renewable sources. Federally, a similar target is to be instituted, and the introduction of a Carbon Trading Scheme in 2010 will no doubt also encourage environmentally sustainable practises. One might think that, on the environmental front, things are just peachy.

Well, it’s not quite a case of ‘you couldn’t be more wrong’, but there is one difference between making social progress and making environmental progress. The social advances that have been made didn’t occur in an environment of urgency. Women campaigning for women’s rights didn’t need to achieve their goal by a certain time and, while the existence of discrimination in the past would always be sad, it would be possible to prevent it from directly affecting the present once equal rights were gained. Regarding gay marriage, while I think that it should be made legal, I don’t fervently campaign for it: when Prop. 8, a proposition to remove the right of gay people to marry, passed in California: 62% of voters over 65 voted for it, a similar proportion of younger voters voted against it. This demonstrates that the legalisation of gay marriage is almost inevitable – it is a simply a matter of time, as those who would vote against it are gradually taken to the grave. While it is shameful that it will take maybe twenty more years for this injustice to be righted, those twenty years aren’t much considering the centuries of injustice that preceded them.

Environmental progress is a different ball game, because even if it may be desirable, there is an inescapable deadline on making change. Lowering of our carbon emissions is definitely set to happen, as technologies continue to improve and people continue to realise how easy it is to change. This lowering is urgent, and must occur within the next few years. Head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, a scientist and an economist, has made it clear:

“If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

Tackling climate change isn’t comparable to opposing apartheid or supporting the legalisation of euthanasia: climate change is a threat to human civilisation that demands immediate and urgent action. If this action occurs doesn’t occur in time, even if it does eventually, the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere will contribute to irreversibel change. A rapid reduction in emissions from 2010 would still result in 2.1 – 2.8ºC rise in global temperature by 2100. On our current emissions path, we are looking at 5.5 C: mass extinction, ocean acidification, desertification, brutal heat-waves and rising sea levels.

Climate Change isn’t an unfortunate injustice that ought to be righted some time in the future. It is a threat to human civilisation as we know it.

Image courtesy of westcoastclimateequity.org

Vegetarianism

In the back of our minds, we are each aware that there are millions of people dying each year from starvation – in a single day, thousands. Many organisations like to make us aware of this but do little else. Even donations to Caritas, or participation in the 40-hour famine seem to me to be actions that, for all their good effects, largely ignore the real issue here. That issue isn’t that these people don’t have enough money or that there isn’t enough food. It’s a whole lot of different things. This is about one of these things, the inequitable distribution of food. It’s also about what can be done.

What I’m talking about is absolute poverty: an issue that directly impacts upon no reading this and very few people in Australia. I’m not looking at the world poverty that has been an object of political discussion for at least thirty years. I’m not interested in the decades of suffering and the inaction that has historically accompanied it, with successive generations pledging to do their bit and consistently failing. What I’m interested in is looking at world poverty in the modern context of the world food crisis. This is because it is current, it is a moral disaster, and because there are things that we can do.

This ‘food crisis’ might come as news to some of you. This is because we are lucky to be of the first world or, as some people call it, the minority world – a title ironically contrasting the first world’s relatively miniscule population with its vast consumption. Because of our lucky position, all the world food crisis means to most westerners is having slightly less money to spend on mobile phones, jewelry, or new shoes for the school formal. We are allowed to smugly continue our unsustainable habits of consumption, pretending that these problems can be solved without real change. The reality is far different.

In the majority world, including the ‘two dollars per day’ world that is 45% of the world’s population, this food crisis is another matter altogether. Whereas in the western world 15% of income, on average, is spent on food, the world’s marginalized spend up to 75%. And of late, for a number of different reasons, food prices have been rising. Since the start of 2006, the average world price for rice has risen by 217%, wheat by 136%, maize by 125% and soybeans by 107%. These products are staple food items in much of the majority world, and their increased cost has had a vast human toll: people can no longer afford to eat. The poverty of these people means that they can get priced out of the market, the food that could have fed them going to a consumer who is able to pay more. They can’t compete.

So, in Haiti, people, to live, have had to make salted cakes of mud to eat. In Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, The Ivory Coast, Egypt, Haiti, India, Mozambique, Senegal, Somalia and Yemen, people have launched protests against rising food prices and the failure by governments to deal with the issue. Malnutrition already kills 3.5 million children annually, and this is going to get worse.

Think about this: Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. This is common knowledge and it is an event that the media remembers, that people and governments remember, that is recognised.

On the other hand, seven million children died in the time it took me to complete my SACE. Seven million. One person for every millimetre in seven kilometres. Everyone who lives in Sydney and Melbourne. And so little is being done. This is a reality that no one with enough food to eat can begin to understand. People are literally dying because they don’t have enough food. We aren’t talking about an artistic tableau demonstrating the plight of the homeless. We are talking about 30 000 children under 5 every day. This is sickening. It’s sickening that it happens, it’s sickening that not enough is being done, it’s sickening that it isn’t on the conscience of every single westerner.

It’s too easy to hear this, as we all have, before, to varying degrees and think: ‘nuts…this problem is too big for me, I can’t cancel the debt, I can’t make trade fair, I can’t give more aid.’ Well yeah, you can’t. But there is one thing that everyone can do, and, I believe this: one thing that everyone should do to try to minimise the suffering in our world.

While there are lots of different things contributing to the food crisis, one of them is meat consumption. Eating meat contributes to the suffering of millions, of billions of people the world over.
Because, to be prepared for slaughter, cows, pigs, chooks, sheep, are fed food specially grown for them on huge areas of land. The animals ssentially are transformers: they convert this vegetable protein from corn, or grain, or maize into animal protein. This is a hugely inefficient process. According the theory of trophic dynamics, the study of the energy economics of natural systems, it requires ten times as many crops to feed animals being bred for meat production as it would to feed the same number of people on a vegetarian diet. What this means is that ten times as many people could be fed if the meat wasn’t involved.

What this means is that land is being used to grow food, and this food is going to animals for meat: it is not going to people. In the US, 70% of grain is consumed by cattle, not people – with a horrific human toll. According to ecology professor David Pimentel, “If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million.” Worldwide, of the 2.13bn tonnes of grain likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, less than 50%, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, will feed people. 760m tonnes will go to chickens, pigs and cows for meat, instead of the world’s starving. This amount could cover the global food deficit 14 times. The raising of animals for food is condemning people, all over the world, to starvation. This is about humanity. This is about preventing injustice. And this is a heinous injustice that needs to be righted.

Whether or not you are vegetarian, the less meat you eat the better. Less meat eaten means less food going to animals for meat and more food going to people to live. Simple.

It is easy to look back on past generations and criticise their moral ignorance: issues such as slavery, apartheid, the subjugation of women, the Stolen Generation, seem almost to be too obviously wrong to have ever happened. It’s much harder to look at our own generation in the same way. Acting morally isn’t just about taking big stands on controversial issues. It’s about living so that your decisions make the world a better place. I initially became vegetarian to prevent animal suffering. Since then I have learned more and more about vegetarianism and have become more and more resolute. The meat I don’t eat means that there is more food for the rest of the world. Food that goes to the world’s deprived instead of the world’s depraved. This is a choice that you each has to make. The power is on your plate.