The Coming Crisis: Environmental Disaster, The Global Meat Culture, And

Your Health

"Where there is disharmony in the world, death follows," an ancient Navajo saying

I. The Dialectic Of Western Culture

In so many ways, western culture is the pinnacle of human civilization: it is without

parallel in its scientific and technological achievements; it is home of the
enlightenment and critical reason; it has borne a pantheon of philosophical geniuses
from Plato and to Kant and Nietzsche; it spawned the tradition of democracy that
grants every person, theoretically at least, basic rights regardless of race, color,
gender, or creed.

But there is another aspect of western culture that we donít like to think about,
another face that is ugly and scarred, a dark side of the light of reason; here we find
a culture bent on the domination and exploitation of all forms of life.

Side by side with the bible, Greek philosophy, the discovery of new worlds, the
declaration of independence, and brilliant medical and echnological advances we find
slavery, authoritarianism, inquisitions, imperialism, genocide, an appalling abuse of
animals, and the rape of the natural world.

This dark side of western culture has brought us to the brink of disaster --
ecologically, socially, economically, spiritually, and in our very bodies.

Ancient eastern cultures were founded on the principle of ahimsa -- the absence of
desire to do harm; this entails a profound respect for life, a deep sense of connection
with living processes, and a way of life in harmony with the world.

Western culture, however, especially in modern form, is founded on the desire to

control; it is informed by an arrogance that separates human beings from everything
natural; in fact, it is a nature-hating culture.

The western mind is built on a sharp distinction between culture and nature; culture
is the domain of reason, to which men alone belong, and where they exercise
rationality as a means of control; women, seen to be full of emotion and passion, but
lacking reason, were relegated to the sphere of nature and hence, with animals and
the natural world, were targeted as objects to be subdued and controlled.

The doubly unfortunate result of this dualism is that culture has been separated from
natural history, as reason has been estranged from the emotions, while the living
things of "nature," both animals and women, have been reduced to mere biology and
denied a complex subjective life.

In a word, or maybe two, western culture is patriarchal and anthropocentric, male-

dominated and human- centered; man, literally, is the measure of all things -- he
alone deems what is of value and values accordingly; man places himself at the apex

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of creation, second only to god, and sees all other things as mere means to his ends,
having only instrumental value, devoid of intrinsic value.

The Hebrew religion was the first world religion to create a sharp distinction between
man and nature and to desacrilize nature; in the Christian religion, we find a value
system that claims god created man in his image, and just as god is ruler of man,
man is ruler of the earth and the animals.

These attitudes were passed on to the contemporary world through Greek humanism,
medieval and renaissance philosophy, and modern science.

As Aristotle put the utilitarian ethos of western thought so well, "plants exist for the
sake of animals, and brute beasts for the sake of man ... Since nature makes nothing
purposeless or in vain, it is undeniably true that she has made all animals for the
sake of man."

If everything was made for man, then he only need discover the laws of the universe
to apply them toward the control of life; this was the vision of Bacon and Descartes at
the dawn of the modern world; in Bacon's words, "let the human race recover that
right over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest"; not surprisingly, his writings
are filled with images of violence, conquest, and rape; Descartes rigidly separated
mind from body, humans from animals, and saw the world as a vast machine; he
urged men to become "lords and possessors of nature."

By desacrilizing nature, the western mind could exploit it without the qualms other
cultures had in disturbing a living, evolving process; to cite another crucial figure in
the early development of modern science, Robert Boyle: "the veneration wherewith
men are imbued for what they call nature has been a discouraging impediment to the
empire of man over the inferior creatures of god."

Clearly, reverence for life is an impediment for domination over it; it is no wonder
that a crucial part of the training of scientists is desensitization to life, the
replacement of respect with "objectivity," all too often a mask for cruelty as in the
case of animal experimentation.

Once the anthropocentric vision was implemented through the power of modern
science and technology, within the context of a capitalist economy where nothing is
sacred but profit itself, the western culture of death in very short order began to
destroy everything in its path, premodern and nonwestern cultures, the animal
kingdom, and the natural world.

We are now living in think in the final stages of this process; the current social order
is recklessly tearing down the pillars of evolution that have taken nature billions of
years to construct.

II. Apocalypse Now? The Environmental Crisis

In contrast to the visions of progress that prevailed in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the last part of the twentieth century feels like a ride on the titanic or the
U.S. Spaceship challenger.

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The feeling of doom and ending that pervades contemporary life is not unique; in
nearly all times different cultures found it difficult to imagine how the world could
continue after their own demise.

In fact, the early origins of western culture in Judeo-Christian history are deeply
rooted in the apocalyptic consciousness of the book of revelations, the notion of
armageddon, and the vision of the second coming -- all of which are part of the
catastrophic mindset of the extreme right, the survivalists, and militia movements
sprouting all over the country today like poisonous weeds.

Yet, if these visions of apocalypse were once rooted in fantasies and paranoia, only in
the last few decades, under the panoply of atomic mushroom clouds and punctured
ozone holes, have they had any plausibility.

With the successful testing of the atom bomb in the New Mexican desert on July 16,
1945, and its devastating use on Hiroshima less than one month later, armageddon
shifted from distant fantasy to impending possibility; while the threat of nuclear
apocalypse has subsided somewhat for now (with the exception of nuclear terrorism),
we are facing a new threat unthinkable to the cold war culture of the 1940s and
1950s -- the threat of systemic environmental collapse.

Consider a few facts:

*The natural resources that sustain life, such as air, water, and soil, are seriously
poisoned or depleted.
The ozone layer is thinning and tearing, creating conditions of global warming; there
is a mounting scientific consensus that we have indeed entered a greenhouse world;
this is suggested by phenomena such as unprecedented levels of skin cancer in
Argentina, unparalleled heat waves in Chicago and droughts in Spain, and the
breaking up of a 48 by 22 mile chunk of the Larsen ice shelf in Antarctica; a
greenhouse world with a surface temperature rise of 4-9 degrees in will be
characterized by severe drought, flooding, super-ferocious hurricanes, environmental
dislocation, economic crisis, and a massive cost to human life through heat and
diseases like malaria.

*Global warming is worsened by the destruction of the rainforests, whereby living

trees that give off oxygen instead release accumulated carbon dioxide when cut
down; since 1945, half of the world's rainforests have been destroyed; 140,000 acres
are demolished every day, 8 acres every few seconds; although only 7% of the
earth's total area, the rainforests contain 50% of all animal and plant species,
including the plants that may prove crucial one day to cure human diseases.

*The human population continues to rise at an alarming rate which is approaching

four births per second, over fourteen thousand per hour, nearly one hundred million
per year; the world population doubled in the past four decades and is projected to
increase to between 11 and 15 billion by the middle of the twenty-first century;
clearly, this will further the destruction of other species, the rainforests, vital
resources, as well as causing more human suffering in the form of hunger, poverty,
and disease.

*Animal species right now are facing the greatest extinction crisis since the dinosaur
age 65 million years ago; we are losing species over 100 to 1000 times the normal
rate of extinction; 1000 species a year are destroyed, a figure that is rapidly
increasing; conservation biologists predict that within next few decades, over 1/3 of

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species will be destroyed; some have claimed that vertebrae evolution has come to a
halt.
While some animals teeter on the brink of extinction, others are mass produced and
slaughtered in a supply so abundant and pervasive that most people consider the
natural order of things; billions of animals meet grisly deaths each year in the
slaughterhouses of the U.S. alone -- 7 billion chickens and 53 million pigs

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III. The Global Meat Culture

Let's face a basic fact: the main force driving the modern juggernaut of death is the
capitalist economy acting out its lust for profit; whether our focus is the HMO
industry, biomedical research, the mass media, the tobacco corporations, or the
structure of research in the universities, the profit imperative always takes
precedence over any moral imperative.

But the creme de la creme of corporate destruction are the meat and diary
industries, or what I call the global meat culture; for example, the water pollution
attributable to U.S. Agriculture is greater than all municipal and industrial sources
combined; one third of all raw materials are consumed by the livestock industry; the
great majority of rainforest destruction is caused by the livestock and feed-crop
industries; and so on.

The global meat culture began in the 16th century as Spain sought to establish a
profitable cattle complex in the Americas and West Indies; its epicenter moved
across Europe three centuries later as the English people acquired an addictive taste
for meat as both food and status symbol; they colonized Ireland and Scotland and
turned their lands into grazing grounds, pushing the people off their land.

The dynamics of GMC shifted to the U.S. Just after the civil war, when American
entrepreneurs colonized it for raising cattle, after slaughtering 4 million buffalo and
disposing of the native Indians.

Very quickly, cattle raising became a major source of profit and a few U.S.
Corporations monopolized the entire market which it began to export around the
world; and today we see a disturbing pattern where one of the first things a
developing country does is to replace a plant-based diet with a meat-based diet, and
their health, environment, and social relations deteriorate accordingly.

The global beef culture is directly implicated in almost every major problem we face
today (cf. handout and cf. Robbins handout for environmental stats).

Environmentally:

* Because of the impact of their hoofs and foraging, cattle are a prime force of
destruction of the land and topsoil throughout the world; the 21 inches of topsoil the
U.S. Had two centuries ago has eroded to a mere six inches, a coming crisis masked
by chemical fertilizers.

* Much of the rainforest is cleared to provide grazing ground for cattle; this is the
leading cause of rainforest destruction in Brazil, Bolivia, Columbia, and throughout
Central America.

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* Ruminant animals contribute directly to the release of 3 out of 4 major ozone
depleting gases: nitrous oxide (fertilizer), carbon dioxide (tree cutting), and methane;
cow farts are potentially an amusing subject, but is also a very serious one: cows and
other ruminant animals release 80 million tons of methane gas each year and animal
waste at the feedlots and factory farms emits another 35 million tons; some see
methane gas as becoming the primary global warming gas in the next 50 years.

* Animals outweigh human beings on the earth by a 3 to 1 ratio; a visitor to this

planet from outer space would think that cattle are the dominant species of life; the 2
billion tons of animal waste products produced every year contaminate rivers, lakes,
oceans, and underground water sources with nitrates and other deadly chemicals;
nitrogen and phosphorous in manure over-fertilize algae and deplete oxygen levels in
water, thereby choking all other forms of life; they can cause nervous system
impairments, cancer, and blue baby syndrome.

* The GMC involves a tremendous waste of food, water, land, and energy: 80% of our
corn and 95% of our oats supply goes to feed cattle rather than directly feeding
human beings; 64% of agricultural land in the U.S. Is used to grow food for livestock,
compared to only 2% for fruits and vegetables; over half of the water consumed is
used to irrigate land for livestock food; almost half of the total energy expended in
American agriculture is devoted to livestock production.

Human and economic costs:

* By wasting food, the global meat culture contributes directly to the world hunger
problem: as livestock consumes half of the world's resources, 60 million people in the
world starve to death every year, including 40,000 children who die of hunger every
day.

* Third world countries gravitating toward a meat-based diet quickly become

economically dependent on other countries for import of livestock food; the situation
is exploited by international development agencies like the world bank who provide
monetary loans with political strings attached.

* Once imported, the GMC always widens the gap between rich and poor as it shifts
food production from staples to livestock, thus contributing to world hunger in yet
another way.

* Since the beginnings of the GMC, governments have provided massive subsidies to
various industries associated with meat production -- such as incredibly cheap land
for lease and water for irrigation, government storage of food, tax credits, import
levies, and product insurance; the total value of subsidized irrigation water used by
animal feed growers, for instance, is $500 million to $1 billion every year.

Of course, we all foot the bill for this in our taxes; if U.S. Taxpayers did not heavily
subsidize the water, land, and energy used by the meat industry, common
hamburger meat would cost $35 a pound; people would therefore eat much less of it
and the all of the problems caused by the GMC could be drastically reduced!
We also pay for the huge medical costs to treat the diseases caused by poor diet;
meat eating is directly responsible for up to $61 billion dollars in health care costs
that we all pay in taxes.

Health:

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Diet is the major contributing factor to most of the diseases of advanced industrial
cultures: colon, cervical, and breast cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes,
osteoporosis, and other diseases are directly the result of a diet laced with animal
fat.

The correlation between disease and animal fat has been proven by many studies,
but none as illustrious as the famous china project which tracked the diet of
thousands of Chinese people in dozens of countries; it showed that as fat and protein
consumption and blood cholesterol levels rise, so does the incidence of disease;
Chinese villagers who lived off of low-fat, low meat diets, had far less diseases.

To give just two examples of the health risks of consuming animal fat: the average
American man faces a 50% risk of heart attack, compared to the total vegetarian
man who faces only as 4% risk; women who consume meat face a four times greater
risk of developing breast cancer as women who eat little or no meat.
Americans eat more than twice the amount of protein they need, along with the
excess saturated fat in meat; the excess protein alone causes osteoporosis and
kidney disease.

Because of deregulation practices begun in the Reagan years, the public has been
eating increasingly unsafe meat; although the USDA gives these toxic corpses its
stamp of approval (with red dye #5), most of it is not fit for dog food, which is not a
very nice thing to say about dogs I know (cf. handout).

The contamination of meat and poultry with harmful bacteria kills more than 4,000
people a year in the U.S. And sickens as many as 5 million.

And now Americans face the real danger of mad cow disease since meat producers,
to save as much money as possible, feed cows the remains of cows and other
animals, the same practice which lead to occurrences of the disease in Britain.
By peddling their poisons through deception and propaganda, the meat and diary
industries have caused major health problems; seizing on scientific data from 1914
that showed that rats grew larger through animal rather than plant-based protein,
the meat and dairy industries have sold generations of Americans a huge lie.
Perhaps the most destructive myth of our time, more harmful that the red menace,
more pervasive than the belief in Santa Claus, is the protein myth; the protein myth
says (1) that we all need huge amounts of protein, and (2) that meat and dairy
products are the best sources of this protein.

False on both counts -- have you ever asked yourself where do animals like cows get
their protein? The healthiest sources of protein come from plant-based foods and a
well-balanced diet automatically provides you with the protein you need.

We have all been victims of this propaganda through the posters in our grade-school
classrooms that praised the blessings of the four food groups, telling us that half of
our daily caloric intake should be animal fat!

The recently revised food pyramid is an improvement, but was approved by the
government only through strong pressure from the meat and diary industries; the
pyramid tells us that we should have 4-6 servings of meat and diary products a day,
which is exactly 4-6 servings too many.

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Animal fat is bad enough in itself, but it has been laced with powerful chemicals that
cause disease; since the 1940s, the family farm has been taken over by large
agricultural corporations that have transformed the open, sunlit farm into a dark
prison where animals are confined and mass produced as commodities.

Under these conditions, animals are pumped full of drugs such as growth steroids for
maximum weight and antibiotics to control the diseases that grow like a plague in
these conditions.

55% of the total antibiotics used in the U.S. Are fed to livestock; the abuse of these
drugs have caused serious health damage in human beings; until the early 1940s,
people in the most advanced countries lived in fear of deadly plagues and diseases;
but beginning in 1944, the era of antibiotics arrived and penicillin was hailed as a
"miracle drug"; with vaccines soon available against polio, tuberculosis, smallpox,
and other diseases, medical science believed it could "close the book on infectious
diseases" (1967 surgeon general).
This complacency was shattered first in the late 1960s, with the return of yellow
fever, meningitis, and other diseases.

Many diseases like malaria and tuberculosis have evolved into drug-resistant strains
because of the overuse of antibiotics; indeed, almost all disease-causing bacteria
today are on their way to complete drug resistance.

As if not bad enough, since 1973, 30 previously unknown diseases began to appear,
such as Lyme Disease, Legionnaire's Disease, Toxic Shock Syndrome, and AIDS;
deadly new viruses such as the Marburg virus, Ebola, and Lassa Fever also appeared
during this time.

One important cause of new diseases like Ebola is environmental disruptions such as
the decimation of the rain forests; the diversity of a healthy ecosystem keeps
organisms and diseases in check; disturbing ecological balance creates opportunities
for microbes to grow in number and strength.

Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone, provocatively suggests that through
diseases like AIDS and Ebola, the earth is mounting an immune response to the
increasing invasive human species, to the 5.4 billion parasites attacking its flesh and
vital organs.

IV. Toward Sustainable Bodies And Cultures

The GMC is obviously unsustainable in its present form: supporting the world's
current population of 6 billion on an American style, meat-based diet would require 2
1/2 times as much grain as the world's farmers can now produce for all purposes; to
support a future world population of 8 to 14 billion people is impossible.

We can no longer base our society on a fetishization of growth and development; the
new goal of human beings must now be to develop a sustainable culture that reduces
human needs, many artificially generated by the media, and learns to live in
harmony with the natural world; to accomplish this, of course, many changes need to
be made -- changes in our economic, legal, and educational systems; changes in
mass media and advertising.

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These changes seem very difficult and distant indeed; yet there is one crucial change
that we can all make immediately if we haven't yet, and that is a shift to a vegetarian
diet.

Consumer demand fuelled the growth of the GMC and it can also deflate it; if this
demand was increased through propaganda, then it can be decreased through
effective public education.

Indeed, despite the propaganda of the GMC, there is a growing consensus that the
healthiest diet is a vegetarian diet, preferably a vegan diet; even the AMA and U.S.
Dept. Of agriculture have been forced to admit this recently.

The good news is that since 1976, the average meat consumption per person in the
U.S. Has fallen 14%, and similar declines can be found in countries like England,
Australia, and New Zealand.

The bad news is that developing third world countries and traditional second world
countries like china are shifting increasingly toward a meat-based diet.

But the revolution starts at home, one meal at a time; by greatly reducing or
eliminating the amount of animal fat in our diet we not only help ourselves, we also
help the animals and the environment.

Imagine a truly new world order, a new global vegetarian culture; this culture, rather
than wasting 90% of the protein in grains, 96% of calories, 100% of fiber, and 100%
of carbohydrates, instead of squandering so much of its land, water, and energy, it
would put its resources to the most rational and efficient use, as it respected the
entire process of life.

If Americans reduced their meat consumption by only 10%, 100 million more people
could be fed with the available land, water, and energy freed from growing livestock
feed; with the land no longer used to grow feed, the forests could be regrown and the
animals could return.

With a new sustainable culture would come new sustainable bodies; in our current
post-antibiotic environment, we must reexamine our basic assumptions about health;
the prevailing medical system and mentality is clearly a disaster.

In 1995 alone, the U.S.. spent over 1.4 trillion dollars in "health care." Health care
costs are increasing around 180 billion dollars a year and will hit the 2 trillion dollar
mark by the year 2000, as Medicaid and Medicare now plunge into bankruptcy. The
department of health and human services estimates that by the year 2030, as
America's baby boomers reach their seventies and eighties, health care expenditures
will top 16 trillion annually.

Moreover, after 100 years of intensive animal-based research we are losing ground in
the war against disease rather than finding solid cures. Since president Nixon
launched the "war on cancer" in 1971, the rate of cancer incidence has risen 18%
and the rate of cancer death has increased by 7%.

For society to make true progress in the control of disease, it must abandon its
Cartesian outlook which denies the unity of the mindbody field and shift emphasis
toward a more holistic vision. It must shift from faith in the technological "fix" of the

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body through drugs and surgery to a preventative outlook that places the burden of
health responsibility on each individual. If we are now under attack by deadly
diseases, old and new, we must all do what we can to strengthen our immune
systems, a goal greatly enhanced by a vegetarian diet.

As if by karmic justice, our medical problems directly relate to the exploitation of

animals: we experiment on animals to find cures for the very diseases that largely
stem from our consumption of animal products in the first place; and because animal
research is misleading, fraudulent, and blocks superior alternatives such as clinic
research, we are again harming and killing ourselves through our misguided relation
to animals.

Perhaps the most basic changes that need to be made are changes in our morals,
values, and ways we relate to the natural world. We have to decisively overcome the
poisoned legacy of anthropocentrism; we can no longer see the world in terms of us
vs. them, human beings separate from animals and the natural world; cows are cows,
not hamburgers; trees are trees, not timber; we need to relearn the nature and
meaning if intrinsic value.

We need to abandon the old atomistic mode of thinking which says that we can
isolate one part of the world from another in order to control it and replace it with a
new holistic or ecological approach which sees everything as interconnected in ways
so complex we can never fully comprehend them and we best not disturb the world
too much.

The next step in human evolution must not be in science and technology, but in our
moral and spiritual life; the gap between our technological evolution and moral
evolution is as dangerous as it is wide. We live in conditions where, in Martin Luther
King's words, "misguided men employ guided missiles."

To evolve as human beings, we must attain a viewpoint of profound compassion and

respect for life; this entails embracing an ethic of non-violence. To be consistent, we
cannot limit this ethic to human beings, but must extend it to animals to; and we
must exemplify it in all our actions, beginning with our food choices and diet; no one
can rightly claim to love animals at the same time they eat them and perpetuate
their painful slaughter.

In the words of Thomas Edison, "non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the
goal of all evolution; until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still
savages."

Vegetarianism will never be a sufficient condition to change the world, but it is a

necessary condition, an idea whose time has clearly come. With Henry David
Thoreau, i believe that "it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual
development to leave off the eating of animals."