acti-veg - Tumblr blog

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This feels like a really silly thing have to post but it has become quite clear to me that an awful lot of people I encounter online do not know this (or are at least pretending they don’t) so I’m going to spell it out as if we’re all five.

People seem to treat veganism as some sort of exclusive choice that means you don’t choose anything else. ‘Eating local is much more sustainable than eating vegan!’ This isn’t true, but even if it were, how is this an argument against veganism?

Think of it like this - a checklist where you can select more than one option. Ticking ‘go vegan’ doesn’t magically grey out all of the other options. You can both wear vegan clothes and avoid plastic, you can eat vegan food and support local farmers, you can be vegan and support Fairtrade.  We don’t all have the same options available to us, but choosing one doesn’t take away any of the others. I can’t afford to buy all organic or local, for example, but I can afford to be vegan and buy at least mostly Fairtrade coffee, chocolate and fruit.

You need to all stop pretending that being vegan means you’re buying ‘child slave quinoa’ (again, not even true), or that it means you’re wearing plastic jackets, or that all your food is imported. These are lazy, fallacious, intellectually dishonest false dilemmas that don’t serve your argument and do absolutely nothing to help workers, animals or the planet.

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My biggest pet peeve about sustainability discourse is that, yeah, a handful of companies are fucking us all over, and yeah, we need fundamental change coming from the government. But also you need to understand that you can't have both things:

You can't have zero single use plastic and only sustainable materials and expect to be able to afford brand new clothes every month.

You can't have an increase in workers rights protections and expect to still get things you order online delivered to your house in a couple of days.

You can't have meat production reduced to the point where it's not environmental destructive and expect to be eating meat more than a couple times a week at most.

We NEED big scale change but that WILL significantly affect your lifestyle. You need to stop living in a fantasy world where fast fashion prices or eating animal products daily can ever coexist with sustainability.

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“Can’t people see that? Are there minds incapable of reaching beyond petty, selfish pleasures? People have a duty toward Animals to lead them - in successive lives - to Liberation. We’re all traveling in the same direction, from dependence to freedom, from ritual to free choice.”

- Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

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The Rwanda bill has been passed. People seeking asylum in the UK are no longer safe. This bill has been criticised by many human rights groups, yet parliment have still decided to go ahead with it. People are seeking safety in the UK, and are being turned away. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.". The Rwanda bill prevents this. There is no conformation that people sent to Rwanda will be safe there. This is a blatant violation of human rights. Asylum seekers are human too, and they should be treated as such.

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Not feminist as in "women should be included in the draft" but feminist as in "being drafted is a violation of bodily autonomy for any gender".

The draft should not exist. Drafting people into the military is a violation of human rights. You should not be able to force someone to risk their life. If you can't find enough people who care about a conflict to keep it going then it simply shouldn't keep going. You can't even force someone to donate a kidney using government power, why the fuck can you force them to donate their whole body and life to a cause they don't agree with or don't care about?

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Lindt, Mondelēz, and Nestlé together raked in nearly $4 billion in profits from chocolate sales in 2023. Hershey’s confectionary profits totaled $2 billion last year. The four corporations paid out on average 97 percent of their total net profits to shareholders in 2023. The collective fortunes of the Ferrero and Mars families, who own the two biggest private chocolate corporations, surged to $160.9 billion during the same period. This is more than the combined GDPs of Ghana and Ivory Coast, which supply most cocoa beans. Decades of low prices have made farmers poorer and hampered their ability to hire workers or invest in their farms, limiting bean yield. Old cocoa trees are particularly vulnerable to disease and extreme weather. Many farmers are abandoning cocoa for other crops, or selling their land to illegal miners.

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Academics and scholars have vowed to boycott Columbia University over its repressive policies against protesting students in shocking scenes that have sparked a wider student movement for Palestine across the US.

Over the past 24 hours, student encampments have mushroomed in colleges - on the east coast, in particular - with more anticipated to begin over the next few days. Middle East Eye is aware of at least two other universities that are planning similar encampments which have not been announced yet.

Student encampments demanding divestment from companies involved in Israel's occupation of Palestinian land and "genocide" in Gaza have popped up at the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology (MIT); Tufts and Emerson in Boston; New York University and The New School in New York City; Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee; Yale University in Connecticut; University of California-Berkeley; The University of Michigan; Washington University in St Louis; and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[...]

The targeting of students, the attacks on academic freedom and the policing of speech at the university from administrators has also drawn condemnation from several academics and scholars with ties with Columbia.

On Monday, academic Marc Lamont Hill, presidential professor at CUNY, said he would be pulling out of his scheduled lecture from Columbia over the ongoing repression at the university.

Faculty at Columbia and Barnard College on Monday staged a walkout in support of students.

Hours earlier, the Graduate Center Program in English announced a full academic boycott of Columbia and Barnard College "until they reinstate suspended students and respond to their demands: transparency, divestment, liberation".

Several others have released public statements cutting ties with the prestigious university.

22 Apr 24

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That honey post keeps coming across my dash. Bur as far as I know, in North America Honey bees are bad for the environment? Native bees are what we need and honey bees cause declines in their numbers. Google brings a lot of articles on this. Here is one from scientific America. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-honey-bees/

I’m not sure which honey post you mean, there are quite a few floating around making claims about honey ‘saving the bees.’

When we’re talking about honey, it is important to remember that we are discussing managed hives of domesticated bees, most of whom are non-native and compete with natural pollinators for the same food sources. It is even thought they may be spreading disease to wild pollinators, too, who do a far better job of pollination than managed hives do. This is why research suggests where domesticated hives increase, wild bees decrease.

The best way to actually support wild pollinators and their ecosystem is to grow local, pollinator-friendly flowers and to provide them with natural habitats and constructed ones like bug boxes, which are widely available to buy and very easy to make. The claim that exploiting bees for profit is in some way good for bees or good for the environment is nothing but effective marketing.

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You can’t be anti-capitalist and anti-ableism if you base someone’s worth off of whether they can work or not.

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I am very lactose intolerant so I drink vegan dairy products, yet sometimes I still get stomach problems is this just a placebo effect or is the milk in my vegan milk?!

It won’t be dairy in your vegan milk, it’s far more likely that you just have other sensitivities that you aren’t aware of. If you’re getting stomach problems directly after having vegan milk then you may want to try a different variety of plant milk, or alternatively, an unsweetened version in case it’s the sugars.

If you are just generally getting stomach problems then it’s likely to be from something you’re eating, so it may be a case of trial and error finding out what it is. It could also be nothing to do with diet or your lactose intolerance, so if it persists then the first step should be to see a doctor just in case.

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"Animals do not ‘give’ their life to us, as the sugar-coated lie would have it. No, we take their lives. They struggle and fight to the last breath, just as we would do if we were in their place."

– John Robbins

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‘We cannot protect our environment while continuing to eat meat regularly. This is not a refutable perspective, but a banal truism.

Whether they become Whoppers or boutique grass-fed steaks, cows produce an enormous amount of greenhouse gas. If cows were a country, they would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world. According to the research director of Project Drawdown — a nonprofit organization dedicated to modeling solutions to address climate change — eating a plant-based diet is “the most important contribution every individual can make to reversing global warming.”

Americans overwhelmingly accept the science of climate change. A majority of both Republicans and Democrats say that the United States should have remained in the Paris climate accord. We don’t need new information, and we don’t need new values. We only need to walk through the open door.’

-The End of Meat is Here, Jonathan Safran Foer writing in the New York Times, 2020

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Loving animals is a privilege. To see the richness and beauty of their lives. It's in every cat sitting on a windowsill. It's every dog that people are walking. It's also the flies that lose their way in my apartment. It's the spiders that used to scare me. It's the hope-you're-safe I sent towards the rat I saw crossing the road. It's happy cows and pigs and chickens. It's all the animals that I know I'll never see, but that do exist in all their splendidness. All these individuals, all these lives, all these minds.

Loving animals is also hard. It's seeing their dead bodies plastered on billboards. On people's plates. In the butcher's window just around the corner. It's 90% of the grocery store I refuse to buy. It's knowing there is a street in my town where in one building they're saving animals deemed worth saving, and in the one next door their throats get slit. It's animal abuse that only counts when it's an animal we think is cute. It's fish not even getting the respect of being count as individuals. Loving animals means living in a world full of murder. A reality so inescapable the only safe space is my own house. And the people I love are all complicit.

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Abstaining from eating meat on ethical grounds while being totally fine with dairy is like boycotting a sweatshop by buying their T-shirts instead of their shoes.

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“Mice, rats and many other rodents do indeed make a wide repertoire of ‘ultrasonic’ calls, with frequencies too high to be audible to humans (…)

Male mice that sniff female hormones produce ultrasonic songs that are remarkably similar to birds, complete with distinctive syllables and phrases. Females attracted to these serenades join their chosen partners in an ultrasonic duet.

Rodents are among the most common and intensively studied animals in the world and have been fixtures of laboratories since the seventeenth century. All that time, they’ve been spiritedly talking to each other without any human realising, exchanging messages that slipped beneath the senses of the oblivious researchers and technicians milling around them.”

-Ed Yong, An Immense World