Vegetarian Myth, The: Food, Justice and Sustainability (Flashpoint Press)

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The second reason is that I didn’t want a whole new group of idealistic young people to destroy their health. A vegetarian diet — and especially a vegan diet — does not provide for the long-term maintenance and repair of the human body. So vegetarians are on drawdown of their biological reserves. Anybody who lives near them, there’s always resistance to this. Arsenic is released from the manufacturing plant. There’s one in Iceland that we talk about, people had burns in their throats from living near the smelter. They couldn’t go outside. Their throats would ulcerate just from breathing. They were in this huge battle with the government to get this thing shut down and they feel like their being held hostage because they can’t go out and that’s horrible. But I want everybody to remember the animals because they have got nowhere else to go but outside.

All things being equal most couples only want 2 children. There’s always going to be people who want more or don’t want any but it averages out to about 2. What’s interesting about that is that it’s replacement levels. Most people understand, there’s a level of fulfilment you get with 2 but when you add more, it’s more than they want to do. It starts to have a negative effect on their future and their emotional capacity. They know they’re going to get overwhelmed and they know they won’t be able to provide the future they want for their kids so 2 is the number most couples settle on. a b Lane, Walker (Spring 2011). "The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability/Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World". Fifth Estate. 46 (1) . Retrieved July 27, 2014. Andrea Dworkin talked about the barricade of sexual terrorism, it’s rape, incest, battering, pornography, prostitution, sexualised murder in various forms from culture to culture. That word civilisation just means people living in cities. That means those people need more than the land can give. A city is basically concrete, stone and buildings, there’s not anything wild there. The food, water and energy have to come from somewhere else. From that point forward it doesn’t matter what peaceful values hold in their hearts, that society is dependent on imperialism and genocide because no-one willingly gives up their land, water, trees, soil, fish but since the people in the city have used up their own they have to go out and get them from somewhere else.

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It’s the simplest thing in the world and also really hard. We actually have to do it if we’re going to save our planet. The planet has been skinned alive. And the only reason we have not hit complete collapse is because we’ve been eating fossil fuel since 1950. This is not a plan with a future as peak oil is probably behind us and we are on the downside of Hubbert’s curve. J – I grew up with a love of the natural world. I would go camping and go out in nature and see all the creatures we share the planet with. At the same time for much of my life I was unaware of the destruction that was happening. When I was 16 I watched a documentary called Revolution and learned for the first time that we’re in a mass extinction and the amount of life that is being lost and the devastation that is taking place because of this insane culture. That completely changed my life. I came out of the theatre and decided this is what I have to dedicate my life to. I’m going to work on this and do something about it. I started making documentaries about a week after that.

Another woman who was pepper-sprayed, Linda, said that “only one or two” witnesses to the assault attempted to intervene on their behalf. L – In 1978 Mary Daly wrote - Patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet and that it’s basic value was necrophilia and that what it was after was dead objects on a dead planet.We are on the biggest draw down and overshoot that could ever have been imagined, the entire thing has gone global. Enszer, Julie R. 2016. “How to Stop Choking to Death”: Rethinking Lesbian Separatism as a Vibrant Political Theory and Feminist Practice. Journal of Lesbian Studies 20 (2): 180–196. Instead there’s this constant effort to make us believe we can have this forever, that the problem is that it’s not being distributed equitably, so everybody should have this one way or another and we just need to figure out how to fuel it. The sun shines everyday so why don’t we just harvest the sun?

So, that’s the main problem, the main principle of our movement has been hollowed out from the inside. We know this, some of the founders of radical feminism, we’re the survivors of the worst of these harm. That’s how they knew what they knew. They had experienced it themselves. They all got together and talked about it. That was the basic model of consciousness raising. That’s the problem that nobody wants to face. It’s a very long standing problem and there’s not really a solution except to stop doing it.Then there’s the partnership model where you understand we’re all in a relationship with each other and the relationship is important and it’s about care and concern for other humans, we all should have basic human rights and extending all of that to all the creatures of this incredible planet. In a biological sense, this is a planet of bacteria. They are the people doing the basic work of life. They keep the basic cycles going–the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, without which no animals would be here. We need to get profoundly humble before the incredible activities they do that make our lives possible. That humility needs to be the basis of our culture, our religion, our reality. Graham, Dee. 1994. Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives. New York: New York University Press.

Allen, Pamela. 1970. Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group in Women’s Liberation. New York: Times Change Press. McFadden, Patricia. 2016. Why Women’s Spaces are Critical to Feminist Autonomy. In Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics’ War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights, ed. Ruth Barrett, 309–315. Pacific Palisades: Tidal Time Publishing. The reason we can’t harvest the sun is because the rest of the planet needs the sun. Plants need the sun, they’re the ones doing the primary production. They can photosynthesis, you and I can’t do that. If we take all the land and turn it into solar panels, there’s not going to be any life. The scale of what would be necessary to use something like solar to produce this kind of energy, you’d have to cover the whole planet in solar panels. It’s not feasible. a b Sanbonmatsu, J. (2017) Blood and Soil: Notes on Lierre Keith, Locavores, and Death Fetishism Upping the Anti (Issue 12) We’re going to have to remember there are better ways and there are people still here who can help us. We’re going to have to learn to listen to them and approach this with a lot more humility.Up until very recently with genetic testing, you can’t be really sure in the way women can be sure that the child is theirs. It means that women have to be controlled and to control her fertility you have to control her entire life. I think we forget, it’s so painful, what’s happening to our planet, a lot of people just learn to not feel it anymore and just go numb inside. But for whatever reason, I never did. It was just a natural progression to me when I became old enough to really start to try and understand what had really gone wrong on this planet. It was one of things I desperately wanted to get to the bottom of – why are doing this to our one and only planet? – and then, what can I do about it. You’re right, in my lifetime the same thing has happened to the feminist movement. Some of the worst things that are happening to women on this planet are now re-cast as something that is called empowering. So you have torture of women in pornography, prostitution and the industrialised sex industry, they will defend it as if it is a way to freedom. They would never suggest that brutal, body punishing, permanently damaging activities would be liberating for anyone else but somehow for women this is supposed to be the road to liberation. They told us that they were concerned for the library staff. They couldn’t keep them safe. We didn’t want to put them at risk because they certainly didn’t sign up for this,” Keith said.