[Sailesh Rao]

The thrust of our global industrial capitalist system has been to exacerbate inequities so that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, year after year. This is because the system is based on continuous competition, selecting winners and losers ad infinitum. Winners tend to skew the system to ensure their continued winning, which is why the governments of the world, who are supposed to be reducing inequities, are now doing the exact opposite, viz., taxing the poor while enriching the rich. When the poor get poorer, they counter-intuitively have more kids leading to the population statistics that Paul is lamenting about!
In fact, while population increased by a factor of 6 from 1800 to 2000, from 1 billion to 6 billion, consumption increased by a factor of 64 in constant dollars. According to the UN Human Development Report of 1998, the top one-third of humanity are responsible for 91% of world consumption, while the bottom one-third are responsible for less than 2.5%. Therefore, if the current system is to be preserved, unless draconian population reductions are going to occur within the top one-third of humanity, i.e., among us, the human predicament is not going to get much better.
I assume that we are not suicidal and therefore, conclude that the human socio-economic system has got to change into a more equitable version that doesn’t value scarcity but rewards abundance. Instead of a currency system that is pegged to nothing in particular except blind faith and the nation’s ability to print, we need a currency system that is pegged to the totality of Life. The more Life there is in your nation, the stronger your currency. Only then will the human socio-economic system be in harmony with the biophysical systems of the planet. And only then will humans will have an economic incentive to improve the bio-diversity of the planet.

[Sailesh Rao]

Facing a similar and seemingly intractable situation nearly 100 years ago, in 1918, Gandhi started the Khadi movement, in which the people of India voluntarily discarded their British milled clothes and wore locally hand-made cotton (Khaddar) clothes instead. This led to the bankruptcy of the Manchester mills within a dozen years and the Indian independence movement that this spawned is now legendary.
For our situation, instead of changing what we wear, we need to change what we eat. Therefore, I contend that the Vegan movement is the Khadi movement of the 21st century. Consider the following two facts:
1. Half the fruits and vegetables eaten in the US, along with 75% of the almonds eaten in the whole wide world are grown on just 3 million acres of land in the central valley of California.
2. More than half the land in the continental United states, around 1 BILLION acres, is being used for livestock production.
The contrast is stark. But we cannot expect the Vegan movement to be effective if even the top intellectuals in the environmental movement embrace Veganism half-heartedly. That would be like expecting the Khadi movement to be successful when Gandhi and his close circle continued to wear British ties, bowler hats and Saville row pants, while changing to Khaddar shirts reluctantly.

[Author]

Posts