Changing the world from the comfort of your home

There is no shortage of informed opinion suggesting that we are heading towards tough times with climate change, dying oceans, disappearing topsoil, food/water shortages, and social destabilisation. We need to steer the ship in a different direction, soon.

Central to the problem is human consumption- food, water, material goods. August 2 was Earth Overshoot Day- the day in 2017 when we’d already used more natural resources than the Earth could replenish this year. Phrased another way, we’re credit spending for almost half of the year, on resources borrowed from our/our children's future. We have no way to pay back the debt though, so it’s really theft.

We’re great at washing our hands of personal accountability and defending our comfort positions by arguing that our individual choices have no impact in the context of a large world population, but the burden on the world’s natural resources is heavily impacted upon, by the cumulative weight of individual consumer choices- choices made by people like you and I. It’s not the population as a whole that's the problem. It’s estimated that as little as 25% of the world’s population consumes 75% of its natural resources annually.

We have both an opportunity and responsibility, to start effecting change through our choices. Broader systemic change is essential and consumers have a very important role to play. The time has come to crowdsource environmental & social repair. We need to consume less, and consume ethically.

I’d been vegetarian since age 14, but earlier this year I became a vegan after finding out that baby calves are taken from their mothers and either killed or bred into the same system of exploitation. As a father this horrified me.

How can I possibly expect society to contribute to the wellbeing of my son, when the world places more value on a slice of cheese than on a young animal’s relationship with it’s mother?

Veganism is a powerful tool for positive change. How can we aspire to a healthy, compassionate society when we’re feeding ourselves on the imprisonment, suffering & murder of 56 billion animals a year? Over and above the egalitarian, non-violent qualities that we must surely want to see in society, a vegan whole food plant based diet offers huge environmental benefits.

A person can be fed on a plant based diet using as little as 5% of the land and 8% of the water required to feed a meat eater, with 50 - 70% lower global emissions than those associated with animal agriculture.

There are also huge gains in terms of health and healthcare costs. An Oxford university study estimates that continuing with current trends of meat consumption, could cost the global economy as much as $31 trillion per year by 2050.

The UN reports that nearly half of the population will be living in areas of high water stress by 2030 , and that we will need to increase food production by 70% by 2050 in order to meet global demands.

It’s clear that we need to do something, and what simpler way could there be to help deal with these issues, than by simply changing what we put on our plates?

It’s hard not to draw figurative parallels between global warming and the way our bodies respond to infection. When we’re ill, our core body temperature rises to create a hostile environment for whatever’s making us ill. We have such an inharmonious relationship with the planet right now, it feels very much as though the planet is gearing up for a similar immune response-a global fever that will certainly be hostile to humans.

According to the FAO, the most pressing environmental issue isn’t even global warming, it’s soil degradation. They report that we have as little as 60 years of food harvests left! That’s pretty terrifying. A major contributor to soil degradation is deforestation, much of which can again be attributed to …animal agriculture. By now it should be obvious, the meat & dairy industries are nasty!

There’s more, but but nobody wants to read a really long article, so go and research the rest yourself. Here are some starting points: ocean dead zones caused by faecal runoff from farms , cows as the major consumers of fish, the relationship between chronic disease(cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure etc) and animal protein.

Our food choices are a a huge problem, but not the only problem. We’re pathological consumers of material goods, trying to fill the voids created by a broken society, instead filling only cupboards. What we really need is less stuff, less work, more kindness, more community, more play, more nature, more time to think, more sleep…and a planet to do it on.

Go vegan. Buy less. Consume ethically. Grow some food. Compost your waste. Reuse, Recycle or Repurpose. Spend time in nature. Be fair. Be nice.