Incomplete thoughts: Destruction of nature - plants and animals
The use of animals as food is natural; it is as natural as can be. But, the price paid for feeding is paid in effort when hunting, facing danger when chasing prey and avoiding becoming prey. And in the end returning to the earth when all energy have been spent.
Things are different today. Too many people on the planet, too many mouths to feed for the animals that still roam wild on the earth (although wild can only apply to the oceans and perhaps remote parts of the planet) and for the animals raised and slaughtered by the millions every day.
How did this state of affairs come about? Well, the obvious is that humanity “progressed” from hunter-gatherer to agrarian to more complex societies. (I place progressed in inverted commas since it is debatable whether humanity’s development over the years can count as progression, for all concerned, for animals, for nature and for humans.
This progression came at a cost to the natural world. From forests being cut down and cleared for subsistence farming, mines and quarries mined for ore and stone, and more and more natural resources used as society continued…including fossil fuels that is so damaging to the environment. “Natural resources” is a misnomer today. It might have been a resource hundreds of years ago to cut down a tree or two or catch an animal or two for your daily needs, but we see a resource today as an integral component of modern economies, a scientific term, which invariably creates the idea of an endless supply. This can be seen in the mass “production” of animals for food and the use of oil for energy; the use of the former raising ethical concerns and the latter is finite.
Where the mass consumption of animals is concerned, it is clear that it is for the time being sustainable, it does however still take up a lot of space and food and water to raise and slaughter millions of animals. But what of moral concerns, surely it cannot be moral to animals who cannot speak for themselves? I am not talking about the ethical treatment of animals or their comfort, or their moral deaths? This is not easy to answer: what can a chicken for instance know about its fate at the end of the line, but is it moral for humans to look upon and control animals we know are not living in a natural environment and can it be moral to end the life of a chicken just after it has reached maturity, never having lived longer…
The term that comes to mind and that might be critical here, is the idea of mass production, mass consumption and the implications of mass economy, big economy and the huge (-massive) resources it draws in from nature…
To be continued…
Written by Omar Daniel Fourie on 5 March 2018 and published on Steemit on 26 November 2018.