Go Vegan For The Earth

Even in calmer times on the planet it is difficult to feel that our choices as individuals make a difference. During extremely chaotic times, it is even more elusive. The feeling of helplessness as we witness the suffering around us gets more intensified with political and environmental upheaval. Trying to remain mindful of our consumer choices is difficult when those choices often involve two of our most addictive habits: shopping and eating.

We have a hard time seeing how our choices are contributing to the destruction. There is a major disconnect, as most of us simply do not see the processes that bring us our goods or what happens to these items after we throw them “away”. The reality is that there is no “away”. The items we throw into the trash do not magically go “poof”. Away simply means somewhere else on the planet…whether near or far.

We have been trained to believe that the cost of an item is only in dollars. The disconnect is widespread. The earth and all life are paying the price for a growing population of humans who do not think beyond their own pleasure/desire. The supposed progress of new products and more volume (to feed a growing human population) happens in a relatively slow pace that keeps us from noticing the impact. When we are surrounded by a majority engaging in some consumer pattern, we go along with it without questioning whether it is a positive direction for all life. There are countless examples. I am in Chicago visiting family right now. When I travel, I call it “visiting America”, because I get a view of what the culture is up to that I do not get in my life in the forest. I see the amount of trash created by just one couple or one family or the throngs of people in the airport. Everyone in our family (except my household) has a machine that makes a cup of coffee using little plastic cups. Each cup of coffee has its own little plastic cup that gets thrown away after use. This, and so much more, has been normalized.

To understand how we can think of something as normal or okay when it happens over a period of time, I will give you a visual. Imagine that 500 years ago, you walk up to someone drinking from a stream and tell them that 500 years in the future, the water will be too poisoned to drink. They tell you, “You are crazy. We would never poison our drinking water. ” Today, you walk up to someone standing near the same stream and tell them you are going to get a drink from the stream. They stop you, “Don’t be crazy. That water is not drinkable. ” This happened over many years and because of that it is normalized, and we are not alarmed that we cannot drink from our fresh water rivers and lakes.

In my dream world, there would be a different kind of price tag on every item that we humans consume. It would be the True Price Tag. The True Price Tag would not just give you the price in how much money it costs, it would tell you what it took to produce that item and what the impact is when you throw it away. Each tag would include: Environmental cost, human rights cost, animal rights cost. For example, on a carton of 12 eggs, the True Price Tag could read something like this:

Non-human animals: 288 hours of cramped cages or crowded indoor environment for the hens (24 hours per hen per egg). Forced molting to encourage more production. Male chicks killed by suffocation or being ground up alive at the hatchery. Automatic watering and feeding machinery often fail killing many birds. After about a year of being in the cage, the “spent hens” are sent to other factories to be ingredients in soup.

Humans: Factory conditions that force each worker to stand for 10 hours at a time and breath toxic dusty air.

Environment: Waste from the facility, which houses 700,000 birds, flows into the closest water way, making it too toxic for swimming or other water activities.

Transportation: Hens transported from hatchery to facility, then to another facility when “spent”. Eggs shipped long distances in refrigerated trucks.