I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m
a long term optimist when it comes to our species and its
prospects. By that I mean I reckon we’re in for a rocky
600 years before we can exist in true equilibrium with our
planet. The next 300 years though, are likely to have some
nasty cataclysmic surprises for us. Of course, in 11 billion
years or so the sun will have expanded and subsumed the earth
before imploding into a black hole so we’re ultimately
done for anyway. But that’s a bit too long term for
even the direst pessimist and hopefully our species will have
found their way to another galaxy by then.
One way or another, by choice or by force of nature, our species
will be driven to planetary common sense, that or vanish from
the face of the Earth. We have never before demonstrated such
wisdom on a global basis. We didn’t have to, the planet
could take itself. Now it can’t. And, since I rather
doubt our ability to do the necessary by choice we will be
forced to mend our ways by a very unpleasant succession of
catastrophic natural and man-made events. The toll in loss
of life will be far greater than anything we’ve experienced
in human history so far, but on a pro rata basis the species
can take it.
But at least the Earth will remain be a lovely place to be,
not a grim toxic wasteland. It’s fun to speculate on
ways to hasten that day and avoid some of the self-created
global catastrophes I’m envisaging.
How might it look? Totalitarian systems benign or malign won’t
be it. There’ll be a few attempts of course, but they
won’t last more than a century or two. After a beastly
20th century, we’re mostly inoculated against that.
Some form of global market system will prevail, ensuring personal
freedoms against the dangers of communalism gone toxic, but
it will have been tamed. The filthy rich among us, the 1%
who really run things and control the world’s wealth
today, and who dispossess and con the rest of us while throwing
us the crumbs, will be contained.
Starvation and abject poverty can and will be things of the
past. With the world’s wealth shared on a more equitable
basis, all men and women can enjoy the basic rights of personal
freedom, freedom from hunger and poverty, decent housing and
education, effective healthcare and care in old age. These
are not things possible now, even though we already have the
means for it and could do it tomorrow if we really wanted.
The fact is, whatever we say, we don’t want it. People
are not prepared to take the required steps. They think they’ll
lose something and they’re probably right. Until circumstances
leave no other option, it won’t happen. And when that
good day dawns, does that mean all will be well with the world?
Don’t kid yourself. We’ll still be the flawed
creatures we’ve always been, only we’ll live half
decently and will have learned, probably through bitter experience,
some form of communal conflict resolution other than killing
each other en masse.
One of the most significant and practical steps toward a better
world is for us to treat the other creatures with whom we
share the planet decently. Animal rights, no less. It is in
our own vital interests that we do so. The industrial raising
and slaughter of our fellow mammals, the fish in the sea,
the birds in the sky, for our consumption should cease. By
this I do not mean we should all be forced to become vegetarians
by law. No, what I’m saying is if we kill for food we
do it individually and knowingly, that we should stop subsidising
the people who farm animals. Let’s start with beef.
We simply don’t need to eat great slabs of decomposing
dead cow. Even if it didn’t contain hormones and poisons
in its fat, even if it is free range, too much beef is bad
for us. In other words a little meat goes a long way. It would
do us good to eat less of it and increasingly the better off
do eat it less. It is the working poor who have been addicted
to junk food who account for huge areas of the world being
given over to raising cattle and, more to the point, the grain
required to raise them.
The rich men who get richer by poisoning this underclass by
addicting them to salt and sugar and an unhealthy diet, largely
based on beef served up in a “tasty” and seemingly
cheap way, can only do so because they are subsidised by the
rest of us. The land for it is either communal or leased to
them by our governments. Alternatively they receive large
cash subsidies and tax rebates. Meantime we are drowning in
a sea of ordure which poisons the land and the oceans. How
much animal waste do you think that is? Try 3.5 trillion tons
a year in the USA alone.
Then there’s all that death. Sentient beings all. In
America alone they kill upward of 6 billion animals every
year. That is something like 750,000 animals killed every
hour. Most of them cruelly and in full knowledge of what’s
about to happen to them. That is a lot of fear, a lot of death
and a lot of blood. And just because we don’t see it
we are not affected?
Consider too, if all the land currently misallocated to the
raising and killing of animals was released for other purposes.
And, even greater than that, if all the land given over to
growing grain to feed the animals we eat was freed up too.
What would that do to our world?
Lots more people need not starve for starters. 60 million
people are known to die from starvation or malnutrition every
year. If Americans alone reduced their meat intake by just
10%, enough grain would be saved to feed that 60 million people.
Next, an awful lot of world could become wilderness again.
We actually need very little land to feed us all, if only
we ate a reasonable and healthy diet.
No, let’s not subsidise beef any longer. Let the price
find it’s true level.
Large tracts of the world going back to wilderness. Wonderful!
Animal life would return and thrive. Nature would be allowed
to take its course. Best of all, think what it could do for
us. It would give us back our soul. Of course the wilderness
would need to be protected from us, but only to a minimal
extent.
A few simple rules should do it:
i) no firearms, only weapons being spears, bows & arrows
etc.
ii) no engines, the only form of transport being by horse
or by foot.
iii) no permanent dwellings.
iv) no farming, no animal husbandry.
If you get your rocks of by hunting and killing animals, you
can still do so. You can even become a professional hunter
supplying meat for human consumption to authorised meat dealers.
The good thing being the slab of meat you’re hunting
has as good a chance of getting you as your getting it.
Humans would have a massive recreational resource. Some could
even revert to being hunter gatherers permanently if they
wished, most would soon get over it. Others could do so as
a temporary holiday from their normal lives. The wilderness
would re-enter the psyche as a living reality and not as an
archetypal memory, which is the way its going. The original
aboriginal populations could return to their ancestral lands.
Metrosexuals can stay where they are and macho types can really
find out if they’ve got the bottle to face nature or
an animal on equal terms.
In this way our modern world can continue to develop in whatever
way it wants side by side with the wilderness, neither threatening
the existence of the other. What a wonderful antidote too,
to all the ineffably vulgar democratisation of luxury consumption
that so trivialises our world today.
