CULTIVATING COMPASSION
Sustainability? Don’t Sustain What We Do To Animals — End It BY JEREMY LOEB; EDITED BY CAM MACQUEEN
must learn empathy. We must learn to see into the eyes of an animal and feel that their life has value because they are alive.” I very quick - ly decided going vegan wasn’t enough. I wanted maximum impact. I knew I’d have to be an activist and bring to the public what had been hidden from me for more than three decades. I shifted my focus away from the climate catastrophe and towards animal rights. I started watching videos on YouTube from prominent animal rights activists like “Earthling Ed” Ed Winters and “Joey Carbstrong”, and from there I learned about several of the largest animal activist groups. The first activist event I joined was a vigil outside of a chick - en slaughterhouse in Morganton, N.C., with the Save Movement, to bear witness to the animals’ final moments and to tell their stories. I watched chickens trucked in by the thousands to meet a grisly end inside a bleak factory. I started attending events with Anonymous for the Voiceless, a group that displays slaughterhouse footage on city
For the better part of ten years I called myself an “environmental - ist”. I obsessed over things like getting low-energy LED light bulbs, recycling, and biking to lower my carbon footprint. As a reporter and host at four different NPR-affiliate radio stations across the southeast, I worked to elevate stories about the climate and other progressive causes; but I felt a deep sense of powerlessness. That all changed over - night. What jolted me from a sense of powerlessness to a sense I could actually make a meaningful impact was the Joaquin Phoenix-narrated documentary “Earthlings” on YouTube. The film documents in brutal detail all the ways in which humans exploit animals. I was left shaken and embarrassed that what was depicted had never crossed my radar until the age of 34. I felt enraged that I spent 15 years as a reporter
and had no clue about animal agricul- ture. I consider it a personal failure and an indictment of the media I voraciously consumed. I had been looking at the issue of sus - tainability all wrong. I had this amor - phous concept of the environment, the planet earth, and the sustaining of life on it. But until I watched “Earthlings”, I was missing the point entirely. The only rea- son the climate matters is the individual lives that are affected; and until that film, I had barely spared them a thought. Watching what happens to animals in animal agriculture changed me forever. I wanted to learn more. Documentaries like “Cowspiracy” on Netflix highlight the massive environmental toll animal agri-
streets, encouraging conversations with curious passersby. I visited what was then the largest slaughterhouse in the world — a Smithfield-owned pig slaughterhouse, in Tar Heel, N.C. — and heard the screams of pigs being killed inside the facility. Tour- ing the hidden-in-plain-sight pig farms throughout southeastern North Carolina, I witnessed a dumpster full of rotting pigs discarded like trash, including a mother with her piglets, some still attached by their umbilical cords. I joined brave activists in South Korea at a slaughterhouse outside of Seoul, where I saw that what happens in America is exactly what happens across the world. All the while, I watched as politicians I enthusiastically backed ignored the issue
culture plays. A 2018 study from Oxford University researchers , pub- lished in the journal Science, looked comprehensively at the damage animal agriculture does to the planet. Lead researcher Joseph Poore stated, “A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gasses, but global acidi- fication, eutrophication, land use and water use.” And that’s where I suddenly felt empowered, because I eat three times a day, and that’s something I have complete control over. Animal agriculture’s damage isn’t just felt in methane emissions, though those emissions alone are enough to bring about the worst ef- fects of climate change. Animal agriculture uses most of the land on the planet. We breed and kill, conservatively, 80 billion land animals per year. All of them must be fed and given water. All produce enor- mous amounts of excrement. Many people fail to consider that the amount of crops and fresh water used to keep those animals alive long enough to reach slaughter weight dwarfs anything 8 billion people could consume. The waste creates environmental hazards for ground water contamination and health hazards for people living in close proximity to animal ag facilities. Animal agriculture is a leading cause of land use, deforestation (in - cluding the Amazon rainforest, the “lungs” of the planet), freshwater use, water pollution, species extinction (we are in the sixth mass ex - tinction event recorded in the earth’s history), and ocean acidification. When we factor in fish, both farmed or ripped out of the ocean, we kill between one and three trillion animals per year. Focusing only on the environment is a mistake. We need a different relationship with animals. As “Earthlings” so powerfully states: “We
entirely. I watched President Joe Biden tout his administration’s cli - mate initiatives while giving a billion dollars to the meat industry to build more slaughterhouses. I watched as politicians like Democrat Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin spoke about the urgency of the climate catastrophe while pushing dairy industry protectionist bills like the “DAIRY PRIDE Act”, which is trying to prevent plant milk companies from using terms like “milk” under the absurd notion that it confuses consumers. Democrat John Fetterman of Pennsylvania is pushing an equally ridiculous bill to protect the egg industry from its cruelty-free alternatives. I watched as the COP28 international climate negotia - tions barely touched the issue of animal agriculture. This protection of animal industries already benefiting from a sub - sidy system heavily weighted towards animal agriculture is a betray- al of stated commitments to “sustainability.” I thought back to how I used to buy “free range” “cage free” eggs, “organic” “sustainable” milk, “humanely raised” “grass fed” “local” meat and felt like a fool. We have all been duped by greenwashing ploys, and we don’t have time for this. We must wake up to the reality that raising and killing animals for our taste buds is a major contributor to climate collapse. I scoured the media looking for stories about animal agriculture, thinking maybe I had just overlooked them. I had not. They hardly existed, save for a few notable publications like Vox, The Intercept and The Guardian. I reached out to my former NPR affiliate in Asheville, N.C., and was able to get them to cover the trial of an activist who rescued a goat in western North Carolina. Wayne Hsiung, a lawyer and co-founder of the international group Direct Action Everywhere continued on page 17
PATHWAYS—Spring 24—15
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