The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability by Lierre Keith
May 5th, 2009I’ve listened to a few of Lierre Keith’s radio appearances and talks. This information will be nothing new to those of you who are involved with producing your own food in ways that build top soil. To the rest of you, this will be deep, chilling doom… for your belly.
Lierre Keith is absolutely NOT suggesting that eating industrially produced meat is a viable option. Obviously, it isn’t. What is she saying to eat? In short: Food that encourages perennial polycultures to thrive; meat and fish with the standard Weston A Price caveats. She mentions Weston A Price by name, actually. But this is not your standard WAPF advocacy message. Keith advocates Derrick Jensen’s militant anti civilization perspective, which, unfortunately, is dumb. I’m not saying that we’re not fucked, or to look for glimmers of hope inside this system. I’m saying that the release of nuclear weapons should be on the mind of anyone advocating the indiscriminate destruction of critical infrastructures. I wrote about this in Resistance on the Brink of Oblivion:
In a linear* collapse scenario—what we’re living in now—there is less of a chance of nuclear weapons being used. If, however, an insurgency began dismantling key infrastructures, the regimes in question could (and probably would) see the threats as strategic and begin to follow scripted war plans that include the use of strategic nuclear weapons. In such a cascading collapse, the release of nuclear weapons would, because of the confusing nature and fast pace of events, be much more likely.
Voluntary simplicity is as frightening to many people as armed insurgency. Those, however, are the only viable options that remain at this late stage of the game. If you go with voluntary simplicity, you have to assume that the system is actually in the process of collapsing, because, if it doesn’t collapse, we will pass a point beyond which resistance of any meaningful kind will be impossible. If you go with armed insurgency—and, let’s say that you, by some miracle, actually manage to collapse civilization—avoiding total extinction via thermonuclear holocaust would be your next goal.
Choose carefully.
* Linear is probably the wrong word. Orderly might be better.
Unfortunately, there is no quick way out of this, assuming that there is a way out of this at all.
I hope that Lierre Keith’s (rhetorical) anti civilization militancy doesn’t put you off from investigating her perspectives. She presents a great deal of critical information with regard to the fallacies of large scale agriculture and the mass production of annual monocrops.
Via: Lierre Keith:
We’ve been told that a vegetarian diet can feed the hungry, honor the animals, and save the planet. Lierre Keith believed in that plant-based diet and spent twenty years as a vegan. But in The Vegetarian Myth, she argues that we’ve been led astray–not by our longings for a just and sustainable world, but by our ignorance.
The truth is that agriculture is a relentless assault against the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. In service to annual grains, humans have devastated prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate, and destroyed the topsoil–the basis of life itself. Keith argues that if we are to save this planet, our food must be an act of profound and abiding repair: it must come from inside living communities, not be imposed across them.
Part memoir, part nutritional primer, and part political manifesto, The Vegetarian Myth will challenge everything you thought you knew about food politics.
Research Credit: RF
Voluntary simplicity is as frightening to many people as armed insurgency.
Those, however, are the only viable options that remain at this late stage of the game.
THIS LATE STAGE OF THE GAME, is the key phrase.
We are blindly accelerating towards the precipice.
I used to think I wanted to see it (the big change), but as I get older I wonder….
Kevin,
2-1/2 years after you wrote those paragraphs, what’s your take on the likelihood of a full-scale nuclear war vs a more limited exchange – say, under two dozen warheads – in the event of a fast-paced cascading collapse?
Has anything changed your opinions, even slightly, on the nature of these two choices?