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VEGETARIAN_MYTH
September 28, 2009
October 23, 2013
I was listening to a Lierre
Keith lecture on KPFA... Lierre Keith, author of
"The Vegetarian Myth: Food,
Justice, and Sustainability" (2009)
Really remarkable... I haven't
heard from one of these in ages.
She's got that earnest, open, The cool clear
I-know-what-I'm-talking-about eyes of a seeker
vibe that I know so well from of wisdom and truth.
anti-nuclear debates; and a ANTI-PROMETHIAN
tendency toward melodramatic
over-statments that she tosses She's got some seriously dangerous
off with complete seriousness. skills, but is unlikely to do much
damage becuase her central message
contradicts the recieved wisdom on
the left.
She presents her epiphanies
as a tale of personal
discovery, slanted toward
an audience that's presumed
to be the left-wing version
of politically correct.
She takes the bold, daring line that
veganism is mis-conceived, and the It uses up
reason is that: agriculture is *evil*. "fossil soil".
She apparently started out with the idea She spits out
that mother nature is some sort of benevolent amazing numbers
diety, and it dawned on her suddenly that about soil depletion
agriculture isn't natural. that I do not believe
for a second.
No one ever mentioned to her
the problems with monocultures?
Coming into the middle of her
rap, it's hard to fathom where It sounds an awful lot like
she's going with the polemic. the deep ecologists of the
early 90s, when they were
looking forward to human
"diebacks".
EMPIRICAL_MORALITY
On her list of evils:
Agriculture:
o It requires wiping out "every other
living thing", it is a kind of "genocide"
o It requires slavery, and leads to warfare to
defend the horde of agricultural surplus
Only recently have we gotten away
from slavery for agriculture through
the use of...
Fossil Fuels:
o Polluting and "unsustainable". PEDDLING_SUSTAIN
Civilization (i.e. life in cities)
is dependant on agriculture
She claims "Leisure requires slavery",
but she also brings up the factoid that
hunter-gathers had *more* leisure...
so which is it?
She pushes a bunch of buzz phrases that
made it easy for me to look-up her name:
"fossil soil"
"perennial permaculture"
"takeover vs takedown" That one is attributed
to a book named
"Overshoot" (1980) by
William R. Catton
"... overwhelming amount of anthropological
evidence showing an overlap of herding- and
war-based cultures. "
-- Dani, May 6, 2009
http://vegansofcolor.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/vegetarian-myth-lierre-keith/
No one I see is taking on her
numbers, e.g. inches of soil How long does she think this has
burned per year. been going on, and how thick does
she think the layer of topsoil was
to begin with?
Have a feeling she's doing an
apples-to-oranges comparison: Vegetarians would like us to eat
big agri-business vs. small organically grown vegetables, and
animal culture (grass-fed). Lierre Keith wants us to eat free
range meat, and neither of them bear
much resemblence to the big business
versions that most people are really
being fed by.
I took a glance at her taking So the questions are
on "Diet for a Small Planet", o how well can they scale up
but I don't see her addressing o what's the relative damage
their claim that cattle-farming produced by either?
on government land was
destroying the soil. And I suppose:
o how bad are the big business
Just pointing fingers approaches, really?
at each other?
Even giving Lierre Keith most of
her premises, I submit that:
We need to fix agriculture to save
civilization.
If we can't finese it and find a
way to do it with less energy, then
we need different high-grade energy Nuclear power
sources that are cleaner. comes to mind.
We should not assume that either NUKES
present industrial agriculture,
or present organic agriculture are
the last word.
If you're worried about topsoil
preservation, you should be Which means, for example,
interested in "no-till" agriculture. that GMO agriculture
and Monsanto's "round
up" are not necessarily
the ultimate evil.
WHATS_GOOD_FOR_GM
And further, I speculate that
someday: agricultural robots
might enable a return to a more
diverse, intermixed style of
agriculture.
Monocultures have economies of
scale via standardization, but
as our technology gets more flexible,
we may be able to get away from that,
and craft agricultural ecologies that
are easier to sustain.
NATURAL_PROBLEM
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