The issue, though, is that individual choices are literally statistically irrelevant compared to collective choices. The only calls to action that actually have a chance of working long-term are those that directly address systematic issues.
So yes, make individual choices. Eat vegan and wear vegan leather (although I could talk about how you’re just wearing plastic which continues the globally destructive consumption of fossil fuels), fine. The problem occurs when we moralize individual choices to the extent that individuals forego the more important collective power that we must exercise.
But yeah, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, at least not under the sort of laissez-faire capitalism we practice in the US.
The important take away from this is we should strive to be better and consume morally, but to demonize an individual for not consuming morally is not effective considering corporations create a logarithmically bigger impact than all individuals combined.
Captain Planet was basically an anti-capitalist, pro-environmentalist show, but it ultimately pointed the aim that the people who need to fix it are the children watching. Best case scenario, children watching may have a parent who works for a large company and maybe can suggest that they be more eco-friendly. Otherwise, the program shifts to children that to save environment, you must do lots of little incremental tasks rather than looking at the main reason why the planet is in such disarray from corporate pollution and greed.
The world has become worse primarily due to unregulated corporate greed and disregard for nature when it comes to the issues of oil digging, fracking, manufacturing productions and dumping chemicals. But that’s not something the children can immediately solve nor even knew it would get to the point where climate change could effectively doom upcoming future generations.
We can’t fix these problems unless we start putting in laws and effectively ousting the Hoggish Greedly President and his pals from the White House and in Congress.
Some rough math, based on the average US meat consumption and some estimates of meat per animal:
A single person going vegetarian saves a significant number of animals every year. Given how cheap, easy, and healthy it is to go vegan, there’s no excuse.
speaking of statistically irrelevant
[oil use] source
Knowing that capitalism is bad and unsustainable doesn’t stop it, slow it, or make it any better.
Right now we live in a capitalist system. Unless you remove yourself from society, you’re complicit in it. You participate in it, you make choices within it, and in some small way you affect it. While abandoning capitalism as soon as possible should be everyone’s goal, consumer choices can mitigate the damage until this happens.
In the rare case where you’re given two choices of similar products you can afford and one is obviously more harmful, if you choose the worse one you bear some of the responsibility. Animal farming should be all but eliminated by law. The fact that it’s legal is not an excuse to buy a steak.
How many capitalist societies are truly voluntary? There is little to no unclaimed land in them. There is zero infrastructure to support yourself for free/off your own labor. Theoretically you could survive off of a small family run farm but it would be at the cost of zero support from roads, sewers, the grid, phone, etc. That social coercion hardly feels like people surviving under capitalism should be considered complicit in it. As has been shown time and again with Republicans, they want you to think that you can make change by voting with your dollar, because then people with more dollars (republicans for example) get more votes. If half of all Americans were to stop buying red meat overnight they’d double the price (more likely triple it) and radicalize the remaining consumers to keep buying.
Also, while lentils aren’t bad, they aren’t delicious. Why couldn’t we have evolved such that cookies and pastrami sandwiches couldn’t be the healthiest possible foods? Actually, screw that. Flavor is entirely a construct of our brains. There’s no reason that a different configured brain couldn’t set of all the same signals for lentils that it does for cake. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to eat lentils and taste cake by reconfiguring my brain somehow.
Well, to a certain degree, but yeah. I’m almost tempted to see how those miracle berry tablets do with lentils, but honestly, I can’t be arsed making a bunch of lentils and buying some expensive berry tabs just out of curiosity.
You need to get better at cooking lentils, they’re goddamn delicious. Too carby for keto or else I’d be all over them right now.
What’s your source for those numbers, just out of curiosity?
The only endgame that is relevant to me is reducing greenhouse gas emissions, so I’m all about reducing beef consumption. Poultry is vastly less problematic. But why fully vegan? Vegetarianism would save the same number of animals while crippling the environmentally destructive meat industry.
You are also failing to account for socio-economic status here. Food deserts make it virtually impossible for economically disadvantaged people to make ethical food choices. So I go back to the inherent problem, that we are trapped in capitalism and until we can fix that, demonizing individual choices is counterproductive.
I don’t disagree about the need to change things, but the lionizing of the value of individual action distracts from efforts that could be more effective.
You’d destroy the beef industry, because they operate on narrow margins.
Unfortunately, destroying the beef industry means destroying the livelihoods of a vast number of farmers and farm families.
There is no neat way to extricate ourselves from the capitalist trap. Changing it will cost lives, and given the number of people trapped in poverty, there is strong disincentive among the working class to jeopardize their already strained position in life.
Yep, you’re part of capitalism and unless the revolution comes soon, you will be forever. Deal with it. While you’re here you have to make choices, and you bear some responsibility what you choose to consume when given reasonable alternatives.
I really don’t follow. Is the idea that rich people will just buy twice as much meat? They can already buy as much meat as they want. There’s no incentive for farmers to produce significantly more meat than people eat.
Consumption comes from here. Meat per animal are rough numbers I estimated off half a dozen sources, but I now realize the USDA reports that too so I can recalculate. Regardless, a 20%-30% variation wouldn’t change my point.
Dairy and egg farming are both ethical atrocities. I don’t really give a shit about bees individually, so go nuts with honey.
Yep, my arguments only apply to people with reasonable alternatives. If it is unreasonable for you to get to a grocery store once or twice a week, then you’re probably not in a position to go vegan (unless you’re wealthy).
A lot of shitty industries employ a lot of people. This isn’t a reason to keep them around.
This seems to be the core disconnect I’m experiencing with your position. You don’t care about bees, and I don’t care about chickens. What’s the difference there?
The only things that matter to me are 1) getting food to humans and 2) reducing greenhouse gas emissions so that we can continue to have a planet.
I literally do not care about animal welfare because we have a lot of human welfare issues to address. When every person has access to the resources they need to thrive, then I’ll give higher priority to animal issues.
But I can cop to less-cruel practices, sure. What about legitimately free-range chickens and dairy? If, instead of a CAFO or poultry farm, what if I just have chickens running around my yard and collect their eggs? What about dairy from grass-fed cows raised with sustainable agricultural practices? Or are you looking to abolish all animal agriculture regardless of its environmental impact?
It has to be a consideration while we are still trapped by capitalism. You want to discuss animal ethics, but what about the ethical treatment of people?
This thread half makes me want to just say fuck it, be thankful for my white western privilege and consume and live how I please until I die. Most of what’s wrong in the world isn’t going to be fixed in my lifetime, and some of it might be irreversible, but I’m never having kids and when I’m dead I won’t give a fuck about anyone else being dead and all so why bother giving a fuck now? I won’t do that, cos I’m not a shitty person like that but christ this shit sometimes just makes me want to throw up my hands in frustration and give in to nihilism.
I don’t think anyone here is calling for disaction. We are calling for a different kind of action and absolving each other of the guilt of not being perfect. Making individuals feel guilty for their small personal actions is itself a capitalist construct created by the big evil corporations to shift blame from themselves, and push their guilt onto the individual consumer.
For example:
It has been estimated that just one of these container ships, the length of around six football pitches, can produce the same amount of pollution as 50 million cars. The emissions from 15 of these mega-ships match those from all the cars in the world. And if the shipping industry were a country, it would be ranked between Germany and Japan as the sixth-largest contributor to global CO2 emissions.
If one container ship makes as many emissions as 50 million cars, I’m supposed to feel guilty about driving a car (which I rarely ever do)?
To make a programming analogy. Let’s say you’ve got a web site. It takes 5 seconds to load. 4.9 of those seconds are spent waiting because the database is slow. 0.1 seconds are spent rendering in the browser. Even if developers find a way to turn that .1 seconds into .05 seconds, that is a waste of their time. They should be focusing their efforts on speeding up the database to make a meaningful impact. Focusing on optimizing the rendering is splitting hairs and a waste of time as long as the database is still garbage.
The guilt we put on people to consume and behave as ethically as possible under capitalism makes individual people put in a huge effort into changing their behaviors, but makes a relatively insignificant impact. The idea that somehow a critical mass of people will change their behavior, like everyone becoming vegan, and that in turn causing a major shift in society, is a pipe dream. The most (only?) realistic answer is to pull the levers of government to regulate the big boys.
An example for this specific case I brought up: let’s say we don’t allow any container ship to dock in the US unless it meets certain emissions standards. That alone would have the impact of making millions of people stop driving completely.
