Discuss: The Era of Small and Many

Yes, finally some good news! And someone said that individual actions wouldn’t add up in the end. It’s good to read something that puts a positive light on the future, that let’s me know that my trips to the farmer’s markets do make a difference.

Bill McKibben has identified an important pattern that connects and characterizes some hopeful developments across our economic, energy, and cultural landscapes.

Of course, it feels good to read that, despite the retrograde trajectory of corporate and governmental BAU (business as usual), there are nascent rumblings and trends that threaten to head us in a saner direction. But I believe Bill would agree that it’s going to take millions of us working and pulling in the same general direction to make our communities as resilient as they’re going to need to be in coming decades. Climate change alone, never mind other realities, will ensure abundant challenge.

I encourage everyone to recognize where and how the decentralizing shifts to “small and many” are happening in their surrounds, and get on board. Join the group in your town working on creating a municipal power company; investigate time banking or local currencies; make the local farm stand, CSA, farmers market, or co-op your primary food sources; start (or join) initiatives such as Transition Town, Democracy School, or others that create visions of, and provide tools and deploy actions for, communities transformed — to connected, resilient, more-sustainable points in our shared constellation.

Good article but I beg to differ about the need for local communities to build neighborhood slaughterhouses.  It will never make economic sense to run our vitamins and minerals through animals first.  The waste of water, soil depletion, methane emissions etc… make this choice a farce.  And the above argument pales in comparison to the ethical problems with killing sentient beings for no good reason.

Exactly, Melisa. Using animals for food makes no sense as far as ethics, the environment, or human health. Yes, we need to shift to “small and many” but we also need to shift to eating plants instead of animals.

A couple of additions to Mr. McKibben’s article:
1. Please include herbalists, acupuncturists and other traditional, non-conventional healers along with PAs and NPs
2. One place worthy of centralization would be community commercial kitchens—open to small farms or others who want to create value-added products, but don’t have the money to build certified kitchens that would pass muster with health inspectors.
3. Microfinancing. This is so needed here in the States in increments of less than $500 up to a couple thousand dollars.

And to Melissa and Claire, we need local abbatoirs. People are going to eat meat, which should be pastured and grassfed…energy from animals that lived happy lives, not those in concentration-camp-style factories, where runoff harms everything around. All the animals that have been domesticated are domesticated because humans made use of them. When they are not used, they go extinct. Also, we humans cannot eat grass and make protein the way domesticated livestock do and there are certain vitamins we get only through meat protein, not plant protein. And that’s quite an efficient process (grass captures the solar energy, animals eat the grass, we benefit). I would say that we eat far too much meat that is maybe, after all, not meat or meat from animals drowning in antibiotics or which are mistreated. Also, keep in mind that plants are sentient, too, and they willingly and lovingly give up their food, medicine and fiber…and appreciate it when we return the same to Earth.

Leigh -
Yes, factory farms are concentration camps for animals and must be abolished. But no, there is nothing essential in meat or dairy products that we can’t get from plant sources, as thousands of healthy vegans prove.  Here’s a list of good protein sources: http://www.chooseveg.com/vegan-protein.asp
Producing a meal with animal products takes many times more resources (water, fossil fuel, etc) than producing a vegan meal.
Also, if plants are sentient (highly doubtful), wouldn’t you prefer to kill fewer plants by eating them directly rather than feeding huge quantities of plants to (definitely sentient) animals and then eating the animals? No animal willingly gives his or her life to humans, and no human needs to eat animals.

@the Vegetarians: Where I live in the Rocky Mountains, with the Great Plains nearby, there’s no doubt that raising pastured animals is the most efficient use of land—especially if those animals are wild ungulates, like deer, elk, and bison. Agriculture is, as Lierre Keith has pointed out, carnivorous—it eats landscapes whole. In order to produce enough vegetable protein here (soy and other beans) we would have to plow up every arable acre, and exclude every wild animal that would otherwise graze those lands if they were left to grass, effectively limiting (or rather, exterminating) the native biological diversity of the place where I live.

In order to feed everyone on a Veg. diet locally, we would have to devote habitat for other species (birds, field mice, grazers, and top-end carnivores) to limited human ends, a process which has the unintended consequence of threatening wildlife—hardly a moral out, as far as I’m concerned.

Vegetarianism has the psychological plus of letting us externalize our impact on animals by ignoring the species that are displaced when we transform wild places into biological deserts.

Hi, Claire.

Thank you for your comments. For plant sentience information, check out Stephen Buhner’s The Secret Teachings of Plants or Pam Montgomery’s Plant Spirit Healing. Both animals and plants are, I believe—for who can “prove” such things? – sentient, and I believe that both willingly give of their lives for us. We are just one of many species here, and, under the right conditions—not the way the current death and burial industry is structured—we would all go back and become food for others. That said, I do not support CAFOs; they are energetic holocausts in all ways, for the people who work there, the animals impounded, and everything downstream (and upstream, as you cited, for all the fossil-fuel inputs).

And as for plant protein, I would caution anyone against fake meats and the like. Hydrolyzed vegetable protein and similar concoctions are not good for us—they do make industry wealthy, though. Same with soy (see http://www.wholesoystory.com). Most of it is genetically engineered now, and according to research by Dr. Don Huber, the glyphosate used (Roundup Ready soy with Roundup herbicide) does not benignly go away—it depletes the soil of vital nutrients, so someone relying on that (or other plants grown in such depleted soils) as their sole means of nutrition may be experiencing malnutrition in multiple ways. (Not only that, but there are serious fossil-fuel and water inputs that go into monocrops…pesticides from petroleum, fertilizers from nat gas.)

Also, I do kill plants. I garden and I raise them for food and for medicine (sometimes even medicine for themselves, like fermented nettles) and I compost every scrap of vegetable matter I can. And if I had the yard space and lived in a place where folks were more receptive, I’d also have chickens, mostly for eggs and entertainment, but for stewing hens when they stopped producing, as well as rabbits and bees.

Let me ask you something, Claire: If everyone stopped eating domestic livestock and their products tomorrow, what would keep them alive? How would they fend for themselves?