December 5, 2020

Consumerist veganism is not sufficient

This article by Lynda V. Mapes is a reminder of how any emphasis on consumerist veganism as a strategy, or shaming people for their diets, is ineffective and, considering the opportunity cost, actively counter-productive.

It’s not enough to stop eating fish, to convince all of your friends and family to stop eating fish, to boycott or pressure restaurants into no longer selling fish, when the fundamental problem is something like what chemicals are in tires.

But identifying that’s so is only the first step. The much harder work is not to invent a new tire product or developing a new transportation system but developing the empathy for non-human species enough not to kill tens of thousands by side-effect. It’s developing a political system that centers the cultures and defers to Coast Salish peoples who coexisted with the salmon populations sustainably for thousands of years even while including them in their diets.

Fascism is particularly in need of strong opposition, but there’s not much that’s particular to it, and its logic draws from well-established forms of oppression, like settler colonialism and species hierarchies, before intensifying them.

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