I discussed the stupidest article I’ve ever read on my radio program recently:
https://goveganradio.com/06-march-2017/
https://goveganradio.com/17-april-2017/
It is such an insult to intelligence, that it also merits a written response…
The Sierra Club is a fraud in much the same way as the Humane Society of the United States is. Neither is dedicated to its supposed cause. Both are dedicated to the almighty dollar. Neither campaigns for its basic solution – Vegan living. Both are awash in rancher donation money. Because they are so compromised, we are expected to swallow a diet of absurd propaganda. HSUS feeds us “humane meat” and “cage-free eggs”, products and concepts of torture and death for each of its constituents, by the billions. The Sierra Club also inexplicably feeds us “meat” – the production and consumption of which are humanity’s most destructive environmental actions.
There are no legitimate rationalizations for the production and consumption of “meat”, dairy, fish, eggs, and honey from either animal advocates or environmentalists. Animal agriculture has been revealed to be the #1 cause of Climate Change, responsible for at least 51% of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions as we are informed by Robert Goodland and Jeffrey Anhang of the World Bank in “Livestock and Climate Change”:
http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf
How can the Sierra Club not know this? If the Sierra Club does know this, why is it hiding it? If it doesn’t know this, what kind of “environmental” group is it? In either case, the Sierra Club loses all credibility. As if it didn’t look goofy enough in “Cowspiracy”, now we have the writing of the editor of its official magazine. No, it is not “The Onion”.
Surely the Sierra Club is aware of the leading role of animal agriculture in deforestation, desertification, soil erosion, resource squandering, water shortage, pollution, habitat and ocean depletion, and GMO’s – or is it? I don’t see any of this on its website.
When we are told by the world’s leading ecologists, Goodland and Anhang, that the ONLY solution for Climate Change, before it is too late, is a massive population shift to Vegan living – what do we get from the Sierra Club? It’s more “meat”.
The Sierra Club would like to save the planet by pointing fingers and blaming someone else – Trump, coal plants yet to have been built, future pipelines – “but, hey, askin’ me to give up my meat – now that’s askin’ too much”.
One simply cannot be a “meat”, dairy, fish, egg, and honey – eating “environmentalist”, unless, of course, one receives the blessing of a pseudo-environmental organization to do so.
Some months back, the Sierra Club published one of its absurd pro-“meat” rationalizations, an actual shopping list of the “eco-friendliest meats”, as if there were any:
http://sierraclub.org/sierra/2015-4-july-august/taste-test/6-eco-friendliest-meats-you-can-buy
What’s next, Sierra Club – a list of the friendliest terrorist attacks, the happiest wars?
Over the years, as an animal advocate, I have observed the ongoing, ever-growing corruption and compromise of the “animal rights movement” and the accompanying enabling propaganda, much of which reaching the heights of outright stupidity. Lately, though, it seems that almost everywhere I look, I am bombarded by stupidity – from social media to politicians to mainstream media. I am to the point of being jaded now, almost numb to whatever the next episode of stupidity may be. That is why I am so impressed by the recent article by Jason Mark, the “meat”-eating editor of “Sierra”, the Sierra Club magazine:
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/green-life/toward-moral-case-for-meat-eating
“TOWARD A MORAL CASE FOR MEAT EATING
BY CONSUMING OTHER ANIMALS, WE CAN AFFIRM OUR ANIMAL NATURE, DRAWING OURSELVES CLOSER TO THE EARTH”
Pretty much by the title and subtitle, one is forewarned that this may be the most warped writing ever, and the article does not disappoint.
Mr. Mark begins:
“I once experimented with vegetarianism for a couple of years. When people asked my reason for forgoing meat, I told them that while I had no problem with killing animals, I didn’t want to have to feed them…”
Mr. Mark didn’t want to feed animals, but somebody had to raise the cows whose milk he drank and the chickens whose eggs he ate as a “vegetarian”. Let us also note that the Sierra Club hires as the editor of its magazine, someone who has “no problem with killing animals”. This is a reflection of the attitude of the “environmental movement” in general and is one of the basic foundational flaws dooming it to failure. What is the environment, anyway – a bunch of rocks? Where are the animals in the equation? Where are our brothers and sisters of companion species traveling with us in time whose mother is also planet earth? How much better could the world be if the editor of the Sierra Club magazine DID have a problem with killing animals? Instead, he is the one chosen to write about the morality of killing animals and eating their flesh, and in such writing his mission is to create a new morality, an immoral morality.
Mr. Mark actually does make some sense for a paragraph or two, when soberly accessing some of the negative aspects of animal agriculture vs. Vegan eating, although he emphasizes that “industrialized” animal agriculture is more to blame, ignoring that “grass-fed” “pasture-raised” animals can produce up to 400% more methane than those in confined imprisonment. But Mark does enumerate significant environmental destruction by animal agriculture, which should lead him to a Vegan conclusion, but instead he embraces reduction of consumption, citing counterproductive campaigns – Meatless Mondays, Reducitarian Solution, Vegan Before Six – that purport to do just that, but do not.
Mark says:
“The meat-reduction pledges seem to be saying: ‘All bad things in moderation—including moderation.’ Which has me wondering anew: Can meat actually be a good thing? Is there any way to make a moral case for eating animals?”
The answer, Mr. Mark, is simply: “NO”! Didn’t you just call it a “BAD thing”? Shouldn’t you be “wondering” about something more productive? Read your own article, Mr. Mark. Do you see where you write:
“If we acknowledge that eating animals will cause them some measure of pain, then it’s impossible to defend on a strictly ethical basis. Think of Kant’s categorical imperative, which says, ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.’ Unless you’re willing to be kept, bred, and eventually slaughtered by a species of superior strength and/or intelligence, you can’t justify doing so to other species.
If you’ve spent any amount of time thinking about the morality of meat eating, you might have already come to this conclusion. And if you’re like 97 percent of Americans… you still eat meat. Isn’t this blatant hypocrisy? Not necessarily, according to ethicist Paul Thompson, the author of From Field to Fork: Farm Ethics for Everyone. Moral ideals are exactly that—ideals. Something we strive for. A Christian, for example, isn’t necessarily a bad Christian just because she doesn’t give away all of her worldly possessions to the poor. Charity doesn’t require asceticism.”
What? “Moral ideals are exactly that – ideals. Something we strive for.”? Really? Do we merely strive not to kill, strive not to rape, strive not to steal, strive not to abuse children? How hard should we strive? That’s quite a mindless analogy. Because we don’t expect a Christian woman to rid herself of worldly possessions, it’s okay to slit someone’s throat? It’s starting to really get stupid.
I may have to heckle (in caps in parentheses), as Mr. Mark writes:
“The question becomes, might the suffering that animals experience in the course of being sacrificed for human food contribute to some other social good? I think the answer is a conditional yes.” (HOW STUPID – INTENTIONAL SUFFERING AS SOCIAL GOOD!!!)
“By eating animals, we can remind ourselves of our animal natures.” (OR IF YOU NEED A REMINDER, YOU CAN WRITE YOURSELF A POST-IT NOTE) “That recognition of our corporeal reality—the fact that we are flesh and blood and bones and skin, each of us ever on the way to very likely an unpleasant end can, like few other things, keep us connected to the living earth. Surely such a connection is vital in an age of increasing dislocation between human civilization and nonhuman nature. (COULDN’T YOU TAKE A WALK IN THE PARK OR GROW A GARDEN!?) When we kill other animals for our sustenance—as long as we do so with careful moral consideration (WHAT DELUSION!!!)— it can reinforce our interdependence with other species, linking humans to the rest of nature. (IF I WERE ON THE SIERRA CLUB STAFF, I’D BE A BIT NERVOUS BEING IN THE SAME BUILDING AS THIS GUY! KILLING WITH CAREFUL MORAL CONSIDERATION – JUST LIKE JEFFREY DAHMER DID? I’M SURE HE TRIED HIS DARNDEST! ) And that linkage is a social as well as a trans-species good. (HUH? DUH!)
“By taking another animal’s life, we can attune ourselves to the laws of ecology, and the laws of the animal world of which we, as animals, are a part.” (BUT WE ARE HERBIVORES.) “Those laws state that everything is connected, and that there can be a harmonious balance in a natural food chain. Mindful meat eating (A TOTAL IMPOSSIBILITY) plugs us into that chain and connects us to the fates of other living beings.(THIS IS THE MOST NONSENSICAL GIBBERISH THAT I HAVE EVER READ!!!) Paradoxical as it might sound, (MORE PSYCHOPATHIC THAN PARADOXICAL) the conscientious carnivore (MORE FICTION!) can reestablish our moral obligations to the other species with whom we share this planet. Meat eating can be an ecological good insofar as the act reaffirms an environmental ethics that places other species’ interests alongside human interests.” (SORRY, BUT THE STUPIDITY OF THIS ARTICLE IS BEYOND WORDS. HOW DID MR. MARK GET HIRED BY THE SIERRA CLUB – OR ANYONE?)
Okay, that’s it – I can’t take anymore of this – or the Sierra Club, with its compromised “environmentalism” and immoral morality. Attempting to justify the unjustifiable with this kind of trash talk is a new low in polluted thinking, and a new high in what can only be called “stupidity”.
After publishing this article, doesn’t Sierra Club membership become a complete embarrassment?
Bob Linden
“Go Vegan Radio with Bob Linden”
