Take Action Tuesday: Speak Up for Whales, Dolphins, Giraffes and Public Lands

Free no more: Beluga whales at the Georgia Aquarium. Activists are calling for the release of over 100 whales—orcas and belugas—who are being held captive in tiny enclosures in the Russian port city of Nakhodka. (Photo credit: Diliff/Wikipedia)

 

 

Change.org: More than 100 whales—orcas and belugas—are being held in tiny enclosures on Russia’s Pacific Coast in the city of Nakhodka. This is the largest number of marine animals ever to be held captive in such small temporary spaces. Some of them have been there since July 2018. Marine mammal experts claim that the animals will be sold to Chinese aquariums and are concerned that they will die if they are kept in these stressful conditions much longer.
>>>Urge the Minister of Natural Resources and Environment of the Russian Federation Dmitry Kobylkin to immediately transfer these whales to a responsible party to be rehabilitated and released back to their natural habitat.

 

Pew Charitable Trusts: America’s public lands help define us as a nation. They are precious and prized—as sources of clean air and water; as wildlife habitat; as quiet havens of solitude. The public lands package being considered in Congress would preserve cool mountain streams, desert canyons and rivers, granite peaks, and other special places to the National Wilderness Preservation System.
>>>Urge your senators and representative to ask their leadership to protect wilderness and uphold bedrock environmental protections.

 

Care2: “Bama Bayou” is a proposed $300 million dollar project that will transform the small town of Orange Beach, Alabama into the next big summer destination. If approved, it will include tanks, pools and holding facilities where captive dolphins will live their entire lives and be forced to perform. Dolphins who live in the wild can live up to 50 years, but in captivity, a 25-year lifespan is considered long. These intelligent, emotional animals deserve to be in the wild.
>>>Tell the Orange Beach City Council that the bayou would be better without dolphin cruelty.

 

African Wildlife Foundation: About 40 percent of Africa’s giraffe population has been decimated in the last 30 years. Poachers are targeting the species for its body parts and skin—and a recent AWF study found that giraffe meat is being passed off as beef or goat in butcher shops. This heartbreaking development worsens the effects of habitat loss and human encroachment, which have been wreaking havoc on giraffe populations for decades.
>>>Tell the Kenya Wildlife Service that you support a recovery and action plan to save the giraffe.

 

Paws 4 a Cause NZ: In the quiet of New Zealand forests, hidden from public view, tens of thousands of animals are dying. Screaming. Squealing. Writhing. Convulsing. Fluttering. Suffering. These animals have been poisoned by helicopter drops of lethal 1080 (sodium fluoroacetate) poison baits. These poison baits are dropped by New Zealand government to target rats, stoats and possums. But the poisons are indiscriminate, and can cruelly kill any animals who ingest baits or a poisoned carcass.
>>>Urge New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to ban 1080 poison.

 

Parting thought…

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” —Martin Luther King Jr.

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and animal/nature rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Trump’s Border Wall Would Be an Environmental Nightmare

National shame: “Three weeks into the partial shutdown, trash is overflowing and human waste is blighting park roads and visitor areas,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle’s Kurt Repansket on the state of U.S. National Parks. “Illegal campers and off-roaders have trashed delicate ecosystems. Vandals axed some of Joshua Tree National Park’s namesake spiky evergreens.” (Photo credit: daveynin/Flickr)

 

 

League of Conservation Voters: President Trump shut down the government to demand funding for a monstrous border wall that would unfairly target and disrupt border communities, endanger immigrant families, waste taxpayer money and cause environmental damage.
>>>Tell your senators to end this shutdown without funding Trump’s racist and environmentally damaging border wall.

Sea Hugger: 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are littered worldwide each year. Cigarette butts are 98 percent plastic, take up to 10 years to degrade and are the most common form of human-made litter in the world. They are also the worst ocean contaminate.
>>>Urge Phillip Morris International, the world’s largest tobacco company, to create a biodegradable cigarette filter.

Organic Consumers Association: Glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, is the most-used agricultural chemical ever. Mounting scientific evidence of its human health impacts indicates that it may also be the most devastating. In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer reclassified the chemical as a probable human carcinogen.
>>>Tell the EPA to ban glyphosate.

Cathy Liss, Animal Welfare Institute: A recent review of USDA enforcement records has revealed more than 50 incidents in which birds were knowingly neglected or abandoned during transport or at the slaughterhouse. In all of the instances, large numbers of birds suffered; often, hundreds or thousands of them died. In one case, more than 34,000 birds froze to death in unprotected trucks en route to slaughter.
>>>Tell the Secretary of Agriculture to take action to prevent incidents of avoidable suffering to birds destined for slaughter.

Care2: In a quietly-dropped executive order, President Trump just authorized a radical increase in logging on federally owned land in the West. He says it will decrease fire risks. But scientists disagree. This proposal will benefit members of the Trump administration who receive support from the timber industry.
>>>Tell President Trump to leave the trees alone.

Parting thought…

“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken.” —Leo Tolstoy

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and animal/nature rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

How Examining My Whiteness Brought Me to Animal Rights

Sisters-in-arms, and legs: Without an animal rights pedagogy, any anti-oppression movement that seeks “liberation for all” is fundamentally deficient.  (Photo credit: Kat Jayne/Pexels)

As a queer white woman doing social justice work, giving my money to the animal industrial complex was an expression of solidarity with my oppressor.

By Stuart McDonald, Independent Media Institute

 

3 min read

Growing up in rural Virginia, veganism was never on the menu. It was one of the many things I simply did not know about until later in my life—much like the idea that I could love women, or that I am complicit in systems that oppress people of color.

The bootstraps ideology I was raised to believe in—this idea that those with less than me simply didn’t work hard enough to earn it—instigated not only my racism but my speciesism. I believed we were entitled to animals because we had dominion over them by virtue of being “smarter,” more “developed,” and able to “contribute to society” in a way that non-human animals could not. It wasn’t exploitation; it was just the natural order of things.

Even when I struggled with eating meat and felt actively uncomfortable consuming the flesh of animals, my socialization made it easier to push my qualms aside than parse through my discomfort.

When I left for college and began to interrogate my place in the world as a white, able-bodied, cisgender, queer woman, my cognitive dissonance around speciesism was still very much intact. I viewed animal rights as a petty movement of yuppies determined to steal the narrative from people of color; to say “it isn’t about you; look how bad the animals have it.” Looking back, I think my determination to believe that was less about inclusivity in the animal rights movement and more about using my social justice ideals to justify not engaging with the topic.

So, to my great convenience, I was able to ignore the issue of animal exploitation. As I became more and more politicized I focused instead on racial and queer justice, examining and unlearning how my whiteness contributed to a racialized system of oppression. It wasn’t until my professor Dr. Paul Gorski introduced me to Dr. A. Breeze Harper’s anthology Sistah Vegan that I realized my determination to whitewash the vegan movement was actually ignoring and discounting the hard work of the many women of color who pioneered it.

As a graduate teaching assistant, I constantly pushed my students to consider the root causes of societal problems. Issues like poverty and food insecurity do not exist in a vacuum—they are the direct result of a system designed to preserve the power of the ruling class. These causes are rooted in those “-isms” and “-phobias,” and in some ways, specifically, anti-Blackness.

When confronted with the realities of the animal agriculture industry, with its wide range of exploitation of human and non-human animals, I realized that without an animal rights pedagogy, my anti-oppression lens was incomplete. And as a queer white woman doing social justice work, giving my money to the animal industrial complex was an expression of solidarity with my oppressor.

Beyond recognizing the systemic connection between human and animal liberation, veganism offered me a much-needed way to care for myself. When faced with the enormity of the world’s injustice, changing my eating habits was a simple way to make a quantifiable impact. Not only that, but eating a plant-based diet did wonders for my health, virtually eliminating medical issues I had struggled with since I was a child and helping me better manage my depression and anxiety (although I don’t want to claim that veganism can be a cure-all for everyone). My renewed energy makes me a better asset to all the movements and causes I fight for.

Even today, nearly three years into my veganism, I realize my consumption is not, and can never be, completely ethical. But as I attempt to navigate the world in the most compassionate and just way I can, veganism offers me a tangible way to refuse to be complicit and to move toward “liberation for all.”

###

Stuart McDonald is a creative writer for Compassion Over Killing, a national animal protection nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.

This article is part of a content partnership between Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and Encompass. An earlier version was originally published by Encompass on September 4, 2018.

Ecuador Drilling Plans in Yasuní National Park Threaten Indigenous People

Paradise lost: Ecuador’s Yasuní national park, one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, was “once a beacon of hope for global conservation,” writes Jonathan Watts, global environment editor for The Guardian. But the lure of oil has marred that view—and a sensitive ecosystem. (Photo credit: Buster&Bubby/Flickr)

Amazon Watch: Ecuador’s president recently named Marcelo Mata Guerrero to lead the country’s environmental agency. A career oil executive, he is expected to grant an environmental license for new oil drilling deep inside Yasuní National Park—widely regarded as one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. The project would allow multiple drilling platforms, 200+ wells, pipelines and access roads, and it would threaten the very existence of the Tagaeri-Taromenane indigenous people living there in voluntary isolation.
>>>Urge Minister Mata to protect Yasuní from oil drilling.

Katherine Sacks, FoodPrint: Are you resolving to live in a more eco-conscious way in the new year? Here’s a list of resolutions you can commit to in 2019 to lower your “foodprint.” You could start out small and pick just one. Or pick one for just a month. Or try one once a week. Or, if you are a champion (or a superhero), you could try all seven at once.
>>>7 New Year’s resolutions for a more sustainable 2019.

Caroline Cox, Center for Environmental Health: Glyphosate has been found in over 70 percent of oat-based breakfast cereals served in U.S. schools. Exposing children, with their developing bodies, to a chemical that can cause cancer and hormone dysfunction is wrong. It’s especially wrong for children simply eating breakfast at school, who often are from low-income families.
>>>Tell the CEO of General Mills to get rid of glyphosate in Cheerios and other cereal products by switching to organic oats.

Asha & Jia Kirkpatrick (aged 11 & 8), Leighton Buzzard, UK: Sisters Asha and Jia love orangutans. They are big fans of Orangutan Jungle School on BBC Channel 4. “We were really upset when they saw that the orangutans are being killed and orphaned as their jungle homes are destroyed by companies that want cheap palm oil,” they write in their petition. “We want it to stop now.”
>>>Join Asha and Jia in urging Kellogg’s to stop using these suppliers immediately and to tell the public exactly which palm oil companies they buy from.

Care2: Animals like elephants, rhinos and lions—despite their vulnerable or endangered status—are legally hunted in South Africa. Trophy hunters argue that their activities and the money they pay to take big African game actually creates an incentive for locals to protect these vulnerable species. But according to research by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, trophy hunting has negative impacts on wild populations, and legal hunting and poaching are closely linked.
>>>Urge the South African government to ban trophy hunting.

Alexa Frandina-Brown, PETA: After activists pointed out that more than 150 dogs have died during the Iditarod’s history and that off-season tours keep mushers’ kennels in business, Merit Travel Group—which operates CruiseExperts Travel and AlaskaShoreExperts.com—dropped dogsledding excursions. It’s time for Discover Holidays to join the competition by ending its sale of these activities.
>>>Urge Discover Holidays to remove all dogsledding excursions and replace them with activities that showcase Alaska’s beauty and culture without promoting cruelty.

Parting thought…

“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.” —Marshall McLuhan

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and animal/nature rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Take Action Tuesday: Speak Up for Kittens, Chickens, the Climate and an Eco-Friendly Christmas

Unconscionable: Even though 75 percent of Americans want to end taxpayer-funded experiments on cats, the USDA continues to conduct deadly and wasteful experiments on kittens.

 

 

White Coat Waste: U.S. taxpayers are funding a USDA laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, that breeds up to 100 kittens a year for wasteful experiments, feeding the two-month-old kittens parasite-infected raw meat, collecting their feces for three weeks, and then killing and incinerating them—even though they’re healthy and adoptable. The USDA is being sued for hiding details about the experiments from taxpayers and Congress.
>>>Urge your Representative to co-sponsor the KITTEN Act (HR 5780) to de-fund these horrific experiments (via phone or online webform).

Compassion in World Farming: The chicken on the McDonald’s menu comes from factory farms, where the birds are bred to grow so big, so fast, they can’t even support their own weight. Their unnaturally large chests can cause the birds to suffer from chronic pain, leg deformities, and heart attacks. Despite the fact that other big names like Subway, Burger King and Sonic have already committed to treat chickens better, McDonald’s is lagging behind.
>>>Urge McDonald’s to commit to better animal welfare standards for chickens in their supply chain.

Prairie Protection Colorado: In October, the Denver Board of Water Commissioners began killing prairie dogs on a small plot of land off Quebec Avenue that they own in Denver, Colorado, for what they claimed were “neighbor complaints.” This colony is not harming anyone and is located in one of the only prairie communities left in this area. No developments are planned to occur here and Denver Water is killing only to get rid of what they see as a “pest.”
>>>Tell the Denver Board of Water Commissioners to stop killing prairie dogs.

350.org: The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there are only 12 years left to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5C, and just two years to stop fossil fuel expansion for good. Even half a degree more will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty that hundreds of millions of people are already feeling.
>>>Tell world leaders to protect the climate by banning fossil fuel development.

PETA Australia: Last week, the Australian government released draft advice for a new heat-stress test for measuring animal-welfare standards on board ships that take live sheep to the Middle East, where animals endure abuse and methods of slaughter that would be illegal in Australia. The draft advice recommends that these ships be allowed to reach no higher than a wet-bulb temperature of 28°C. Since air temperatures reach over 45°C in the Middle East during the summer, such rules could prevent the industry from shipping live sheep for much of the year—and may make it no longer financially viable ever to send animals on these terrible voyages of despair.
>>>Urge Prime Minister Scott Morrison and federal Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources David Littleproud to adopt rules prohibiting ships exporting live animals from traveling during the hottest months of the year.

Marisa Pettit, RESET: Want your Christmas to be green, not white, this year? And celebrate the festive season with glow in your heart and a squeaky clean conscience? From ethical gifts to sustainable decoration and fair trade food, we show you how.
>>>Get 6 tips for an eco-friendly Christmas.

Parting thought…

“The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” —Jeremy Bentham

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and animal/nature rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.