Environmentalists and Vegetarians
In Richard White’s Essay “Are You an Environmentalist, or Do You Work for a Living?”, he discusses some of the struggles faced by today’s environmental movement. His characterization of environmentalists and his discussion about the demonization of modern technology immediately turned my thoughts to one particular subtopic of this issue: vegetarianism and the condemnation of factory farming.
Like environmentalists, who, as White points out, can be seen as “self-righteous, privileged, or arrogant”, vegetarians are sometimes viewed as believing themselves to be “morally above” those who choose to eat meat. When I eat at someone else’s house – particularly someone I don’t know very well – I always find myself trying to draw as little attention as possible to my vegetarianism because I don’t want to seem as though my “special” diet requires accommodations, or that I’m too good to eat the same thing as everyone else.
Just as environmentalists condemn modern technology as the root source of land mistreatment and environmental degradation, vegetarians condemn the factory farming system for animal mistreatment and the degradation of food values in America. As White says, it is easy to condemn this technology for its obvious flaws (for example, hydroelectric dams killing salmon), but it is important to remember the reason we adopted it in the first place. The practice of factory farming was endorsed because it provided a cheaper and more efficient way to produce mass quantities of food for our ever- increasing population. As a result, the percentage of our income that we use to pay for food is much smaller than the percentage our grandparents paid, thus, giving us more disposable income to spend on leisure.
White’s main idea (which both environmentalists and vegetarians need to remember) is that it’s not the machines themselves that are evil; it is the fact that we fail to recognize how these machines remove us from working the land and, in effect, mask our harmful human impacts. When White describes sitting at his computer typing – a seemingly benign activity – it is much like going to the grocery store and buying a package of beef. Since you did not have to go out to the barn and slaughter the cow yourself, it is all too easy to forget the process involved in turning this cow into ground pink stuff wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam. In both cases our connection to the land is masked, leading to overconsumption and a false belief in the harmlessness of our everyday activities.
One way may be through the use of television and the media more generally. Simply telling individuals that their consumption is hurting the environment will not bring about change. Instead consumers must be presented with graphic images of environmental degradation and further the link between their own consumption and environment must be made explicitly clear. The media can help accomplish this goal by providing the public with powerful images that evoke strong emotional responses. What sort of images will evoke such a response? Tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis and blizzards are undeniably worsening and becoming more frequent as a result of human consumption and pollution. Further images of such natural disasters easily evoke human responses and empathy from viewers as these disasters are rife with human pain and suffering. As such they are just the sort of images the media should propagate in abundance, while emphasizing that they are often the result of human consumption and subsequently pollution.
Just like when some consumers become vegetarians following direct exposure to the horrors of the meat packing industry, exposure to such graphic images may help individuals realize the true relationship they have with the earth.
It is important to remember though that our relationship with the earth as a place is much more complex than a direct relationship between natural disasters and consumption. Human's consumption and use of the land also leads to deforestation, air pollution, animal extinction, ect. These human effects are not as graphic and tangible as the previously mentioned natural disasters and as such, they are and shall likely remain further removed from the consumers conscious. Getting individuals to relate to these less graphic components of the environment is going to be difficult, but by taking one step at a time perhaps such a goal could be reached.