The memes of the climate

Veganism without some kind of conceptual framework of speciesism is not veganism. Your assessment is backwards, not only is the concept of anti-speciesism not fascist; speciesism is foundational to racism, sexism, and ableism.

"When you are laying down the groundwork for what it means to be human, that is what it means to actually create human as a political identity because scientifically what we actually know is that human is just one of many species of animal on this planet, but we don’t actually think of ourselves as animals. I’ve talked to countless people who actually balk at the idea, who actually say to me well, I’ve never heard of that; of course humans are not animals. I’m like wow, you definitely did not pass seventh-grade biology. It’s like, you know, but this is just — this just illustrates to me how deeply entrenched these ideologies are. Because of course humans are animals but when we create human as a political identity, what we simultaneously do is create animal as a political identity and not just a species classification.

When we set up this binary, everyone who does not fall into the neat little perfect box of what’s considered human, they exist on the spectrum as an animal. You see the animalization of black people. You see the animalization of any marginalized group or any group that we desire to marginalize and that’s occurred several times throughout history. Yeah, you know, that’s one of the driving things that I want people to take away from these conversations or what I want people to understand. Human was actually never something that was meant to include — in particular — us as black people. Human was just a distinction that was meant to be — that was meant to include primarily people who were white, male, straight, land-owning, heterosexual, and had all of their abilities.

That’s really what we are — that’s really what we’re talking about and if you don’t meet these qualifications, if you don’t meet these criteria, then you are somehow considered to be less-than. That’s when the animalization starts to creep in. Yeah, this sort of aspirational humanity is something that I see people working toward over and over again in black liberation movements. We’re always talking about I am a human being. You know what? I deserve these rights as a human without ever critically interrogating what it means to be human or why human was considered someone — a person who is deserving of rights and not all of these other citizens that we share the planet with. That is one of our fundamental problems. Until we actually include other persons in our frame of reference of who is a marginalized community, I think that is going to continue to keep us back. Instead of actually embracing solidarity with other marginalized species, we instead continue to perpetuate the perceived exceptionalism of human and why that’s so good."

But while this is something that has to be done on a larger and organized scale, and while your alternatives for mobility might be limited, an easy choice for people is to eat less meat. Or at least substitute beef with lamb or chicken.

Food spans social, religion, race, culture, countries, regions and a ton of other things I can't think of. In your little American bubble, you probably can survive perfectly fine if you choose to be a vegan. I live in Taiwan and don't eat sugars/carbs. It's so difficult to survive here with this simple restriction and I live in a 1st world country. China is the highest producer of emissions, and they are a 3rd world country.

Sometimes it's not a simple choice to eat less meat. Maybe it's your culture to mostly consume meat. Again, even if you made everyone in the world to stop eating meat, nothing happens.

One of the difficulties of climate change is that it os a complex problem requiring many approaches at the same time. But we can and should take the approaches within our reach and demand politics to take the approaches that have to he taken on a societal level.

It's a complex problem. We need complex solutions. Stop focusing your efforts on non-needle moving strategies that might work in an extremely narrow use case. It will only divide us since it shifts the blame from fossil fuels to the people.