Rancho de la LibertadJan 29

People who like growing things tend to be the least "zero sum" people I've ever met. I meet activists who act like sharing their time will inevitably lead to their death, but gardeners are always sharing.

We give each other seed, baby plants, cuttings, vegetables, greens, eggs - sometimes even before we know each other. If I say to someone "I wish I could grow tomatoes better" they'll jump in and offer last generation's regionally adapted seed without hesitation.

Because perhaps there's something to the experience of planting a bean and watching it turn into hundreds of beans, all from one bean. Or a single squash seed and seeing it produce dozens of squash and thousands of seeds. Or watching an enormous tree grow from a tiny seed and then a little sprout, and bring owls back where there weren't any before. And realizing that sharing only spreads the abundance, and never takes it away. If my tomatoes grow better, and hers fail, she knows I'll probably offer her that even better performing seed right back, and some extra tomatoes.

One of our friends on the border said he realized capitalism is bullshit the first time he grew tepary beans and watched a single bean turn into pounds of food and plenty of seed to save for next time. Why would anyone control your access to food when it's just that simple?

And the homesteading folks seem to like to make it seem really difficult, but they'll plant 10 acres to grain instead of oak trees and lament having to rent a harvester combine instead of having food literally fall out of the trees (and have a forest of other food and habitat for game, to boot), which is a failure of planning rather than the reality of what growing food is actually like.

#Gardening #Food #Agriculture #Permaculture #FoodJustice #Community

Show thread🌱🏴‍🅰️🏳️‍⚧️🐧🔧📎 AmbiyelpJan 30

@rancholibertad

Eggs arent resources 2b exploited by humans theyre bodily produce of another who didn't agree 2b part of a sexually exploiting eugenics program that breeds them 2 maximize egg laying @ the expense of health: theyre bred 2 lay ~30x more than healthy from 1/mo to 1/day: overlaying causes many problems like egg yolk peritonitis egg-binding prolapses calcium deficiencies osteoporosis & fractures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YFz99OT18k

#Vegan #Eggs #Chickens #Veganism #HumanSupremacy #Speciesism

Why don't vegans eat backyard eggs?

YouTube
Show threadRancho de la LibertadJan 30

@ambiguous_yelp Hello, while I always appreciate good faith debates on ethical topics, I find very often that most vegan stances are dogmatic and not actually interested in debate, but rather conversion. We were vegan for several years, and are no longer vegan for health reasons and that we now understand that the raising of animals has a very integral place in a functional system - and the products therein are critical when considering that we are not operating from a place of nutritional abundance brought about by the exploitation of billions of beings by a global industrial food system, but rather a place of nutrient scarcity as we produce our food on sight or obtain it from local farmers operating in a completely desertified place.

Unless you have deeply embedded yourself in ecosystem and radically analyzed each and every consumptive choice you make as a vegan, it is very likely that you are implicit in untold suffering. We all exact a cost - if you were to produce all your food in the ecosystem you live in *without* animal aid, I would imagine your vegan diet would not suffice for long.

Show threadAdrian Riskin Jan 30

@rancholibertad @ambiguous_yelp

Thank you for this clear and insightful statement. After having raised backyard pigs* and chickens for years on nothing but household food scraps and dumpster diving and recycled their waste into fertilizer (which turned into fruits and vegetables and then to more scraps to feed the critters) I find it maddening to have these practices conflated with industrial agriculture.

Most, maybe all, the waste involved in industrial meat production is caused by capitalism. Into the early 20th century in the US even backyard goats and cows were common in cities and it was possible to feed them by grazing on unused land, no waste at all, just turning weeds into food. Capitalists squelched this to increase their profits with zoning laws and fence laws which shifted responsibility for keeping animals out of yards from yard owners to animal owners. Without these kind of resource enclosures industrial meat production wouldn't be profitable. The stats that certain ideological vegans love to cite aren't inherent to keeping animals, they're an intentional tool of capitalist exploitation.

* If two acres counts as backyard.

Show threadRancho de la Libertad
@AdrianRiskin @ambiguous_yelp Indeed. Animals and humans cohabitate, and have formed cooperative and, yes, mutually beneficial relationships. There is no cycle without others to fill the niches in ecosystem we cannot fill, and the vegan standpoint that it is immoral for anything to die by our hand is illogical, as is the "speciesist" stance (though they kill untold trillions of microbial lifeforms each and every day in the movements of their lives) that it is speciesist to decide whose life is supported by the life of another. It is a viewpoint which is strictly linear and hierarchical, and cannot fathom a lack of hierarchy and the kind of mutualistic web that we exist within or that land-connected peoples have understood for millions of years. And truthfully it is only the product of colonialism and global food systems: only contemplative disciplines ever practiced veganism historically, and it was with willing regard for life and cycles and the knowing that they were denying themselves. Veganism is not a culturally viable practice for many, and dogmatic and prosyletizing veganism stands in ideological opposition to food sovereignty in many instances. Its morality is also philosophically quite flimsy, but it makes its adherents feel good about themselves, and therefore it is quite a tempting stance to adopt.
Jan 30 at 4:33pmWeb
Show thread🌱🏴‍🅰️🏳️‍⚧️🐧🔧📎 AmbiyelpJan 30

@rancholibertad

We cannot avoid killing microbes, we can avoid treating chickens bodies like machines that are here to produce *for humans*

To suggest that because all ways of living cause some harm to non-humans invalidates the whole vegan position is a form of appeal to nirvana fallacy. Just because the perfect cannot be attained doesn't mean we shouldnt avoid obvious exploitation wherever we can

Actually antihierarchy is a foundational part of veganism, I'm a veganarchist, for me extending fundamental rights to non-humans is part of a wider anarchist project of dismantling systems of supremacy. When you put "food sovereignty" above other creatures right to life you are perpetuating a human supremacist hierarchy. You are saying that our human ambitions excuse exploiting their bodies.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "culturally viable" but any culture that necessitates unnecessary death and exploitation is not an excuse for exploitation its just a self serving rationalization for continuing to benefit from the subjugation of other species

From an anarchist perspective what it comes down to is this, for most of human history humans have leveraged their immense power over other species for their own ends with varying degrees of consideration to their wellbeing. As the population has gotten larger the demand for animal products has skyrocketed and now farming them has become incompatible with continued life on earth.

But the whole time there has been an implied consensus that other animals were here for us to use. That by way of us being able to kill them we were justified in killing them, and when self imposed limits were placed on hunting etc it wasnt for the non-humans benefit, it was to allow their continued exploitation forever

And the veganarchist position is this: that this supposed right of humans to kill other animals for our own purposes is a power hierarchy, and its an incredibly violent hierarchy that needs to be dismantled for the sake of the vast majority of creatures on this planet. So the claim that as a vegan I inherently justify a hierarchy of other species is unfounded.

#Vegan #Anarchism #Veganarchism #HumanSupremacy #Speciesism

Show threadJ LouJan 31
@ambiguous_yelp @rancholibertad Microbes most likely have no moral value. What matters is cognition not life. Many nonhuman animals clearly have cognition. Predation in ecosystem isn’t inherently morally good either. We should also act to reduce #WildAnimalSuffering as well
Show thread🌱🏴‍🅰️🏳️‍⚧️🐧🔧📎 AmbiyelpJan 31

@jlou

I agree but I thought that that position was harder to defend than the obvious use of Nirvana Fallacy. I think its more convincing to say that *even if* microbes had moral value that wouldnt justify killing and exploiting chickens.

They seemed to be more interested in using microbes as a gotcha against veganism than a serious concern for all life and that approach would fundamentally be a non-sequitur, starting from an assumption microbed have moral value, whether or not it is possible to live without harming them should have no bearing on whether or not it is exploitation to harvest eggs from chickens