Meat, the elephant in the room

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The elephant, or actually more like the herd of elephants, in the room for humanity, is clear for all to see. As the phrase implies, huge for all to see, yet no one wants to discuss it.

Partly this is due to the daily distractions fed to us by a media aligned with the very people who are or have created the elephants in the room. Part due to the conditioning we all experience to ensure compliance with those same people’s system and finally due to the apathy created by large masses, namely 7.5 billion people who inhabit this planet.

Changing a mass that large, with their ingrained acceptance of the myths created by those who control, is now becoming almost unachievable without some catastrophic event.

So few talk about the sustainability of our system and us as a species. In a little over 70,000 years Homo Sapiens, the only remaining human species, has wiped out all other human variants, and from the start of the agricultural revolution 14,000 years ago, us and our domesticated pets and animals have gone from being a few percent of the planet’s biomass to now 98%.

Our 77 billion animals kept alive for our collective meat over-consumption needs 50% of the world’s agricultural space just to grow the genetically modified soybeans that most of them are fed. Shock horror cow’s aren’t fed grass!!! This over consumption has lead to mega-industrial scale farming, cruelty to animals and destruction of the environment on an unsustainable scale. Overfishing/overfarming and chemicals have created dead zones on land and at sea.

The contribution to global warming caused by this over-consumption of meat dwarfs the effects caused by the heavily talked about CO2 from industry, cars, planes etc.

These environmental disasters in the waiting, there for many to see, are swept under the carpet by most and especially by the ones who creating them, they spin more myths about the issue such as ‘it isn’t a real threat’ and ‘no need to worry’.

We are told to worry about terrorism (mainly a creation of the myth makers), migrants (AKA humans displaced by myth makers’s wars of greed), and all kinds of other largely unimportant things compared to the potentially catastrophic outcome of our continued over-reliance on meat.

If as a human race we can not convince our fellows of the need to consume less meat and to find alternatives, then we are likely to very soon be living on a planet with conditions too hostile for us to survive. This likely to be in most of our lifetimes and certainly that of our children’s. Many know that it is there and chose to ignore it or do not try to educate others to create change.

How much longer will we ignore the elephant in the room that is meat?

Sense of perspective

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Travel can be great for giving you a true sense of perspective on your life, especially when you travel to a developing country. I am currently in Bali at the Copass camp and today we travelled from the luxury of our resort to the Ulun Danu Bratan Temple.

During our journey there and back several things struck me, fortunately not literally.

One thing, for example, the population of Bali is over 4 million and for a small island that means the roads are pretty crowded, and the drivers do not follow the highway code in quite the same way we are used to in the sanitised developed world. They love their scooters, a cheap and an easy way of navigating the traffic. But for those not used to this, they would look with amazement when one passes laden with children, gas cylinders and a surprising number of adults and other items, none of the passengers wearing a helmet and travelling in the wrong direction in monsoon style rain.

The majority of the population here are poor and their day-to-day existence is tough, yet blind to the world we live in, most seem contented and cheerful. Although, that does not mean that their lives could not be improved by a better system of wealth distribution. That is a whole new topic for another time.

Many in the developed world would almost hyperventilate, in an often phoney hysteria, one which has been cultivated by a society that has risen well above Maslow’s basic needs, to an elevated part of the triangle, where we question ‘why we are here’. The bottom section of food and shelter has been replaced by date codes and Wi-Fi connectivity.

Our fear based media and society has us worrying about flu’s, insects, bugs that will leap from the toilet and eat us. We worry about the sell-by dates, we fear terrorism, we fear almost everything. Yet if we lived or experienced more or the world that billions live in daily, then we would worry less about the mundane.

We would be less fearful, we would be a lot more grateful for what we have and we would be happier with what we have.

We focus our energies on what we do not have, when compared to most people on the planet, we have it all and more.

We would focus more on people, activities and shared experiences and a whole lot less on material stuff and many more unimportant things.