Ode to Animals: Part 3
Mostly, vegetarians seemed like glorified animal lovers, people who could be admired for their giant hearts and the soft spot they had for animals.
Animals were so cuddly.
Why
would
you
eat
them?
I think part of the reason I never got too into the vegetarian “scene” is that when I think of farms, I don’t think of industries, I think of farms back home. People like Nathan and his family. It’s the same with hunters. I don’t picture wealthy safari addicts, plucking rhinos away from their mothers. But people who wear John Deere hats and drive tractors down roads at annoyingly slow speeds. People who have some sort of respect for life and gratefulness for a winter’s worth of venison in their freezer.
The first lady who invited me beyond a simple don’t-hurt-cute-animals position was Diane Matsumoto. Diane was wise and balanced, a generation older than me, and scaled literal mountains to raise funds for breast cancer. She recruited me and my students to participate in a lobbying day in Lansing in 2003, where the Sierra Club appealed to politicians to work toward a greener, more natural way of life. I remember, at the time, the Sierra Club was pushing big corporations like Victoria’s Secret to print their catalogs on a more biodegradable paper. And they were also working against “Factory Farms”—a term that had previously lingered on the outside of my vocabulary, without much specific understanding of what kind of abuses were involved. It was Diane who introduced me to words like “Hormone Free” “Grass Fed” “Free Range” and “Cage Free” and who explained how consumers can create a demand for more humanely processed meats.
I joined the Sierra Club around this time (Check my Facebook groups as well, for more info). What impressed me about the Sierra Club was that they weren’t just talking about their convictions or living them quietly off on their own. They were actually rallying human energy to create a political and consumer voice loud enough to be heard by corporate and government officials alike. That year the Sierra Student Coalition, for example, pulled together college students from around the country to successfully convince the huge Boise Corporation to adopt landmark environmental guidelines, including eliminating the purchase of wood products from endangered forests. They also, among other things, created a lot of pressure for the Bush Administration regarding a deal that would’ve given legal immunity to factory farms that produced hazardous waste.
To be honest, one of the things that impressed me most about the Sierra Club was their organization. At the time, you could walk into the book store at Westwood Mall and pick up Sierra Club Christmas gifts, such as calendars, that were already pre-packaged in sealed mailers and just needed to be dropped in a UPS box for an out of town Christmas delivery. The proceeds went to the various initiatives the Sierra Club was fighting for. Joining the Sierra Club also got me more literature from every environmental and animal rights group on the planet. I have more address labels with elephants on them, as well as information on current global issues, than a person could use in a lifetime.
Around the same time, I went to an event in Chelsea that presented a couple workshops on natural food sources. Several retailers, including one from Whole Foods and one from Polly’s Country Markets, explained how consumer demand drives supply and selection. They also outlined the natural and organic products their stores were already offering. This is where I learned about the holes in product labeling—how brands sometimes use misleading words to create an illusion products are more natural than they really are.
A couple years later, another co-worker, Warren Lester, would occasionally take up a soapbox on behalf of natural products. He convinced me to think more critically about what I ate, to stop using regular brand deodorant (read the research on aluminum content) and to not microwave plastic, for starters. I have to admit some of these ideas sounded like the sort of scares you read in email forwards at first, but slowly—as I became more educated on these issues—the tips began to fall into a context where they made a lot of sense.
Through new reading sources and information passed onto me by others, I picked up a handful of earth-friendly habits along the way…replacing lightbulbs with energy-efficient models, putting low-flow aerators onto our water faucets, picking up reusable shopping bags, moving to organic cleaning products and so forth. I think of each of these, coupled with humane treatment of animals in meat production, to be part of a broad philosophy promoting quality of life.
Later, when my first book was released in 2006, I met a guy named Simeon—on a plane of all places—whose father was a leading expert in South African animals. Simeon and I talked at length about the restaurant industry, elephant culling and other issues related to maintaining animals in their natural habitats. I remember I had just read Life of Pi, which I emphatically described to him as it seemed like half the scenes could be pulled right out of his life.
Each of these snapshots helped me broaden my pursuit of God’s intentions by eliminating unnecessary waste and harmful products/processes from my life and world. In the next couple days, I’ll blog about how the book, Dominion, found its way into my hands.
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