Meltdown

At present, in the natural world, if animals were capable of judging us morally, we’d be very much ‘on the nose’. We don’t have a good reputation, so we need to earn our way back to re-acceptance. Humans have become so used to regarding our own species as supreme that it’s almost impossible for us to imagine things switching around – the animals thinking of us as the barbarians and soo dumb or worse; that it is we who are left out in the cold.
If, godforbid, there were a major global collapse with destabilisation of social structures and food supply drying up, how would we react? As hunger hit we’d realise to what extent we’d lost touch with Nature. In such a crisis we might find animals better able to survive than us. We humans, especially those in the affluent West, have never learnt to feed ourselves or deal with adversity, having lived on easy street all our lives and having been softened by our dependency on animals for so long.
Before the eleventh hour, to help avert a collapse, we need to get busy repairing. We can’t pretend not to have noticed the need for it. If there were a global collapse, we’d need to draw on our sanity and creativity to pull us out of it. What we wouldn’t need is seven billion deranged humans, gripped with fear, doing even more damage than at present. At such a critical point, we might see the need for repair but might believe we are suffering too much and weighed down with too much fear, to do anything much about it. It’s likely that, once we stopped using meat and broke free of other addictive animal products on the market, we’d develop some self-discipline. By which time a lot of fear and panic would fall away, letting us focus on repair.
Using a shipping analogy: the great ship of society is sailing towards rocks – it hits and begins leaking. It needs running repairs to avoid sinking. Steering away from the rocks is difficult due to the inertia of the ship taking on so much water. The atmosphere on board is panic, with any essential running repairs made harder because of that. Everyone seems transfixed by the rocks ahead. Repairs are slow and the ship is getting heavier and disaster seems inevitable. Rescue is unlikely. Should we jump? (give up?). With animal cruelty so deeply ingrained in human nature and with our deteriorating health, humans are feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the need for repair. The ship of our society is foundering.
Vegans are suggesting a way to avert catastrophe, by offering an idea for steering away from the rocks and for repairing the gash in the side of our ship. To repair the cumulative damage we’ve done to ourselves and our world we need a simple-to-understand safety principle, that suggests how we go about self-repairing and how the environmental damage is mended too. The very beginning of this repair involves boycotting animal farm produce, because it is this, more than anything else, that has caused a near catastrophe on so many levels.