How to save our souls

1316: 

Violence would have been dropped long ago if humans were less quarrelsome.  Our thirst for war stems from our need to be safe and to place ourselves at the top of the heap – to do that we have to dominate ‘inferior’ humans and ‘lower’ species.  Humans might see themselves at the top, but we also know our ambition to get there has been our undoing.

The thirst for power is the province of those people already near the top of the heap, but for the rest of us, we’ve been content to exploit the lower orders, most prominently the non-humans; for us, it hasn’t been so much a matter of dominating and feeling powerful as being able to guarantee food supplies and, with that ensured, the pleasure of eating certain types of foods.  By becoming hooked on pleasure-giving foods and many other little comforts associated with products from the animal kingdom, we’ve landed ourselves in both a physical and ethical mess.  If we’d learnt how to survive and thrive on plant based foods and materials, we wouldn’t now have to face up to reducing our carbon footprint or ending mass starvation or fighting obesity or struggling with the shortage of clean water.  Each of today’s major problems can be related back to centuries of advantage-taking, of taking more than we need and leaving others, notably animals, to their unenviable fate.  We are now so used to a decadent lifestyle that we can’t face the habits we’ve developed, which make us dependent on the enslaving and domestication of animals.

         

If we do eventually come to our senses and save our world in the nick of time, then we’ll have effectively saved our souls.  But we still have a long way to go to reach this stage of human development.  And if circumstances of ill-health and climate change are forcing us face the music, we can either get there easily or get there kicking and screaming.  It’s up to each one of us.  We can be insensitive and suffer for it, or we can start to respect our planet, look after our bodies and empathise with our victims.  The we can set about repairing the damage we’ve done.  And with good grace, we can become vegan.  It's our choice as free-willed individuals - we can step onto the vegan path now or go vegan at the eleventh hour when there’s even more damage done and even more to repair.