People should always come first
When I was in my twenties, I was a pretty staunch vegetarian and environmentalist. I’d scowl at people while they ate chicken wings; I’d judge those who wore leather and fur; I found Whole Foods shoppers to be somehow morally superior to those at Walmart (even though, paradoxically, I couldn’t afford to shop at Whole Foods).
And I imagined I’d feel the same way forever. My eyes had been opened, and humanity was wrecking the world!
At some point, though, I began to realize it takes a lot of privilege to be a certain kind of environmentalist. After all, Whole Foods is nicknamed “whole paycheck” for a reason.
On top of that, I felt miles away from the messages of activist groups like People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who had women cellophane themselves — naked — and lie down in the middle of the sidewalk imitating a bloody slab of meat on a grocery store shelf.
What did that achieve, other than titillating a few people and essentially reinforcing the already prevalent cultural message that women are pieces of meat?
Make no mistake: plenty of vegetarians hate PETA and their publicity stunts in the name of animal rights. But it’s still a shame that one of the most well-known animal rights groups is known for their sensationalism.
As for my reasons for eating meat again, basically, they’re selfish. I’d grown tired of the non-meaty food I’d been eating for eight years: pasta, beans. I started incorporating a little seafood here and there, and then a little chicken.
But another, less selfish reason I dialed back my save-the-world, animal rights passion is this: every time I watched someone eat a hamburger, I felt disappointed. Didn’t they know how that animal had suffered! How could they? It alienated me from people I love, and at some point, from humanity in general. Humanity, I thought back then, was all just a bunch of cruel monsters.
That was no way to live in the world.
At some point, I determined that people were more important to me in this short time I have on earth. Of course, I could have ditched the judgment without eating turkey and gravpy at Thanksgiving, which is where the selfish thing comes in. But at the same time, the longer I watched other people eat turkey while I stuck to mashed potatoes and veggies, the more judgment I felt myself bestowing.
I didn’t want to be the moral judge of people’s food choices anymore. I wanted to expend my energy understanding and tackling the reasons why people felt they had no choice but to shop at Walmart.
Maybe that’s why I have no patience for some activist groups now.
I read this morning about the environmental activist group Greenpeace doing something so phenomenally stupid, it defies belief.
In the middle of the night, they walked into the Nazca Desert in Peru, where the Nazca people had created now-centuries-old geoglyphs depicting wildlife and other geometric patterns. This was their first offense. According to Peru’s deputy minister of culture, not even the president of Peru can walk there.
Then they placed bright yellow banners reading “Time for Change! The Future is Renewable! Greenpeace” under the wings of one of the Nazca hummingbird drawings. There was, apparently, damage to the hummingbird geoglyph as a result of this stunt.
Sure, it got people’s attention (quite a few websites are talking about Greenpeace today) in a time when it’s nearly impossible to get people’s attention. But trampling a 1,500 year-old mark of human history is not the way to achieve lasting change. Or achieve anything, really, aside from alienating people from the very pressing need to start doing things differently.
People who just plain don’t want to make a change will often lean on activist groups to justify their inaction. “Me? Recycle? I’m not a crazy environmentalist!” Even me, an idealist at heart, felt alienated by activists in some ways.
I hope, somehow, we can create an all-encompassing movement to tackle pressing issues like climate change — one that leaves out the stunts.
Jessica Vozel is originally from Perryopolis and, after attending graduate school and teaching in Ohio, now works as a freelance journalist and copywriter in the Pittsburgh area.