From Racism to Speciesism with Gratitude to MLK

I send out a weekly update to the Prayer Circle for Animals.  This message went out today on Martin Luther King Day.  If you would like to sign up for these updates and/or join the Prayer Circle for Animals, please click here. 

Our prayers for all animals continue to circle the earth, to uplift humanity’s consciousness,

and to bless the animals themselves. Thank you for joining people around the world who are

 praying this prayer in many different languages but all with the same love:

“COMPASSION ENCIRCLES THE EARTH FOR ALL BEINGS EVERYWHERE”

Today we honor Martin Luther King, Jr., for all the great work he did toward bringing an end to racism. He lived what he taught and believed. He confronted the evil of racism with, in his words, “the power of love.”

As animal liberationists, we confront the evil of speciesism with the power of love. We all know that racism is still with us, but it has diminished significantly because of the courage of those who could see and speak the truth. The fact that racism has diminished is a beacon of hope for us. In the same way, we are seeing speciesism begin to be understood by people and the number of people transforming their lives to vegan nonviolence increasing.

Just as MLK taught that we must be nonviolent and compassionate to all people, we are taking the next big step in human consciousness evolution and expanding the circle of nonviolence and compassion to include all beings.

On another note, our campaign to free the Topeka Zoo elephants is still on. We have erected two billboards in Topeka, KS, and they are causing quite a stir. Please pray for Tembo and Sunda that they will finally be set free to The Elephant Sanctuary. There is a lot of information on www.elephantfreedom.com, including a “how to help” page. Tembo and Sunda need your prayers, and I believe they will be able to feel your love surrounding them.

May all beings, including all people, be happy and free.

A New Year's Vision for Human and Animal Liberation

This week as we venture into this new year of promise and hope, let us envision a special liberation for all human beings. Let us see through all the trappings of everyday life—the costumes and customs that often hide the truth of who we all are—sacred beings all connected to one another and to all life. As we look past the surface of each of us, let us really “see” the true heart that beats in us all with love for all life.


The possibility, the potential for all people to become liberated from the paradigm of domination and fear is real. Let us bring clarity and faith to this vision of the dropping away of fear which leads to the desire to dominate and exploit. And as the fear drops away, we see unconditional love for all earthlings take its place in human hearts. Imagine and feel the joy that fills the earth with the mere thought of this radical liberation. As human hearts are unchained, so all animals are free to live and celebrate their own lives. Animal liberation truly is human liberation.

May all beings, including all people, be happy and free.

Gentle Thanksgiving Letter to the Editor

This LTE appeared in my local newspaper, The Lawrence Journal World on November 19, 2011.  It is always such a big help to the animals when a mainstream newspaper agrees to print an animal liberation letter.  There were 33 comments.  Most of them were mean-spirited, but Karen Davis and several others wrote very supportive comments.  Here is the LTE:

I’d like to propose a new tradition for Thanksgiving, one that is more in keeping with our holiday sentiments of kindness, giving and gratitude. The suffering of the turkeys on our tables stands in stark contrast to the joy of our family gatherings.


According to Karen Davis, president of United Poultry Concerns (upc-online.org) in “More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality,” the turkeys who greeted the original colonists were friendly, playful and peaceful. I have met rescued turkeys at animal sanctuaries who love to cuddle and who have distinct personalities.

However, turkeys today in factory and so-called “humane” farms are prevented from expressing their true nature. Without anesthetics, they have their toes and beaks cut off, their snoods pulled off and are crammed motherless into buildings filled with pathogens and sick and dead birds. The end is the same for them all: a painful, undignified, undeserved death at the hands of people who have a choice.

Let’s give turkeys a reason to be thankful this Thanksgiving and have a cruelty-free celebration at which we can be truly grateful for the wonder, beauty and miracle of all living beings. If you need ideas for great nonviolent recipes for the coming holiday, just Google vegan Thanksgiving recipes, and you will have all you need.

Peace to you and to all beings.

Peace on Earth and Good Sandwiches

This is my article for  the Sierra Club Planet Kansas, December, 2011, January, 2012, Eating as Though the Earth Matters column.  Hope you like it. 

Please share it with all those lovable tree huggers you know.  May we all be tree huggers, animal huggers, and loving huggers of all living beings.  Once there are enough of us we can all get together and hug the earth. 

Here is the Sierra Article

Peace on Earth and Good Sandwiches

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Somewhere on the planet today there is a little boy eating a tuna sandwich which was placed in his lunch box this morning by his adoring parent. If he likes that sandwich, his mom or dad may make another one for him tomorrow. They don’t know there is a sick, poisoned fish in that sandwich. According to an October 11 Sierra Club Insider email, two tuna sandwiches a week can contaminate this child with methyl mercury. In the U.S. alone coal plants release over 48 tons of airborne mercury every year. Yet it takes only one-seventieth of a teaspoon to pollute a 20 acre lake.

Coal, agriculture, aquaculture, overfishing, desertification, oil spills, rainforest destruction, extinction of species, human and animal slavery, nuclear power, war, and all the other animal, peace, justice, and environmental issues—they all grow out of the same root cause.

That one root cause at its core is human fear. We all have some amount of fear within us, of course. However, there is real trouble when people with a knack for gaining power attempt to ease their fear by gaining obscene amounts of money and convincing themselves that they have the right to exploit all other life forms and the earth.

The Occupy movement that is sweeping the country is being criticized for seeming to be confused about its issues. No wonder. This movement is revealing that corporate, political, and criminal greed has contaminated nearly every aspect of life on this planet. The breadth of the destruction is truly unfathomable. Tackling such a giant requires tracking every footstep and challenging all the forms of destruction no matter how vast.

It requires the joining together and participation of all the justice movements, for each one is equally affected by the domination of the system. It has been said that animal rights are human rights and that there is no peace without justice. We are coming to understand that we cannot end war against people and continue the killing of billions of animals every year. Tolstoy said it succinctly, “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.” I would add that as long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be unbridled pollution and criminal devastation of the earth, wildlife, and human health.

Simply ending the practice of confining, killing and eating animals of land and sea would bring vast healing for the earth, the wilderness, and the seas. And it would bring a large part of the pharmaceutical, agribusiness, and oil giants to their knees.

The “Declaration of the Occupation of New York” lists a poisoned food supply, a monopolized farming system, the torture and brutal confinement of animals, endless wars, the blocking of alternative energy initiatives and the covering up of oil spills, to name just a few of the reasons for the occupation.

And yet I see within, under, and around these huge tentacles of domination three major reasons for hope.

• More courage: It takes courage to face such widespread injustice. I see this courage among more people than ever before.

• More unity: It is becoming ever more clear that these issues are all intricately interconnected. Activists are realizing that their issues overlap, that they need each other, not only because of the overlap, but also because of the attempts by the power elite to silence all the voices of truth, to prevent videotaping of atrocities, and to attempt to prosecute non-violent protesters as “terrorists.”

• More love: The driving force behind greed is a deep, usually unconscious, fear. The motivating force for activists and the people who support them is an abiding love for what and whom they are trying to protect and heal. Love, whether in the microcosm of our own lives, or in the big picture, always trumps fear. As Martin Luther King, Jr. stated “True pacifism is not unrealistic submission to evil power. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of Love.” It is the most powerful force in the universe. I see more love than ever before at work in the world.

Arthur Conan Doyle once said, “At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.” I think this sentiment can be applied equally to all the justice movements. The endless permutations are everywhere evident now, and as people wake up, one by one, the singular cause is no longer hidden.

The Occupy movement and all the other great work that activists have done is all about hope in the face of madness, and it is about faith in the power of people. That power we share does not come from corporate oppression, from money, or from the exploitation of nearly every form of life on the planet. The power that we have comes from our love and respect for this exquisitely beautiful planet that is our home, for our non-human relatives, for plants that feed and heal us and astonish us with their beauty, for the poor of the world who suffer so much, and for each other.

As the holidays draw near, as always we will enter a magical time when most of the music we hear will be about love, peace on earth, family, friends, and all good things. We will be treated to, not just visions of sugar plums (whatever those are), but also to visions of what the world would be like if we really could create peace on earth. We’ll get holiday cards bearing wishes for “Peace on Earth,” as if, at least in December of every year, we have permission to believe that peace is possible.

And in January we will be prompted to make the mandatory New Year’s resolutions to become better people than we are, or shall we say—to behave in better ways. These two months make up a season of the heart more surely than any other time of year. It is a time to dream the impossible dream, to love more than ever before, to find tears in our eyes at the sight of snow and stars and puppies and the children who are trusting us to make non-toxic sandwiches and make the world safe for them.

During the holidays we can draw from and add to this charmed atmosphere of hope and love and peace. Let us, each in our own way, bring peace and healing to the soil, to seas and rivers, to the air we breathe, to forests and prairies, to fish and coral reefs, to whales and dolphins, to all animals longing for freedom, and to all people. May the wars that are ravaging animals, earth, and people come to an end and the truth be told again and again. May your holidays and your new year be bright with promise and may the vision you carry in your heart for a better world hold steady.

New York City Occupation Declaration includes animals

An official statement of purpose for the ongoing massive protest was recently released. 

It's title is “The Declaration of the Occupation of New York city." It is important for everyone as we see our world being held hostage in so many ways by the power elite. What I love about the declaration is that it is so inclusive—so inclusive, in fact, that animals are on the list of injustices. So often the many protests for human rights sadly exclude animals even though the rights of both are so intricately interconnected.  But this time, we see a wider view being taken. Here is part of the statement. (To learn more, go to http://www.nationofchange.org/.)


“As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

“As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.”

What follows the introduction is a list of atrocities. Two of the items on that list are:


• “They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.


• “They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.”

It is so heartening to see human rights groups such as this acknowledge the suffering of animals as an intrinsic part of the struggle for an end to oppression in general. Animal rights are human rights. There is no separation. We cannot have one without the other. 

Wars, oppression, slavery, and all forms of violence toward people will end when we become nonviolent as a species, and when that bright day of higher consciousness arrives there will also be no more war, oppression, slavery, or any form of violence toward animals or the earth. 

In our prayers and thoughts as this awakening of the people continues, let us carry these heroic activists in our hearts and--

See the change and be the change. 

Peace is possible for all life everywhere. 

Together we can do this.  

May all beings be happy. May all beings be free.

Do Animals Go To Heaven?

Our town newspaper is the Lawrence Journal World.  On their Faith Page, they receive questions and then invite various community members to answer the questions.  I have been so thrilled to be asked to submit answers to several questions over the years, because it allows me to give voice to the animals who are so often misunderstood and mistreated by the human species.  Here is my recent answer to the question--

Do Animals Go to Heaven?

For the Faith Page, Lawrence Journal World

Lawrence, Kansas

May 14, 2011

One night Raymond and Suzanne Peters were awakened by their dog, Mac, barking loudly. Half asleep they hushed the dog, but the barking became so frantic that Raymond finally arose. When he did, he found, to his horror, that their house was on fire. Quickly the couple ran from the house carrying their children.

Once outside and safe, the couple suddenly realized the true extent of Mac’s devotion to them. Without doubt, it was Mac who had saved their lives, but Mac had died three months prior to the fire. Although this event may seem improbable, a quick look at the number of books and websites dedicated to such stories indicates that many people have experienced similar evidence of animals living on after death.

The Hebrew word for living soul in the Bible is “nephesh,” and it is given to both human beings and animals. This is the mysterious, unseen life force that animates all living beings. It is the breath of God infused with Divine Love.

When asked whether animals go to heaven, the beloved author, James Herriot, stated that he believed they do and added, “If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.”

St. John the Divine stated that he saw many animals in heaven. St. Francis of Assisi noted that “there is no degradation in the dignity of human nature in claiming kinship with creatures so beautiful, so wonderful, who praise God in the forest even as the angels praise Him in heaven.”

This question, though perhaps unanswerable in the literal sense, has profound implications for us. When we open our hearts fully to the realization that animals are sacred and endowed with Divine Love; when we look into their eyes and remember that they are our precious companions and not ours to use and kill; we enter a realm of infinite compassion, love, and inner peace.

Missing Dirt and Dirty Deeds

This is my latest article for the newsletter "Sierra Club Planet Kansas", April-May Issue, 2011.  I write articles for the "Eating as Though the Earth Matters" column for each issue.

Missing Dirt and Dirty Deeds

As environmentalists and outdoor enthusiasts we are all keenly aware that the Earth does indeed matter—and not just to each of us but to everyone and all those who will live here after us. We are also painfully aware of what “civilization,” empire building, and runaway greed has done to our precious planet.

Yet caught somewhere in the shadows is another fearsome force that seems to have two faces. It is agriculture. This 10,000 year old invention has, on the one hand, the aura of love and care. It carries with it the pastoral images of farmers planting seeds and watching the miracle of food, flowers, pollen, and green leaves germinating from each tiny seed. It also brings with it our very survival since that is what the majority of people depend on in order to eat and stay alive. On the other hand, it carries with it a picture we don’t really like to face. Both animal agriculture and plowing to grow food are among the primary factors which have brought this planet nearly to the brink of disaster.

In order to take action, of course, we have to bear witness to this and fully understand what has been happening gradually over the centuries that has brought us, the earth, and the animals into this crisis.

In this article, let’s take a look at one aspect of the destructive face of agriculture—soil erosion and desertification. As we know, this is happening all over the world right now. As William Kotke explains in his book The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future, desertification occurs as follows:

1. Too many confined animals overgrazing their limited space, deforestation (often done to provide more grazing land for more animals), and plowing land for grain to feed animals strip the native vegetation. That vegetation was kept intact and nourished for centuries by wild herbivores, but domesticated grazing animals cannot roam freely, choose their favorite grasses, and move on before doing any damage.

2. Once stripped, the land begins to erode, and the topsoil leaves a more or less impermeable layer of soil with less vegetation behind. This layer does not absorb water as well and so begins to wash away as well. In addition the water tends to run downhill instead of being absorbed into the soil to work its magic there and to replenish the water table.

3. This begins a spiral of more and more erosion as less water is absorbed and instead races downhill causing floods followed by droughts. Springs and creeks dry up, and rivers run muddy and full of the many toxic products that come from upstream, including farmed animal urine, feces, pesticides, herbicides, and animal pharmaceuticals.

4. According to Kotke, the floods carry huge amounts of sand and gravel that then bury the fertile floodplains downstream. He states, “This is the history of civilization from China, to India, to the Caucuses of Central Asia, to Europe, and now to the whole world. Civilization equals aridity.” He calls soil erosion “one of the most life-threatening problems on the planet.”

5. As the ability of soil to retain moisture is lost, rainfall decreases.

6. The end result is desertification. We have seen this happen in the span of our own lifetimes, for example, where rainforests have been clearcut in order to provide grazing land for cattle.

7. It’s important to also face the fact that this desertification alters the ecosystems. So not only do wild, native animals suffer from loss of habitat, but ranchers kill them by the millions in order to maintain their domesticated herds.

A permaculture book entitled Forest Farming points out that land dedicated to animal herds can produce only an average of 200 pounds of food per acre, compared to 1 ½ tons of cereal grain or 7 tons of apples.

According to Kotke, domesticated herds are grazing 70 percent of the land in 11 western states.

I love deserts and semi-arid ecosystems, but that is not what is being created here. A healthy natural desert provides homes for many animals and plants, and life flourishes. But deserts that have come into being as the result of human manipulation and destruction support very little life.

Animal agriculture is an immense and overwhelming factor in this devastation to the earth. However, the very, very good news is—we don’t need legislation to change this. We don’t need to change the minds of ranchers. We need simply to stop supporting this destructive industry by ending our consumption of animal products. One of our greatest powers as people is the boycott. And as I have said before in this column—the Mother of All Boycotts is to go vegan. When we adopt a vegan lifestyle, which is essentially a commitment to nonviolence to the earth and all life, we no longer purchase animal products and, thus, end the demand for the destruction that such purchases cause.

As human beings dedicated to bringing our beloved, miraculous earth back to health; restore ecosystems for our wild cousins; show compassion for all animals; and repair the enormous damage caused by our species, we need to show the power elite that we do not depend on them to tell us what to eat or how to treat the earth.

The meat and dairy industry is heavily subsidized by the federal government. Otherwise, those animal products would be much more expensive than they are. Out of all federal agricultural subsidies, vegetables and fruit receive .37% of the take; nuts and legumes, 1.91%; sugar, oil, starch, and alcohol, 10.69%; grains, 13.23%; while meat and dairy receive a whopping 73.80%. (Source: http://www.pcrm.org/magazine/gm07autumn/health_pork.html) And remember—the vast majority of the grains are fed to farmed animals. Powerful, special interest lobbies, good old boy networks and our own complicity have caused this dysfunction. We have the power to choose not to support them.

"I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence." Frederick Douglass, abolitionist (1818-1895)

As if it weren’t fun enough to say “we don’t need you” to the power elite, here are some vegan recipes to make life even more fun. (Use as many organic and fair trade ingredients as possible.)

Vegan Mac and Cheese from vegweb.com
Ingredients:
1 1/2 pounds pasta, preferably macaroni
"Cheese" Sauce:
1 1/2 cups unsweetened nondairy milk
1 1/2 cups nutritional yeast
1 cup canola or vegetable oil
1 cup water
1/3 cup tamari or soy sauce or Braggs Aminos
1/4 (12 ounce) block firm (not silken) tofu
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1 tablespoon paprika
1 tablespoon vegesal or salt
1 dollop mustard, optional

Directions:
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Boil water in a big pot and cook pasta according to package directions.
- Add all of the "cheese" sauce ingredients in a blender and process until smooth. Once pasta is cooked, drain and put it in the baking pan (about the size of a brownie pan). Pour the "cheese" sauce over the pasta.
- Bake until the top of the pasta looks slightly browned and crispy, about 15 minutes.

Julie’s Amazing Cole Slaw
In a food processor, finely shred
One head of purple cabbage
Or ½ head purple and ½ head green cabbage
In a separate bowl mix
2/3 of a large jar of Vegenaise
2/3 cup apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
Pepper
Adjust seasonings to taste
Toss in cabbage and mix together.

Submitted by Judy Carman, M.A., Author of Peace to All Beings, co-author of The Missing Peace: The Hidden Power of our Kinship with Animals.and owner of a truck powered by used veggie oil. circleofcompassion.org, peacetoallbeings.com