The World's Gone Crazy - Or Is It Just Me?

What the hell is going on, people? Seriously.

We've got a long-term oil problem in the Gulf, and suspicions that that shiny cap may lead to gas blowing out from other unstable areas of the sea bed, while BP spins the story to be, "Hey, if you want us to open it up and let it start spewing again, then it's on your head." Nobody willing to step up and say, "Do THIS." And then take responsibility.

The drug companies are trying to get the FDA to approve cholesterol-lowering medicine for kids. It's so much easier to give the kids a pill along with their vitamin, because everyone's working multiple jobs, nobody's able to be home to boot them out from in front of the television or the computer, take away the chips and say, "Go out. Play. Come home when it's dinner time." So the next generation sits on their widening little butts, not even knowing what they're missing. Besides - if they went out to play, there's probably no one else out there to play with.

A science blog actually agreed to let PepsiCo. host a page called "Food Frontiers."
Pepsi knows a lot about good, wholesome food, I'm sure we all agree.

Not surprisingly, they got slammed.


http://scienceblogs.com/seed/2010/07/transparency_regarding_food_fr.php

They took it down after their scientists starting leaving en masse in protest.\

http://scienceblogs.com/seed/2010/07/food_frontiers.php

Now that I'm a corporate type I realize that I'm totally losing touch with the natural world. I wake up, dress, drive to work, spend the day in an office, drive home, and spend my evening inside working on my book, my show, playing Freecell and trying to stay awake until 11. I am a hothouse flower and that is not me at all. But it is who many of us are.

It's unnatural. And it's dangerous. You could almost begin to forget that our lives rely on that world outside our windows.

There is one bright spot. A couple of years back I stumbled upon a small blurb about a proposal to lease drilling rights all over my area of New York for horizontal gas drilling. I did a series of stories and the news started to spread, thanks to some of the environmental groups I spoke with.

The movie "Gasland" is doing the rest. It was shown at a school auditorium nearby this past weekend and suddenly the entire region is mobilizing with online activists who are emailing, writing, calling and visiting their legislators, concerned that the hazards that Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia and other states which are already allowing hydrofracking are facing will be coming soon to a flaming sink near them.

I am impressed with the power of film. Similarly, our friends at Tribe of Heart are opening hearts and minds with their film, "Peaceable Kingdom". It's an attempt to reconnect that mental schism between our love for animals and how we get the food on our plates. They're winning awards all over the country and audiences are reacting thoughtfully, starting conversations, starting to talk - just as they'd hoped.

It's a Mad Mad World, my friends. But I don't think it's hopeless yet.

Transformative Film

I feel really lucky to have seen this film grow over the past few years.
It's important, it's powerful and it's got a lot of heart.
It's Peaceable Kingdom, the new film from Tribe of Heart.

Follow that link and the music you hear will be my guy's. That's why I've been able to watch this film evolve over the past few years. He's been working with Jenny and James and I've watched them methodically edit, trimming and trimming until what's left is the most powerful movie I've ever seen.

I've written about it before, but writing just doesn't do it justice.
Now they've put up a clip that gives you a real feel for this project's spirit. It's about animal rights, yes, but it's done in a way that works. It doesn't preach, it doesn't shriek. It just asks you to listen to farmers who've changed the way they relate to their animals, and lets you look more closely at those animals to see why. This, for instance, shows a mother hen and her chick. And it makes you think.

Mother Hen and Chick from Tribe of Heart on Vimeo.

This film is kicking some serious film festival butt. It's won three top prizes already. Maybe its time has come. Maybe it's the right filmmakers, the right subject, the right approach, all together at the right moment.

It's not out on DVD yet. But it will be. If it's going to be screening near you, go. If it's not, request it.

I've seen "An Inconvenient Truth," Michael Moore's films - I've admired them. I got a lot out of them.

Nothing has packed the emotional punch of this one, and not in a harrowing, I'm-scarred-for-life way, though it doesn't flinch from showing reality. Peaceable Kingdom makes you rethink what you thought you knew, and encourages you to reconsider your own relationship to the way things are.

Does What We Eat Define Us?

I'd like to discuss this without a firestorm. I have questions.

The Judeo-Christian ethic teaches that the world and all its creatures are here for Man's use. Based on that logic, we have used this world's resources, abused and depleted them. Among the problems we have created is the factory farm.

I am a vegetarian. I'll tell you that up front because I'm not trying to do a sneak attack on those of you who aren't. From an animal rights perspective, I'm only part of the way there. To really practice what I believe, I should be vegan. So I understand that making a drastic lifestyle change is a huge and difficult step. Okay?

First, I want to know if there is a way to discuss this issue without the knee jerk hysteria that so often happens the minute you say, "Eating animal products is bad on a number of different levels and our modern livestock agriculture is inhumane."

It's blunt, but it's fact. You live longer if you don't eat meat. Here are some links if you want to study the numbers.

http://www.thevegetariansite.com/diet_stud.htm

That's enough right there to start a fight, and I wonder why that is. Is it because it threatens our habits? Is it because it is seen as an implied criticism?

But wait until you start discussing the ethics of modern farming. We have a vision of the family farm, the peaceful cows in the field, the well cared for animals that are treated with respect, with care until the time comes for them to be slaughtered for meat. That's not reality. And we know it.

The book "Eating Animals" is a bestseller. It documents the horrific conditions under which today's animals life on factory farms. The movie "Peaceable Kingdom" is making the film festival rounds (and winning). It tells the stories of farmers, good, compassionate people who try to run humane livestock operations, who realize that their livelihood is based on a belief they can no longer support: they kill the animals they care for.

Our children's bodies are full of antibiotics from the food we feed them. Their hormone levels are artifically elevated. Our food is tainted, it makes us sick. Sometimes it kills us. The animals are kept in conditions that we could not abide if we witnessed it firsthand.

Scientists say the huge population of animals are contributing half the methane that's changing our climate.

Yet look at this article in a Missouri newspaper. Obviously, in a farm state the question of animal rights would be seen as threatening. What strikes me is the tone of the comments below it. It's a "war".

http://www.marshfieldmail.com/articles/2010/02/09/opinion/doc4b71ee6a615ee713670417.txt

I don't want to fight. I want to know if it is possible to lay out the arguments, line them up against that "Man is the Earth's Master" chestnut and see if it's possible to get past the knee jerk denial to a place where the evidence can begin to be considered on its own merits.

The family farm, a beloved part of my background, is already dying, killed by big agriculture. A plant-based diet won't kill it. Creativity will, in fact, save the few that remain. Rather than eat the animals on farms, find ways to make money from our nostalgia for that way of life. Or switch to sustainable crops. Don't tell me I'm anti-farm; I'm not.

For me, the bottom line became that I couldn't justify the death of an animal to please my palate. I don't have that right. It was that simple. All the arguments are there to support my diet. The arguments for eating animal products don't stand up to scrutiny.

So it's a very personal choice, and perhaps that's why it's such an emotional one. But I can tell you that when I see a pig, a cow, a chicken at the county fair now, that disconnect between my fondness for them and what I eat is gone. And that's a huge relief.

Peaceable Kingdom Is Coming - Pass It On

Did you see the climate change issue differently after watching Al Gore's
"An Inconvenient Truth"? Then you are the audience for a new film that's about to be released by NY-based filmmakers Tribe of Heart.

It's a movie that will change the way you see farm animals. I saw it as part of their pre-release audience testing. It is called "Peaceable Kingdom, The Journey Home".

Filmmakers Jenny Stein and James LaVeck have made a powerful film on a controversial issue, but they've kept a compassionate touch. Rather than strident demands for change, they've focused the film on livestock farmers whose own lives transformed when they began to question what they were doing. The answers to those questions haven't been easy, and their conclusions have cost them friendships and a great deal of money. But those answers have also created amazing relationships with animals they once considered food. The softening of their hearts is reflected in their faces.

Tribe of Heart goes to farm animal sanctuaries and introduces us to farm animals in a way many of us have never experienced. Once you've gotten to know them, it is impossible to believe they are any less individual, sentient creatures than the pets we love.

There is inescapable evidence that our factory farm, mass produced food system is dangerous. The latest recall involves the most benign food of all - cookie dough. Tribe of Heart goes behind the scenes, showing the creatures at those farms, showing the conditions in which they live and the way they die. These are tough scenes to watch, but open your own heart. Realize that what you eat, what you ate at your last meal, came from those conditions. Be brave enough to see where that food that's presented so neatly wrapped at your cavernous grocery store really comes from. If it raises questions in your own mind - all the better.

Open yourself to the possibility of change. "Peaceable Kingdom - The Journey Home" is a great first step.

Thought Trails As a Baby Sleeps

The picture was taken through our front window. Miss Jane Doe, as we called her, was apparently dropped off by her mom very early in the morning and told to stay put while mom ran off to do a few deer-errands.

She can't be more than a week old - her body is just about the same size as our fat cat's, though her legs are impossibly long.

I watched her all day, compulsively checking on her through the window to be sure she was okay. We have coyotes here. In fact, the first week I lived here, before KB got here, I heard a deer being killed under the weeping cherry on the other side of the house. I have never heard anything so horrific, ever. I hope never to hear it again.

So my concern was legitimate, and I was fully prepared to go out and defend her with a baseball bat if necessary.

It wasn't.

She stayed curled up in a ball all day, occasionally waking to look around, once standing up and peeking out from her sheltered spot behind the flowers, then blinking and curling back up to sleep some more.

By ten pm, we were worried. She was still there. It was getting colder. I'd already gone online and saw that the number one rule with "abandoned" fawns is to stay away. But what if mom didn't come back?

It was a rough couple of hours - an attempt to distract myself with television led me to an insultingly simplified yet hope-crushing view of the future on some network. The gist was that climate change would be creating disaster, even with heroic attempts to address it, and things were going to be pretty damned grim even in my own children's lifetime. Thanks. That helps.

I've been fighting a sense of hopelessness for a while, and it's shaking my sense of myself as an optimist and an idealist. The issues are so huge and humans have such basic errors in their assumptions that solutions seem like an incredible longshot.

Take food, for example. Do we really understand the cost of what we eat? No, no, no, I'm not some holier than thou vegan fanatic. I should be vegan. I can't be holier than thou since I know the reasons why and I'm still not doing it.

But Jenny Stein and James LaVeck came over recently to show KB the nearly-final version of Tribe of Heart's new documentary, "Peaceable Kingdom". It tells the story of the transformation of three farm families who suddenly questioned the assumption that everything in the world is here to serve humanity.

What if Man isn't the crown of creation? What if we treat animals like sentient beings? Can we then even bear to think of what we do to them?

But challenging that assumption is massive - it goes against even what many religions have institutionalized: God put Man in charge and everything in it is here to serve his needs.

That's put us where we are. That removes us from the web of interconnectedness that is our ecosystem, and entitles us to exploit all resources for our own comfort and gain. Drill, baby, drill. Suck up all that oil so we can drive. Breed those animals so we can eat. Develop that land so we can shop. Test those toxins on animals so we're safe. Dump that waste someplace and to hell with the consequences because we NEED that nuclear energy, that chemical, that drug, that plastic, that road, that fuel.

And we DO need much of it. That's the problem. We have created an insatiable society and to step back into the environmental web and take our places as equals rather than rulers, we'd have to completely change how we live.

What are the odds of that? We are some of nature's most helpless creatures with a talent for technology and a massive sense of entitlement.

See why I'm discouraged? It feels to me today like society is hurtling toward its inevitable end while most of us are yelling "faster, faster!" It just doesn't make sense, but I guess that's what denial looks like.

So that's where my head's at and it's not pretty. But there is one bit of good news.

Miss Jane Doe, after worrying us for several hours, quietly disappeared sometime around midnight. I'm hoping that means Mom finally got home.

Why Do Humans Suck So Much?

I'm about ready to give up. Seriously. We've got Bernie Madoff and his Limitless Greed, Hank Paulson and his Tunnel Vision, George Bush, who doesn't seem to notice anything except a shoe winging toward his head. We've got Republicans, we've got Democrats, we've got liberals and conservatives. We have, in my opinion, a really stupid collection of beings that call themselves Americans. And every day I seem to find out that our cruelty, selfishness and sense of entitlement is bigger than I thought.

I was collapsed on the couch last night, soaking in the usually-harmless drug of television entertainment. But there was a show on chimpanzees that I came in on about halfway through. It was Nature's 25th anniversary special: "Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History". These were chimps that have been in advertising, in the movies, in the circus. They've been pets. They've been prisoners in medical labs. And they're now in chimp sanctuaries.
The show ended with the release of some of the chimps into a new island - a place where they could wander with no bars between them and the sky. One ailing chimp couldn't bring himself to step onto the grass. Concrete was all he'd ever known. And one aging chimp immediately clambered up a tree and stayed there.

That was enough to rip my heart, but I found something else was even worse. At one point, the man who'd raised two of the now-rescued chimps was found and invited to come visit the animals. He'd had to give them up and they'd been sold, bred and sent to labs. It had been twenty years since they'd ridden in his car or had an ice cream.

"No way will they remember me," he said as they walked toward the cages. "I don't even remember people after twenty years."

But they did. Their joy in hearing his voice was unmistakable. They let down their guard and behaved in ways the staff had never seen. And I fell apart.

Our arrogance and our biblical belief that all creatures are here to serve us has turned us into monsters. We imprison animals and torture them to make sure our mascara won't make our eyes sting. We enslave creatures for our own trivial wants as well as our medical needs. We even eat them. And they know what is going on.

When my kids were young they helped raise two dairy cows for 4H. And long after they'd given up 4H and moved on to other hobbies, they went back to that farm. When they called their cows' names, those cows came running. They know. Don't tell me how smart animals are or aren't - they're aware. And we act like we don't know.

Just when I think I'm aware of all the rotten things we do, I get slapped in the face with one I'd never considered. We'd better hope there is no heaven and no hell, because what we as a species and particularly as a nation are doing is unforgivable.