Why a hipster, vegan, green tech economy is not sustainable

Vijay Kolinjivadi

Al-Jazeera

Improving eco-efficiency within a capitalist growth-oriented system will not save the environment. 

On the western borderlands of Montreal's well-to-do Outremont district and the ultra-hipsterised and gentrified Mile End lies an expanse of land where the University of Montreal is currently building a new science campus. Just across is Parc-Extension, one of Canada's poorest and most densely populated neighbourhoods and a port of call for many newly arrived immigrants.

The new campus has been touted as a model of "sustainable development". It boasts LEED-certified buildings to reduce environmental impact, rainwater collection structures, energy-efficient lighting and heat recycling, infrastructure for electric vehicles and bikes, lots of greenery, and overall, a minimal carbon footprint. A number of tech companies, including Microsoft's new AI Hub, are moving in and are expected to further enhance the "eco-efficiency" of the area.

The unspoken expectation is that once the green new campus is completed, capital and economic growth will naturally flow into the area. This means nearby neighbourhoods will get "revitalised", especially the poorer ones, like Parc-Extension.

Thus, immigrant-owned grocery stores, halal butcheries and community centres will soon be replaced by vegan chain restaurants, hip vintage clothing joints, organic food stores and coffee-shops galore, as landlords push out poor tenants to make space for more well-to-do ones. 

In the process, the implicit socio-economic violence behind gentrification will be invariably "greenwashed" and presented as development that would make the area more "sustainable", "beautiful" and "modern". 

Unfortunately, creation by destruction is what capitalism does best, and its damaging practices are anything but green. This market-driven "sustainable" vision of economic activity, ecological-conscious diets and "hipness" within modern capitalism reinforce inequality and still hurt the environment. 

Before I proceed further with my argument, I should mention that I am an academic, living in a "hip" part of Montreal and engage in activities that follow a particular aesthetic ethos, all of which make me very much a part of the reality I critique below. My aim is not to moralise, but rather to highlight the dangers of a political and economic system that profits from deceiving perhaps well-meaning self-proclaimed progressive folks into believing that a greener, more efficient capitalism is possible.

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The cult of veganism is riddled with inconsistencies

Paul Murray 
Western Australian 

Do vegans think that lions, hyenas — even feral cats — and other carnivores also should give up eating meat?

And if so, can I negotiate the video rights with Direct Action Everywhere to catch their silent walk-by protests live?

Or maybe not so live.

If veganism is driven by a moral issue about exploiting animals, why does it not logically extend to other meat-eating primates — our closest relatives, chimpanzees, are omnivores too — or to other predators?

These people would march in the streets about such discrimination in other forms.

What about fish? How can vegans possibly approve of big fish eating smaller ones if rescuing animals that are plundered for food is central to their cause?

Fsh are sentient animals. They feel pain and they bleed. Some fish positively bream with personality. Sorry, brim.

When will James Warden and his mates start lecturing white pointers about their dietary choices?

Now, it’s not funny to ridicule vegans. They can eat what they like.

But when vegan activists wilfully interfere with the livelihoods of farmers, invade the social interactions of citizens enjoying a meal out and try to make children fearful of a balanced diet, they should expect some push-back.

And the cult of veganism is riddled with inconsistencies.

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No, George Monbiot, Dropping Meat and Dairy Will Not Reduce Your Impact on the Earth

Doug DiPasquale
Sott.net

© The Guardian Feel the awesome power of meat guilt

If you were to believe the headlines (something not generally recommended) gracing newspapers and interwebs this week, you'd be assured that if you don't go vegan, you're going to kill the planet. Peer-reviewed research published in the prestigious journal Science late last month is based on a database of a bunch of different food products, which the study's authors analyzed from production to retailing to determine their environmental impact. From Science Daily:

Researchers at Oxford University and the Swiss agricultural research institute, Agroscope, have created the most comprehensive database yet on the environmental impacts of nearly 40,000 farms, and 1,600 processors, packaging types, and retailers. This allows them to assess how different production practices and geographies lead to different environmental impacts for 40 major foods.

So how did they assess the environmental impact of our daily foodstuffs? Pollutants like heavy metals or toxic chemicals being released? Destruction of fragile ecosystems? The number of endangered species affected? Invasive genetically modified technologies and their consequences? Nope. Those things don't matter in the grand scheme of things, apparently. All that matters now is carbon dioxide, the innocuous gas that feeds plants. In the current media landscape, all the horrific things we do to the environment get a pass. The only thing that gets attention is CO₂.

So it's no surprise that the studies that bolster this propaganda get the most traction in the media, dutifully tweeted out by the PC brigade, who are secure in their belief that they're 'doing something' to 'help save the planet'.

One article about this that stood out was George Monbiot's column at the Guardian, which ran with the headline: 'The best way to save the planet? Drop meat and dairy'... Right away, we know we're in for a wild ride. This is actually the second Guardian article in the last week about this study, and it attempts to guilt their readers into going vegan. It would appear their readers' diets is a particularly important issue for them.

The Monbiot piece opens:

Whether human beings survive this century and the next, whether other lifeforms can live alongside us: more than anything, this depends on the way we eat. We can cut our consumption of everything else almost to zero and still we will drive living systems to collapse, unless we change our diets.

The "more than anything" part is debatable, but as long as we're talking in generalizations, this is likely true. Monocrop farming, confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), genetic modification, glyphosate, toxic chemical agriculture - these things are all absolutely brutal on a planetary scale and it's probably true that we're going to reach a tipping point, if we haven't already, and start seeing absolutely devastating consequences and loss of life (human and otherwise). But that's not what Monbiot is talking about, as we see in the next paragraph. 

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