Climate Change and the 500 Million Army
Rocky VI is a better movie than you may remember. And that’s mostly because the final fight between Rocky and Ivan Drago is beautifully written. Rocky can do little but absorb Drago’s punches until the second round, when he finally unleashes a wicked punch that cuts his giant foe above the eye and draws blood. From then on, as they said, “it’s anybody’s boxing match.”
Climate change seems to be getting worse right before our eyes. A massive number of us — over half the people on Earth, definitely — know that it’s real and getting worse. And yet we continue to take it: to accept the incessant rain of blows to our homes, our communities, our livelihoods, and for the unfortunate (so far) few, to our loved ones. We take it, because there doesn’t seem to be another option. And we struggle over what to do about it, and wonder if what we’re already doing is worthwhile. Every new thing we consider trying, we’re inevitably back to “what good will that do?” Indeed, how will one person’s actions accomplish anything at all?
Individually, that’s a completely reasonable thinking process. But collectively, there’s another option. Hence the title of this piece.
70–75 percent of the world’s population consume meat. That’s at least 5.6 billion people.
That other option is a global online campaign. A campaign to get 500 million people who eat meat (including the organizers, obvs), around the world but especially in the developed world, to pledge that they will become vegetarians on October 1.
Everybody on Earth doesn’t have to become vegetarian that day. Just 500 million meat eaters for now. (With more to follow, of course.)
In a world that runs on money and power in the hands of the few, that would be a sudden, sharp blow to their profits, because the life cycle of most food inputs is short. And it would be a very sharp, sudden demonstration to the fossil fuel industry that they’re next.
A certain segment of the public will try to deride us as virtue signalers, even though this is clearly not that since it’s a melding of words with action. As libtards, though that one’s out of fashion with them. As social justice warriors, which, I mean, maybe that’s part of it to some of us. As communists, definitely, because they now seem to believe everybody who disagrees with them is one. (Probably as anti-worker, because workers in the meat industry could suffer and lose their livelihoods. We’ll have to strategize on that one.)
But those arguments will fall flat on arrival, because of what the movement would be at its essence: an uprising of regular people, exercising their freedom of choice as human beings, their right to their own bodily integrity as they see fit, and their rights as consumers to buy or not buy as they choose. (That’s personal freedom, bodily integrity in the age of antivaxxers, and the free market in one campaign. Conservatives couldn’t come up with something that more clearly furthers their most fundamental values.)
What are the wealthy powerful going to do? Force us to buy their meat? (They may artificially pump up atmospheric carbon in order to argue that the campaign accomplished nothing. We’ll have to be on guard for that.)
This campaign will not get us out of the escalating climate tailspin on its own. But it would send a powerful message of unity and hope among regular people and a message to polluters that they’d better straighten up and fly right. Because we have actual power, because we have numbers, and because our numbers can only grow.
It would be Rocky’s first successful punch.
Thoughts? Stuff I haven’t considered? Worth doing?
Thanks everybody. Keep safe and healthy.
