CHILDREN’S BURDEN

           I guested on Dr. Peter Osborne’s podcast today and he used an interesting statement worth sharing.  We talked about fake meat and the anti-livestock craze to save the planet from incinerating. 

            He mentioned twice that today’s children are being guilt-driven with an abusive burden to save the planet.  I had never thought about the emotional trauma of placing that burden on our children.  As if they have nothing else to worry about, now society is telling them they’d better be vegans or their planet will incinerate.

            If stress is the leading cause of disease, society is surely creating an epidemic with this narrative to our children.  No wonder they’re screaming, killing themselves, and consuming more anti-depressants than any civilization in history. 

            The real downer here is that they can’t even eat a hamburger or hotdog.  They can’t eat a chicken casserole or enjoy bacon and eggs.  Livestock must go. 

            Who will tell them the truth?  That 500 years ago, the world had more pounds of animals (including humans) than it does today.  North America produced far more pounds of flesh 500 years ago than it does today.  Some 200 million beavers consumed more vegetable material than all the humans.  Bison numbered 100-200 million.  Passenger pigeons in flocks big enough to blot out the sun for three days flew overhead.  Between 1 and 2 million wolves consumed 20 pounds of meat a day.  And I haven’t even gotten to elk, deer, prairie chickens, wild turkeys and a host of other critters.

            If animal burps and farts are going to turn us all into crispy critters, why didn’t they 500 years ago when the planet produced far more of them?  As Diana Rodgers, producer of Sacred Cow says, “it’s the how, not the cow.”  Those massive historical flocks and herds moved in a strategically ecology-enhancing integrated choreography; they ate primarily perennials, not annuals; beaver ponds hydrated 8 percent of the North American landscape, more than double the water surface today.

            All we have to do is mimic these ancient principles.  Fortunately, we have the means to do it today; in fact, we can do it far easier than we could a century ago.  We have electric fence, excavators, plastic pipe and front end loaders.  And chain saws.  Never has humankind had the capacity to duplicate nature as efficiently.

            The answer is not veganism.  The answer is management.  To doom our children to a life of peas and tofu is to deny them soul-satisfying options they can embrace enthusiastically.  We need to tell children that hamburgers grown with mob stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization heal the planet.  I’d be looking for an out too if I thought I could never have bacon and eggs or a glass of milk again.  What a horrendously horrid fate.  Let’s preach it loud and preach it long:  authentic pastured livestock mimics historical abundance; eat and enjoy.

            How are your kids holding up to this “no livestock” narrative?