Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
duced - in preference to cruel culling. Ultimately a whole ecosystem could be man-
aged in the same way.
50
Pearce's predictions may seem extreme, or even lunatic (like many in this chapter) but
he is only a step or two further down the road than Singer - who is without doubt the most
influential philosopher behind the spread of the vegan ethic. There is something to be said
for people who pursue fashionable ideas to a fanciful but logical conclusion. Those of us
who value the natural world, and more especially our relations with members of the animal
kingdom, both wild and domestic, would do well to keep an eye on the vegan agenda, for
it may not turn out to be quite as meek, disinterested and innocuous as it might seem:
We are what we eat, and by eating animals we help to ensure that we ourselves remain
animals, participants in the food chain that momentarily we head before we too become
flesh for worms. By declining to eat meat we abandon our status as predator, ostensibly to
take on the more humble role of middle rank herbivore, but increasingly to assume the roles
of manager and absentee landlord. As we detach ourselves from the natural world, it fades
to a spectral image, glimpsed through the windscreen of a car or the screen of a computer,
a world we can no longer be part of because we are too squeamish to partake of it. As a
species we are slowly resigning from nature, and for those of us who lament this tragedy,
there is at least one consolation: that for some time to come there will be poachers lurking
in the woods, for the vegans and the wildlife managers will never catch them all.
1
The Ecologist (1976), 'Should an Ecological Society be a Vegetarian One?',
The Ecologist
6:10.
2
Fox, Michael (1999), 'American Agriculture's Ethical Crossroads', in Tansey, Geoff and d'Silva, Joyce,
The Meat
Business
, Earthscan, 1999.
3
Hall, Jenny (2008), 'Stockfree Britain',
The Land
5.
4
Appleby, Paul (2004),
What If We Were All Vegan?
,
http://www.ivu.org/oxveg/Articles/whatifallvegan.html
5
Mark Fisher's vision of 'self-willed land' seems to be highly compatible with a vegan society that safeguarded large
areas of land for trees; but I can find nothing stating that it is vegan, and it could also be compatible with a highly efficient
factory farming system. Self-Willed Land
http://www.self-willed-land.org.uk/
6
Paine, R T (1966 ), 'Food Web Complexity and Species Diversity',
American Nauralist
, vol 100 no 910: pp 65-75.
7
Savory, Allan with Butterfield, Jody (1999),
Holistic Management
, Island Press.
8
Fenton, James (2004), 'Wild Thoughts: A New Paradigm for the Uplands',
Ecos
, Vol 25:1, 2004.
9
Long, Alan (1979),
The Green Plan, a Synopsis
, The Vegetarian Society.
10
Singer, Peter (1995),
Animal Liberation
, Pimlico, p 233.
11
Savory,
op cit
. 7.
12
Tony Peacock, on Radio 4 'Today', 12 August 2009.
13
The concept of a choice between 'sharing land' and 'sparing land' has been developed by Tim Benson of the
University of Leeds, from: Rhys Green
et al
, 'Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature',
Science
, 307, pp 550-5, 28 Jan 2005.
See also Chapter 8, footnote 36.
