Starvation of Indigenous in Australia. Utopia's Dirty Secret
Tuesday, 12 April 2016 14:06
Pilger writes: "I had a call from Rosalie Kunoth-Monks the other day. Rosalie is an elder of the Arrernte-Alyawarra people, who lives in Utopia, a vast and remote region in the 'red heart' of Australia."
For thousands of years, the Indigenous people of Australia have suffered the ill-effects of colonization. (photo: Reuters)
Starvation of Indigenous in Australia. Utopia's Dirty Secret
By John Pilger, teleSUR
12 April 16
Black incarceration in Australia is greater than that of Black people in Apartheid South Africa. Indigenous people go to prison, are beaten up in custody and die in custody as a matter of routine. In despairing communities, children as young as 10 take their own lives.
had a call from Rosalie Kunoth-Monks the other day. Rosalie is an elder of the Arrernte-Alyawarra people, who lives in Utopia, a vast and remote region in the "red heart" of Australia.
The nearest town is Alice Springs, more than 200 miles across an ancient landscape of spinifex and swirling skeins of red dust. The first Europeans who came here, perhaps demented by the heat, imagined a white utopia that was not theirs to imagine; for this is a sacred place, the homeland of the oldest, most continuous human presence on earth. Rosalie was distressed, defiant and eloquent. Her distinction as one unafraid to speak up in a society so often deaf to the cries and anguish of its first people, its singular uniqueness, is well earned. She appears in my 2013 film, Utopia, with a searing description of a discarded people: "We are not wanted in our own country."
She has described the legacies of a genocide: a word political Australia loathes and fears. A week ago, Rosalie and her daughter Ngarla put out an alert that people were starving in Utopia. They said that elderly Indigenous people in the homelands had received no food from an aged care program funded by the Australian government and administered by the regional Council.
"One elderly man with end-stage Parkinson's received two small packets of mince meat and white bread," said Ngarla, "the elderly woman living nearby received nothing."
In calling for food drops, Rosalie said, "The whole community including children and the elderly go without food, often on a daily basis."
She and Ngarla and their community have cooked and distributed food as best they can. This is not unusual. Four years ago, I drove into the red heart and met Dr. Janelle Trees, a general practitioner whose Indigenous patients live within a few miles of US$1,000-a-night tourist resorts serving Uluru (Ayers Rock), she said, "Malnutrition is common.
I wanted to give a patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that would have been preventable if living conditions were better, but I couldn't treat her because she didn't have enough food to eat and couldn't ingest the tablets. I feel sometimes as if I'm dealing with similar conditions as the English working class at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
"There's asbestos in many Aboriginal homes, and when somebody gets a fibre of asbestos in their lungs and develops mesothelioma, [the government] doesn't care. When the kids have chronic infections and end up adding to these incredible statistics of Indigenous people dying of renal disease, and vulnerable to world record rates of rheumatic heart disease, nothing is done. I ask myself: “why not?"
When Rosalie phoned me from Utopia, she said, "It's not so much the physical starvation as the traumatizing of my people, of whole communities We are duped all the time. White Australia sets up organizations and structures that offer the pretense of helping us, but it's a pretence, no more. If we oppose it, it's a crime. Simply belonging is a crime. Suicides are everywhere. (She gave me details of the suffering in her own family). They're out to kill our values, to break down our traditional life until there's nothing there anymore."
Barkly Regional Council says its aged care packages get through and protests that the council is "the poorest of the three tiers of government and is very much dependent on [Northern] Territory and [Federal] governments for funds to provide such services to the bush. Barbara Shaw, the council's president,agreed that it was "totally unacceptable that people should be starving in a rich and well-developed country like Australia" and that "it is disgusting and wrong that Indigenous people experience deep poverty such as this.
"The starvation and poverty and the division often sewn among Indigenous people themselves as they try to identify those responsible stem in large part from an extraordinary episode known as "the Intervention". This is Australia's dirty secret.
In 2007, the then Prime Minister John Howard sent the army into Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory to "rescue children" who, claimed his minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mal Brough,were being abused by paedophile gangs in "unthinkable numbers".
Subsequently exposed as a fraud by the Australian Crime Commission, the Northern Territory Police and a damning report by child medical specialists, the "intervention" nonetheless allowed the government to destroy many of the vestiges of self-determination in the Northern Territory, the only part of Australia where Aboriginal people had won federally-legislated land rights. Here, they had administered their homelands with the dignity of self-determination and connection to land and culture and, as Amnesty reported, a 40 percent lower mortality rate. Distribution of food was never a problem.
It is this "traditional life" that is anathema to a parasitic white industry of civil servants, contractors, lawyers and consultants that controls and often profits from Aboriginal Australia, if indirectly through the corporate structures imposed on Indigenous organizations. The remote homelands are seen as an ideological threat, for they express a communalism at odds with the neoconservatism that rules Australia and demands"assimilation".
It is as if the enduring existence of a people who have survived and resisted more than two colonial centuries of massacre and theft remains a spectre on white Australia: a reminder of whose land this really is.
I know these communities and their people, who have shown me the conditions imposed on them. Many are denied consistent running water, sanitation and power. That basic sustenance should join this list is not surprising.
According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth report, Australia is the richest place on earth. Politicians in Canberra are among the wealthiest citizens; they like to hang Indigenous art on the white walls of their offices in the bleakly modern Parliament House. Their self-endowment is legendary. The Labor Party's last minister for indigenous affairs, Jenny Macklin, refurbished her office at a cost to the taxpayer of US$331,144. During her tenure, the number of Aboriginal people living in slums increased by almost a third. When Professor James Anaya, the respected United Nations Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous people, described the "intervention" as racist, the opposition spokesperson on Indigenous affairs, Tony Abbott, told Anaya to"get a life" and not "just listen to the old victim brigade."
Abbott was promoted to prime minister of Australia; he was evicted last year. When I began filming Indigenous Australia some 30 years ago, a global campaign was under way to end Apartheid in South Africa. Having reported from South Africa, I was struck by the similarity of white supremacy and the compliance, defensiveness and indifference of people who saw themselves as liberal. For example, Black incarceration in Australia is greater than that of Black people in Apartheid South Africa. Indigenous people go to prison, are beaten up in custody and die in custody as a matter of routine. In despairing communities, children as young as 10 take their own lives.
Yet no international opprobrium,no boycotts, have disturbed the surface of "lucky" Australia. As Rosalie's call reminds us, that surface should be shattered without delay.
US Counterinsurgency Policing Tactics Ravage Honduras
Tuesday, 12 April 2016 13:58
Excerpt: "Honduran media is ablaze with the latest in the constant stream of police corruption crises. This time the Honduran newspaper El Heraldo published a leaked police investigation into the November 2009 murder of the chief of the anti-narcotics unit Julian Aristides Gonzales, and the related December 2011 murder of his advisor, Alfredo Landaverde."
US Counterinsurgency Policing Tactics Ravage Honduras
By Annie Bird, teleSUR
12 April 16
The U.S. is pushing a counterinsurgency policing model for Honduras, while ignoring state corruption, impunity and violence. Meanwhile, corpses pile up.
onduran media is ablaze with the latest in the constant stream of police corruption crises.
This time the Honduran newspaper El Heraldo published a leaked police investigation into the November 2009 murder of the chief of the anti-narcotics unit Julian Aristides Gonzales, and the related December 2011 murder of his advisor, Alfredo Landaverde.
The investigation indisputably shows that high level police commanders planned, and police officers carried out, the assassinations. The public is not surprised: this was common knowledge and is just the latest scandal involving top level police commanders in murder and organized crime.
In scandal after scandal, all that seems to change are the acronyms. This time ski mask clad agents from the one-year-old new unit of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Criminal Investigation Technical Agency (ATIC), swooped in to take the files on 136 investigations from the archives of the Directorate for Investigation and Evaluation of Police Careers (DIECP), amid calls to shut down the DIECP. The DIECP was created in 2011 to replace the Direction of Internal Affairs of the National Police after the October 2011 murder of the son of the rector of the national university, Julieta Castellanos, by police officers.
Each scandal spurs the reconfiguration of police, the public prosecutor’s office, and military security agencies, but the pattern of criminal activity by the police continues. Three days after the scandal broke, on April 7, President Juan Orlando Hernandez presented a law giving his administration the capacity to fire police officers at will with no formal process. The same measure had been taken in 2012 in the wake of the Castellanos police murder scandal. While press reported hundreds of police officers fired, the reality was that it was just a handful, and the credibility of the whole process fell apart when the man with the power to fire at will, then director of the national police Juan Carlos Bonilla, was accused of sending gang members to kidnap the son of a former National Police Director. Police reforms look like nothing more than redistributing power between organized crime networks.
The question this latest scandal provoked was: why now? The leaked report is seven years old. Renowned police reform advocate Maria Luisa Borjas commented that she believed the U.S. Embassy had leaked the reports to open up the political space for another reconfiguration of security forces. Others comment that the crisis helps distract from the ongoing international outrage over the March 2, 2016, murder of indigenous rights activist Berta Caceres.
On April 5 President Hernandez stated that the National Police could be eliminated, provoking concern that the April 7 law facilitating the dismissal of police officers was the first step in a process intended to disband the National Police and replace it with the Military Police for Public Order (PMOP).
In January, the Security Ministry had announced it intended to give a renewed push to police reform, promoting a military-civilian joint task force, the Interinstitutional Security Force (FUSINA), and along with it promote the principal forces that participate in FUSINA, including the controversial PMOP which began operation in April 2014, and the TIGRES elite police unit that began operation in June 2014, along with the 2015 agencies of ATIC and the Directorate of Police Intelligence, likely in reference to its dependency, the Strategic Information Collection, Collation, Analysis and Archiving System, SERCAA.
In May 2015 the U.S. Embassy announced FUSINA received training from the U.S. Marines. While the U.S. State Department has maintained that the controversial PMOP does not receive U.S. training, on the ground reports claim it does, and given that PMOP forms part of FUSINA, the Marine training of FUSINA would seem to lend credence to local sources. In April 2015 it was announced that 300 specialists were arriving in Honduras to train FUSINA, including FBI agents.
ATIC’s public profile is quickly growing. In addition to the DIECP raids, along with its twin National Police intelligence agency SERCAA, it is leading the investigation into Berta Caceres’ murder. Both are known for their close relationship to the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, and Department of Justice advisors accompany the agencies in their investigations.
TIGRES, PMOP, ATIC, SERCAA are all elements of a counterinsurgency policing model the U.S. implemented in Iraq and Afghanistan and is trying to apply to Central America. The problem is there is no insurgency, and the criminal networks that run the state make Indigenous and campesinos who defend land and resource rights into enemies of the state.
Even the scandal following Berta Caceres’ murder has built up the figure of ATIC and SERCAA, as the State Department prioritizes making space for this as its newest project, over lending support to her family and her organization COPINH’s demands that the Honduran government allow the Inter American Commission for Human Rights to support and independent group of international experts to investigate the crime, following the model established for the investigation into the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa students in Mexico.
There is no doubt that this latest police scandal marks another surge in the militarized counterinsurgency policing model promoted by the U.S., in the guise of police reform. The question is what impact will it have on security in Honduras. Violence in security forces, not just the police but also the military, is chronic, and the public sees the security forces as a principal source of violence against the population. State involvement in Berta Caceres’ murder, and the murder of other human rights advocates, is widely suspected.
The public is tired of the dizzying parade of changing acronyms that only reconfigure power relations between organized crime networks. Police reform is meaningless, no more than a reconfiguration of criminal structures, without changes in the political structure. Yet, the U.S. has always prioritized stable relations with the corrupt network of political and economic elites over real security for the Honduran population, wasting public money on lucrative contracts for security firms in an endless cycle corruption and violence.
The kind of investigation demanded by COPINH and Berta’s family could begin to uncover the political economic structures that manage violence in Honduras, but Honduran politicians, long the beneficiaries and participants in criminal actions, are refusing to allow independent investigators into the country. But the U.S. Embassy is more interested in using the scandals to push through the counterinsurgency policing model than challenging the criminal networks that run Honduras.
Reich writes: "Sanders threatens the Democratic establishment and Wall Street, not least because he's intent on doing exactly what he says he'll do: breaking up the biggest banks."
Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
Bernie and the Big Banks
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
12 April 16
he recent kerfluffle about Bernie Sanders purportedly not knowing how to bust up the big banks says far more about the threat Sanders poses to the Democratic establishment and its Wall Street wing than it does about the candidate himself.
Of course Sanders knows how to bust up the big banks. He’s already introduced legislation to do just that. And even without new legislation a president has the power under the Dodd-Frank reform act to initiate such a breakup.
But Sanders threatens the Democratic establishment and Wall Street, not least because he’s intent on doing exactly what he says he’ll do: breaking up the biggest banks.
The biggest are far larger today than they were in 2008 when they were deemed “too big to fail.” Then, the five largest held around 30 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Today they have 44 percent.
According to a recent analysis by Thomas Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the assets of just four giant banks – JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo – amount to 97 percent of our the nation’s entire gross domestic product in 2012.
Which means they’re now way too big to fail. The danger to the economy isn’t just their indebtedness. It’s their dominance over the entire financial and economic system.
Bernie Sanders isn’t the only one urging the big banks be broken up. Neel Kashkari, the new president of the Federal Reserve bank of Minneapolis – a Republican who used to be at Goldman Sachs – is also pushing to break them up, as has the former head of the Dallas Federal Reserve, among others.
Recall that just eight years ago the biggest banks were up to their ears in fraudulent practices – lending money to mortgage originators to make risky home loans laced with false claims, buying back those loans and repackaging them for investors without revealing their risks, and then participating in a wave of fraudulent foreclosures.
Dodd-Frank addressed these sorts of abuses in broad strokes but left the most important decisions to regulatory agencies.
Since then, platoons of Wall Street lobbyists, lawyers and litigators have been watering down and delaying those regulations.
For example, Dodd-Frank instructed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to reduce certain risks, but the Street has sabotaged the process.
In its first major rule under Dodd-Frank, the CFTC considered 1,500 comments, largely generated by and from the Street. After several years the commission issued a proposed rule, including some of the loopholes and exceptions the Street sought.
Wall Street still wasn’t satisfied. So the CFTC agreed to delay enforcement of the rule, allowing the Street more time to voice its objections. Even this wasn’t enough for the big banks, whose lawyers then filed a lawsuit in the federal courts, arguing that the commission’s cost-benefit analysis wasn’t adequate.
As of now, only 249 of the 390 regulations required by Dodd-Frank have been finalized. And those final versions are shot through with loopholes big enough for Wall Street’s top brass to drive their Ferrari’s through.
The biggest banks still haven’t even come up with acceptable “living wills,” required under Dodd-Frank to show how they’d maintain important functions while going through bankruptcy.
Meanwhile they continue to gamble with depositor’s money. Many of their operations are global, making it even harder for U.S. regulators to rein them in – as evidenced by JPMorgan Chase’s $6.2 billion loss in its “London Whale” operation in 2012.
The bottom line: Regulation won’t end the Street’s abuses. The Street has too much firepower. And because it continues to be a major source of campaign funding, no set of regulations will be tough enough.
So the biggest banks must be busted up.
When I debated former Rep. Barney Frank about this on television recently, he kept asking, rhetorically, what limit I’d put on their size.
A good rule of thumb might be to cap the assets of any bank at about 2 percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product – or roughly $330 billion. (To put this in perspective, by the end of 2015, Goldman Sachs’s assets exceeded $860 billion.)
That cap wouldn’t harm America’s financial competitiveness and it wouldn’t cause bank employees to lose their jobs (at worst, they’ll just become employees of a smaller bank).
But it would ensure the safety of the American economy. Extra bonus: It would also reduce the power of Wall Street over our democracy.
Democracy Spring: Thousands Descend on US Capitol, Over 400 Arrested
Tuesday, 12 April 2016 08:05
Galindez writes: "Thousands of Americans have descended on Washington to launch one week of civil disobedience under the banner Democracy Spring. Their main demand is to get money out of politics."
Over 400 activists were arrested outside the US Capitol. (photo: Paulina Leonovich/Twitter)
Democracy Spring: Thousands Descend on US Capitol, Over 400 Arrested
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
12 April 16
housands of Americans have descended on Washington to launch one week of civil disobedience under the banner Democracy Spring. Over 400 people were arrested today, and over 3,000 have pledged to risk arrest over the next week. Their main demand is to get money out of politics. Before the marchers made their way to the Capitol, Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks thanked the 200 people who walked 140 miles over 10 days from Philadelphia. Uygur pointed out that the mainstream media has ignored Democracy Spring and explained that the reason is that they are part of the establishment. Uygur said that the media don’t want money out of politics, they depend on that money when it is used to buy campaign ads. Uygur declared that while this is just the beginning, they are no longer coming for us, but we are coming for them.
Kai Newkirk, a lead organizer of the event, told the crowd that if “we don’t have a democracy that represents all of us, we are in danger of losing what makes America great.” Newkirk went on to say, “We are here to send a message that there will be a political price to pay for siding with the moneyed interests over the people.” The organization’s website says: “This week we began the process of taking back our democracy, with hundreds arrested in our first mass sit-in at the Capitol on Monday, April 11. Now day after day through Saturday, April 16th, we will continue to reclaim the Capitol in a show of hope and for the truly representative democracy we see in our hearts. Over 3,500 people, coming to DC from near and far, have pledged to risk arrest this week.”
Thousands marched from Columbus Circle to the east side of the Capitol, where hundreds of people, including Cenk Uygur and Kai Newkirk, made their way to the Capitol steps. They sat down and received warnings from the Capital Police to move away from the steps or be arrested. Many heeded the warning and moved away from the building. Hundreds, in what is being billed as the largest civil disobedience action ever at the Capitol Building, remained and were arrested one by one over five hours.
Before the arrests were made, Uygur addressed the crowd with a bull horn and the people’s mic from the Capitol steps. “It’s time for civil disobedience. They think they have all the power, but we have the people. We are tired of the corruption. We want free and fair elections. We want our democracy back! We want our government back! We want our country back! We want our Constitution back! We want our Congress back! Thank you all for fighting back!
Every American deserves an equal voice in government. That is our birthright of freedom, won through generations of struggle. But today our democracy is in crisis. American elections are dominated by billionaires and big money interests who can spend unlimited sums of money on political campaigns to protect their special interests at the general expense. Meanwhile, as the super-rich dominate the “money primary” that decides who can run for office, almost half of the states in the union have passed new laws that disenfranchise everyday voters, especially people of color and the poor.
This corruption violates the core principle of American democracy – “one person, one vote” citizen equality. And it is blocking reform on virtually every critical issue facing our country: from addressing historic economic inequality, to tackling climate change and ending mass incarceration. We simply cannot solve the urgent crises that face our nation if we don’t save democracy first.
But if the status quo goes unchallenged, the 2016 election – already set to be the most billionaire-dominated, secret money-drenched, voter suppression-marred contest in modern American history – will likely yield a President and a Congress more bound to the masters of big money than ever before. And our planet and people just can’t afford that. But there is another possibility.
Democracy Spring is calling on Congress to pass four bills:
The Government by the People Act and Fair Elections Now Act
The Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015
The Voter Empowerment Act of 2015
The Democracy for All Amendment
As the week goes on, many more high profile activists will risk arrest, including Mark Ruffalo, Gaby Hoffman, Lawrence Lessig, Talib Kweli, and Zephyr Teachout. The coalition putting on the event is endorsed by groups like the AFL-CIO, National Organization of Women, and MoveOn.org. On April 16th, Democracy Spring will be joined by Democracy Awakening, a broad coalition of organizations representing the labor, peace, environmental, student, racial justice, civil rights, and money-in-politics reform movements. According to their website, they “share a firm belief that we will not win on the full range of policy issues we all care about until we combat attacks on voting rights and the integrity of the vote by big money.”
They are fighting to protect voting rights, get big money out of politics, and demand a fair hearing and an up or down vote on President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. Speakers will include Jim Hightower, William Barber II, and Annie Leonard.
I will be arriving in Washington on Friday for the last weekend of action after spending Wednesday and Thursday in New York covering the Democratic Party debate.
Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott will be spending a year covering the presidential election from Iowa.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
People Still Don't Get the Link Between Meat Consumption and Climate Change
Tuesday, 12 April 2016 07:58
Excerpt: "A new kind of messaging could make it easier to appreciate the enormous benefits of moving away from a meat-heavy diet."
A shopper peruses the meat counter at a market. (photo: H. Darr Beiser/USA TODAY)
People Still Don't Get the Link Between Meat Consumption and Climate Change
By Annick de Witt, Scientific American
12 April 16
A new kind of messaging could make it easier to appreciate the enormous benefits of moving away from a meat-heavy diet
ver the last decade or so, the media have slowly but steadily fed the public information about the staggering impact of our meat-eating habits on the environment, and on climate change in particular. For instance, one recent study found that a global transition toward low-meat diets could reduce the costs of climate change mitigation by as much as 50 percent by 2050. From scientific reports and articles in magazines, to viral Facebook videos to documentaries like Cowspiracy and Meat the Truth, the news about the exorbitant contribution of a carnivorous to the greenhouse problem is clearly spreading.
However, despite all these messages, new research by my colleagues and myself shows that most people are still not aware of the full extent of meat’s climate impacts. We examined how citizens in America and the Netherlands assess various food and energy-related options for tackling climate change. We presented representative groups of more than 500 people in both countries with three food-related options (eat less meat; eat local and seasonal produce; and eat organic produce) and three energy-related options (drive less; save energy at home; and install solar panels). We asked them whether they were willing to make these changes in their own lives, and whether they already did these things. While a majority of the surveyed people recognized meat reduction as an effective option for addressing climate change, the outstanding effectiveness of this option, in comparison to the other options, was only clear to 6% of the US population, and only 12% of the Dutch population.
That is remarkably low! Considering that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time, wouldn’t we want people to know the power of a simple solution that is in their own hands?
In terms of communication efforts for behavioral change, the outstanding effectiveness of reducing meat consumption could be a game-changer: knowing that it makes such a big difference may motivate people to change. This is particularly so, because the research results also show a direct relationship between this knowledge and people’s willingness to consume less meat as well as their actual meat consumption. So knowledge does seem to be power, in this case.
However, to put that last finding in perspective, this may not be a causal relationship. People who already eat less meat may be more open to hear and retain information on the climate impacts of meat, while people who eat lots of meat may be more inclined to deny or downplay it. That is, behaviors may inform knowledge as much as knowledge informs behavior. And as many studies have shown, although knowledge is an important aspect of behavioral change, it alone is rarely enough for people to change their lifestyles. Changing behaviors as intimate and culturally engrained as people’s daily dietary habits therefore demands a careful consideration of the psychological and cultural dynamics at play.
Currently, most communications around meat and climate change are in the category of ‘the pointing finger’, thereby creating guilt, shame, and stigmatization among committed carnivores, and activating psychological mechanisms of denial and downplay. Stating that eating meat is ‘bad’ therefore doesn’t seem to work that well.
However, for people who already identify as environmentalists, this strategy can be very effective. They tend to embrace this message, especially if the finger is pointed at an external other they are suspicious of (e.g., ‘the capitalist system’, ‘the meat-industry’). We see this in the success of Cowspiracy, which readily convinced countless people to ‘go vegan.’ Many of these people have a postmodern worldview, are aligned with environmental values, and are suspicious of the corporate influences in our economic system ~ so the message is easy to digest.
However, if these communications are hoping to convince the rest of the population, we urgently need to move beyond finger pointing tactics. This counts particularly for people with more traditional and modern worldviews, who generally don’t identify as environmentalists or hold strong green values. Perhaps this is the reason environmental organizations have been remarkably silent on the issue of meat consumption, and why the topic is still often lacking in discussions on climate change. Since we haven’t quite figured out how to communicate it in a non-paternalistic, non-judgmental way, most institutions stay away from meddling in affairs as personal as what is on one’s plate.
We seem to be in dire need of an inspiring and empowering narrative about climate change and the impact of our diets. The good thing is, the situation around meat is empowering, as it puts the power back in our own hands (and mouths). We are not at the mercy of the system, but have substantial influence ourselves. Likewise, it is that the most effective way by far for individuals to do their part tends to also lead to better health, weight control, creativity in the kitchen, and animal welfare. While environmental behaviors often involve sacrifices, the meat-reduction option offers a range of personal benefits.
According to a 2015 Chatham House Report“Changing climate, changing diets”, people in industrialized countries consume on average around twice as much meat as experts deem healthy. In the US the multiple is nearly three times. Adoption of a healthy diet would therefore generate over a quarter of the emission reductions needed by 2050! The invitation for people is thus not to give up their delicious steak and become vegetarian (something they may consider ‘extreme’), but rather to do something that serves themselves: eat a little less meat and get healthier. Become ‘flexatarian’, as people call this new trend. For a world that is also struggling with obesity and many other health problems, the news couldn’t be better; address two massive problems for the efforts of one.
In addition, this meat-reduction option fits seamlessly with an era in which the ‘consciousness movement’ increasingly influences mainstream culture. People pay more attention to the origins of their food, value their connection with nature, and generally show more concern for their health and well-being, including food habits and body awareness. We see this for example in the countless yoga studios popping up in big cities, the 'hipness' of organic food, the super foods that are nowadays also found in conventional supermarkets, and struggling fast food corporations like MacDonald’s. It also resonates with the ubiquitous search for 'balance'. This means that the cultural evolution of society is moving in the right direction: we have the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, working in favor of us.
This is of crucial importance. As many authors have argued, the greatest potential for a shift towards sustainable lifestyles is through a change in culture and worldview—a shift in assumptions about human nature, our relationship with the (natural) world around us, and our aspirations for the ‘good life’. Food touches on social habits and norms; plays a role in mediating power and status; is often key to social participation and acceptance; and is expressive of collective values and identity. Consumption and lifestyles therefore tend to be shaped more by people collectively than individually. The most effective strategies thus engage people in groups, and give them opportunities to develop their understanding and narratives about food in dialog together.
One of my master students, Lena Johanning, translated this idea by developing postcards that humorously depict "flexitarian" superheroes on the front, with an invitation for a veggie dinner on the back, coupled with some amazing fact about meat and climate change. In that way, she framed plant-based dinners not only as environmentally effective, but also as fun and social, an opportunity for people to get together and explore.
Developing a range of approaches, including framing plant-based dinners around creative cooking and the deliciousness of vegetables, around the health and weight loss benefits, or around what it means for animals and our connection with nature, could be an effective way to speak to a wide range of people. Although no studies have been done to scientifically examine such approaches, considering what is at stake, it is certainly worth the experiment. Then, policy makers and environmental organizations can start to tap into and reinforce the changing culture and Zeitgeist. In that way, the change can start to accelerate, supporting us to collectively get better at creating the world we want.
References:
De Boer, Joop, De Witt, Annick, & Aiking, Harry. (2016). Help the climate, change your diet: A cross-sectional study on how to involve consumers in a transition to a low-carbon society. Appetite, 98, 19-27.
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had a call from Rosalie Kunoth-Monks the other day. Rosalie is an elder of the Arrernte-Alyawarra people, who lives in Utopia, a vast and remote region in the "red heart" of Australia.
onduran media is ablaze with the latest in the constant stream of police corruption crises.
he recent kerfluffle about Bernie Sanders purportedly not knowing how to bust up the big banks says far more about the threat Sanders poses to the Democratic establishment and its Wall Street wing than it does about the candidate himself.
ver the last decade or so, the media have slowly but steadily fed the public information about the staggering impact of our meat-eating habits on the environment, and on climate change in particular. For instance, 
