Skip wrote:As Tuttle lays out in his book, our herding culture and commodification of animals has created many conflicts when competing for scarce resources. In our past (and in some cases present), cattle was one of those scarce resources. Plant based eating is such a great way to conserve so many constrained resources that can and will lead to conflicts. Water shortages, food shortages, deforestation, global warming ,etc...
Oh, definitely.
Skip wrote:Many violent acts to happen because people are mentally unbalanced. Eating plant based helps to bring that mental balance and clarity back as opposed to the current norm of antidepressant drug use.
As an agent of systemic violence, I was thinking about this off and on today. It seems to me that there's more than one kind of violence. There's this kind of personal, "primitive" violence that we all have the capacity for, and the solution/mitigation of would be some way to channel it or counterbalance it with other psychological forces. I would say that in some situations this kind of violence is even a right, as when other people are engaging in personal or systemic violence against you.
But there is also systemic violence, and worst of all a kind of modern "schizoid" violence--the violence of pushing a button to kill people with drones or modern "painless" ways of slaughtering animals. The dialectic of Temple Grandin is the absolute horror of mass impersonal slaughter, like a Nazi death camp or that Star Trek episode where two sides are fighting a way with computer-randomized casualty lotteries. (Original series FTW!) It is naturally mentally unbalanced. Wars should only be fought with fists, sticks and stones, not modern weapons.
In any case, I stand with Pythagoras and don't eat anything that has the breath of life. (edit: and since his time, a veg*n diet has always been known to be healthy, too)