Being a Joyful Vegan
I often talk about being a joyful vegan, because it reflects the truth of my experience. In my opinion, to advocate for animals and veganism is to advocate for nonviolence and peace. And, not surprisingly, peace is the byproduct of a vegan lifestyle. It is what you give, create and get back. It is an unexpected gift.
There’s a very deep peace of mind that comes from disconnecting yourself with the inherent violence of turning beautiful, living, feeling beings into butchered bodies. To say "no" to that—to remove yourself from the horror, from the slaughter that many of us turn away from releases you from that burden of guilt that so many of us experience — that low, constant, underlying hum that causes us to make every excuse in the book to justify our actions, in order to release us from our complicity. To be released from that is nothing short of liberating - and joy-inducing.
Several years ago, I came across an essay that reflected this very perception. It’s written by Robert Bass, Ph.D., a philosophy professor who has given me his permission to reprint his essay. Everything below is his words, but I celebrate them as if they were my own. There are so many misconceptions about what it means to "be vegan," and I think this essay so eloquently debunks some myths.
"If you look at a photographic negative, the colors are reversed, nothing seems quite as it should, and the image may be unrecognizable. Once you see the picture developed, you recognize the face of your best friend.
That’s a bit like a common impression of vegans. We don’t eat dead animals. Or their products. Pork and beef, seafood and fowl are out. So are milk and cheese, eggs and caviar. And it doesn’t stop with what we don’t eat. We try to avoid leather and wool and fur. We don’t use them to cover our bodies or our furniture or our floors. It sounds like a long list of negatives, of don’ts: Thou shalt not this; thou shalt not that. Why would anybody want that?
You get a better picture by reversing the colors, developing the negative. The incomprehensible prohibitions turn out to be the boundaries of something positive, visible in its true colors and proper proportions. Instead of a list of don’ts, we see an abundance of healthy, delicious foods, with plenty of options for home and clothes and personal care. We do not grudgingly practice a creed of self-denial. We select from an embarassment of riches.
But that is still just a flat, two-dimensional picture instead of the solid, three-dimensional reality. At the heart of being vegan is a kind of compassionate awareness. We share this planet not only with billions of fellow human beings, but also with uncounted billions upon billions of other creatures, with lives, wants, enjoyment and suffering as real as our own. Humans have had and used the power to crowd them out, push them aside, sometimes driving them to extinction, and often, making them into tools for our use, servitors of our desires, food for our tables, clothes for our backs.
As vegans, we look, we pay attention, we see the unnecessary suffering imposed on our fellow creatures. We respond in compassion, refusing to pretend that might makes right, refusing to turn away and ignore what we know. The vegan message is ultimately very simple:
Look. Pay attention. See the unnecessary death and suffering. We don’t have to contribute or help to keep it going. We can stop being a part of this. And so, that’s what we try to do."
It reminds me of B.R. Myers’ fantastic review ("Hard to Swallow") of Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dillemma
Tags: animal rights, animals, Home and Garden, meat, peace, sustainable, vegan, vegetarian, violence
- Uncategorized
September 14th, 2007 at 3:52 am
Time to rename this site “vegan options” I guess.
What does this article have to do with the environment? There is not one mention of anything “green” in this entire article.
September 14th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Veganism has everything to do with the environment, and after the recent publication of in-depth reports from both the United Nations and the University of Chicago I think most people are aware of the connection. Here’s a summary and link to the UN report:
Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor of the Independent says:
“Meet the world’s top destroyer of the environment. It is not the car, or the plane,or even George Bush: it is the cow.”
“A United Nations report has identified the world’s rapidly growing herds of cattle as the greatest threat to the climate, forests and wildlife. And they are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral reefs.”
The recent 400 page UN report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow” says: “[S]cientists determined that raising animals for food generates more greenhouse gases than all the cars, trucks, and [planes] in the world combined.”
Here’s the link to the UN report:
http://www.virtualcentre.org/en/library/key_pub/longshad/A0701E00.pdf
And researchers at the University of Chicago have determined that “switching to a vegan diet is more effective in countering global warming than switching from a standard American car to a Toyota Prius.”
Check out this great cover photo (and article) from Rolling Stone Magazine for more: http://tinyurl.com/y77kvm
September 14th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
Once again, missing the entire message of the previous comment.
The comment said that THIS ARTICLE had nothing to do with the environment. Sure, your comment you posted has much to do with the environment. But the parent article makes not one mention of anything environmental, instead goes blathering on about feelings of veganism.
It is one thing to inform about the environmental benefits of a vegetarian diet - but quite another to just rant on and on about veganism. Perhaps green options has jumped the shark… Time to remove my subscription to their feed.
September 15th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
I’m sorry you feel that way, but it seems to me that– for the public– there is a general disconnect between the specific problems, and the broader, more abstract, problems facing environmentalism and how it affects human lives: a failure to connect-the-dots, even in cases that perhaps, should have been obvious all along.
For years, many people didn’t recognize that some animal populations proliferated –becoming “pesty” to humans –because we’d taken over their habitats, that bears and crocodiles invade yards or landfills because they’re hungry or have nowhere else to go. In a more close-up (for humans) example, only recently have studies been published indicating a link between heart attacks and breathing auto exhaust in city traffic, although we probably should have known all along that breathing auto-exhausts can’t be healthy.
Even now (except for the heart-attack example), when people do recognize the connection between such things as animals in landfills and human encroachment, or damming rivers and declinging salmon populations, resulting in hungrier bears, they still don’t see how _those problems_ affect them personally or long-term, i.e., beyond having to deal with bears in the yard. So they end up with “solutions” like shooting the bears, which of course leads to other problems down the road.
The “awareness” the author mentions in the essay is a broad abstract recognition of this fact, i.e., that everything is connected and that humans have been abusing their place in nature. He says:
While this may not be an explicit environmental statement -it certainly is implied. It is expressed philosophically, in a more subtle way, speaking to the larger picture of humans abusing their power to crowd out, drive to extinction, and use other beings simply as means to our own ends. It goes to the heart of the general disconnect that society has with nature.
And while I’m thinking about it, this same disconnect and abuse of power is relevant to other problems we face as well. When we disregard the fact that other beings have “lives, wants, enjoyment and suffering as real as our own” it enables us to disvalue the lives of people of other cultures, which in-turn allows us to accept the collateral-damage and killing that accompanies the horrific wars we wage on other nations.
When Dr. Bass says “Look. Pay attention. See the unnecessary death and suffering. We don’t have to contribute or help to keep it going. We can stop being a part of this”, he is taking a bird’s eye-view of the world. And a very good view it is!
~ Cree Prophecy
“Only after the last tree has been cut down, only after the last river has been poisoned, only after the last fish has been caught, only then, will you find that money cannot be eaten.”
September 25th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
If there were an article that gave tips on recycling, would it still be environmentalist if it didn’t explain the connection between recycling and the environment?
It is assumed that the average reader would already know the connection between recycling and environmentalism, so explaining it each and every time would be redundant.
I think it might be erronous to assume that the average reader already understands the conenction between veganism and environmentalism, but not erronous to assume that an educated reader couldn’t research the matter further on his own if he had any questions.
October 15th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
living a vegan lifestyle automatically makes you “greener” since many of the products that are avoided are harmful to the planet at at large such as factory farming, chopping down rain forests to make room for cattle grazing, the toxins and poisins released from leather tanneries, etcetera, etcetera. in fact, going vegan is the single most important thing you can do to protect the world’s resources and improve the outlook on this planet for both human and nonhuman beings. perhaps the author of the article was erroneous in assuming that their audience was more informed about these topics than was the actuality but personally i had no problem folowing the bouncing ball :).
June 22nd, 2008 at 11:27 pm
I like your wishes,
December 13th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Thanks!,
December 19th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Hi people
As newly registered user i just wanted to say hello to everyone else who uses this forum
February 15th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
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