Go Vegetarian!

Animal Rights Activism Peta2

Animal Rights Activism Peta2

Why Are You Vegan?

Why Are You Vegan?
August 18, 2010
tags: veganismby Marji
.When I posted an article about a pig farmer going vegan to my sanctuary’s Facebook page, I found a few of the responses interesting.

The farmer went vegan for health reasons and no mention was made whether he still raises pigs.

One person was angry, because the farmer makes no mention of how his behavior inflicted immense suffering on the animals he raised and consumed. Another person suggested we should create a more supportive community and that, whatever their reasons, all vegans should be welcomed and embraced.

I went vegan because I love animals. In my 13-yr-old brain, eating animals = not loving them. Granted, it took my 22-yr-old brain to realize milk and eggs came from suffering animals too. Once I knew, gone were dairy-based milkshakes and scrambled eggs. All very simple for me.

If you are vegan, what compelled your choice? If you did so for health reasons, did you eventually embrace the ethical reasons too?

Should we embrace people like this pig farmer who isn’t vegan because he cares about pigs but because he cares about himself? If so, how?

On Whales, Dolphins and Effective Activism
August 31, 2010
by Mary Martin
.

I recently caught up on Whale Wars. When I first started watching the series I was a big fan. Then less so, feeling more like the characters on the South Park episode that pokes fun at the show and its oftentimes keystone cops-esque shenanigans. Then there’s the single-issue issue–that going after a single issue isn’t effective or is even a problem. I’m not one to believe that (exhibit A: my anti-greyhound racing passion), but I do understand the point that no single issue, other than the use of sentient nonhumans, is the source of the problem for the animals. The same line of reasoning that criticizes Whale Wars can be applied to The Cove and the tragedies that have befallen dolphins at the hands of man. But this is all a narrow conversation that leaves out some fairly significant points and fails to acknowledge effective activism.
Regarding Whale Wars, the Sea Shepherd crew frequently reminds the audience that although their plans to sabotage the Japanese whalers often (and I mean often–can you say prop fouler?) don’t work, the goal is to keep the whalers occupied and moving and not killing (or processing) whales. Economic damage is their goal. And at the end of the season, the whalers were 528 whales under their quota. In other words, through the failed prop foulers, the potato gun, the paint balls and the destruction of the multi-million dollar Ady Gil, 528 individual lives were not cut brutally short. In addition, the international media attention to whaling in the Southern Ocean due to various actions (not to mention the broadcasting of a weekly series) has resulted in unprecedented pressure on the Japanese whalers. Mainstream America is now aware of this issue (and that the Sea Shepherd ship serves only vegan food), whales have been spared, the global political community is applying pressure. Our job as individual activists is to decide whether our donation of whatever amount has been well spent.

Regarding The Cove and Blood Dolphins, which premiered on Friday, the crucial connection is that what happens in The Cove isn’t just about slaughtering dolphins–it’s about capturing dolphins who will then be held captive and made to entertain humans at marine parks. And as Flipper-trainer-turned-activist Ric O’Barry said: in captivity, they’re surviving, but they’re not living and doing. Again, we are increasing awareness about not just killing, but using animals. Sure, we’re talking about dolphins, whose likability quotient is probably third after puppies and kittens in the minds of people, but at least we’re talking about it. And if there’s anything I’ve learned in my decades of talking to people about our relationship with nonhuman animals, it’s that change happens at a glacial pace. And we need all of the strategies and tactics and angles we can find to get others to pay attention and to care and to act.

But those are just my thoughts, and I don’t claim to have all of the answers.

What do you think?

–

The City That Ended Hunger

The City that Ended Hunger
A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger.
by Frances Moore Lappé
posted Feb 13, 2009

“To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.”
CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL



More than 10 years ago, Brazil’s fourth-largest city, Belo Horizonte, declared that food was a right of citizenship and started working to make good food available to all. One of its programs puts local farm produce into school meals. This and other projects cost the city less than 2 percent of its budget.

In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States—one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps—these questions take on new urgency.

To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market—you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.

The new mayor, Patrus Ananias—now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort—began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system. The city already involved regular citizens directly in allocating municipal resources—the “participatory budgeting” that started in the 1970s and has since spread across Brazil. During the first six years of Belo’s food-as-a-right policy, perhaps in response to the new emphasis on food security, the number of citizens engaging in the city’s participatory budgeting process doubled to more than 31,000.

The city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers and consumers. It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce—which often reached 100 percent—to consumers and the farmers. Farmers’ profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.

When my daughter Anna and I visited Belo Horizonte to write Hope’s Edge we approached one of these stands. A farmer in a cheerful green smock, emblazoned with “Direct from the Countryside,” grinned as she told us, “I am able to support three children from my five acres now. Since I got this contract with the city, I’ve even been able to buy a truck.”

The improved prospects of these Belo farmers were remarkable considering that, as these programs were getting underway, farmers in the country as a whole saw their incomes drop by almost half.

In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets, from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices.” Today there are 34 such markets where the city determines a set price—about two-thirds of the market price—of about twenty healthy items, mostly from in-state farmers and chosen by store-owners. Everything else they can sell at the market price.

“For ABC sellers with the best spots, there’s another obligation attached to being able to use the city land,” a former manager within this city agency, Adriana Aranha, explained. “Every weekend they have to drive produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, so everyone can get good produce.”

Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal. When Anna and I ate in one, we saw hundreds of diners—grandparents and newborns, young couples, clusters of men, mothers with toddlers. Some were in well-worn street clothes, others in uniform, still others in business suits.

“I’ve been coming here every day for five years and have gained six kilos,” beamed one elderly, energetic man in faded khakis.

“It’s silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food,” an athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. “I’ve been eating here every day for two years. It’s a good way to save money to buy a house so I can get married,” he said with a smile.

No one has to prove they’re poor to eat in a People’s Restaurant, although about 85 percent of the diners are. The mixed clientele erases stigma and allows “food with dignity,” say those involved.

Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.

“We’re fighting the concept that the state is a terrible, incompetent administrator,” Adriana explained. “We’re showing that the state doesn’t have to provide everything, it can facilitate. It can create channels for people to find solutions themselves.”

For instance, the city, in partnership with a local university, is working to “keep the market honest in part simply by providing information,” Adriana told us. They survey the price of 45 basic foods and household items at dozens of supermarkets, then post the results at bus stops, online, on television and radio, and in newspapers so people know where the cheapest prices are.

The shift in frame to food as a right also led the Belo hunger-fighters to look for novel solutions. In one successful experiment, egg shells, manioc leaves, and other material normally thrown away were ground and mixed into flour for school kids’ daily bread. This enriched food also goes to nursery school children, who receive three meals a day courtesy of the city.

“I knew we had so much hunger in the world. But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”

The result of these and other related innovations?

In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate—widely used as evidence of hunger—by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.

The cost of these efforts?

Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident.

Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a “new social mentality”—the realization that “everyone in our city benefits if all of us have access to good food, so—like health care or education—quality food for all is a public good.”

The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.) It can mean redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to participate. It can mean, as in Belo, building citizen-government partnerships driven by values of inclusion and mutual respect.

And when imagining food as a right of citizenship, please note: No change in human nature is required! Through most of human evolution—except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years—Homo sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm. As food sharers, “especially among unrelated individuals,” humans are unique, writes Michael Gurven, an authority on hunter-gatherer food transfers. Except in times of extreme privation, when some eat, all eat.

Before leaving Belo, Anna and I had time to reflect a bit with Adriana. We wondered whether she realized that her city may be one of the few in the world taking this approach—food as a right of membership in the human family. So I asked, “When you began, did you realize how important what you are doing was? How much difference it might make? How rare it is in the entire world?”

Listening to her long response in Portuguese without understanding, I tried to be patient. But when her eyes moistened, I nudged our interpreter. I wanted to know what had touched her emotions.

“I knew we had so much hunger in the world,” Adriana said. “But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”

Adriana’s words have stayed with me. They will forever. They hold perhaps Belo’s greatest lesson: that it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes—if we trust our hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government accountable to us.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frances Moore Lappé wrote this article as part of Food for Everyone, the Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Frances is the author of many books including Diet for a Small Planet and Get a Grip, co-founder of Food First and the Small Planet Institute, and a YES! contributing editor.

The author thanks Dr. M. Jahi Chappell for his contribution to the article.

NATARAJ RIO PROJECT 2011

http://rioproject2011.wordpress.com/

NATARAJ RIO PROJECT 2011 -http://rioproject2011.worldpress.com

http://rioproject2011.worldpress.com

Introduction

Posted on August 21, 2010 by martinaalencar

Hello!

So, after meeting some amazing people in Tanzania, I decided to set up this site to help them help me with my upcoming project. I am trying to set up an organization to help develop the community in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and make a difference in people’s lives.

I would have never thought so many people could take such a genuine interest in my affairs, wanting so enthusiastically to help a country they don’t even know. I was really surprised and very, very pleased because these people gave me a palpable glimpse to my dreams. I am so thankful and touched, I can’t begin to explain it.

I will kindly ask you to be patient because there is only so much I can write about in this moment. I am travelling with my laptop and am still lacking solid information about the project. I will, however, anticipate some stuff to give you guys a superficial idea of what is pumping ideas and passion through my mind.

Who am I?

I do not think I could ever explain or describe myself. I will try to give you an idea of what is happening and what has helped shape what I stand for today. My name is Martina Mesquita Alencar and I was born in São Paulo, Brazil twenty-one years ago. I was raised in a wealthy family and was very sheltered my whole life. This makes me a minority in Brazil, though it definately did not seem that way. Brazil, like so many other places will give you a head start just because you have money. Anyways, I am now trying to use this opportunity to help bring a sense of equality back to light.

I have invested in myself to be all I can be for the benefit of other people (of course, I realize I am no martyr, I have made sure to enjoy the ride). The plan is to see as much as I can, talk to as many people as I can, gain perspective and dimension and share it with everyone I can. So, a few years into my journalism and social science courses at Uni, I decided to travel the world to fulfil what I was set off to do. It was very subjective journey. I worked in orphanages in Argentina, foster homes, schools, I have camped in Central America, survived the jungle, the heat. I have seen loads, met some of the most amazing people, heard the most bizarre stories and have been plenty inspired in the way.

Everyday I feel more confident and more prepared to put myself out there and reach for anyone who wants to meet my hand. I have learnt loads in the way and have got attached to many children I have been in contact with.

In february, I got really close to a class of eleven year-olds in Rio. They made me want to invest in them, and because of them I decided to restart my studies and my life in Rio. These children are amazing and they really touched my heart. They taught me more than I could ever think possible.

One student in my class, Wesley Gilbert was a happy little chap, chirpy and extremely full of life. Sadly, one week before I came to Africa, in July, I received the news that he was hit by a stray bullet. Sad as it was, he was inside the school, in a maths lesson and a bullet from a street cross-fire (policemen x drug dealers) and killed him. It was devastating. It gave me, however, a confirmation and a stronger desire to raise a generation away from drugs and degrading street life.

Aim:

To make everyday more pleasant for as many people as possible. To make it easier to smile, to make it easier to recognize how life can be good. To show people respect and to have a venue to share what we are and what we know.

Practically, to create a space to bring together people to promote exchange in message, to broaden people’s horizons and incite joy and laughter.

Volunteers are invited to teach kids any skill, to tell jokes and to connect as equals. Difference in backgrounds, views on life are most welcome as to increase their field of reference, to show the infinite amount of options kids can chose to conduct their experience. This will help them develop an analytical mindset which will allow them to become self-sufficient individuals.

What I believe

Money is not fundamental to run this organisation. Time and energy and good spirits are requirements to start this. I believe that knowledge and love put forth can only become something bigger and positive. You might not harvest the fruits of your actions immediately. But be sure that one day your smile has inspired someone to act more compassionately towards someone else, and this has made some other person more kind and could possibly prevent a violent action. Smile like you would like to be smiled at and that will bring change. The more good energy you put out, the more results you will see.

Situation in Brazil

The situation in Brazil is always described as being complex. I am sure it is. I confess I am still very young and have got just enough tools to give you an idea of the situation. This will be mainly come from personal observation.

The thing in Brazil is that you have a really bad distribution of wealth. What does that mean? Very simply, you have the country divided in the very rich and the very poor. This means there is a handful of owners: of land, of major companies, of the media and then, you have the people who work for them.

The way politics and media have written history means that the wealthy remain wealthy and the poor remained poor. As long as they kept opportunity of the poor extremely dire, they could not have the strength/voice to pose any threat to the status of the wealthy.

So there it is: the polar society.

Unfortunately, so many of us have been brought up with values that reinforce the alienation of the rich and the poor. It has snowballed and we cannot even be classified as the same species – though we are (in case you forgot). I will definately post some more thoughts I have on the subject and will further explain the nitty gritties of it all.

Thank you so much for reading this far. I will keep you guys posted and would love the support.

Special thanks to my dear friends: Tracy Hinton (England), Sarah Iqbal (England), Zahrah Sharif (England), Alison Elrick (Scotland), Ian Nickels (Essex boy), Eugena Oram (Wales), Ewan Johnston (Scotland), Chris Paine (Scotland), Amber Hayward (Scotland). I really appreciate the love.