A Based Plant - Future

Written by Billy Nicholles

Artwork by Sophie Hoet

Rapid climate change is one of the most pressing global problems of our age, and we seem to be almost totally united in our desire to fight it.

How we do so, however, is less certain. Who has the most responsibility to change? Who should make the biggest sacrifices?

One industry that I think needs more attention, and crucially more action, is animal agriculture. Abstaining from animal products is one of the best things we can do to nurture our warming planet. And it’s not only the environment that would benefit.

It is becoming undeniable that removing animal products from our diets and our lives is one of the best things we can do for our planet. Eliminating animal agriculture would dramatically reduce deforestation, allow us to rewild and renew our natural environments, and make a huge dent in our global greenhouse gas emissions.

The role of animal agriculture in promoting climate change is significant and underappreciated: by most estimates, the industry is responsible for between a fifth and a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, roughly equivalent to all transportation combined.

Simply put, animal agriculture just isn’t sustainable. Abstaining from it is increasingly being recognised as one of the biggest and most important steps we can take to reverse the destruction that we have caused to our environment.

But cutting out animal products doesn’t just nurture our planet. It also nurtures an often-disregarded group that suffer in unprecedented, incomprehensible numbers. I don’t think you have to be an ‘animal lover’ to be horrified at what happens to non-human animals in factory farms, where the vast majority of our meat, dairy, and eggs come from. I don’t think you even have to care about them that much at all.

What we do to billions and billions of sentient, living beings every year can only be described as the antithesis of ‘nurture’.

Of course, this doesn’t make omitting animal products from our lives, and especially our diets, easy. Our relationships with food are exceptionally personal and sensitive to us. The food we eat nurtures us too, and it nurtures more than our physical bodies. It nourishes our cultural bonds, our mental wellbeing, our very sense of identity.

To hear that we have to change such a fundamental, such a treasured, part of our lives can feel instinctively uncomfortable. I felt like this for a long time even after becoming convinced of the need to care for our planet in this way.

I think a lot of people are at this stage. We know that eliminating, or at least drastically reducing, our consumption of animal products is crucial if we are to steer our planet away from a climate change catastrophe. And yet we also feel the need, the urge, the right to nourish our own bodies with the food that is to many people easier, cheaper, and tastier to eat.

We all have to work to nurture our planet back to health. But it would be foolish to think that we all have the same amount of time and resources available to devote to this goal. In a world where the neutral or easy option is invariably to harm our environment and its inhabitants, it is necessary to make our own decisions about how willing and how able we are to prevent and reverse this.

When I decided that abstaining from animal products was one of the best ways I could do this, I was motivated by this thought. It is easy to downplay the role an individual can play, swamped as it is by the role of the industry, the corporation, the collective. The millionaires and billionaires of society, the top 1%, can do far more than any of us.

And yet, in a global context, I was in this category. Much of the world’s population don’t even have enough to survive, let alone contribute significantly to climate change. In contrast, the richest 20% emit disproportionately soaring levels of CO2eq: 70% of all lifestyle emissions.

As a student living in a rich city in a high-income country, I felt an even stronger responsibility to reduce my consumption and nurture the planet that I was not only disproportionately damaging, but the effects of which would primarily be felt by those who were not contributing nearly as much to the problem and did not have nearly as many resources to face the devastating effects of climate change.

It is true that taking this step is not always an easy or an accessible decision. But for me, it was a decision that I could take quickly and easily in an accessible city, and so it was all the more important that I did.

One thing is clear: the level at which we currently farm and consume animal products is, by definition, unsustainable. And yet, despite this, the numbers are increasing every day. We know the urgency with which we need to take a stand and nurture our planet, our species, and the countless other beings that live with us. The advent of ‘clean’, lab-grown meat that is ethically and environmentally superior is coming. But until then the direction of travel is set: a plant-based diet is needed. In the face of climate change we all need to adapt and act. One of the best ways we can nurture ourselves, our planet, and our fellow animals, is to abstain from animal products and go vegan.