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The Vegetarian Myth
But that attitude is only possible if we acknowledge death. This is ultimately why a vegetarian ethic will fail to produce a sustainable culture. Beyond the destructive nature of an agricultural diet, any attempt to remove ourselves emotionally, physically, spiritually from the life processes of the planet will result in a culture based on ignorance, denial, and, given our human capacity for destruction, dominance. We have to face the truth of our existence if we are to do it well. And it could be done well. We could be grateful instead of cruel, humble instead of entitled. We could accept that every living thing deserves our respect and that we are all taking turns. We could embrace our responsibility to be respectful members of this community called Earth. And only the entire culture would have to change to get us there.
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My life as a vegan was so simple. I believed that death was wrong and could be avoided by shunning animal products. My moral certainty took a number of hits over those twenty years, especially as I began to grow my own food. Ants stopped to stroke each other; spiders died for their young; butterflies taught their young the trapline of flowers from which they got nectar. Even without trying I killed them to garden. And they were like me. We shared the genes that produced our eyes and our legs, our very hearts.112 Once I actually had my body outside and my hands in the dirt—once I could actually see insects—I could see their fear, their curiosity, their courage, their love. “Each of these tiny insects is, by definition, an animated being, a being with an anima, a soul; not a human soul indeed, but an insect soul, a thing of marvelous beauty expressing some aspect of the Divine,” writes Thomas Berry.113 I saw that. I saw it and I knew that when I killed them, I was killing someone that mattered. As a child, Abraham Lincoln stopped other children from squashing ants in the schoolyard, “contending that an ant’s life was to it, as sweet as ours to us.”114 Is it a surprise that this boy grew up to sign the Emancipation Proclamation? He could include the least of us—the tiny and multilegged, the voiceless—in his circle of empathy. Varieties in human