Vegetarian

The latest carbon-reducing tips from the Caring For Creation Project include the suggestion of having at least two vegetarian days per week.  Good idea! But what about a vegetarian lifestyle? There is no evidence that Jesus was a vegetarian or that Christians in all times and places should be vegetarian but maybe the time has come?
I've been a full-time vegetarian for 25 years and have no regrets.  I first started because of a concern about justice and "food politics".  I was persuaded by facts like:  you could feed all the hungry people in the world on the grain that is fed to cattle in the United States alone.  The production of animal protein requires vastly more land, feed, and water than the production of vegetable protein.  We could all enjoy more than enough food and arable land to feed the world's population if we didn't waste so much raising livestock.
Later I was interested in Gandhi's claim that you could judge the character of a nation by the way it treated its animals.  In Australia our animals are treated with enormous amounts of love, affection, veterinary care, grooming and food - if they are pets.  Meanwhile in dark, hidden places unprecedented numbers of cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and other livestock die gruesome, painful deaths, only to appear on supermarket shelves in bright, sterile packaging that looks fresh and pristine and nothing at all like a dead animal.  What does this say about our nation and our attitude to life and death?
Now, global warming has provided a new justification for vegetarianism.  The high carbon cost of raising and transporting meat reinforces further that it is a luxury item that we can increasingly ill-afford.  I have always shied away from taking the high moral ground about this because, in all honesty, I have not found it a sacrifice to give up meat.  In my younger days I ate everything from raw clam, which I gouged myself out of coral reefs in Tonga, to emu roadkill freshly extracted from the roo bar of a vehicle in the Gascoyne - and, of course, loads and loads of supermarket meat. But I don't miss any of it and I never have.
Clearly, we should all be cutting down on the amount of meat we consume but I don't know that it's necessary for everyone to be a vegetarian.  What I can recommend though, is making decisions, even very small ones, to reduce or avoid cooperation with systems, structures or behaviours you know to be wrong.

Walk Against Warming

Five of us from the Swan Parish attended the Walk Against Warming at the Fremantle Esplanade on Sunday afternooon.  Although there wasn't any "Walk" there was plenty of talk from the speakers on the stage and the bands and entertainment that had been lined up for the event.
I've been attending this kind of protest rally since I was sixteen and wouldn't have a hope of remembering how many I've been to and for what causes - although the Palm Sunday March for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament was an annual fixture on my calendar for many years. In all that time, though, the character of these events hasn't changed much.  The crowd is made up mostly of the young "hippies", who stilll look exactly the same as they did when I was their age - is there a whole new generation of them or are they kept in cryogenic storage and brought out specially for rallies? - and the ageing ex-hippies who look pretty much like any other 45+ year-olds but they are likely to have arrived on a bicycle and be wearing a straw hat. For the record, I was wearing an extremely munted Piping Hot hat and attempted to go by train but was offerd a lift with someone else.
It was hard to tell how many were there because the whole of the esplanade was full of people, many of whom were just out enjoying the sunshine, but the concentration of people generally increased as you approached the stage. It certainly seemed to be more about enjoying the festivities than expressing rage, outrage, or old age. 
I found myself wondering if such events are necessary. Sure, they give a bit of a boost to those who attend but this wears off when you get to my vintage and does it really do any good anyway?  Having thought seriously about it, though,  I'm quite certain that rallies and marches are essential to the process of achieving social change.  In an era when hundreds, thousands, or millions of people can be contacted in  no time by social networking sites, we are better, and more quickly, informed than ever before.  But information seems to be where it ends. - it doesn't translate into action. Unless we involve our bodies, take physical action, literally make our presence felt, I'm convinced we don't subscribe to our own opinions and beliefs.  To have the courage to take serious action for carbon reduction in our own lives we have to know physically, not electronically, that we are part of a movement of like-minded people. We need to actually stand shoulder-to-shoulder with others who care about this world and who believe in the power of God and humanity to change it.  In the words of a protest song by Holly Near "When we turn out its good for the world".