a gentle place

Posted By Harry on September 27, 2010

Like most bloggers potential posts swirl around in my head on a regular basis but need a spark of some sort to get me to transfer them from my grey matter through the keyboard to cyberspace.  The spark for this post was provided by The Voracious Vegan (aka Tasha), whose latest post was on the Bill Clinton “plant-based vs vegan diet” issue, an issue which has gone viral in the vegan blogosphere. Most posts on this were written with an unhealthy dollop of criticism dressing the main story: it wasn’t good enough that he still occasionally ate fish. It wasn’t good enough that the new diet was for his health and not for the animals. But Tasha wrote about the positives in his dietary move. And pointed out that even the strictest vegan is responsible for the death of animals. That sent my thoughts on this swirling at breakneck speed …

Life, and living one, is not a black-and-white affair. Choices that we make have consequences. And choices that we think are purely positive (eg a vegan diet, a vegan lifestyle) carry with them their own set of negative side effects. While I’ve touched on the conflict between animal advocacy and environmentalism in a previous post on feral cats, the conflicts are for more widespread than that.  Knowing how we deal with those conflicts on a personal level not only allows us to live outside of a cocoon, but it should also help stem our self-righteous rants, outbursts that I – like any person passionate about things such as injustice – am prone to.

For me it’s all about intent. But, as I wrote on Tasha’s site, an educated intent. And it’s about far more than a vegan lifestyle; it’s about ahimsa.

• Intent – an aim, plan or purpose
• Vegan – a person who does not eat or use any animal products
• Ahimsa – the law of reverence for, and non-violence to, every form of life

Living on over 40 acres with two-thirds of that bush teaming with native wildlife, and living on an island Paradise with power predominantly hydro- or wind-generated gives me plenty of scope to work on not being a self-righteous git. While our hot water heating is solar with electric back-up, the heating of our cottage is by means of a slow-combustion wood-burner. Just that simple act of heating our water and its home brings with it multiple conflicts:

Solar energy – a renewable resource but one that uses fossil fuels in its manufacture and transport. Photovoltaic cells carry even more of an impact than solar hot water generators – the extraction of the silicon required for their manufacture results in both environmental degradation and the burning of fossil fuels.

Conflict: solar hot water and smoke from woodheater

Tasmanian electricity – the creation of dams for the hydro-electric scheme caused major environmental destruction (and a split in the community), and the large wind turbines are responsible for the death of many birds; the large counted, the small forgotten.

Wood-burner – not in itself the cleanest form of heating, but we source most of the required wood from our property. A positive is that limited fossil fuels are used in its gathering and preparation. But while we try and use only dead trees or trees that have blown over, we know that these are required as homes for animals, birds, insects, reptiles and a whole host of other living creatures. So we try and balance what we take with what we leave behind. The last large, dead gum we felled was magnificent firewood, but on starting to split it we realised that a large crack running up one side contained the nest of thousands (?tens of thousands) hatching ladybugs. So we took the 5 rounds that appeared to have the most ladybugs into the vegie patch where we created a ladybug nursery, split the others as best we could without injuring ladybugs, and then spent an entire winter removing ladybugs from cracks in wood before we placed the logs on the fire, and rescuing ladybugs from blinds, windows, tables, lamps and anywhere else they may have escaped to as the wood sat overnight in the pile next to the heater. And then yesterday, while working in the vegie patch and cutting down stinging nettle for compost and herbal infusions, I noticed that some ladybugs had taken to the forest of nettle as a new home. Deciding that there was so much more for them to live on, and with the intent of moving them and not killing them, the nettle is now almost all gone. New plants in the vegie patch will be fed by the highly nutritious nettle compost, and long-term the ladybugs should have a better home than a pure nettle forest.  But I have no doubt my actions will have unintentionally, but knowingly, killed some individuals.

Ladybug nursery (on right) in vegie patch

My synthetic farmboots and work shoes will pollute the ground for far longer than my neighbour’s leather shoes. Our catching, taming, neutering and spaying three feral cats rather than shooting them leaves three more cats here now, three cats to still cause damage, but three cats that hold their territory and cannot produce more feral cats. Our maintaining cleared land for feed and pleasure for our animal family and us prevents it from regenerating back to native bush. But these choices are made in the spirit of ahimsa, with the intent of being responsible for as little harm as possible to every living thing: human animals, non-human animals, birds, insects, reptiles, plants and trees. As we learn more, as we become more educated as to the consequences of our choices, we alter some of them. We realise that we may have been causing too much unintentional damage.

Tobi & Thomas, two once-feral cats who now spend most of their time inside

The choices Sue and I make, the choices I make, are not perfect. With the rights of non-human animals always forefront in my mind, it’s unlikely they’ll ever be. But each choice I make seeks to cause as little harm as possible, and hopefully carry with it benefit for others as well as for me. Knowing that allows me to walk in the real world.

Categories: Animals & us, Nature
Tags: Ahimsa, Animal rights, Choices, Feral cats, Fossil fuels, Hydro energy, Intent, Plants, Solar energy, Trees, Vegan, Wildlife, Wind energy