For radical people, they think in surprisingly binaristic terms.

(Yes I just created the word, but binary deserves a goddamn adjective.)

I'm at the Animal Rights 2010 Conference which is mad orgasmic but also challenging blur of all the best animal rights activists ever. I'm surrounded by activist 'celebrities' who really inspire me, so many who just really know what they're talking about. This includes

• Dennis Kucinich (vegan presidential candidate)
• Peter Young (ex-prisoner for freeing mink)
• Gene Baur (founder of Farm Sanctuary)
• Erica Meier (executive director of Compassion over Killing)
• Nathan Runkle (exec. director of Mercy for Animals)
• David Benzaquen (staff and previous fellow intern at Farm Sanctuary)
• Matt Rice (previous fellow at Farm Sanctuary and currently Campaigns Director at MFA) George Eisman (vegan nutritionist)
• Josh Hooten (founder of Herbivore)
• Will Potter (author of GreenIsTheNewRed.com)
• Jon Camp (founder of Vegan Outreach)
• the entire staff of COK, naturally, and all the random people I've bumped into.

Back to the title of this post:

I can not get over how goddamn divided the animal rights movement can be. I know, i know, this is old news, but seriously, there normally aren't that many of us all in a room so we don't have to address these problems.

What is the problem, you may ask? Well, here I go:

Like all other social movements, the animal rights movement is full of individuals who believe in different tactics to achieve their own defined goal of success for animals. This generally falls into two camps:

1. Animal Welfarists
2. Abolitionists

Welfarists are stereotypically the puppy-lover activists who only argue for bigger cages for slaughter animals (though many of these activists are often vegan, too.) Abolitionists do not believe in any kind of legislation that engages with, and thereby legitimizes the meat, dairy, and egg industries and only advocate for pro-veg*n education or in extreme cases, animal liberation. This has become a seriously contentious topic, because abolitionists believe that welfarists are actually hindering their own abolitionist efforts -- They argue that if legislation is passed that bans cages for layer hens, more people will feel better about buying eggs, and will actually increase their purchases of eggs--Welfarists often believe that abolitionists come on too strongly -- the most radical of abolitionists refusing to talk about anything but animal cruelty as a reason to go vegan -- which turns people off to veg*nism in the first place.

These two poles have been created, and I scratch my head. This is supposed to be one of the more radical conferences, and these people make me want to eschew away from the identity of a radical-progressive! The politics of animal rights is a continuum and organizations and people can occupy multiple points on that line when they have multiple campaigns. Must I always bring up the word spectrum? It is not an either-or question, nor should we all agree. The palpable tension and hostility between these two main camps is really frustrating, but I guess inevitable.

Gah. If anyone has ideas or suggestions as to how to navigate the strange political waters of social movements, don't hesitate to throw stuff out there. I'm all ears. I'm really passionate, but it's difficult to deal with sometimes. (It also makes me feel very wary about analyzing the role of gender in the animal rights movement for my thesis, because that will only serve to divide the movement.)

Fancy New Blog Design

Because Blogger is still free.

Diane di Prima

Stumbled upon some delicious Beat poetry. Not my words, di Prima's. Enjoy.

From her Revolutionary Letters:

#29

beware of those

who say we are the beautiful losers

who stand in their long hair and wait to be punished

who weep on beaches for our isolation

we are not alone: we have brothers in all the hills

we have sisters in the jungles and in the ozarks

we even have brothers on the frozen tundra

they sit by their fires, they sing, they gather arms,

they multiply: they will reclaim the earth

nowhere we can go but they are waiting for us

no exile where we will not hear welcome home

'goodmorning brother, let me work with you

goodmorning sister, let me

fight by your side'

This One's for You, Col.

Alright, so apparently more people read my blog than I think.

So it's time for an update.

The House (not Haus):

Intergenerational living is rad, difficult, but rewarding. The chore system is way different from Ferry's and it's really annoying/difficult. Essentially, you have to do way more work because there are messy kids who don't do any of the chores and adults who have to clean up after them. Plus we do our own yardwork, trash, maintenance, etc. It's a completely independent house, unlike Ferry. I don't like the amount of work, or the fact that it's a first-come first-served signup.

There have been a number of days where I've just wanted to climb into my room on the top floor and never come out. Sometimes the workday is really damn long, and I have a tendency to have depressive and anxiety episodes, which really doesn't help much. Over the past couple years, I've been hovering in this strange struggle between introvertedness/isolation and extrovertedness. I consider myself to be a nurturing person, and am genuinely interested in the wellbeing of all the people with whom I cross paths, so cooperative living seems to make sense, even though I do have those down times when I have a tendency to isolate. Fortunately, my housemates often support me when I'm feeling weird or shitty, which is awesome. I feel connected here to a lot of my housemates (there are varying levels of commitment, like any cooperative), and have become good friends with some of them. It's nice to come home to a cooked dinner, and great people. Coop: 1. Mainstream Society: 0.

The Job:

Working as an outreach intern has its boring times, where I'm sitting at the computer, editing vegetarian restaurant guides for hours, but I get to leaflet, and write weekly letters to the editor, organize future events, and do generally rad stuff. I've gotten pretty good and leafleting and really feel like I'm finally coming into my activist skin after my 3rd year post-enlightenment. (Thanks, Tom(?)). Working in a vegan haven like that seems feel pretty basic to me and my mental well-being. Trying to figure out whether I'd want to do non-profit work post graduation (probably will.)

Strokes of Luck:

There have been so many strange serendipitous events accumulating over the past couple months that I'm questioning my hesitation around spirituality/my usual athiesm. It was a hard semester, what with my sister's near-fatal car accident and my grandfather's death, but the goodness in life is beginning to thaw me back into reality. This is probably way too personal for a public blog, but whatever, we're all going to die anyway and I have nothing to hide from anyone.

Examples:

-finding a great guitar half off in a random mall in New Jersey that I had never been to before and will probably never go to again the day after I decide I seriously want to learn the acoustic guitar

- finding an intentional community less than a mile away from my job

- finding a housing scholarship through my hometown (of all places!) to pay for that housing

- finding an internship semi last minute with an organization I really support after everyone else was like 'fuck you'

- Dumpstering skills! 'nuff said.

- Randomly running into a fellow Vassar activist at the Capital Pride Festival (where I was tabling for COK), and finding out that she's doing an animal rights internship this summer! She was only in the DC office for a week, and I managed to grab a vegan meal with her.

-opening the Takoma Voice paper for the first time ever on an otherwise banal metro ride and seeing that Amy Goodman would be speaking that day two miles away. After serious disbelief and confirmation calls, I went and bought a $10 ticket to hear her speak. When she signed my book, I mentioned Vassar and she mentioned Joe Nevins. I drooled. I love her.

- Randomly meeting the supposed founder of the organization I work for, and finding out that he used to go to Vassar and take class with Bill Hoynes (Bill told me about this guy who "dropped out his freshman year for animal rights") What are the fucking odds I would meet this exact guy? Small world

- Randomly making an amazing Swedish vegan progressive friend in a vegan bakery in DC who I talked to for many hours about politics, culture, and language-- who was only in DC for 2 days. (Life is fleeting but beautiful.)

- running into an awesome floormate/previous classmate from Vassar on the metro (who was only coming into town for the weekend)

- being able to attend 2 amazing animal rights conferences in D.C. later this month / having free housing because I'm already here, bitches.

What the fuck. So much interconnectedness. So much awesomeness. When I look at it all like this, it makes the banal shit seem actually bearable. Everything is fleeting, but there's so much beauty, too. Count your blessings, folks. It's not cliché, it's how we survive.

Alright, this was a sufficiently personal post. Hope you enjoyed crawling inside of my mind. Make sure you shut the door on your way out.

UNEP Report

The new United Nations Environmental Programme released a report on June 2nd, 2010 that calls for a shift towards plant-based diets in an effort to curb carbon emissions of the meat industry.

The following is a direct quotation from the site on its proposal :

[…] the priorities for achieving transformational change are:-

• Agricultural goods, particularly products from animals, which are fed more than half of all world crops. Agricultural production accounts for 70% of the global freshwater consumption and 38% of the total land use. Food production accounts for 19% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and 60% of the phosphorus and nitrogen pollution and 30% of toxic pollution in Europe;

• Users of fossil fuels, especially electrical utilities and other energy-intensive industries, residential heating, and transportation. Fossil-fuel production and consumption dominate as the world's leading cause of environmental degradation. Extraction from alternative fossil fuel sources, such as tar sands, poses potentially even heavier environmental consequences."

• Materials, especially plastics, iron, steel, and aluminium, use of which is growing, not least in the unsaturated emerging economies; and the energy requirements for which are rising because of declining grades of ore as they get used up.

'Agricultural Goods' gets FIRST MENTION. This is another huge success for vegetarian and vegan activists everywhere.

Here’s even an FAO report from 2006 that I just stumbled upon that illuminates the damages of animal agriculture.

The amount of administrative support for vegetarianism on at least a sustainability angle is enormous, and that’s pretty awesome. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the awesomeness of this.

Moment over. Let’s go kick some ass.

I live in the best place in the world...

When I first moved in, everything was so uncomfortably new, like a was an invader in some strange way, in spite of everyone saying that they wanted "short term guests" to feel just as welcome. All the kitchen drawers were foreign, the pots didn't make sense there, I couldn't figure out what anything in the fridge was so I just didn't eat. I didn't unpack my things because I didn't feel at home. I felt like a store-bought plant just taken out of its pot and dumped onto the lawn, my roots hesitating to unravel as my soil crumbles around me, because I was so unaccustomed to this earth beneath me.

I've only been here a little over a week, and I've realized co-ops are my home. Naturally, not all co-ops fit my needs, but I've learned in a short time that living cooperatively sustains me best. Individualized society numbs me, turns me cold against myself and my own creativity, whereas being in constant interaction with others allows me to be constantly creating. We can learn so much from each other, but when we're constantly taught to be in competition by the larger capitalist society, collaborating seems cause a bit more hesitation. Naturally, living cooperatively doesn't have to happen in the form of a co-op or commune, but it can often help.

At first I thought this specific house would be a little too 'ooshy gooshy' for me, a little too overly emotional, and well hey, i guess sometimes it can be a little bit. But at the same time, I feel an explicit connectedness with everyone in the house because everyone has explicitly said that they care deeply about each other. This house is an actual support network, and everyone works through their issues with everyone else -- often around good dumpstered food (tonight, potatoes, eggplant and polenta!) Yes, the word "share" is a buzzword of sorts, but I guess there are worse things in the world. For instance, not caring about the people you live with.

But one thing I can say is that I've moved into a completely foreign town, and using my housemates, I feel like this is could be my home already, like I could have lived in this town for several months already. I'm even considering moving here after graduation. Can't say that about too many places, now can you?

Of course it's not perfect. There is conflict and complexity to the house, especially this one in all of its non-conventionality, but it's so much better than so many other alternatives. I feel so oddly privileged that I happened to stumble upon this place and email them, in hopes that they might want a 2-month guest. And that it happens to be less than a mile away from my work. Seems oddly divine, though I'm not religious in the slightest way. It's going to be bizarre and painful to leave, but ay, it will show me the importance of growing the roots of a nomad. (I really like that line. One of my housemates said it in a meeting, and it still resonates with me very deeply. I feel like I'm constantly struggling to find a sense of community in a life that requires frequent moving around, and I'm trying to figure out what that means.)

More soon.

New Co-op Living

I just moved into a new co-op in DC, kind of blindly assuming that all co-ops are pretty much the same, and knowing only tidbits about this new space I was about to inhabit. I've been here for less than a day now and it's already been a challenge in so many ways... There are six kids, one of whom is mentally challenged. I awoke this morning at 7am to screaming children and slamming doors. . . I'm not sure how to address that. Some of the people seem standoffish, but then again so do I. Some of the people are really gentle and centered, though, and I think I will pretty much depend hugely upon them for the first few weeks.

The common spaces are huge and the dumpstered food is plentiful! The house is beautiful and my room is massive, though un-air-conditioned. The age range of house members is wide, and I'm definitely one of the younger ones, the kids and dogs excluded, which is weird since I'm 21. There is no uniform dietary intake -- that is to say, not everyone is vegan or even vegetarian, though I believe house dinners are all vegan (we'll see). In spite of all the awesomeness, though, I feel very unsettled, constantly on edge, not really knowing where I'm going just yet, but I'm sensing that I'm going to learn a great deal from this time here. Much more than I'd be learning from living in a single room in some craigslist apartment anyway... This is a difficult summer for me in a number of ways, so hopefully I'll come out of this experience with some tools to better understand the world.

Silver Lining: I bought a guitar in new jersey and I believe this will punctuate my summer. I'm going to be one of them self-taught guitar players, because I don't have the patience or money for guitar lessons. Woot.