The following suggestion was left on a blog introducing the concept of Deep Vegan Outreach. This discussion represents the kind of productive exchange and progressive thinking that will help break us out of the straight-jacket of mainstream veganism. While our community has overlooked — and in some cases dismissed — a given tactic, every radical idea can be instrumental in building a social revolution.
says: December 16, 2009 at 8:21 pm (Edit)
Steven Best, you want to do something “radical” and different from your “adversary” (Francione)? Promote veganic gardening/farming. Francione abolitionists seem not to get that this is the key to empowering people. Even the most staunch animal rightists seem to want to just accept that animal feces is in the food they eat. What’s worse, is the feces comes directly from enslaved animals at the factory farms, and therefore even organic farmers are supporting cruelty and death (and we do too, so long as we eat it and don’t make an effort to change it).
Francione is not interested in promoting this. Et tu? His simple solution is for everyone to switch from Mayonaise to Veganaise. His approach is not flawed because it is nonviolent – it’s flawed because it is market-based. He literally refuses to admit that we are not going to make any change by “voting with our dollar.”
Apparently, in the eyes of almost all animal rightists (from every faction), this idea of veganic farming/gardening is either far too trivial or far too “radical” to incorporate in vegan outreach as one of the *KEY* principles. So it remains a side topic – veganic gardening is currently viewed more as a hobby or a fun topic of discussion. Go on to Vegan Freaks forum under the “gardening” section – people rarely post, and if they do it’s usually on very light topics on par with “What’s your favorite plant?”
This will all change one day soon. Because climate change will demand it.
The time to talk about this topic is now.
Well Jeannie, this shouldn’t surprise you, but I am not Francione and my theoretical, political, and experiential background is quite a bit broader and deeper, and I have an infinitely more open mind.
So, actually, my response is to agree with you 110%, to say this is a fantastic and important idea, and to invite you to work with us to put this issue at the forefront of importance, should you be willing and amenable to our overall approach and politics. You can see we are trying to wake up and shake up this stagnant and complacent vegan community and reinvent ourselves in new and exciting ways. This is certainly one.
Oddly enough, I have just started to read through 3 books I purchased on composting and veganic gardening. I live on an acre of land which goes to waste and I’d like to make it into a community garden or at least grow food for myself and to share with others who might need it.
I see the importance of gardening in broad terms, involving not only avoiding chemical poisoning of corporate agriculture and the high costs or inaccessibility of organic foods, but also as cultivating individuals and communities not only soil, breaking with capitalist market relations and a key link of the oppressive chains, becoming autonomous and self-reliant, and bonding with the earth and processes of growth in one of the best possible ways to nurture ecological consciousness.
So there are nutritional, individual, community, educational, political, and economic dimensions to this that are crucial for planting seeds for a new world. It is key to autonomy, health, veganism, community, and breaking with corporations and market structures.
I am with you completely in seeing this as a crucial and centerpiece issue. I encourage you to help us incorporate this into our budding thinking and raw green efforts to reinvent veganism as something meaningful and accessible for all people, and to make the paradigm shift from vegan outreach to social outreach, from kitchen cookbooks to social cookbooks, from the “culinary activism” to revolutionary movements.
Too much so, the vegan community is a joke, but it’s not funny anymore, now that we are at the most critical threshold in the 7 million year history of hominid/human evolution.
Francione, Vegan Freaks, and the rest of it — just bourgeois ideology, narcisstic consumerism, “green” and “cruelty-free” capitalism, another intolerable expression of elitism and, in fact, racism, in the indifference to class and racial struggles.
They are the past, we’re trying to scatter seeds toward winds of the future; they are part of the problem, we’re struggling to be part of the solution.
But we are a lonely few, we need you, thousands, and millions like you. Our door is open for business, and our sign does not say “Whites Only.”
Steve
says: December 16, 2009 at 10:32 pm (Edit)
This is a brilliant idea and exactly the kind of independent thought we need.
We need to move away from consumerism and the systems that reinforce speciesism and oppression. In addition, gardening can be an excellent way of bringing people together in the community and sharing vegan principles. It seems so much more organic to do outreach with members of the community already engaged in this common project rather than evangelizing with leaflets to other suburban whites.
We encourage you to join our efforts and contribute. Do you have experience? Can you provide any advice or direction? I look forward to your thoughts.
This could be a launchpad for total liberation politics.
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I wouldn’t mind going back to that life style at all. Great idea that could be promoted easily.