Dear Climate Healer,

When our granddaughter was 4 years old, she took me to see Cinderella in the movie theater. Or rather, I was supposed to be watching her at home and she asked,
“Grandpa, can we go see Cinderella?”
I said,
“Why not, let’s go.”

I thought I would be bored watching yet another Disney rendition of the well-known story, but within a few minutes into the movie, I sat up and started paying close attention. I realized that this movie was also for me, not just for our granddaughter, when Lily James as Cinderella said,
“Have courage, be kind and all will be well.”

That, in a nutshell, captures what is called for in these troubled times. It takes courage to be kind when cataclysmic violence is normalized all around us through war, school shootings, dead birds falling from the skies, animals dying of heat stress and people dying of hunger in the streets.

At the World Economic Forum Summit in Davos last week, the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, chastised the Russians for starving the world’s poor by weaponizing food and blocking the export of wheat from Ukraine to the world. Meanwhile, the European Union, along with the rest of the world, is continuing to subsidize meat and dairy conglomerates which weaponize food by starving the world’s poor to feed the grains to farmed animals and fatten them for slaughter.

Now, Friends of the Earth is running a campaign to stop the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank, from approving yet another $200M loan to Louis Dreyfus Company Brazil (LDC) next week to support commodity feed crop production in the Cerrado biome of Brazil. LDC is planning to destroy the world’s most biodiverse savannah for “commercial, highly mechanized, industrial farms,” to grow soy and grains for animal agriculture.

Our food system is a microcosm of the entire system and it is failing us, along with our political system, our social system and our economic system. Gasoline prices, food prices and rents are through the roof as more people join the ranks of those living in tents on sidewalks every day in the “richest country in the world in human history.”

It is time to turn this around.

Earth care starts with self care. Therefore, a new, health-promoting, whole-foods plant-based Vegan food system is the foundation of Earth care. As in the oxygen mask rule on airplanes, it’s best to put on your own mask before helping others.

Heal yourself, heal your fellow humans and simultaneously, you will help heal the earth and its climate because whole-foods, plant based vegan living is the single biggest way to reduce our environmental impact, fight global warming and meet UN sustainable development goals.

A healthy vegan diet also helps you become spiritually aligned with our ongoing transformation from a predator species (Homo Sapiens) to a caretaker species (Homo Ahimsa). The turbulence that is going on today can be seen as the birth pangs of this transformation.

It takes courage to assume our responsibilities as a caretaker species, while we are so used to asserting our rights as a predator species.

It takes courage and discipline to embark on a journey of self-care, when we are bombarded with messages to indulge ourselves and get sick.

Finally, it takes courage to be kind to all life, starting with your self-care.

Speaking of self-care, I went through all the medical tests prescribed by my cardiologist and I’m happy to say that my brain and carotid arteries are fine, though the radiologist who read my MRI is convinced that I must be suffering from severe migraines.

I haven’t had a single headache in at least a decade.

As for my heart, it passed the nuclear stress test by imaging but my cardiologist is recommending that I undergo a coronary CT angiogram because the EKG showed an abnormality during the stress test, contradicting the imaging result.

But, I decline to undergo any further tests.

Regardless of what the angiogram might reveal, I’m not planning to subject myself to any treatments or procedures, except to stick to a low-fat, whole-foods, starch-based McDougall vegan diet to keep myself out of heart trouble. If Paul Chatlin could do it after finding a 100% blockage in one artery and 65% blockages in two others, then why can’t I? At worst, I might have mild chronic coronary artery disease, while he had it bad.

After going through the 12 day online McDougall program, I highly recommend it to everyone. It taught me to monitor my vital signs and do a simple plank every morning to decrease my abdominal fat, which is especially unhealthy for Indians like me. I’m happy to say that I’ve lost 10 pounds since my restaurant episode and I held the plank position for 2 mins 35 seconds today. It’s a long way from the world record of 9 hours 30 mins 1 sec, held by Daniel Scali of Australia, but it’s a vast improvement over the 1 min plank I could do at the start of the program.

And I feel terrific!

Self-care. You can do it. You are amazing, but you have been systematically suppressed and made to feel less than who you are.

That’s all changing, now that we know better.

Please join us. Let’s make this greatest transformation in human history happen sooner rather than later.