Engineering the Greatest Transformation in 2024

Dear Climate Healers,

As the clock ticks away 2023 and ushers in the New Year, we pause to reflect on our gains during the year and renew our commitment to accelerate the Greatest Transformation in Human History during 2024 and beyond. At Climate Healers, everything we do is in service of this Greatest Transformation in Human History to a climate healing civilization based on a sustainable, plant-based, vegan rewilding economy from a climate heating civilization based on an unsustainable, animal-based, conspicuous consumption economy.

2023 gave ample signs of the inexorable nature of this transformation. Starting with the Guardian Newspaper designation as Climate Hero – thanks to a sponsorship by Virginia Bell – with the citation lauding us as “the foremost voice on the green transition and the true scale of societal change required to save the planet,” and ending with the comprehensive win in the Oxford Union debate on the proposition, “This House Would Go Vegan” – thanks to a sponsorship by GenV – we have seen millions of people all over the world implement the spiritual and cultural changes needed to build the vegan foundation of this transformation.

The Vegan Forest Festival hosted at Sadhana Forest in Auroville, India, in February 2023, was a smashing success, prompting the organizers to make it an annual event. The next one is scheduled for Feb 2024. We hosted the Vegan Convergence Of the Peoples (V-COPs) four times in 2023, V-COP12 in January through V-COP15 in October, exploring various aspects of the Greatest Transformation in Human History, incorporating the wisdom of numerous guest speakers. The next one, V-COP16 is coming up on Jan 27-28, 2024.

Food Healers in Los Angeles, Ollas Comunes Veganas in Peru and SMUUF Food Healers in San Marcos, Texas served thousands of healthy meals during the year to advance our proposition that healthy vegan meals should be freely available to every human being on the planet as a basic human right. We formed alliances with international NGOs like Go Dharmic as well as local NGOs like Feed Phoenix in Phoenix, AZ, to realize this vision and to address UN Sustainable Development Goals, SDG #2, “Zero Hunger,” and SDG #3, “Good Health and Well Being” in earnest.

On the global front, Sir David Attenborough, the British broadcaster, biologist, natural historian, author and narrator of the famous Life collection at the BBC, came out swinging on our side during 2023. He said in his hugely popular BBC One show, Planet Earth III,

“If we shift away from eating meat and dairy and move towards a plant-based diet, then the sun’s energy goes directly into growing our food. And because that’s so much more efficient, we could still produce enough to feed us, but do so using a quarter of the land.”

In an interview with Radio Times magazine, Sir David expanded on this point, “Human beings have overrun the Earth. We have completely destroyed the world. The planet can’t support billions of meat-eaters. If we all ate only plants, we’d need only half the land we use at the moment.”

This is precisely the point we’ve been making for years now. When we take into account the potential carbon absorption of the forest land that is being inefficiently used for raising animals, animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change responsible for at least 87% (118% with IPCC AR6 data) of greenhouse gas emissions on an annual basis. In addition, going Vegan mitigates all six planetary boundary transgressions that are destroying life-support systems on the planet.

Therefore, it’s only a matter of time before the world goes Vegan and the sooner the better, for us and for the children of all species.

When faced with the truth of its destructive impact on the planet, Big Ag has been fighting back with its typical heavy-handed tactics, persecuting Tracy Murphy in New York, imprisoning Wayne Hsiung and threatening to imprison Zoe Rosenberg, Conrad de Jesus and Rocky Chau in California. Clearly, Big Ag is frightened that the two most liberal states in the Union, New York and California, are about to fully embrace Veganism. Now, let’s make sure that Big Ag’s overreaching accelerates the Vegan movement in 2024.

Of course, not everything has been rosy during 2023, as it is likely to go down as the hottest year ever in human history, while raging wars in Ukraine and Gaza made peace feel like a fantasy. In an f-word laden poem, Dr. Corey Bradshaw, a Professor of Global Ecology at Flinders University, recently lamented about all the ways in which our beautiful planet has been broken. For the f-word sensitive, here’s a scrubbed version of his poignant poem, “My Daughter’s Earth

“The trees are stumps
The oceans are dumps
The plants are weeds
The planet bleeds
The laws are dearth
Welcome to my daughter’s earth.

The air’s thick
The soil’s sick
The forests are slashed
Our dreams are dashed
The water’s black
The world gives jack

The cities are jammed
The rivers are dammed
The fish are eaten
The wilds are beaten
The place is heaving
Seven billion humans needing

The horizon’s hazy
The weather’s crazy
The system’s broke
The policies – a joke
No one heeds the warning
The climate’s warming

A billion have nought
Democracy is bought
Tellies spew wank
Corporations own the bank
The West is fat
Buying useless shit is where it’s at

The schools are pathetic
The news is synthetic
The churches are insane
The economists are inane
The pundits are liars
The denialists are for hire

The goddies are knobs
The rich are slobs
The pollies are weak
The future’s bleak
For whatever it’s worth

You destroyed my daughter’s earth.”

Though Dr. Bradshaw didn’t call out my engineering profession explicitly, let me begin with a mea culpa. We engineers actually broke the planet. We didn’t do it intentionally. We were told to maximize growth and minimize cost, while assuming that the planet is an infinite sink for the waste from all our processes.

And we did what we were told.

Like Adolph Eichmann, we can offer the common plea of Nazi perpetrators that we were only following the orders of others, but that would be disingenuous. While we may not have dictated policy, we were more than a “mere little cog in the machinery of destruction” and therefore, we need to take responsibility for what we have done. Indeed, engineers actually designed and implemented the systems and processes for every single machinery of destruction responsible for the carnage listed in “My Daughter’s Earth.”

For the purpose of illustration, take the sewage treatment plant in Sedona, AZ, that I was invited to tour a few years ago. It is a magnificent state-of-the-art facility with multiple tanks and chemical processes to separate out the solid waste from the sewage water and clean it of biological contamination. The result of the treatment is water that passes Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requirements for potable drinking water.

Naturally, I asked the administrator of the plant whether the potable water was being fed back into the fresh water supply of Sedona. He was horrified. He said – and I’m paraphrasing here – “Of course not. It passes FDA requirements for potable water, but the FDA doesn’t check for chemical contaminants. The water is full of pharmaceuticals and other household chemicals that would make it unacceptable for the people of Sedona to drink.”

(As an aside, if you want to know why the FDA does not check for chemical contaminants in drinking water, please watch the 2013 documentary, The Human Experiment, narrated by Sean Penn and now streaming for free on UnchainedTV. You will begin to understand why President Eisenhower warned us about the Military Industrial Complex in his farewell speech.)

Then I asked why the treated water had been poured into a lake adjacent to the treatment facility where birds and other animals could drink it. As the lake got full, the treated water was being sprayed onto an adjacent 200 acre plot of land where it had already killed off the majority of trees on the land. Around the time of my visit, the city had also decided to drill a hole and inject the treated water directly into an underground aquifer, downstream of where Sedona taps its drinking water supply.

All of this is perfectly legal.

Engineers designed this sewage treatment plant to meet FDA requirements. Engineers could have installed systems for decontaminating the water of chemical pollution making it more suitable for drinking. However, that would have occurred only if the engineers had been given a different objective function for the systems they were building, an objective function that ensured the well-being of all life on the planet instead of merely minimizing the dollar cost for a specific city.

Of course, a true systems engineer would also examine the upstream pollution of the sewage water and ask what could be done to minimize the use of pharmaceuticals and harsh household chemicals. Indeed, for every single carnage listed in “My Daughter’s Earth,” we engineers can design and implement the systems and processes for mitigating and even reversing it, if only we are given the opportunity. We are eager and willing to do so.

Therefore, here’s “My Granddaughter’s Earth,” an adaptation of Corey Bradshaw’s poem, which can serve as our vision for 2024 and beyond…

The trees are green
The oceans are cleaned
The plants are wild
The planet’s rewilded
The laws are birthed
To protect my granddaughter’s earth

The air’s fresh
The soil’s blessed
The forests are verdant
Our dreams are vibrant
The water’s blue
The world is due

The cities are slowing
The rivers are flowing
The fish are swimming
The wilds are brimming
The place is needing
Seven billion humans seeding

The horizon’s clearer
The weather’s cooler
The system’s nice
The policies wise
Everyone heeded the warning
Of the climate warming

A billion have fought
To avoid democracy bought
Tellies make apparent
Corporations transparent
The West has wisened
As the East has risen

The schools are bright
The news is right
The churches are feeding
The economists are heeding
The pundits are persistent
The denialists nonexistent

The goddies are praying
The rich are paying
The pollies are serving
The future’s deserving
For whatever it’s worth

You saved my granddaughter’s earth.”

When we hold onto such a vision, we can surely make it happen. Here’s wishing you and your family health and prosperity in multiple dimensions, physical, mental, spiritual and material, in 2024 and beyond.

Please do join us for the live training on the Climate Healers story for 8 weeks, starting the first Friday of the New Year, during Day 5 of the 7 Days of Rest and Reweaving Wholeness. The sessions will last for one hour every Friday at 9am Pacific time and you can register for it here.

With much love,
Sailesh on behalf of the Climate Healers Core team.
(Akhil, Alison, Anne, BJ, Carl, Dakota, Dani, Deborah, Debra, Gabriele, Giva, Jamen, Kelly, Ken, Kimaya, Krish, Lisa, Liz, Maggie, Marco, Paige, Pareen, Paul, Ray, Sailesh, Sarah, Shankar, Stacey, Suzanne, Tami and Vega, the Cow and Climate Healer)

 

Building Belief in Vegan World 2026
Numbers Don't Lie - with Honest Accounting
Sailesh Rao
srao@climatehealers.org
2 Comments
  • Rebecca "BJ" Allen
    Posted at 00:44h, 02 January Reply

    Thank you so much for the reminder of the good things being done by Climate Healers and others to save this beautiful life on earth.

  • Dakota Matthes
    Posted at 04:50h, 02 January Reply

    Thank you so much Sailesh. Your recap of 2023 and your vision for 2024 are inspiring. I especially love your example and precedent that you set with your personal accountability for creating systems that serve humanity and not just the corporate interests and their profit margins. You lead the way for other engineers to follow suit and create better systems for Mother Earth, the animals and elementals, and for our grandchildren. Bravo to You, your work and your leadership. And Bravo to all the food healers in San Marcos, Phoenix, and Peru!! So much love for you all. 🫶🏼🫂🙏🏼🐮🐷🐔🌞🌱

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