“Action will remove the doubts that theory cannot solve” – Yeh Ti Hsieh.

Share Vega’s message about animal agriculture and climate change.

Share Vega’s message about Food Healers.

Dear Climate Healers,

After an exhilarating Vegan Convergence Of the Peoples #14 (V-COP14) over the past weekend, in which Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop’s Keynote presentation was one of the major highlights, a colleague of ours shared an unlocked access to Nicholas Kristof’s opinion column in the New York Times. In the column entitled, “,” Kristof asserts,

“What I am confident of is that right now we’re on the wrong side of history and that future generations will look back at videos like these and be baffled that nice people like us could blindly tolerate such systematized cruelty towards intelligent if cantankerous fellow mammals not so different from us.”

In that sentence, Nicholas Kristof makes clear an innate human desire to live so that our children, grandchildren and future generations can actually look back at this era.

At the moment, Dr. Warren Hern, a Colorado-based physician and author of the book, “Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth,” argues that our global industrial civilization has similarities to cancer and cancer does not stop until the host organism has died, while killing itself. By continuing to behave like cancer despite all the alarm signals blaring around us, he believes that “we have essentially made a decision as a species to go extinct.”

He also points out that the difference between us and cancer – the only difference – is we can think and we can decide not to be a cancer.

We can make that decision now, tomorrow or the day after.

This is not about climate change alone. Climate change is just the fever that the earth has contracted as the human cancer rages on in the biosphere. The fever is the symptom, while the cancer is the disease.

Indeed, in the planetary boundaries framework of the Stockholm Resilience Center, climate change is one of the least violated boundaries while biodiversity loss or species extinction is the most violated boundary. Please note that any one of these boundary violations can cause life to die out on this planet, which is why they are called “boundaries”.

It is up to Americans and Pope Francis to make the decision not to be a cancer on this planet. The US and the Vatican are the only two nations not to have signed the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

It is the American and Western consumerist lifestyle that is primarily responsible for all our planetary boundary violations.

There is one key to solving all of these environmental problems: TREES! Humans have reduced the tree count on the planet by half over the last 10,000 years and if we restore those missing 3 trillion trees, that will fix the water cycle, the carbon cycle and clean up our chemical pollution (novel entities) since trees are natural carbon filters.

In order to free up the land for planting all those trees, we have to stop animal agriculture and transform to a vegan ethic and lifestyle. By doing so, we will also fix the nitrogen cycle and the phosphorous cycle as well.

Just imagine, a completely healed planet, with healthy humans, wild animals, birds, insects and fishes – a restored garden of Eden – as a result of us getting clear on that one innate desire to live and making that one simple decision not to be a cancer on the planet.

Typically, it is only when we are given a terminal diagnosis such as cancer that we are ready to contemplate our transformation to a healthy lifestyle. May Dr. Hern’s diagnosis do the same for us as a species, especially in America, the land of the can-do people and in the Vatican, the home of the namesake of St. Francis.

As a contingent of delegates from the Interfaith Vegan Coalition travels to Chicago for the Parliament of World Religions next week, let us also get clear on our desire to wake up Tom Regan’s “sleeping giant of organized religion” to enact these necessary lifestyle changes on a global scale so that we may live, laugh and love with our children and grandchildren while we restore the ecosystems of the planet.

May the life force of all species be with us in Chicago!