“Trust has two dimensions: competence and integrity” – Simon Sinek.

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

Share Vega’s message about Food Healers.

Dear Climate Healers Family,

(adapted from the Prologue of the forthcoming book, There IS a Planet B )

The villagers of Hadagori in the state of Odisha, India, were perplexed. They knew me as a city dweller and they wanted to question me about what was bothering them.

The villagers had started trading with a middleman who was buying vegetables from them to sell in Bhubaneshwar, the capital city of Odisha. The middleman had specific requirements on the vegetables that he would purchase. They had to be clean and without any holes in them. Ugly vegetables had to be picked out. The villagers had to use pesticides to ensure that worms did not feast on the vegetables as they were grown.

The villagers knew that there was something wrong with what they were doing to grow vegetables for the middleman. They planted them far away from the patches where they were planting organic vegetables for their own consumption.

They asked me the question that was bothering them:
“Why do people in the cities want to eat vegetables that even the worms don’t want to eat?”

I was stunned. I later thought about it and realized that as buyers in the city, we don’t load our shopping carts with ugly produce or vegetables containing worm holes. This sends a message to the middleman that such produce cannot be sold.

He then figures out how to eliminate such produce from his supply chain and our chemically drenched agricultural processes result. Of course, he legitimately conceals what he has asked the villagers to do from the buyers so that he can continue to grow his business.

The Power to Take Remedial Action

This is how through our consumer choices, we are unwittingly facilitating our own food poisoning. Likewise, through our lifestyle choices, we are also unwittingly exacerbating the nature and climate crisis that is threatening mass extinction, including our own. When we realize this, it gives us the power to take remedial action.

Dr. James Hansen is known as the “grandfather of global warming”. He has done pioneering research work teasing out the relationships between human activities and the ongoing nature and climate crisis. In his book, Storms of my Grandchildren, he wrote,

“There is a social matter that contributes equally to the crisis: government greenwash. I was startled, while plotting data, to see the vast disparity between government words and reality. Greenwashing, expressing concern about global warming and the environment while taking no actions to actually stabilize climate or preserve the environment, is prevalent in the United States and other countries, even those presumed to be the “greenest.”

The tragedy is that the actions needed to stabilize climate, which I will describe, are not only feasible but provide additional benefits as well. How can it be that necessary actions are not taken? It is easy to suggest explanations—the power of special interests on our governments, the short election cycles that diminish concern about long-term consequences—but I will leave that for the reader to assess, based on the facts that I will present.”

But what if governments are like the vegetable middleman and climate scientists are like the villagers in the Odisha story? Everyone knows deep down that we need to urgently change how we relate to other life forms on the planet if we are to tackle the nature and climate crisis seriously. The actions needed to stabilize climate, if one were to honestly examine the data, begins with immediate lifestyle and cultural changes, followed by gradual changes to the fossil fuel based energy infrastructure.

The Greenwashing of Lifestyle Issues

But climate scientists like Dr. Hansen are not talking about immediate lifestyle and cultural changes, preferring instead to speak about fossil fuel use. Dr. Hansen did state 15 years ago that animal agriculture is a leading cause of climate change, but he hasn’t spoken much about it since.

Throughout the 2024 State of the Climate Report, authored by 12 prominent scientists, there were 15 references to fossil fuels and zero references to animal agriculture. In the concluding section, the authors even wrote,

“Rapidly phasing down fossil fuel use should be a top priority.”

From a systems engineering perspective, we know that it would be an unmitigated global disaster to rapidly phase down fossil fuel use without first shutting down animal agriculture and rewilding the planet. This is due to what Dr. Hansen has referred to as the Faustian bargain of fossil fuels.

When prominent scientists don’t adopt the necessary lifestyle and cultural changes and don’t talk about the urgent need for them, they behave similarly to greenwashing governments. This elite greenwashing of necessary lifestyle and cultural issues is a social matter that also contributes to the nature and climate crisis.

The actions that we need to take, like dropping animal products from our diets, consuming less, exercising more, etc., are not only feasible, but provide additional benefits for us all. Then why are climate scientists not adopting them or speaking up about them?

Perhaps the brunt of the impacts from the nature and climate crisis falls not on the climate scientists, but on the poor, the marginalized and the indigenous communities, and most acutely on the flora and fauna of the world. Perhaps the climate scientists don’t want to take unpopular stands, upsetting their families, friends and grant funders. Perhaps they are habituated or even addicted to their traditions, lifestyles and culture.

I will leave that for the reader to assess based on the facts, but what if the greenwashing governments are just mirroring greenwashing scientists and by extension, greenwashing citizens?

We know that there is citizen greenwash on lifestyle issues since almost everyone claims not to want to hurt animals unnecessarily, while the data shows that we are eating animal foods causing unnecessary suffering to animals.

Perhaps, we have been misled by school science teachers into thinking that protein is only found in animal products and calcium is only found in dairy products. Perhaps, we too are habituated or even addicted to our traditions, lifestyles and culture.

How we can Solve this Together

This is an invitation for prominent climate scientists like Dr. Hansen to engage with us on the necessary lifestyle and cultural issues and speak about them openly in order to start the conversation with ordinary citizens. This will create the momentum for mass grassroots action so that Dr. Hansen’s grandchildren, someday in the future, will look back and say,

“Opa understood what was happening, and he made it clear.”

This is also an invitation for Climate Healers to have faith that those who are still ensnared in choices of personal and planetary destruction are just waiting for the right moment to break free. It is an invitation to have faith, not hope because hope comes from a position of fear, while faith comes from a position of love.

Have faith that we already have all the tools and technologies to ensure that every human being is able to implement the necessary lifestyle and cultural changes in every corner of the globe.

Have faith that the lie of endless economic growth, of food systems rooted in suffering, is coming to an end – not through force, but through an irrepressible wave of love, kindness and compassion in action.

Have faith that we are living in a world of abundance, not scarcity.

Have faith that the necessary global transformation is already happening everywhere and that the path to planetary and personal healing is not only possible, but actually inevitable.

This is not a question of whether, but how fast.

Engaging with Naysayers

If anyone tells you that it is already too late and our species is doomed to near-term extinction anyway and so why bother changing, please ask them,

“How would you know?”

Life is a complex, emergent, nonlinear process which is impossible to model accurately. As a systems engineer, I used to do modeling for a living and I know that even a single significant nonlinearity makes it difficult to get the model to predict certain aspects of reality reliably. For instance, it is notoriously difficult to predict the tipping point for a nonlinear feedback phenomenon, a point of no return beyond which it is impossible to reverse the condition.

The nature and climate crisis is governed by thousands of significant nonlinearities with both positive and negative feedback loops. For such a complex reality, the best we can do is to estimate the ranges for the tipping points using our models. We have to acknowledge with humility that we cannot predict the exact tipping points reliably.

In this case, the only way to know if we crossed a tipping point is to initiate a forcing in the opposing direction, i.e., actually reduce the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, plant native trees in a region, etc., and verify whether the system is responding in the right direction, i.e., whether the Arctic sea ice cover begins increasing year on year, native wild animals return to the region, etc.

Even if the system does not respond in the right direction, we would still be unsure if we have crossed the tipping point or not. We can then increase the forcing in the opposing direction and see if it responds. This is why as long as photosynthesis is still working and there is sufficient oxygen in the atmosphere, we will have air to breathe, food to eat, a life to live, a lot to love and plenty of work to do. We certainly won’t have time for hand-wringing and such tales of doom.

Please carry on with your amazing work…

A Call to Action

If this message has touched your heart and you want to act, then here are 3 easy steps YOU can take NOW to ACTUALLY make this happen:

1) Say out loud to yourself, THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN! IF you really mean it, then take the next two steps.
2) Write down the names of three people who will listen to you when you speak. Not that they are presupposed in any way, just that they will listen to you when you speak.
3) In the next 30 minutes, forward them this entire message with a simple personal statement that you think this needs to happen and you would like them to take these actions with you.

With much love,