“Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it” – Joseph Heller.

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

Share Vega’s message about Food Healers.

Dear Climate Healers,

At all times, we each get to choose whether we wish to restore life as we knew it or to continue civilization as we know it. Let’s consider the case for both options.

The case for restoring life as we knew it is based on evolution. It may be hard to believe given our current focus on the earth overheating, but the earth is currently in the fifth known major ice age in its 4.6 billion year history.

The first major ice age in the paleo record is the Huronian ice age from 2.4 billion to 2.1 billion years ago. The second is the Cryogenian ice age from 720 million to 635 million years ago. The third is the Andean-Saharan ice age from 450 million to 420 million years ago and the fourth is the late Paleozoic ice age from 335 million to 260 million years ago.

Finally, the earth is now in the fifth major ice age, the Quaternary ice age from 2.7 million years ago to the present.

Each major ice age can have smaller ice ages, called glaciations and warmer inter-glacial periods between them. During the initial 1.7 million years of the present Quaternary ice age, the warm inter-glacial periods occurred quite frequently, about once every 41,000 years. However, over the past million years, the warm inter-glacial periods have been occurring less frequently, about once every 100,000 years.

In every such 100,000 year cycle, the earth is largely frozen for about 90,000 years, followed by an inter-glacial warm period of about 10,000 years when most of the glaciers melt and life expands beyond a narrow band around the equator to cover the northern and southern hemispheres. Then the process repeats again.

The earth is currently in a warm inter-glacial period called the Holocene. The Holocene era began about 11,700 years ago and unlike previous inter-glacial warm periods over the past million years, the Holocene era shows no sign of returning to glaciation anytime soon.

This is because Mother Earth spawned us, humans, during the Quaternary ice age and gave us control of fire about 500,000 years ago. With the controlled use of fire, humans can burn things and cause the planet to heat up. However, we didn’t begin to do so in earnest until the current Holocene era.

In the glacial period prior to the Holocene era, about 50,000 years ago, humans with the help of domesticated wolves who became our dogs, spread out of Africa and migrated to every continent on earth, except Antarctica. Dogs lent us their vastly superior senses of smell, sight and hearing to enable us to overcome predators and survive even in the harsh environments around the world. Then, about 10,000 years ago humans started burning down forests for agriculture almost everywhere, thereby heating up the earth significantly.

According to William Ruddiman’s Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis, the earth’s temperature would have returned below the glaciation threshold about 5000 years ago, if not for these human activities heating up the earth. Then, about 200 years ago, humans started digging up and burning fossil fuels in great quantities, causing the earth’s temperature to spike upward by 1.2 deg C into the modern era.

Now, we have developed the engineering instrumentation and the scientific knowledge to understand that humans are gravely impacting the conditions for life to thrive on this earth. We also know that by stopping animal agriculture, while dialing down our fossil fuel burning, we can create the conditions to restore life as we knew it on the planet. We can replant the 3 trillion trees that we cut on the land that gets freed up from animal agriculture and largely restore the ecosystems that we destroyed over the past 10,000 years.

This transformation from an animal eating, climate heating, nature destroying “Homo sapiens” to a plant eating, climate healing, ecosystems restoring “Homo Ahimsa” species is the Greatest Transformation in Human History that we are called to do in this generation. It will rank greater than the great migration out of Africa, the agricultural revolution, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the internet revolution, you name it. We can safely predict that it will even rank greater than the discovery of fire 500,000 years ago, since it is truly the discovery of the spiritual fire within us.

This is a fitting culmination to our struggles, providing meaning for all the suffering that our ancestors and other sentient beings have experienced during the climate heating phase of our existence.

In contrast, there is an exclusive group of male politicians and corporate figures, called the Bohemian Grove, who meet for two weeks every July at a Sonoma county retreat in California to chart the continuation of Western civilization as we know it. As the leaders of the worst polluting countries skip the UN climate summit in New York city, it is clear that these elite members of the Bohemian Grove remain comfortable with the status quo, perhaps because the impact of the ongoing ecological catastrophes fall largely on the poor and the downtrodden.

We shall surely overcome and rise above such an uninspired view of our role as a nihilistic, purposeless species on this planet.