What a breakthrough year 2022 has been!

While our UnchainedTV documentary, Countdown to Year Zero has racked up over 30 awards, our newest documentary, The Land Of Ahimsa, has also been gathering awards at Film festivals. It won a Certificate of Excellence from the WRPN Women’s International Film Festival and the Best Documentary Award of Merit at the Hong Kong World Film Festival. Now, it has received 5 nominations from the International Film Festival of London, for the Best Documentary, the best Directing in a Documentary, the best Cinematography in a Documentary, the best Editing of a Documentary and in the Science category! The producers, Dolly Vyas-Ahuja and Mayur Ahuja, will be attending the Festival and the award ceremony in February 2023.

Despite the convention breaking nature of our work at Climate Healers, it is being increasingly recognized and lauded with numerous podcast appearances and awards such as the Winsome Constance Kindness Medal of 2022. The article by Jordi Casamitjana in Vegan FTA and the Vegan Reflections discussion between Jordi and Jamie Woodhouse of Sentientism, as well as the incredible podcast with Dr. Frank Sabatino of the 75-year old National Health Association stood out this year.

We began 2022 hosting our online quarterly Vegan Convergence Of the Peoples (V-COP) as a serious alternative to the annual corporate circuses that the United Nations hosts in its Conferences of the Parties (COP) on climate change, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse. We ended the year boycotting the UN Climate Change meeting, COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, and the UN Biodiversity meeting, COP15, in Montreal, Canada, since the UN was insisting on serving meat, dairy, fish and eggs at these meetings.

The UN’s selective myopia on food and other cultural issues is in stark contrast to its increasingly shrill rhetoric on the ecological catastrophe it is facilitating with that selective myopia. For instance, the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy (GCOM), launched in 2014 by UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon and former New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, the UN Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change, has calculated that 76% of the greenhouse gas emissions from the city of Northampton, MA, comes from its buildings, 20% from transportation and 4% from waste management. That adds up to 100%.

A quick online search reveals that Northampton, MA, hosts 5 steakhouses and 2 McDonalds for a city of 29,100 people and yet, according to the UN and GCOM, the greenhouse gas emissions contribution of Northampton, MA, from its animal food consumption is precisely ZERO!

Think about that. A food system that unnecessarily takes the life of one precious human being from diet and hunger related causes along with the lives of 30,000 to 90,000 innocent non-human animals, while destroying 1 acre of sacred rainforests for every second of every minute of every hour of every day, 24X7, has ZERO impact on the climate, according to the UN and GCOM.

Such is the deceptive accounting by authoritative sources that cause us to collectively do stupid things in a Climate HEATing civilization. As any systems engineer would tell you, Mother Nature does not forgive deceptive accounting. Systems engineers have scars to prove that she dishes out consequences for our actions dispassionately, taking into account ALL of the facts on hand.

This is just science, physics, chemistry and biology, with a bit of randomness thrown in for good measure. Therefore, even though Northampton, MA can pretend all it wants that it will be carbon neutral by 2030 despite its citizens scarfing down hamburgers and cheesesteaks regularly, thanks to the UN and GCOM’s deceptive accounting, it won’t make much of a difference to the hellacious bomb cyclones that Nature will be unleashing upon the citizens of Northampton, MA and their neighbors frequently, if they don’t get real soon.

In any case, do the people of Northampton, MA, truly believe in their heart of hearts that their dietary choices are irrelevant to climate change? Or are they merely going along with the UN and GCOM’s deceptive accounting because they find it convenient to ignore Vega, the Cow in the Room?

Fortunately, the time for such pretenses is over. The Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, considered to be the second most powerful man in USA, has detonated a huge hole in the UN and GCOM’s dam of denial by proclaiming World Food Healers day on Dec 18, 2022 and by explicitly calling out the betrayal of medical doctors by the education system that trained them. He called out this betrayal during his press conference announcing the $44M collaboration with the American College of Lifestyle Medicine to train all medical professionals in New York City in the rudiments of nutrition science and the essentials of Lifestyle Medicine.

A few days later, the City of Orlando, FL, followed suit with a World Food Healers day proclamation for Jan 15, 2023, in which the Mayor, Buddy Dyer and City Commissioner, Patty Sheehan, threw the proverbial book at the animal agriculture industry. Please read the proclamation text here and weep for joy. Our eternal gratitude to Climate Healer, Charlie Behrens for making this proclamation happen in his hometown of Orlando, FL.

The nice thing about a dam of denial is that once we punch enough huge holes in it, it will burst and our collective consciousness will gush over to the other side. The larger the dam, the faster it will gush over to the other side. Therefore, by 2026, we fully expect the vast majority of people on the planet scrubbing their social media posts to claim that they had been Vegan all along or that they never really ate that much meat, dairy, fish or eggs anyway.

We fervently look forward to 2023 and beyond.

Now, our mooovement needs to act like we have won the debate on this issue as we stampede ahead to Human, Earth and Animal Liberation (HEAL). Just to put whole foods plant-based Vegan icing on the whole foods plant-based Vegan cake, the Karuna Foundation has agreed in principle to replace our $100K challenge with a $1M challenge, but we will be formally announcing it later once the format and wordings are agreed upon with the Foundation. Incidentally, no one has taken us up on our $100K challenge either, but we intend to target specific sources of disinformation such as the UN and GCOM in formulating the $1M challenge. It’s time to put their feet to the fire – metaphorically speaking, of course.

Our Food Healers monthly events in Los Angeles have grown from serving 200 meals to over 1000 meals during the course of 2022. We now pick up Vegan food cooked by volunteers at the Sanatan Dharma Temple in Norwalk, CA, for the distribution. In Phoenix, AZ, we have formed a close collaboration with FeedPhoenix, serving over 200 Vegan meals to the houseless in central Phoenix every Friday.

This is how we begin to build the foundations of a nonviolent Climate Healing civilization, one brick at a time, using all the spare resources that we have been gifted within our violent Climate HEATing civilization. We urge you all to join us, wherever you are.

We are at a unique moment in human history. We are the first generation to acknowledge that we are HEATing the Climate of the planet and we are the last generation that can actually do something to Heal the Climate and enable future generations to harmonize it on behalf of all life on Earth. This is a huge responsibility, but if we don’t step up and do the needful, we would be dishonoring all of our ancestors who labored and suffered to develop the technologies we needed for this task.

Think about it. No other generation could access plant foods from all over the world in their grocery stores. Is there any need to slay an innocent animal and pray over them while cooking and eating them, when we could have stopped off at a grocery store and bought beans grown in Mexico or chickpeas grown in Canada to eat instead? Such are the enormous resource gifts that our ancestors labored so hard to give us and this is why Climate Healers will be starting 2023 with 7 days of Rest and Return to Essence on Jan 1-7, 2023, in the Convergence room at 9am PST every day.

The themes for the 7 days are:

January 1 – Presence: Understand that we belong as a species exactly as we are and that we had taken a 10,000 year detour from our compassionate selves in order to HEAT the Earth’s climate.

January 2 – Resonance: Returning to our essence of Homo Ahimsa, a compassionate, climate harmonizing caretaker species is truly in resonance with who we are when we are born.

January 3 – Radiance: Go forth and shine our light so that others may join us in performing the momentous task of building the foundations of a nonviolent Climate Healing civilization based on a service economy, centered around ecological cleanup and restoration.

January 4 – Gratitude: Send gratitude to our ancestors for all the sacrifices they made over the past 10,000 years to bring us to this critical juncture in the Earth’s history and to our children and especially, our grandchildren for joyfully guiding us back to our true inner selves.

January 5 – Truth: Muster the cowrage to transform our consciousness, to let the acid fluid of Truth eat through the gossamer fabric of Lies that our Climate HEATing institutions keep spinning in order to bind us all in ignorance.

January 6 – Clarity: Find the clarity to define the task before us with compassion for all creation.

January 7 – Kinship: Remind ourselves that all Life is one family and that we take care of all members of our family to allow them to express themselves fully in their natural roles.

Each day, we will also be playing Tami Hay’s video contributions on consciously nourishing ourselves with healthy Vegan food aligned with the day’s themes.

Please join us at 9am PST, Sunday Jan 1 – Saturday, Jan 7, as and when you can. We look forward to seeing you online and here’s wishing you a wonderful New Year, 2023!

Thank you for your support.

HELP us every day to

Heal the planet.
Eat plants.
Love animals.
Plant trees.

It’s that simple.

Thanks again for being a superhero and joining our herd. Please forward this post to all your friends and let’s grow our MOOOvement together.

With much love,
Sailesh, Vega, Cow and Climate Healer and the Climate Healers team.