“Slaughterhouses are a moral abomination” – Anonymous.

Dear Climate Healers,

In a recent survey conducted by Sentience Institute, 47% of American respondents said that they would support a ban on slaughterhouses. The survey also indicated that 69% of Americans believe that ‘factory farming of animals is one of the most important social issues in the world today’, and 49% of the respondents would support a ban on factory farming.

Yet, none of us would hold our breath waiting for these bans to occur on Planet A, mainly because of three properties of big living systems:

1. Narrative Lock-in: Foundational stories on human supremacy, scarcity and endless economic growth act as high-level controllers that bound the solution space on Planet A. Solutions outside this space are treated as “unrealistic” regardless of merit.

2. Institutional Inertia: Laws, infrastructures, and professional societies propagate past decisions even as they become outdated. For instance, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) continues to use the 1996 reporting guidelines for greenhouse gas emissions, even though climate science has progressed by leaps and bounds since 1996.

3. Political Economic Capture: Powerful beneficiaries shape rule-sets, metrics, and even the framing of scientific problems, redirecting proposed changes toward efficiency tweaks, while leaving core system characteristics untouched.

These properties map directly on to the Berkana Institute’s Two Loops Theory of Change, which posits that big living systems can never be changed from within. We can only abandon them and start over.

Enter Planet B…

Join the meeting tomorrow

Please join us at 8-9 am and 5:30-6:30 pm Pacific time for the Million Vegan Grandmothers meeting tomorrow, Wednesday, September 10, in the convergence room as we strategize our International Calf and Cow Mother’s Day campaign. We will be discussing the logo for the ICCMD campaign as well as the proposed compilation of art, recipes, and stories for the “Milk of Human Kindness” book and web pages.

Join us at V-COP23

Please join us in Toronto for the Vegan Convergence Of the Peoples #23 (V-COP23) on Nov 1-2 to help shape and implement our system design plan for Planet B. The theme for V-COP23 is offered by our co-host, Plant Based Treaty: Redirect, Relinquish, Restore::

Redirect our focus from fixing Planet A to building Planet B.
Relinquish the excess resources we have taken from the planet.
Restore the life-support systems of the planet with the relinquished resources.

Please be there and let us make some history.

With much love,