“Don’t give up on people” – Minh Nguyen.

Dear Climate Healers,

The Vegan World 2026 Conferences were rebranded as the Vegan Convergence Of the Peoples (V-COPs) after the tone-deaf debacle at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference Of the Parties (COPs) where world leaders arrived in private jets and drove in a convoy of gas-guzzling SUVs to a venison dinner at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, Scotland on Nov 1, 2021. Since then, we have been convening every quarter at V-COPs and this July 25-26, 2026, the 26th gathering will occur under a theme that exquisitely captures where the movement now stands: “Vitally Engaged in the PolySolution.”

V-COP26 is a free (until Friday, July 24, and it will cost you $9.99 after that), fully virtual event, which means that the only barrier to attending is you deciding that the PolyCrisis it addresses and the PolySolution it discusses is worth two days of your attention. Given the integrity of the life-support systems of our planet is at stake, that decision should be a no-brainer.

Indeed, the case for showing up starts with the understanding that animal farming is the leading driver of environmental degradation, reshaping land use on a continental scale, consuming a disproportionate share of the world’s fresh water, polluting rivers and oceans, accelerating biodiversity loss, and contributing significantly to all seven planetary boundary transgressions undermining the life-support systems of our planet. Understanding these impacts is essential to understanding the environmental crisis as a whole, because no other single sector touches climate, land, water, and biodiversity as simultaneously and as forcefully as raising animals for food, clothing and other purposes. A Zoom room full of people who understand this simple fact can do more for the planet than a UN Conference full of people who pretend not to.

The guiding position of V-COPs is that the world has two machines to shut down: the “Killing Machine” of animal agriculture, and the “Burning Machine” of fossil fuel extraction, and that the safest sequence is to wind down the Killing Machine as quickly as possible while transitioning the Burning Machine at a slower, more nuanced pace. That is a specific, falsifiable claim about strategy and sequencing, the kind of claim that deserves engineering scrutiny and scholarly debate rather than passive acceptance. V-COP26 is where that debate happens among people who have actually done the underlying analysis.

What makes V-COP different from a typical UN COP is that it treats the PolyCrisis as a system design problem requiring a structured systemic PolySolution. V-COP organizes its work around building Planet B, a new Operating System for human civilization, encoding equality, nonviolence and compassion into systems that structure daily life. That is a more ambitious agenda than what most UN COPs attempt, and it is precisely why attending is worthwhile. You are not there to listen to a Keynote and leave with a fancy tote bag. You are there to help draft the actual architecture of a post-extraction, compassionate civilization, alongside people who have been doing this work convergence after convergence since the series began.

There is a continuity to V-COP that rewards participation over passivity. Records from twenty-five prior convergences already exist, publicly archived, which means new attendees are not starting from zero. When you participate in V-COP, you are joining a cumulative, collaborative process, one where each session builds on the last and each participant’s contribution becomes part of a growing record rather than a one-off comment lost after the closing session. If you have ever felt that individual action is too small to matter, V-COP’s structure is explicitly built to aggregate individual effort into durable solutions.

Finally, there is the matter of who else is in the room. Just as in past convergences, V-COP26 features a plethora of philosophers, physicians, economists, architects, movement leaders and independent researchers, all engaging with thoughtful presentations rather than talking past each other. That kind of cross-disciplinary rigor is rare in advocacy spaces, and it is worth experiencing directly rather than secondhand.

Attending V-COP26 costs nothing but a weekend and an open mind. In exchange, it offers a rare thing in environmental discourse: a coherent theory of the PolyCrisis, a concrete plan for the PolySolution, and a community that has spent twenty-five prior sessions building toward it in public. For anyone serious about continuing to live on this planet, that combination alone is reason enough to register.

Registration is open at climatehealers.org/v-cop. We look forward to seeing you all soon.

With much love,