Changing the world?

Is being vegan about trying to change the world? Absolutely not! So why become vegan, if nothing is going to change anyway?

It helps to understand that being vegan is as much as harm minimisation as anything else. It is about doing what is achievable, not about beating your head against the wall. Being vegan is about adopting principles that place value on the world around you, and about finding ways to ensure - as best you can - that any impact you have is either positive, or else is as minimally negative as can be achieved instead. And you would be surprised at just how many things you can do about this, if you are prepared to take the first step of caring about your impact.

No vegan can say that no living creature suffers because of their lifestyle, and neither can any other person make that claim. It is a simple fact of life that merely by being alive we are impacting on the world around us, just as every other creature does too. Even the simple act of building your house has a negative impact on the environment, but we all need a place to live. That's why I used the phrase "harm minimisation" earlier, because while the elimination of suffering is impossible to achieve, we can all do something to at least minimise it even so.

Being vegan means that no animals are abused and slaughtered just so we can eat their corpses or cloth ourselves with their skins. That doesn't mean that no animal suffers for our food, because wildlife can still become innocent victims of agricultural processes even so - but the important thing is that it does certainly eliminate our culpability for the conscious and wilful abuses that millions of animals must endure to feed those who insist on eating meat and consuming dairy and eggs. We don't eliminate suffering entirely with a vegan diet, but we certainly do make a considerable step towards eliminating suffering due to cruelty, and that's more than any omnivore can say. What does it really mean for an omnivore to say they are against animal cruelty, when their daily diet serves as a very pointed and inescapable contradiction?

Being vegan is also about showing a more meaningful concern for the environment. There are entire ecosystems on the verge of collapse because of our insistence as a species in continuing to hunt, breed, and consume animals. Fish stocks in many places have already collapsed, and will never recover, with many more soon to join them, because of relentless fishing. And most of what is caught isn't even used anyway! Pollution from factory farms has destroyed rivers across the world. And then there is the considerable waste of producing food from animals in the first place - how much sense does it make to take 17kg of perfectly good food and process it through an animal to produce a mere 1kg of meat? How much sense does it take to use tens of thousands of litres of fresh drinking water to produce the same kilo of meat, when so many people have no water at all, and so many rivers are dying due to lack of flow? The impact of factory farming is immense, and is so significant that no person who claims to truly care about the environment can ignore the facts of the environmental damage animal-based diets are promoting. Even if you don't care about the animals, there are powerfully compelling reasons for being vegan if you do still care about the environment.

You're not going to change the world on your own by being vegan, but you will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that you're doing something a lot more practical than merely paying lip-service to popular trends. Helping animals is very trendy, but how does donating to the RSPCA help when they are profiting from commercial relationships with battery hen operators who survive by their cruelty to animals? Helping the environment is also very trendy, but what does it mean to install a free water-saving showerhead when a single animal-based dinner uses more water than you'll save in a year anyway?

Being vegan wont save the world. But what it will do is make a meaningful contribution towards lowering your ecological footprint, to living a more sustainable life, and knowing that your presence on this planet is reducing suffering rather than increasing it. It shows you really do care about the world around you, and those in it (whether they are human or not), and that you're doing something active about it. There's no good reason why animals need to be abused and slaughtered to feed us, when we can get all we need without them in the first place; and there's no good reason why the environment should be made to suffer in order to raise animals for the sole purpose of abusing and slaughtering them for human consumption either. Being vegan takes you out of that loop altogether, and while it wont eliminate suffering completely, it's a pretty decent step in the right direction all the same.

Think about it: what's really important to you?