the most valid ‘consumer action’ you can do is to just buy less shit rather than tearing your hair out finding the most ethical products and companies but still maintaining the same consumption level. anyone with an interest in maintaining an economy based on profits is not going to encourage you to buy less of anything, no matter how sustainable and plant based and so on. rather than thinking overconsumption can be good as long as you find the right stuff to buy, challenge the consumer mindset.
Hello, yes, good morning. I would like to not work today please. There is much other fun stuff to do. Practice piano! File my taxes! Tidy the house! Fun exercise videos! Go for a walk! Set up the backyard table that was stored for winter! Meal plan!
I saw the amount of books you read per year and I believe you work as translator? So for the curious mind, it begs the question... How many hours a day do you spend reading?
Oh, I’ve no idea…! I always have a book on me and I don’t mind reading in tiny increments during the day, taking advantage of small ‘wasted’ moments, like as I wait 1 minute for something to warm up in the microwave. When I was a kid my mum used to joke that if she took too long to reply when we were having a conversation she felt like I might just whip out of a book and read a paragraph or two in the meantime. I also have designated moments during the day for longer reading sessions, like my morning coffee break, or my afternoon walk with Pandolf (the end goal of the walk is to find a nice place to sit for a bit and read). And I read for a few hours after dinner at night—I don’t have any social media other than tumblr, which I visit for a limited amount of time before dinner, and I hardly ever watch films or TV shows, so reading is really my no.1 hobby.
I mentioned it in this post a while ago, but living in a place with no mobile network and slow, faulty wifi has been a blessing. I’ve always read a lot, but ever since moving here I’ve really noticed a decrease in the amount of time I waste aimlessly online. I’ve always got a PDF book open on my computer, that I switch to when a page takes too long to load, and just in general having to wait a noticeable amount of time for pages to fully load makes my internet use less mindless—I’ll follow a link almost on reflex, but then as I wait and stare at a blank page I have time to be like, “do I really want to visit this page. why did I click this.” As I was saying in that other post, having a bad internet connection tends to give my browsing a “why?” rather than “why not?” basis, and I noticed over the past three years that this has freed up a lot more time to read.
I went on a mini vacation with my boyfriend and a friend this weekend, and I was desperate for a vegan milkshake the whole time (because I have always craved ice cream/milkshakes on vacation ever since I was little). We went into a burger place that had a vegan menu section (yay!), but they were out of vegan ice cream (noo!).
So when I got home Sunday night, I made some chocolate peanut butter nice cream and added some dairy-free mini chocolate chips, and it was all I hoped it could be. I pretty much just want to eat nothing but nice cream all week.
« [A] revolution in knowledge is revealing the enormous
richness and cognitive complexity of animal lives, which prominently
include intricate social groups, emotional responses, and even cultural
learning. We share this fragile planet with other sentient animals,
whose efforts to live and flourish are thwarted in countless ways by
human negligence and obtuseness. […] If injustice involves wrongfully thwarted striving—and I think that’s a
pretty good summary of the basic intuitive idea of injustice—we cause
immense injustice every day, and injustice cries out for accountability
and remediation.
But to think clearly about our responsibility, we need to understand
these animals as accurately as we can: what they are striving for, what
capacities and responses they have as they try to flourish. […We] also need an ethical theory to direct our efforts in policy and law. [The Utilitarian] theory holds that pain is the one bad thing and pleasure the one good thing. [It] looks like a beginning: if we were only to get rid of the torture to
which we subject animals daily—through the manifold harms of the meat
industry, through habitat destruction, through lethal pollution—we would
improve animal lives considerably.
[But Utilitarianism] lacks curiosity about the diversity
of goals each animal life pursues. An elephant in a zoo enclosure, or an
orca in a pen, might possibly lack pain if well cared for, but she
would still lack free movement over a large terrain and the company of a
large social group. […] People who care about animals have therefore increasingly turned to a theory known as the Capabilities Approach (CA), [in which] the central question is “What is this creature actually able to do and to be?”
For each species, it must identify the most significant activities and a
minimum threshold beneath which we should judge an animal’s life to be
unjustly thwarted. It must also allow plenty of room for the individual
choices of different members of the species. And then we must propose
strategies for achieving that threshold in law and policy. […]
A favorite case of mine is Natural Resources Defense Council v. Pritzker (2016),
in which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated the US Navy’s
sonar program on the grounds that it violated the Marine Mammal
Protection Act by impeding several characteristic marine mammal
activities […].
This novel interpretation of the statute is exactly what the CA
would recommend. Even though the sonar did not cause physical pain, the
fact that the whales were unable to live their characteristic lives was
sufficient to make it a violation of the statutory requirement to avoid
“adverse impact” on marine mammal species.
[…] Achieving
even minimal justice for animals seems a distant dream in our world of
casual slaughter and ubiquitous habitat destruction. One might think
that Utilitarianism presents a somewhat more manageable goal: Let’s just
not torture them so much. But we humans are not satisfied with
non-torture. We seek flourishing: free movement, free
communication, rich interactions with others of our species (and other
species too). Why should we suppose that whales, dolphins, apes,
elephants, parrots, and so many other animals seek anything less? If we
do suppose that, it is either culpable ignorance, given the knowledge
now so readily available, or a self-serving refusal to take
responsibility, in a world where we hold all the power. »
