Urban Scout: Rewilding Cascadia

As you may imagine, I’ve gotten many e-mails from pissed off vegans after posting, Civilization Found in Vegan Ethics. One person just couldn’t understand the fundamental connection between grain diets and population growth. Others, like the ones I responded to here, live in denial that plants have feelings too. I would like to say that some very nice non-fundamentalist vegans and I had a good dialogue, so thank you guys!

Urban Scout,

How can plants feel pain? They have no nervous system. The reason that you can’t hear their screams is because they have no mouths, vocal cords, etc. For me, I place bugs lower on my hierarchy because they have many less neural connections than, say, a chicken or pig. So, I would think that there is less “substance” to them. I mean, come on man, what kind of thinking is it to think that an oak tree can feel pain? I’m all for stopping industrial civilization, as I believe you are, but to advocate a philosophy such as animism is as foolish as believing that some guy named Jesus who lived 2,000 years ago is going to take you to some fairy land called heaven. You also said, “crops kill wild animals too”. If you cared about wild animals why would anyone eat raised animals? The amount of grain, mostly corn, to feed them causes more land to be plowed (thereby causing more deaths of wild animals) than if you just ate lower on the food chain.

Just to make it clear, I do think that the Paleolithic diet is a good thing, relative to most diets. I know and realize that veganism is part of the industrial food system. That is why I try to dumpster dive as much of my food as possible thereby giving less $ to the industrial food suppliers.

and this one:

i’m glad you have empathy for plants. but here’s the difference between plants and animals: plants are cut down, and we eat them. now here’s the thing: weather its because god made them that way, or evolution has created it, or whatever you believe: when you cut a pland down, it does not struggle. it falls, and you eat it. thats the difference. when you kill and animal, it fights for its life. it defends its existance. that’s the difference.

My Response:

You know the BBC reported a few years back that fish can actually, oh my god get ready; feel pain. Listen to this:

The first conclusive evidence of pain perception in fish is said to have been found by UK scientists. This complements earlier findings that both birds and mammals can feel pain, and challenges assertions that fish are impervious to it. The scientists found sites in the heads of rainbow trout that responded to damaging stimuli. They also found the fish showed marked reactions when exposed to harmful substances.The argument over whether fish feel pain has long been a subject of dispute between anglers and animal rights activists.

This of course, makes no fucking sense. Anyone who has ever gone fishing can see the fear in the fishes eyes and notice that it wriggles uncomfortably, in obvious physical pain as it dangles from a hook. Did we really need to have scientists cut up fish and test them with machines to know they feel pain? Does anyone else see the insanity?

Though plants cannot run, scream or speak many people feel that they have sentient qualities as well. Scientists have also done similar studies with plants. You can read all about it in The Secret Life of Plants:

A galvanometer is that part of a polygraph lie detector which, when attached to a human being by wires through which a weak current of electricity is run, will cause a needle to move, or a pen to make a tracing on a moving graph of paper, in response to mental images, or the slightest surges of human emotion. Invented at the end of the eighteenth century by a Viennese priest, Father Maximilian Hell, S.J., court astronomer to the Empress Maria Theresa, it was named after Luigi Galvani, the Italian physicist and physiologist who discovered “animal electricity.” The galvanometer is now used in conjunction with an electrical circuit called a “Wheatstone bridge,” in honor of the English physicist and inventor of the automatic telegraph, Sir Charles Wheatstone.

In simple terms, the bridge balances resistance, so that the human body’s electrical potential–or basic charge–can be measured as it fluctuates under the stimulus of thought and emotion. The standard police usage is to feed “carefully structured” questions to a suspect and watch for those which cause the needle to jump. Veteran examiners, such as Backster, claim they can identify deception from the patterns produced on the graph.

The most effective way to trigger in a human being a reaction strong enough to make the galvanometer jump is to threaten his or her wellbeing. Backster decided to do just that to the plant: he dunked a leaf of the dracaena in the cup of hot coffee perennially in his hand. There was no reaction to speak of on the meter. Backster studied the problem several minutes, then conceived a worse threat: he would burn the actual leaf to which the electrodes were attached. The instant he got the picture of flame in his mind, and before be could move for a match, there was a dramatic change in the tracing pattern on the graph in the form of a prolonged upward sweep of the recording pen. Backster had not moved, either toward the plant or toward the recording machine. Could the plant have been reading his mind?

When Backster left the room and returned with some matches, he found another sudden surge had registered on the chart, evidently caused by his determination to carry out the threat. Reluctantly he set about burning the leaf. This time there was a lower peak of reaction on the graph. Later, as he went through the motions of pretending he would burn the leaf, there was no reaction whatsoever. The plant appeared to be able to differentiate between real and pretended intent.

When he and his collaborators, using other plants and other instruments in other locations all over the country, were able to make similar observations, the matter warranted further study. More than twenty-five different varieties of plants and fruits were tested, including lettuce, onions, oranges, and bananas. The observations, each similar to the others, required a new view of life, with some explosive connotations for science. Heretofore the debate between scientists and parapsychologists on the existence of ESP, or extrasensory perception, has been fierce, largely because of the difficulty of establishing unequivocally when such a phenomenon is actually occurring. The best that has been achieved so far in the field, by Dr. J. B. Rhine, who initiated his experiments in ESP at Duke University, has been to establish that with human beings the phenomenon seems to occur with greater odds than are attributable to chance.

Backster’s antics with his plants, headlined in the world press, became the subject of skits, cartoons, and lampoons; but the Pandora’s box which he opened for science may never again be closed. Backster’s discovery that plants appear to be sentient caused strong and varied reaction round the globe, despite the fact that Backster never claimed a discovery, only an uncovering of what has been known and forgotten. Wisely he chose to avoid publicity, and concentrated on establishing the absolute scientific bona fides of what has come to be known as the ‘Backster Effect.’

Some of us don’t need scientific instruments to understand and feel empathy towards fish and further, plants. If you can tune in with your sense of empathy, you can “hear” the screams of plants, and feel their own kind of pain.

It all comes down to observation. Animism does not refer to something you “believe” in that one cannot experience or see through direct experience. It refers to observations made while living in an animate world, about an animate world. It works as a way of perceiving the world based on direct experiences with it. I cannot observe Jesus, his teachings, or a heaven, but I can observe the world around me and its happenings. My perception of animate plants does not come from faith, but from direct sensory experiences. I’ll give you one example:

I had sat in my backyard for one hour a day for several months, in the same spot under the dogwood tree with the Robins nest. Every day I would sit and practice a sensory meditation, clear my thoughts and relax and watch the natural world of an urban yard unfold before me. Much like watching television, I merely observed, I did not interact, though I had a deep sense of “wanting to belong.” After several months of this I began to wonder if I would ever feel like I belonged. Then one day I sat down and began to enter into the mental space of the sensory meditation. Immediately I felt different. I could sense something completely new. I can’t tell you which sense experienced this feeling, but it felt like I had finally become part of the family. I could feel the plants. I could feel the water pulsing up their stalks and I could feel the energy feeding them from the sun. It felt like they had put their arms around me. I hate using the term “oneness” to describe anything, but it really did feel as though they had let me in on a secret. It felt more like “togetherness.”

The next moment I began to feel afraid. I could feel they felt scared too. Then the neighbor came outside. Somehow I just knew what would happen next. I wanted to run. But I heard something say, “We can’t run!” At that point I knew they wanted me to stay. So I stayed there with them as my neighbor weed-whacked his yard and I cried. Imagine your legs buried in cement and someone begins to cut them off. You can’t run, you can’t do anything but watch. Imagine your family members stand next to you, and you can do nothing for them. At least animals can run and fight. Actually, some plants can too. Thorns anyone? Poison anyone? But even then, so what if one can run and one can’t. I don’t discriminate against one more than the other because one has legs and one has roots.

That experience only speaks to me, since I experienced it alone. Though I know many people who have shared similar experiences with plants, as well as rocks and trees and wind and everything else. So why then, do scientists spend so much time cutting up and torturing fish and cutting up and torturing plants looking for hard-core factual, measurable data that these things experience pain, when our own bodies if listened to can actually communicate with these other-than-humans? Derrick Jensen wrote a great book about these kinds of experiences and why we lie to ourselves about them called A Language Older Than Words:

In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party. We try to stay out of harm’s way, afraid they will go off, shatter our delusions, and leave us exposed to what we have done to the world and to ourselves, exposed as the hollow people we have become. And so we avoid these truths, these self-evident truths, and continue the dance of world destruction.

As is true for most children, when I was young I heard the world speak. Stars sang. Stones had preferences. Trees had bad days. Toads held lively discussions, crowed over a good day’s catch. Like static on a radio, schooling and other forms of socialization began to interfere with my perception of the animate world, and for a number of years I almost believed that only humans spoke. The gap between what I experienced and what I almost believed confused me deeply. It wasn’t until later that I began to understand the personal, political, social, ecological, and economic implications of living in a silenced world.

This silencing is central to the workings of our culture. The staunch refusal to hear the voices of those we exploit is crucial to our domination of them. Religion, science, philosophy, politics, education, psychology, medicine, literature, linguistics, and art have all been pressed into service as tools to rationalize the silencing and degradation of women, children, other races, other cultures, the natural world and its members, our emotions, our consciences, our experiences, and our cultural and personal histories.

I don’t advocate for animism. I experience it, and share my experiences in hopes to inspire others to seek out similar experiences.

As for the other comments:

You also said, “crops kill wild animals too”. If you cared about wild animals why would anyone eat raised animals? The amount of grain, mostly corn, to feed them causes more land to be plowed (thereby causing more deaths of wild animals) than if you just ate lower on the food chain.

Again, if the corn and other grains that currently feed cattle, and cattle ranches turned into fields for human consumption, that would provide MORE food in the food supply for humans, which means MORE humans. Which means they would bulldoze even more wild lands for grains and houses, cars, oil, etc.

I buy most of my food from the store. I don’t claim an ethically pure diet here. When I can I buy local, grass-fed, free range, hormone free, etc. Portland has many of those stores so I don’t find that difficult. The whole point of my project revolves around figuring out how to “unlock the food.” I want to hunt and gather and garden all my own food. I can’t, because I don’t know how and it feels extra hard because no one else does either (at least in this country). No one lives a 100% primitive lifestyle anymore.

Just to make it clear, I do think that the Paleolithic diet is a good thing, relative to most diets. I know and realize that veganism is part of the industrial food system. That is why I try to dumpster dive as much of my food as possible thereby giving less $ to the industrial food suppliers.

As far as dumpster diving goes, I don’t really do much of that either. I dumpster fruit and that’s about it. Most of that food I find contains wheat and sugar which poison my body. I don’t eat grains not because I want to protest the civilized economy but because they totally fuck up my body and make me feel like shit. I don’t think of the paleo diet as good, I think of it as the most nourishing food I can put in my body. Other people may experience a different feeling.