For a humane world,

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, Above All, Be Kind, and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDx talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“

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This was a profound example of humane education: providing information, fostering our curiosity and demanding our critical thinking, eliciting our reverence, respect, and sense of responsibility, and leaving us with a serious question: whether we’re willing to work to change systems so that our electronics are produced humanely and justly. Please listen.

For a humane world,

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, Above All, Be Kind, and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDx talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.  

For a humane world,

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, Above All, Be Kind, and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDx talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.   

and then consider how much further such a viral video could go toward diminishing kids’ sense of entitlement, rather than adults reminding them how lucky they are.

For that matter, I’m going to watch this video periodically to remind myself when I begin complaining about petty, unimportant things.

Pass it on.

A question arose. Is affluence the same as affluenza? The answer is clearly “no,” yet there is sometimes a subtle (and often a not so subtle) judgment by social justice and environmental activists against those who are affluent. It’s true enough that most who are affluent are bigger consumers than those who aren’t. They have larger houses filled with more stuff, more vehicles (and motorboats and sometimes private jets), travel for leisure more often, and so on, contributing to greater environmental destruction than those who do not have these luxuries. They certainly appear to suffer from affluenza. Yet, it’s critical not to lump affluence with affluenza. Having money can be a phenomenal tool for change, and I know people with money who are profoundly generous, live simply, and create substantial systemic change through their donations to social change organizations. This could and perhaps should be the model for affluence.

Most people want to be more affluent, and most want money to buy more stuff. What if we were to transform the image of affluence? Imagine if money were perceived less as a vehicle for luxury and more as a vehicle for the power to create positive change. If we identified those affluent people who have eschewed personal luxury in favor of a deep and abiding commitment to use their wealth for systemic good, we would have models for “compassionate consumerism” that went beyond fair trade, eco-friendly, cruelty-free products and that embraced thrift and simplicity coupled with generosity and philanthropy for a better world for all.

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, Above All, Be Kind, and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDx talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDx talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Jono and Season Korchin share some products on an episode of The View, which demonstrate how choosing a certain salad dressing, paper, soap, and handbag, can actually make an enormous difference. Take a look:

Shop MOGO,

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, Above All, Be Kind, and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDx talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Apparently, we’re willing to go along with this selling frenzy even though it means long lines in crowded stores. We go along because we’ve been told to. It’s Black Friday after all.

Adbusters Magazine launched Buy Nothing Day in response to Black Friday. It’s a campaign to get us to reexamine our shopping habits, and it has gained some traction. Lots of people respond to Black Friday by buying nothing in honor of Buy Nothing Day.

My own shopping habits have never been any different on the Friday following Thanksgiving than any other day of the year, and I personally reject both the call to shop and the call to buy nothing. Both feel like gimmicks to make me change my behavior for a day. What I want is for people to examine their shopping 365 days of the year.

What we buy matters. In the most democratic manner of all, it is a vote. When you spend money you are voting for the things you buy. Money is a reward that says to the recipient, “Good job, do it again!” So what do you want to vote for? That’s a tough question. Most economists, politicians, and employees in stores will tell you to vote with your money as much as possible. The more you spend, the better the economy, the more people will be employed, the sooner we’ll be able to pay off the deficit, the brighter the future will be. But it’s not so simple. Most environmentalists will remind you that the more you drive to malls and spend your money in stores the more carbon is released into the atmosphere, the more resources are depleted, and the faster we trash our planet. Most human rights advocates will want you to realize that the more you spend on cheap chain store products produced overseas the more you’ll be contributing to sweatshop and slave labor. Most animal advocates will wish that you would reconsider the fur, down, wool, and leather you buy in clothing stores and the myriad personal care products tested on animals in the cruelest of ways.

We need to consider what is worth voting for, which foods, which clothes, which electronics, which toys, and so on. I would be happy to attend a local crafts fair on Black Friday and support the many cottage industries in my county by buying homemade jams, artwork, pottery, and so on. I would do so consciously and enthusiastically, choosing holiday gifts with care and love, helping my community while choosing special gifts for loved ones.

What you buy matters. Today, on Black Friday/Buy Nothing Day, I hope people will commit to shopping consciously and conscientiously.

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm: A Simple Principal for a Better World and Meaningful Life

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I agree with the author, Roland Duong, that “in our modern era, which tends to emphasize drama and complaint, the miracle of the supermarket goes unnoticed.” This is undoubtedly true. Many of us take the incredible quantity and variety of food in our supermarkets for granted, and few of us would want to return to the days in which every family had to grind their own wheat or corn and rely solely on what was available locally and in season, or pickled and stored, in harsh climates. Few of us would want to spend almost our entire day procuring food, often feeling insecure about our ability to do so and to feed our children, and often at risk of foodborne infection from, for example, unpasteurized milk. But Duong is just wrong when he says that these days “it is nearly impossible to get old-fashioned food poisoning.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates 76 million cases of food poisoning every year in the U.S. alone. For Campylobacter and Salmonella the estimates (assumed to be significantly underestimated because people with food poisoning often think they have the “stomach flu”) are 2.5 million and 1.4 million cases, respectively. Why so much food poisoning? Because of our modern agricultural systems, which cram billions of animals into tightly confined, excrement-covered spaces for the duration of their lives.

Duong writes: “Take the miracle of milk, a perfectly ordinary beverage we guzzle down without care or thought,” as an example of our great bounty. Let’s deconstruct this sentence for a minute. First, as suggested, let’s take “the miracle of milk.” Milk is indeed rather miraculous. That mammals evolved to produce food from our own bodies to feed our young is truly amazing. Most of what comes out of our body is waste, so it is incredible that we evolved to also produce the nutritionally perfect food for our babies for the perfect amount of time.

Moving on to Duong’s phrase “perfectly ordinary beverage” we might pause for a moment to reflect upon the ordinariness of dairy consumption. If we give it some thought we might wonder why many of us humans (actually a very small global percentage) have chosen to continue nursing long after weaning, and have chosen to nurse on another species. No other mammal does this (unless we feed them dairy products). There is nothing ordinary about nursing beyond weaning or nursing on another species. In fact, it is quite strange. It only seems ordinary to us because in modern times we’ve made a habit of it.

As for guzzling it down “without care or thought,” on this point I agree with Duong, but for different reasons. Few people think about the impact of their choice to consume dairy products. There have been books written on the problems associated with cow’s milk from a health perspective, from an environmental perspective, and from an animal protection perspective. Dr. Spock, the famous pediatrician, discouraged people from giving their children cow’s milk and avoided it himself for health reasons.

But the inherent cruelty to animals in the dairy industry goes almost entirely unnoticed. The only way that we are able to get cow’s milk is by impregnating cows and taking their young away so that we may drink the milk ourselves. Although those cows produce milk for the sole purpose of feeding their own offspring, we remove those calves – usually at a day old – and hook their mothers to milking machines. We force them to produce 5-12 times the amount of milk they would normally produce for their calf, often resulting in mastitis, a painful udder infection requiring antibiotic treatment and resulting in pus in their milk. These mothers bellow out for days when their young are, for all intents and purposes, kidnapped from them. If their calves are male (and therefore of no use to the dairy industry), they will likely be sold for veal. Many are aware of the horrors of the specialty veal industry, in which calves are chained at the neck in tiny stalls, unable to walk (to keep their flesh tender) and fed an iron-deficient diet (to keep their flesh pale) until they are forced to climb onto the slaughter trucks on their atrophied legs. Few realize that the dairy and veal industries are inextricably linked.

We ought to be grateful for the bounty of food available to us, but we ought not to laud it as an unqualified miracle. Our food choices have a profound and enormous impact not only on ourselves, but on other people across the globe, on the environment, and on animals. I believe that instead of giving “our full attention to enjoying this incredible opulence” as Duong suggests at the end of the article, we should give instead our full attention to assessing the impact of our food choices and trying to eat foods that do the most good and the least harm to ourselves, other people, animals and the environment.

Zoe Weil, author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

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Even though the bottle-free day has passed, this is a wonderful example of a quick way to generate critical thinking about our habits and would make a great topic for a high school or college class.

Pass it along.

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm

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