The Activist Diaries

Let me answer a couple of simple questions for you. Why did I become an

activist, and what does it mean to me now to be an activist?

As to why, simple. Because the human race, whilst apparently believing

itself to be some sort of quasi divine and supremely intelligent being,

has unleashed a holocaust of such appalling proportions on all the other

life this planet generates and sustains, that I could not in all

conscience sit back and acquiesce with it. In other words I had to do

something, and this is where the first and second questions get a bit

blurred.

When I came to this realisation, the first thing I knew I had to do was to

look to my own behaviour as it impacted the earth, and do something about

it. So I stopped eating meat and then all other animal products, stopped

living the so called high life, because I used to earn quite a lot of

money, and it was apparent that the making and spending of this money was

catastrophic for the earth and all other life. The car went, no more

flying, no buying all that stuff I didn’t really need. Quite easy as I

didn’t have the money to buy it any more anyway, and I can assure you, you

don’t miss what you no longer want.

I also got involved in animal rights as these people, the best I had ever

met, cared genuinely about non human animals. But soon I was saying to

them that you can not have real animal rights without associated eco

action, you can not separate the animals from the earth, nor indeed from

the air they breathe, or the water they drink. For me, animal rights was

the right to free will and self determination of non human animals still

possessed of their natural integrity. Pets and farmed animals no longer

have this as they are mutant human creations, and this we should not have

done, there should not have been any farmed animals or pets, no indentured

slave animals which is what we have made them. This must stop.

What was needed was a new sort of activism, one based on the wish to

respect and if possible protect, the earth and all the other life it

generates and sustains, not <em>for</em> humans but <em>from</em> humans.

And though I now see a growing movement of people who say that they wish

to protect the earth and other animals, still I see the tendency to

identify more with the perceived needs of humans than of the earth. This

is the change that is needed, the one I would ask you to make, to properly

earth centric activism. That is what it should mean to be an activist, it

is certainly what it means to me to be an activist. Thank you. Matt

@actionforearth http://actionfortheearth.wordpress.com/

Posted 10:15pm GMT on Friday, 13th January, 2012