'Cowspiracy" or capitalism: what's causing the climate crisis?

Cowspiracy shines a light on the carbon emissions of the animal agriculture industry, but its beam is so narrow that it leaves the rest of agriculture and the economy hidden from view, and elevates dietary choice to political strategy.

Like many people, Kip Anderson watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and was frustrated by the limited lifestyle choices to stop climate change—like bike riding more often or using less water. He then found out that animal agriculture is responsible for significant emissions and is backed by major powers but is not the focus of many environmental NGOs. He then made a choice.

He could have made a film connecting animal agriculture to the rest of the oil economy, exposing the massive corporations who dominate the food supply and who have warped our relationships with animals. He could have called for vegans and non-vegans to unite, supporting front-line communities who bear the brunt of climate change, and integrating vegan concerns into a movement for system change and real control over food production and distribution.

But instead he chose to make a film that counterposes animal agriculture to the rest of the oil-dependent economy, dismisses the challenge to tar sands and fracking and the need for climate jobs, blames cows and those who consume animal products, shames environmental NGOs instead of agribusinesses, ignores traditional knowledge about how to live sustainably with animals, and calls non-vegan environmentalists hypocrites—while preaching veganism as the panacea for everything from climate change to world hunger.

The result: protesters inspired by his film denounced the recent People’s Climate March in Edmonton: “The organizers only wanted to focus on oil and gas, the safe climate topics and not ‘switch focus’ to address personal behaviors that can actually make difference.” There would not be a People’s Climate March and a climate justice movement were it not for Indigenous communities who have challenged tar sands and fracking, while defending their rights including hunting, fishing and trapping. It’s ridiculous to dismiss as “safe topics” the challenge to these powerful industries, and to blame diets that communities have followed sustainably for millenia. How do we place industrialized animal agriculture in its proper context so that the concerns of vegans can integrate with the climate justice movement?

Cowspiracy or cowpitalism?

Cowspiracy raises the important point that the climate crisis is not only driven by oil and gas companies but is also connected to our food system. But instead of challenging the corporations who control food production and distribution, it places all the blame on “animal agriculture.” Using decontextualized statistics and graphics, it implies that cows are inherently destructive creatures who waste water while producing the methane that is driving the climate crisis—instead of exposing how capitalism has separated cows from communities, concentrated them in factories and turned them into methane machines.

Kip Anderson claims that “the words sustainable and animal agriculture just is an oxymoron. They can't go together.” But as India’s leading environmentalist (and vegetarian) Vandana Shiva explains, “Factory farming of livestock is definitely a very important contributor of greenhouse gases, especially methane. But normal livestock—grass fed—are important for a sustainable solution. The problem with many of these studies has been that they take the most industrial practice, for example factory farming for meat…and extrapolate it to the world. As if the whole world treats its livestock in the torturous way that factory farming does.”

As she explains in Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, “Ecologically, the cow has been central to Indian civilization…By using crop wastes and uncultivated land, indigenous cattle do not compete with humans for food; rather, they provide organic fertilizer for fields and thus enhance food productivity…Indian cattle provide more food than they consume, in contrast to those of the US cattle industry, in which cattle consume six times more food than they provide.”

Instead of challenging the corporatization of agriculture, Cowspiracy blames cows—reinforcing the industry’s view of animals as abstract production units disconnected from communities. As Vandana Shiva explains, “Livestock are absolutely key. The tragedy is on the one hand we’ve got those who would put animals into factory farms—and that is the source of methane emissions, not free-grazing livestock…And there’s the problem that those who think they love animals push for a situation where there will be no animals. So we need to avoid both these extremes that are anti-animal by denying an effective role for the animal, and an effective role of a farmer. And I think it comes from the paradigm that assumes that both humans and animals can only have a predatory relationship with nature. No, we can have a harmonious relationship with nature.”

Capitalism, sustainability and choice

Our harmonious relationship with nature was not disrupted by consuming animals (which communities have done sustainably for millenia) but by a relatively recent system of production that has separated us from nature and turned animal and plant worlds—and humans themselves—into sources of profit. Not only does Cowspiracy fail to differentiate between traditional and corporatized uses of animals, it also ignores carbon emissions from capitalist agriculture in general. Our food system is not unsustainable because it includes animals, it is unsustainable because of capitalism—which is based on colonizing Indigenous territories, driving peasants off the land, exploiting workers for profit and reducing animals and plants to units of production.

In doing so, capitalism in Europe by the 19^th century created a metabolic rift between humans and nature and eroded soil fertility, sparking a search for artificial fertilizers. As Karl Marx described, “Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres…It disturbs the metabolic interaction between [humans] and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by [humans] in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the fertility of the soil… All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.”

As capitalism has developed it has become concentrated and centralized into massive corporations that dominate every industry—making our entire economy, including the plants and animals we eat, dependent on oil. As Vandana Shiva explains in Soil Not Oil, “Industrialized, globalized agriculture is a recipe for eating oil. Oil is used for the chemical fertilizers that go to pollute the soil and water. Oil is used to displace small farmers with giant tractors and combine harvesters. Oil is used to industrially process food. Oil is used for the plastic in packaging. And finally, more and more oil is used to transport food farther and farther away from where it is produced. Fossil fuels are the heart of industrial agriculture.”

Cowspiracy is right to highlight the massive subsidies and powerful interests that sustain the beef industry and create artificial supply and demand, but this applies to all industries—including the massive agribusinesses that have reduced our diets to corn, soy and wheat monocrops, sustained by massive emissions in fertilizers, machinery, storage and transportation. Calling for dietary “choice” between capitalist plant products over capitalist animal products does nothing to challenge the system that is driving climate change and constraining choices. Any limited choice some of us might have in consumption—a choice determined by the inequitable distribution of resources and income—does not challenge the system of production.

Consumerism vs climate justice

For decades the environmental movement has taken this system for granted. By depoliticizing the environment, NGOs have traditionally focused on reforming single issues by lobbying governments and calling for limited consumer choice over the products capitalism has produced—rather than challenging the profit-driven system of production and inequitable distribution. Even worse, some environmental groups have scapegoated Indigenous communities for continuing their cultural practices. As Francis Frank, co-chair of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, said in response to protests against Indigenous whaling on the west coast in the late 1990s, “The protests that are being engineered are just another form of eco-colonialism…They are arguing for the continued oppression of our people.”

The climate justice movement has risen in recent years by going beyond the old politics of individual consumerism, towards mass movements based on anti-colonial and anti-capitalist politics. It’s exciting that environmental NGOs are joining with Indigenous and labour groups to fight for the system change necessary to stop climate change. Environmental NGOs still have structural limitations and don’t address all the issues, like the fact that the US military is the largest oil consumer on the planet (a fact ignored by Cowspiracy). But the response of anti-war groups hasn’t been to suggest a conspiracy between NGOs and the military, but rather to integrate their concerns with the climate justice movement—like the “No war, no warming” contingent at the 100% possible demonstration in Ottawa.

Instead Cowspiracy names and shames a dozen NGOs without naming any agribusinesses, dismisses demands for climate jobs and ignores Indigenous communities while claiming that those who eat meat are hypocrites. The filmmaker even presents himself as the persecuted climate hero, without interviewing or even mentioning Indigenous and front-line communities who bear the brunt of the climate crisis and of state repression.

The documentary also claims that a vegan diet will end world hunger, without addressing inequalities in food production and distribution. That seems to be the point, as Kip Anderson explained in an interview: “The solution is really simple…It doesn't even take necessarily widespread transformation with the legal system and our politics. It's basically just switching our diet.” This results in just another limited consumer choice, sold as “change.” This isn’t surprising, coming from a self-described “serial entrepreneur” pushing his DVDs and t-shirt, and a few celebrities who want to appeal to environmentalists, but it shouldn’t be a guide for the movement.

Solidarity and system change

As climate organizer (and vegan) Cam Fenton wrote, “we need system change to stop climate change, and our personal dietary choices are not system change. Changing lightbulbs and taking shorter showers wasn’t a really effective strategy for the climate and that’s what switching out steak for tofu seems to be to me. Not only won’t it do a whole lot to solve the climate crisis, it actually doesn’t even get at the heart of what you’re purporting to be pushing — reducing emissions from agriculture. If the goal is really to deal with the emissions from agriculture, and these emissions are a big problem, it’s time to stop telling people not to eat meat and start figuring out how you’re going to stand with peasant farmers who are being forced by the Monsantos of the world to abandon their traditional methods of agriculture for massive mono-crop operations. It’s time to support communities that are standing up to stop cattle barons who want to clear massive tracts of land — like the rainforest in South America—to expand their operations. These things, might help to tip the scales and bring down emissions from agriculture in a way that more vegans just won’t, and they might win you some allies along the way.”

These alliances are growing. A couple of years ago Heiltsuk community organizer Jess Housty wrote an article on eight ways settlers can support Idle No More, including attending rallies and challenging racism. These “personal behaviors” that can actually make a difference, rather than simply switching diets. Earlier this year the Heiltsuk Nation and its allies stopped the Department of Fisheries and Oceans from over-fishing herring stocks on the west coast. The strategy was not to claim that fishing is inherently unsustainable and to demand the community end their traditional fish diet, but to support the Heilstuk Nation that was defending the herring stock and its fishing rights. As Chief Marylin Slett explained, “We're not trying to stop people from making a living. But we need to manage things in a way so we'll have a resource that will sustain everyone into the future...There are strong-willed people in the community that will do everything within their power to protect the herring stocks.”

There is also growing vegan solidarity with Indigenous communities defending their territories: “On the fire at the blockade vegan meals for the Wildlife Defence League cook next to traditional foods for the Klabona Keepers. There is a mutual understanding and respect between the two groups as they work together to stop the over hunting of the Tahltan’s sacred lands...They recognize that it is not their right to tell indigenous people who have welcomed them onto their territory how to live. They realize that the Klabona Keepers have saved more wildlife in their resistance of industrial projects than any person could by changing their diet...Vegans can begin to decolonize our work and fight for the liberation of all, whether it be from the confines of a slaughterhouse or the confines of a colonial state.”

It’s examples like these, rather than Cowspiracy, that show how vegan concerns can be incorporated into the climate justice movement, so that we can challenge the corporations and states responsible for the climate crisis, and win collective system change rather than fight over individual diet change.

This Changes Everything, including Naomi Klein

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate is a must-read guide to the climate justice movement. It summarizes the science of climate change, the extractivist industries driving it, the system to which they are connected, and the growing resistance. Through her dynamic style, Naomi Klein describes the changes in the climate, the changes in the movement, and inspires us to change ourselves as well—just as her own politics have changed.

Climate change

This Changes Everything warns of the severe consequences of climate change, the industries (like tar sands, fracking, and mountain top removal) that are pushing us to the precipice, and the racism and profiteering that accompany it. Klein shows that the proposed capitalist solutions—from industries like nuclear power, market schemes like carbon offsets, technology like geoengineering, or faith in the 1%—only compound the problem. As she explains, “The idea that capitalism and only capitalism can save the world from a crisis created by capitalism is no longer an abstract theory; it’s a hypothesis that has been tested and retested in the real world. We are now able to set theory aside and take a hard look at the results.”

Faced with a capitalist climate change, she debunks simplistic solutions—whether it’s calling for individual lifestyle changes while ignoring the socioeconomic conditions that constrain choice, claiming there aren’t enough resources while billions have gone to corporate bailouts, or blaming China and India while ignoring Western corporations profiting from the exploitation of their workers. This is not only a critique of the system that produces climate change but of the record of the mainstream environmental movement in challenging it. Klein outlines the coopting of the earlier environmental movement, “what had been a rabble of hippies became a movement of lawyers, lobbyists, and UN summit hoppers” who presented climate change “as a narrow technical problem with no end of profitable solutions within the market system.”

The failure of mainstream environmentalism has eliminated gradual and incremental options: “We are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.” This Changes Everything is an urgent call for mass action, connecting the increasing climate disasters to the radical transformation needed to stop them. As Klein explains in her poetic style, climate change is “a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message—spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions—telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet.”

Movement change

This Changes Everything profiles the rising climate justice movements, introducing readers to campaigns and activists around the world, and showing concrete and inspiring examples of how people are organizing. “All of this has changed so rapidly as I have been writing that I had had to race to keep up. Yes, ice sheets are melting faster than the models projected, but resistance is beginning to boil.”

Klein profiles the indigenous communities leading the climate justice movement, from the Ogoni people in Nigeria to the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation at ground zero of the tar sands. Contrasting the lack of solidarity to the Mi’kmaq blockade at Burnt Church 15 years ago with the broad support for the Mi’kmaq blockade at Elsipogtog last year, she describes the sea change that the movement is producing: “The movements against extreme energy extraction are becoming more than just battles against specific oil, gas, an coal companies and more, even, than pro-democracy movements. They are opening up spaces for a historical reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and non-Natives, who are finally understanding that, at a time when elected officials have open disdain for basic democratic principles, Indigenous rights are not a threat, but a tremendous gift.”

Arguing that “exploited workers and an exploited planet are, it turn out, a package deal,” Klein shares lessons from the Northern Cheyenne in building community-run solar panels, and explains how that the technology for renewables exists and provides an alternative both for front-line Indigenous communities defending their land and for non-Indigenous workers needing jobs: “Manufacturing in North America is as battered as family farming, which means that well-paying union jobs are so scarce that people will fight for whatever jobs are on offer, no matter how dangerous, precarious, or polluting to themselves, their families, or their communities. The solution, as the more visionary sectors of the labor movement understand, is to fight for policies that do not force workers to make those kinds of choices…Today’s climate movement does not have the luxury of simply saying no without simultaneously fighting for a series of transformative yeses—the building blocks of our next economy that can provide good clean jobs, as well as a social safety net that cushions the hardships for those inevitably suffering losses…There is no more potent weapon in the battle against fossil fuels than the creation of real alternatives. Just the glimpse of another kind of economy can be enough to energize the fight against the old one.”

As a great theorist for the movements, Naomi Klein has both influenced and been influenced by them. This Changes Everything represents another change in Naomi Klein’s own politics, that have shaped and been shaped by movements against corporate globalization, war and climate change.

From brand bullies to state bullies

In No Logo she explained the rise of multinationals as the result of a marketing idea in the 1980s, and wrote that the “virtual brick and mortar” of branding was replacing production. Taking aim at the “brand bullies” she praised a resistance “both focused and fragmented” that could subvert and hold the multinationals accountable by culture jamming and reclaiming the streets. Released in the wake of the 2001 Seattle protest against the WTO, No Logo reflected the emerging anti-globalization movement and provided activists with a global framework to understand corporations and the diverse threats they pose. But it left open the role of the state.

The Iraq War of 2003 and the historic movement against it showed that corporate profits don’t just derive from marketing strategies but from state violence—whether it’s to steal Iraq’s oil or profit from disasters in New Orleans. The Shock Doctrine reflected this radicalization and deepened it. As Naomi Klein wrote, “Most of us chose to oppose the way as an act of folly by a president who mistook himself for a king, and his British sidekick who wanted to be on the winning side of history. There was little interest in the idea that war was a rational policy choice, that the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means, that the level of terror was proportional to what was at stake.”

The Shock Doctrine was released in 2007 just at the time of the economic crisis, and armed activists to confront the resulting austerity. As the moderator introducing her at the Climate Convergence last week explained, Chicago teachers had reading groups of her book during their successful strike.

Whereas the word “capitalism” did not even make the index of No Logo, it was on the front cover and throughout The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. But it was not capitalism itself that was the problem, but a particular “fundamentalist” “unfettered” and “deregulated” version. Rather than a bad marketing idea of the 1980s, Klein located the problem decades prior in Milton Friedman’s economic theories that led a “50 year campaign for total corporate liberation.” As she wrote, “I am not arguing that all forms of market systems are inherently violent…A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy—like a national oil company—held in state hands…Markets need not be fundamentalist… Keynes proposed exactly that kind of mixed, regulated economy…that system of compromises, checks and balances.”

From disaster capitalism to capitalist disasters

The climate science and the indigenous-led climate justice movement have led to another exciting shift in politics. As she wrote in the introduction of This Changes Everything, “this is the hardest book I have ever written, precisely because the research has led me to search out such radical responses.” Her search encourages us to do the same. Now the problem is not years of marketing or decades of neoliberalism but centuries of colonialism and capitalism: “the things we must do to avoid catastrophic warming are no longer just in conflict with the particular strain of deregulated capitalism that triumphed in the 1980s. They are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our economic model: grow or die.”

Rather than defending state-owned oil companies, she argues: “These have never been safe or low-risk industries. Running an economy on energy sources that release poisons as an unavoidable part of their extraction and refining has always required sacrifice zones—whole subsets of humanity categorized as less than fully human, which made their poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable.”

As a result, she takes on the record of the “extractivist left” who have tried to make change without fighting for climate justice—including trade unions “trying to freeze in place the dirtiest jobs, instead of fighting for the good clean jobs their members deserve,” centre-left Keynesians obsessed with GDP growth regardless of how it’s achieved, the former Soviet Union whose environmental record was just as bad as the capitalists, the Latin American government who have reduced economic inequality but not ecological injustice, and Greece’s left alternative Syriza that counterposed the environment with economic recovery.

Rather than calling for compromises, Naomi Klein denounces the “fetish of centrism” in the face of climate catastrophe: “What the ‘moderates’ constantly trying to reframe climate action as something more palatable are really asking is: How can we create change so that the people responsible for the crisis do not feel threatened by the solutions? How, they ask, do you reassure members of a panicked, megalomanical elite that they are still masters of the universe, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary? The answer is: you don’t. You make sure you have enough people on your side to change the balance of power and take on those responsible.”

Strategic debates

Shifting from subverting brands to calling for a climate revolution leads to a shift in strategy: “I have, in the past, strongly defended the right of young movements to their amorphous structures—whether that means rejecting identifiable leadership or eschewing programmatic demands…As many are coming to realize, the fetish for structurelessness, the rebellion against any kind of institutionalization, is not a luxury today’s transformative movements can afford…Despite endless griping, tweeting, flash mobbing, and occupying, we collectively lack many of the tools that built and sustained the transformative movements of the past. Our public institutions are disintegrating, while the institutions of the traditional left—progressive political parties, strong unions, membership-based community service organizations—are fighting for their lives.”

There’s also the question of the ultimate aim of this fight. If the climate crisis is rooted in centuries of colonialism and capitalism, then we need to replace the corporations and states responsible. But while This Change Everything leads us in that direction, it constantly returns to the theme of The Shock Doctrine: that the problem is not capitalism itself but the “reigning ideology” of “market fundamentalism,” created by the “free market counterrevolution” that has “infiltrated virtually every government” and “binds the imagination of our elites.” This makes it seem like neoliberalism is a conspiratorial highjacking of a system that could otherwise be sustainable, leading to nostalgia for the Keynesianism of the 1930s and social programs after WWII.

But Keynesianism failed to solve the Great Depression, which only disappeared through the barbarism of WWII and a permanent arms economy that temporarily sustained a capitalist boom. This allowed states to develop health and education both under pressure from social movements but also in order to compete with other capitalist rivals. The re-emergence of economic crisis led to neoliberal ideology—not the other way around—and the limitations of its “corporate liberation strategy” was made clear when decades of deregulation and financialization failed to prevent the worst (and ongoing) economic crisis since the Great Depression. Economic crisis and war (whose ecological impacts are hardly mentioned) are both intrinsic features of capitalism, whether Keynesian or neoliberal. But because the democratic and revolutionary waves that ended WWI and inspired the world were first crushed and then buried in history, the only answer to her question “has an economic shift of this kind ever happened before in history?” is some reformist version of capitalism.

This Changes Everything does not quite change everything. But released in the context of 400,000 marching for climate justice—along with thousands of actions across the world—it reflects and advances the hope that this new movement can change everything: “The climate movement offers an overarching narrative in which everything from the fight for good jobs to justice for migrants to reparations for historical wrongs like slavery and colonialism can all become part of the grand project of building a nontoxic, shockproof economy before it’s too late.”

Visualizing reproductive choice

Last month saw the release of two important artistic projects that visualize reproductive choice: the American movie Obvious Child, and the Canadian book One Kind Word.

Half of pregnancies are unplanned, and 40% of these end in abortion. In the US more than a million women have abortions each year, but this is not reflected in mainstream film. As writer/director Jillian Robespierre explained, “We did write this script in response to a slew of movies that came out about unplanned pregnancy that always resulted in childbirth. It was frustrating, and instead of waiting for that movie to be made we decided to make it ourselves. I didn’t want to show the same film where the woman is struggling with the decision—I’ve seen that film before—and it’s not that this didn’t happen with this character, but we didn’t want to show the same story.”

Obvious Child

In 2009 she teamed up with comedian Jenny Slate to make a short film that went viral online. They then got funding to make a feature-length film that premiered at Sundance and was released in theaters last month. Obvious Child (the title of a Paul Simon song used in the film) is a romantic comedy about a stand-up comic who breaks up with her partner, loses her job, then has an unplanned pregnancy—and choses abortion. It has been falsely characterized as an “abortion comedy,” but as Slate said in an interview on CBC, “It's about this woman's journey from being passive to active, and learning how to stand by her decisions and still be herself, which means still be funny. Now that she's making a very adult decision, which is to have this safe procedure, can she still be irreverent and playful? Is her nature still hers when it's paired with this choice?”

The film follows the conventional story arc of a romantic comedy, is very irreverent and playful when it comes to the main character, but is very normalizing when portraying abortion. The filmmakers consulted Planned Parenthood to provide an accurate portrayal of a clinic experience—from counseling, to the procedure and recovery room. It shows the ongoing fear of stigma and importance of support. Refreshingly, the film doesn’t give a second of screen time to the anti-choice, though it does reference financial barriers and government restrictions.

It speaks volumes of mainstream film that this is one of the few to pass the Bechdel test—two female characters with names, who talk to each, about something other than a man—and rarer still that it be a positive portrayal of one of the million American women each year who chooses abortion. As Slate explained, “In the United States, women’s rights are very much under attack, and it’s enraging to some people to see a woman just make that decision. It’s good to me that the film is ground-breaking in a way, and in another way I look forward to a day when this is just part of a story…I get sent a lot of scripts that I read, and a lot of them have astounding and frankly irritating things that the women are doing—like women being traditionally catty to each other, often written by men. That to me is more shocking than a woman choosing what to do with her body.”

This is just one story—of a 30-year old urban white woman choosing abortion—but it’s an invitation to share others. As Robespierre said in an interview on Democracy Now on the anniversary of Roe v Wade, “Women’s rights are under attack, and there are many states that have put new restrictions on women being able to have safe, positive procedures. I think it’s a really good time for people to tell their stories.”

One Kind Word

While Robespierre and Slate were producing their short and feature-length film films on abortion, Martha Solomon and Kathryn Palmateer—founders of arts4choice—were gathering stories and portraits of women across Canada who have had abortions. Seven years of work culminated in the launch last month of One Kind Word: Women Share Their Abortion Stories. The title is from the personal story of Lori, a clinic counselor who reflected on her own abortion in 1972: “the support I would have appreciated: one kind word from anyone.”

In Canada there is no abortion law, but there are still multiple barriers to reproductive justice. As Solomon and Palmateer write in the introduction: “The iniquities of abortion access mirror the greater inequities in our society. Colonialism and racism can severely affect women’s abortion access and experiences. Low-income women face greater barriers than do affluent women, and access is even more tenuous for homeless, refugee and undocumented women. In many parts of the country, there are simply no providers available; in others, such as Prince Edward Island, provincial health authorities have refused to honour women’s basic reproductive health care needs and do not fund abortion services. Women from PEI who require an abortion must travel to another province and fund the costs of their abortion and travel expenses themselves. In New Brunswick, a woman must have the approval of two doctors before obtaining a provincially funded abortion. Sadly, the Fredericton Morgentaler clinic, the only other option for women seeking abortions in the maritimes, is scheduled to close in July 2014 after years of fighting the New Brunswick government, further limiting the already paltry options for east coast women. In no other area of health care would such an egregious disrespect for people’s basic health care needs be tolerated. Indeed, the problems with access in Canada point to a deep-seated misogyny within our country and our health care system.”

This extends into medical schools, which have insufficient discussion of abortion except for students who actively pursue abortion training. Marginalizing one of the most common medical procedures, which one third of women will chose at some point in their lives, contributes to the lack of abortion providers—a problem that Medical Students For Choice seeks to correct, as Jillian Bardsley explains in the book’s forward.

Women sharing their abortion stories was part of the last great wave of reproductive justice struggles, and part of the new movement. As Judy Rebick writes in the book’s forward, “As part of the movement then, we organized testimonials from women who had desperately sought abortion when it was illegal, or later when it was legalized under such restrictive circumstances that only a small percentage of women who needed abortions got them in safe and supportive conditions. But since the legalization of abortion, there has been too much silence. The anti-choice organizations, who now have a supportive federal government, have continued their vile propaganda, the purpose of which is, at least in part, to make women with an unwanted pregnancy feel guilt if they chose abortion. That’s why I think a book where women go public about their abortions is so important today.”

As Solomon and Palmateer summarize, “In this book you will meet thirty-two Canadian women who have had abortions. They are courageous and brave; they are inspiring; they are our mothers, sisters, friends, lovers, neighbors, teachers, politicians, doctors, and grandmothers… Our participants come from a range of class backgrounds, ethnicities, abilities, and language groups. You will read stories from Latina women, French Canadians, and First Nations women, as well as women from Asian, Indo-Caribbean, and African Canadian communities. Our participants are young and old (and in-between), financially stable and just making ends meet, mothers and childless, in relationships and single, heterosexual and lesbian.”

These stories cover the history of abortion in Canada—from Linda who had a “terrifying experience” in 1968 when abortion was illegal, to Joyce whose experience with a Therapeutic Abortion Committee in 1988 shaped her life as a pro-choice activist, to Mika who had a clinic abortion four months before she participated in the book. The stories cover a variety of experiences in unplanned pregnancies, barriers to abortion, emotional reactions to the procedure, and level of support from family or friends. Regardless of their personal reactions to abortion—from grieving to ambivalence to empowerment—the women have a shared experience of facing barriers to choice and feeling the need to speak out. As Kaleigh says, about both her disability and her experience with abortion: “In having open conversations we actively annihilate shame.”

The format of written stories (30 in English, one in Spanish and one in French) combined with photos makes an instant human connection to the women and the importance of reproductive choice. As Sheila explains: “Photos complementing our written stories, particularly a collection of women’s photos and stories like arts4choice is producing (rather than an individual story like mine), is even more dramatic in its effect because the visual dimension will help people see and process more comprehensively that we are everywhere, and we are various ages from different racial, class, and cultural backgrounds. Through the photos, they will see people who look like their friends, coworkers, sisters, etcetera. This association of familiarity will help them feel some empathy, or possibly even a little compassion.”

As Solomon and Palmateer conclude: “It is time for women themselves to articulate what kind of abortion care this country requires. We need to ask ourselves: what is it about our experiences that we need to keep, and what do we need to change? We can only do that when we are open and vocal about our experiences, both positive and negative. In this way, we can expand our vision of what comprehensive, feminist, on-demand abortion care can and should look like in this country, and we can also work towards building a stronger, more inclusive, and more authentic conversation about reproductive justice in Canada.”

Obvious Child is in theatres now. One Kind Word was just launched in Toronto and will be launched in Halifax next week, with launch dates in Ottawa and Vancouver to be determined. You can get a copy from Another Story Bookshop in Toronto, or online from Three O’Clock Press or Amazon.

Thought for Food: two great books on the politics of food

Below are reviews of two great books I've read on the politics of food, an issue around which an increasing number of people are radicalizing.

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD, by Michael Pollan

     Common explanations of the unhealthy “Western diet” blame fast food companies and gluttonous consumers. But for Michael Pollan, the problem is the commodification of food under capitalism, which harms the earth and humans: the increasing geographical separation of food production and consumption robs the soil of nutrients, and the profit-driven processing of food then purges those nutrients. This has produced “a radical and abrupt set of changes over the course of the last 150 years, not just to our foodstuffs but also to our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the meal”.
     In Defense of Food focuses on the “nutritional industrial complex” that has emerged in recent years: governments deregulate food production, marketers sell artificial food as healthy, and scientists provide the ideological justifications.
Pollan explains how food is “a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in intricate and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another”. He contrasts this with the “official ideology of the Western diet”, nutritionism, which reduces food to a static and simple collection of individual nutrients. As a consequence fertilizers ignore and sabotage the earth’s own ability to feed plants, sapping their quality; attempts to simplistically create food produces toxic alternatives; and reducing food to a delivery mechanism for nutrients undermines its cultural diversity and pleasure. Pollan concludes with a series of steps to regain a healthy diet, summed up with his maxim: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
    While In Defense of Food provides a brilliant analysis of food under capitalism, it doesn’t provide a very effective solution: “Not everyone can afford to eat high-quality food in America, and that is shameful; however, those of us who can, should. Doing so benefits not only your health, but also the health of the people who grow the food as well as the people who live downstream and downwind of the farms where it is grown.”
    The problem is that Pollan sees humans and the planet relating to each other primarily through the act of consumption, rather than production—relegating those who actually produce the food to a passive role. But if those workers and others had democratic control over the production, they could consciously grow food in ways that are healthy for humans and the earth.
While In Defense of Food does not provide this ultimate solution, it takes the first step by showing us how food is “no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on the other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight”.

SOIL NOT OIL, by Vandana Shiva

     In her latest book, renowned scientist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva shows capitalism is the root of the climate crisis, and its profit-driven solutions will only makes things worse.
In this short and accessible book, Shiva blends science and politics to analyze three crises—climate chaos, peak oil, and the food crisis—showing how they are interconnected and based on two centuries of an unsustainable quest for profits that drives people off the land and privatizes nature.
     She looks back on the results of the “Green Revolution”, which claimed to promote food security but instead concentrated a monoculture of climate-sensitive crops in the hands of oil-dependent corporations, whose production and use poisons the earth and promotes climate change, and whose expensive patented seeds and fertilizers creates huge debt that has produced an epidemic of farmer suicides.
     Now we are presented with a new series of pseudo-solutions—nuclear power, carbon trading, and biofuels—that will only exacerbate the climate crisis. As Shiva points out, “nuclear winter is not an alternative to global warming.”
     Shiva shows how these pseudo-solutions are rooted in capitalism’s incessant commodification: “some things should not be tradable—water and biodiversity are too valuable to be reduced to marketable commodities. Other things, like toxic waste and greenhouse gases, should not be generated. To turn them into tradable commodities ensures that they will continue to be produced. Instead of putting a value on clean air, emissions trading schemes value pollution”.
Meanwhile, the production of biofuels drives communities and trees off the land, and uses oil and large amounts of water to divert food production into crops to run cars, while wild speculation on these profits drives up food prices and creates artificial famines.
     For Shiva, the solution will come from the periphery of the system and a focus on small farms: “the solution to the climate crisis begins with the cultures and communities who have not contributed to it”. While she condemns capitalism for two centuries of driving people off the land into polluting cities, she does not articulate a role for the urban working class in fighting back. She claims that “as the fossil fuel economy has grown, it has substituted energy for humans”, rendering “humans redundant to the economic process”, and “replacing people with fossil-fuel driven machines”. Seeing no contradiction in capitalism, she calls for a “cultural transition” with an appeal to a mystical energy force.
     But machines do not run themselves, they run on human labour, and the working class has the collective power to bring the system that produces climate chaos to a halt. The 100 million workers in India who struck at the start of the month—shutting down coal, power, port, and road transportation—show how the working class can be a key ally of peasant communities fighting climate choas.
     Despite this shortcoming, Soil not Oil is valuable reading for anyone seeking to understand the climate crisis and the dangers of profit-driven solutions