Every November, roughly 46 million turkeys are killed in the United States for the sake of “American Tradition.” These are curious, socially intelligent birds capable of recognizing flock mates, forming hierarchies, and communicating with unique vocalizations, yet most are reduced to a dining table centerpiece, living just 14–20 weeks before slaughter despite a natural lifespan of 10–15 years. Their short lives, filled with fear and pain, expose the uncomfortable truth that gratitude and violence are braided together in the modern Thanksgiving ritual.
Talking about turkeys means confronting the systems—colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist—that shape their lives and deaths. Thanksgiving, too, cannot be separated from the mythologies that erase Indigenous histories, stewardship, and struggles for sovereignty. This holiday invites us to rethink what, and who, we actually celebrate, honor, and consume.
Most U.S. turkeys live in industrial sheds holding 6,000–20,000 birds and are genetically engineered to grow unnaturally heavy and fast. Their bodies become so large that many cannot stand without pain, often developing joint damage, leg deformities, and heart failure; because of these proportions, they are bred almost exclusively through forced artificial insemination, with their natural social and reproductive lives erased and relabeled as “efficiency.”
Packed tightly together, birds are subjected to “management” practices like beak trimming, desnooding, and detoeing, which remove sensitive body parts without anesthesia and can cause long-term pain, altered behavior, and difficulty eating or moving.
Most turkeys raised for Thanksgiving live on litter soaked with feces and urine under artificial lighting designed to maximize growth; their rapid weight gain often outpaces skeletal development, and many collapse from heart or lung problems. This is not tradition. It is industrial design masquerading as holiday ceremony, where bodies are treated as commodities and exploited to produce life that exists only to generate profit, encapsulating patriarchal capitalist values.
The harm of industrial turkey production does not exist in a vacuum; it is built on stolen land, exploited labor, and ecological harm —precisely the systems that ecofeminism, antispeciesism, and degrowth aim to dismantle. Barns, slaughterhouses, and feedlots sit on land taken from Indigenous peoples which are converted into monoculture grain fields, while underpaid and often migrant workers shoulder the physical risk and trauma required to keep cheap meat flowing.
Thanksgiving intensifies this logic of overproduction: ever-bigger birds, subsidized grain, and millions of pounds of turkey waste each year. In a staggering display of patriarchal capitalism’s disregard for life, it is estimated that 8 million turkeys will be thrown in the trash this Thanksgiving. In this context refusing turkey becomes more than a dietary preference; it is a small but powerful act of rejecting growth-obsessed holiday consumption in favor of justice and planetary boundaries.
And yet, as animal agriculture continues to threaten ecological stability, this year’s H5N1 bird flu outbreaks expose how fragile the turkey industry really is. Since late summer 2025, between 2 and 2.2 million turkeys have been infected or mass-killed, leaving the U.S. with its smallest turkey flock in ~40 years. Zoonotic outbreaks like H5N1 are not random accidents; they are features of a system that concentrates animals, waste, and workers in the same polluted spaces.
These mass culls—often carried out through ventilation shutdown—are presented as “biosecurity,” but they are predictable fallout of confinement, genetic uniformity, and high-density sheds, as discussed in my last post “What We Do to Nature Makes Us Sick – Literally.”
By hiding the ongoing theft and enclosure of Indigenous territories, the Thanksgiving story obscures how industrial animal agriculture depends on those same lands for feed crops, confinement facilities, and slaughter plants.
Additionally, Indigenous relationships with turkeys stretch back more than 2,000 years and offer a radically different perspective of these animals than what is normalized by Thanksgiving as its celebrated today. Historical records show that Indigenous societies in the Americas valued the birds so highly that they tamed them at least twice for companionship and participation in ceremonies.
This contrast makes clear that the way turkeys are treated today is not natural or inevitable—it is a political and economic choice.
This web of ecological and social harm reveals that struggles for land, animal liberation, and bodily autonomy are never separate. Colonial systems reshape landscapes and species to fit extractive needs, while the same logic reaches into gender and labor. What happens to the land, and what happens to the animals forced onto it, mirrors what happens to the people whose labor and autonomy are also controlled.
Ecofeminism names these shared roots and insists that none of these violences can be confronted in isolation. Instead of systems built on domination, extraction, and sacrifice zones, it asks us to move toward plant-based, low-impact, and degrowth-aligned ways of living that are grounded in care, interdependence, and respect for all beings.
Reimagining Thanksgiving through this lens means refusing to isolate animal suffering from land theft, climate chaos, and labor exploitation.
Supporting Indigenous land defenders, eating plant-based seasonal foods, and telling honest histories become interconnected acts of resistance to a system that treats life as expendable.
In place of a holiday that normalizes mistreatment, these choices move us toward traditions rooted in reciprocity, repair, and the shared right of all beings to live and thrive.
With COVID-19 cases rising again globally and health agencies monitoring potential threats from bird flu (H5N1, H9N2) and yellow fever, global organizations — including the World Health Organization (WHO) — have recognized the ongoing risk. They recently signed a new Pandemic Agreement to improve preparedness, as high-threat infectious hazards continue to increase due to animal agriculture, deforestation, urbanization, and global wildlife trade.
These risks compound: habitat destruction not only accelerates species extinctions but creates more pathways for dangerous viruses to emerge, multiply, and move into human populations.
Root Causes: How Human Activity Drives Spillover
Over 70% of new diseases in people—and nearly all pandemics, like COVID-19—originate from animal microbes also known as “zoonoses”. These spillovers occur when human activities disrupt natural barriers, usually through activities like:
Agricultural expansion. Converting natural habitats like forests and grasslands into farmland is responsible for over 30% of emerging disease events, making it one of the strongest predictors of spillover. Land use change like this causes increased contact between humans, livestock, and wildlife, which makes it easier for diseases to pass from wild animals to people (zoonotic spillover).
Intensive livestock production. Factory farms crowd genetically similar animals together in unsanitary dwellings, creating ideal conditions for pathogens to spread and evolve. Animals in factory farms frequently suffer from a variety of illnesses, and many of these conditions often go unnoticed or untreated due to the sheer number of animals and unmanageable animal-to-worker ratios. These environments substantially increase the probability that a disease will jump from animals to humans.
Deforestation. Clearing forests for agriculture, logging, or settlement destroys wildlife habitats and forces animals into closer proximity with people and livestock. More than 70% of deforestation is driven by agricultural expansion, particularly for grazing and feed crops.
Urbanization. Rapid growth of cities creates densely populated areas where diseases can spread quickly and where expanding development pushes into formerly wild spaces, increasing human contact with wildlife.
Global wildlife trade. The legal and illegal trade of wild animals transports pathogens across borders and brings stressed, diverse species into close quarters with humans, creating ideal spillover conditions.
Together, these activities fragment habitats and expose people and livestock to roughly 1.7 million undiscovered viruses, an estimated 600,000 of which could infect humans.
A World Wildlife Fund (WWF) analysis adds that pandemic risk is best understood as feedback loops: agricultural expansion, luxury wildlife demand, industrialization, and global trade all reinforce each other, making spillover not just a single event but the product of complex, interconnected systems.
Increasingly, scientists and policy leaders advocate for the “One Health” approach—a recognition that human, animal, and ecosystem health are inseparably connected. One Health calls for collaborative action across medicine, veterinary science, agriculture, and environmental protection, aiming to address the root causes of disease outbreaks and ecosystem collapse at their source rather than simply reacting to emergencies.
These root causes mirror the forces behind climate change and global inequality: weak regulation, extractive industries, and profit-driven systems that degrade the very ecosystems acting as our first line of defense.
Animal Agriculture: A Major Driver of Climate Breakdown and Pandemic Risk
Animal agriculture sits at the center of both ecological disruption and disease emergence, making it one of the most significant contributors to pandemic risk.
Livestock farming is responsible for 12–20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, produces 37% of human-caused methane, and drives widespread deforestation, water contamination, and biodiversity loss. As global meat consumption rises, the demand for land and feed crops intensifies, pushing agricultural expansion deeper into natural habitats.
Industrial livestock operations also create ideal conditions for infectious disease evolution. Crowded, genetically similar animals enable viruses to spread rapidly and mutate. Many zoonotic pathogens — including avian and swine influenza and antibiotic-resistant bacteria — originated in high-density livestock systems. Live animal transport and global supply chains further amplify transmission risk, moving pathogens across borders at rapid speed.
The ongoing surge in bird flu outbreaks illustrates these risks: in 2025, millions of chickens and turkeys in North America have been killed to contain infection as H5N1 spreads rapidly in crowded factory farms, which serve as hotspots for viral mutation and transmission. When avian flu is detected in a flock, authorities typically employ mass culling methods—such as gassing or suffocation—which kills every bird in the shed to halt the disease’s spread. This process highlights the normalization of suffering and waste in our food systems.
Research consistently shows that transitioning toward plant-based food systems would reduce emissions, restore ecosystems, and significantly lower the risk of emerging pandemics.
Structural Causes: Capitalism, Inequality, and Rising Risk
Large-scale deforestation, industrial agriculture, and wildlife commodification are often financed and directed by high-consuming nations and powerful multinational corporations like JBS and Walmart. These actors profit from activities that degrade ecosystems, while the resulting disease and environmental risks are displaced onto communities.
In a growth-focused global economy, capital flows into industries such as factory farming, fossil fuel extraction, mining, and wildlife trade — sectors that depend on cheap land, weak environmental regulation, and low-cost labor. As these industries expand into biodiversity-rich regions, they fragment ecosystems, displace wildlife, and intensify opportunities for spillover. Global supply chains built for speed and efficiency further entrench this dynamic by externalizing environmental and health costs onto exploited nations and communities.
The very industries that degrade ecosystems and compromise community health channel their profits to corporations and wealthy nations, widening the gap between those who bear the consequences and those who reap the rewards.
Many of the world’s spillover “hotspots” lie in tropical regions managed or inhabited by Indigenous and rural communities who often lack the political power to resist industrial expansion by dominant nations. As a result, these communities face polluted waterways, degraded land, inadequate health infrastructure, and increased exposure to zoonotic disease. When outbreaks occur, indigenous and rural communities experience disproportionate illness, loss of income, and long-term social disruption. Meanwhile, high-consuming nations continue to benefit from exploitation and the availability of cheap commodities, while displacing the risks elsewhere.
The WWF highlights that protecting Indigenous land rights, supporting community-led resource management, and ensuring equitable participation in conservation are not simply justice issues—they are frontline strategies for pandemic prevention. Indigenous management consistently leads to better conservation outcomes, healthier forests, and—by extension—lower pandemic risk.
Calls for pandemic justice echo those of the climate justice movement: those who benefit most from ecological destruction must bear the greatest responsibility for prevention, restoration, and reparative action.
How U.S. Policy Has Increased Vulnerability
If we learned anything from COVID-19 its that reactionary approaches to pandemics are slow, expensive, and inadequate to the scale of the threat (WHO). Instead, prevention must start with transforming the policies that drive ecosystem disruption.
However, recent U.S. policy decisions under the Trump administration have amplified vulnerability to disease emergence and environmental harm simultaneously.
For example, despite warnings from experts about the risk of foot-and-mouth disease in Argentinian cattle, the Trump administration moved forward with policies to expand beef imports from Argentina, a decision that raises the risk of introducing animal diseases into U.S. herds and exemplifies the prioritization of economic and trade interests over ecological and public health safety.
Additionally, there have been significant cuts and delays to federal research funding for emerging infectious diseases, undermining efforts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies to develop new diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments, and diminishing the nation’s ability to monitor and respond to public health threats.
Finally, the U.S. withdrawal from the (WHO) disrupted global data sharing and international public health collaboration, creating funding gaps in vital programs, limiting U.S. influence over international health policy, and reducing coordination on pandemic preparedness with global partners..
These decisions mirror broader climate deregulation: short-term economic gains for those in power, long-term social, health and environmental risks for everyone else.
Plant Based Diets as Resistance
When governments prioritize corporate interests over ecological and public health, it is easy to feel powerless. Yet individual choices — especially the ways we eat and where we put our dollars — offer a powerful form of resistance. A plant-based diet directly withdraws support from the industries most responsible for both climate instability and pandemic risk.
A plant-based diet reduces risk across multiple systems:
Lower pandemic risk: Reducing dependence on factory farming — one of the primary incubators of zoonotic disease — lowers the conditions that enable pathogens to spill over into human populations. Studies show that people eating primarily plant-based diets experience lower COVID-19 severity and improved immune outcomes.
Climate mitigation: Plant-based diets reduce greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 50%, while also decreasing water use, pollution, and resource depletion.
Biodiversity protection: Less demand for meat slows deforestation, protects wildlife habitats, and reduces landscape fragmentation — one of the strongest predictors of zoonotic spillover.
Individual dietary choices can activate our collective power. Even small shifts — like choosing plant-based meals a few times per week — reduce pressure on natural habitats and act as a form of climate care.
International health bodies like WHO, IPBES, and the One Health High-Level Expert Panel consistently affirm that addressing pandemic risk requires protecting ecosystems, reducing destructive land use, and prioritizing community well-being over extractive growth.
Conclusion
While plant-based diets strengthen pandemic and climate resilience at an individual level, systemic transformation is needed to address climate and pandemic risk on a global scale.
The most effective pandemic mitigation strategies cited from IPBES to WHO, BMJ, and global One Health networks include:
Nature-first prevention: Restoring forests, ending deforestation, and protecting biodiversity hotspots maintain the ecological stability that prevents spillover. Healthy ecosystems act as protective shields against emerging infectious diseases.
Integrated One Health policies: Aligning human, animal, and environmental health strengthens surveillance, early detection, and coordinated responses across sectors. The One Health model is now widely recognized as essential for global pandemic preparedness.
Community-led conservation: Indigenous and frontline communities consistently achieve stronger conservation outcomes through place-based knowledge, stewardship, and long-term relationships with land. Their leadership protects biodiversity while strengthening social resilience.
Redirecting funding toward prevention: Investing billions annually in early-warning systems, ecological restoration, and public health infrastructure breaks the costly cycle of reactive crisis management. Prevention is more effective, equitable, and sustainable than emergency response.
These solutions reflect the growing alignment between climate justice and pandemic prevention frameworks. Both demand a shift away from extractive, profit-driven models of growth and promote moving toward long-term ecological stability, community well-being, and global solidarity.
Climate care is pandemic prevention. Biodiversity is a protective shield that stabilizes the climate, regulates ecosystems, and buffers humanity from disease. When we dismantle that shield, the consequences cascade through every aspect of life.
The latest evidence, echoed by WWF, makes clear: The solutions that prevent pandemics are the same ones that restore justice and planetary health— restoring ecosystems, reducing reliance on animal agriculture, supporting Indigenous leadership, and enacting policies that prioritize people and the planet.
Wealth inequality and climate change are intertwined consequences of unchecked capitalist growth and the monopolization resources.
These two issues create a compounding effect: as the wealthy accumulate more wealth, their investments and purchases tend to generate more greenhouse gas emissions, which accelerates climate change and further exacerbates inequality.
Greenhouse gas emissions from both consumption and investments among the wealthiest groups have a vastly disproportionate impact on the climate crisis.
At the individual level, the ultra wealthy lead high emitting lifestyles through energy intensive consumption patterns that include things like travel, luxury goods, and ownership of large homes—often owning multiple properties which contributes to higher emissions.
For example, Jeff Bezos’ two private jets spent nearly 25 days in the air over a 12-month period and emitted as much carbon as the average US Amazon employee would in 207 years according to a 2024 OXFAM report.
Affluent groups not only consume more and purchase emissions intensive goods but their assets and investments are also funneled into emission-intensive sectors such as fossil fuels, mining, real estate and construction. Industries such as real estate and costruction are especially emissions-intensive because they rely on concrete and steel—materials with enormous quantities of embodied carbon. These investments generate considerable returns, widening the wealth gap, while also producing massive carbon footprints.
A 2025 study analyzing emissions inequality from1990-2020 found that two-thirds of warming can be attributed to the wealthiest 10%, with average emissions 6.5 times higher than the average per capita rate. To further put this disparity into perspective, a 2024 OXFAM report found that the world’s fifty richest billionaires produce more carbon through their investments, private jets, and yachts in just 90 minutes than the average person emits in an entire lifetime.
How Does Capitalism Influence Wealth Inequality?
A foundational critique of capitalism is its ability to concentrate economic gains among owners while workers receive only a fraction of the value they create. This surplus extraction has intensified with globalization and automation, leading to stagnant wages and declining worker power— trends widely documented by economists at the Economic Policy Institute and the OECD.
Under this model, wealth breeds more wealth: those with capital can invest and earn higher returns than those relying on wages, compounding inequality over time. This self-reinforcing dynamic is now supported by econometric evidence showing that every increase in wealth concentration significantly exacerbates carbon inequality—meaning the environmental footprint of the richest grows much faster than the average individual.
Research from the World Inequality Lab reveals that public policies often serve to perpetuate these divides, especially when they favor interest of wealth holders through tax breaks, deregulation, and subsidies that disproportionately benefit capital owners.
At its foundation, capitalism prioritizes endless economic growth while disregarding planetary boundaries. Corporate interests drive extraction, pollution, and emissions as structural features of the system.
Why Capitalism and Climate Justice Can’t Coexist
Capitalism perpetuates climate change by embedding exploitation of people, land, and resources into its design. The wealth gaps created by this system ensure those least responsible for the climate crisis bear the greatest impacts, both nationally and globally.
Within the United States, capitalist production has created stark patterns of environmental injustice. Many of the most polluted areas are home to low-income communities who face the externalized costs of corporate profit. In Bakersfield, CA —one of three California metro areas with the largest increases in concentrated poverty from 2010-2018 —is surrounded by oil fields, intensive agriculture, and industrial zones. Weak enforcement of pollution controls enables business owners to cut costs and increase profits, while residents experience higher rates of asthma, contaminated water, and degraded air quality.
On a global scale, capitalism’s colonial and imperial roots continue to shape climate injustice. Wealthy nations such as the United States and members of the European Union account for the majority of historical greenhouse gas emissions, shaping climate impacts felt by countries who have significantly lower GHG footprints and GDP’s. The wealth that fueled industrialization in the Global North was extracted through centuries of resource theft, forced labor, and ecological destruction in colonized regions.
This legacy persists today through global trade structures, debt systems, and extractive industries that keep poorer nations dependent and vulnerable. Countries with the smallest carbon footprints now face the greatest exposure to extreme heat, sea-level rise, and food insecurity—while former colonial powers maintain economic dominance built on ecological harm and human exploitation.
Calls for climate reparations and responsibility recognize the disproportionate contribution of wealthy, historically colonial nations to the climate crisis. Addressing the climate crisis requires not only reducing emissions but confronting the capitalist structures that have normalized extraction, inequality, and ecological violence in pursuit of endless growth.
Solutions: Anti-Capitalist Degrowth Models
The interconnected crises of inequality and climate change cannot be solved within the same economic system that created them. Incremental reforms through green growth models or corporate sustainability pledges merely tinker at the margins of a structure built on exploitation. As thinkers like Kohei Saito and Jason Hickel argue, confronting climate breakdown requires a radical reorientation of our economies away from endless accumulation and toward collective well-being.
Degrowth provides a vision for reorganizing society around equity, and care. Under degrowth frameworks, economic success is measured not by GDP, but by metrics such as community health, ecological restoration, access to essential services, and time for leisure and creativity. The goal is to downscale unnecessary production—particularly luxury consumption and resource-intensive industries—while ensuring that everyone’s fundamental needs are met within planetary boundaries.
Ownership and control are central. If the wealthiest individuals and corporations dominate the financing of renewable energy and climate adaptation, their share of global wealth will continue to grow, deepening inequality even in a decarbonized world. Conversely, public, cooperative, and community-owned models demonstrate how climate action can redistribute both power and resources.
Degrowth also challenges the colonial logic of extraction that still shapes global trade. It calls for ecological reparations, debt cancellation, and the end of exploitative resource flows from the Global South to the Global North. In practice, this means investing in ecosystem restoration, housing cooperatives, and localized supply chains rather than fossil-fuel expansion and militarized borders.
The climate crisis is not an unintended consequence of capitalism—it is the inevitable outcome. Addressing it means redistributing wealth and transforming how we define prosperity, progress, and justice. Dismantling capitalist growth imperatives is not merely an economic task, but a moral and ecological one: a necessary step toward a livable planet for all.
Art has long served as a catalyst for change, connecting information to emotion and inspiring action. In the face of the climate crisis, human imagination may play a critical role in environmental activism by bridging creativity and science to drive transformation and innovation.
Several studies and projects support the idea that art can be a powerful driver for climate awareness.
For example, research published in ScienceDirect demonstrates that artistic activism fosters emotional engagement, behavioral change, and civic participation. Additionally, the US Global Change Research Program has found that climate art exhibitions and educational programs can encourage communities to see themselves as part of the solution, inspiring both dialogue and action.
Collaboration between arts and sciences transforms information into a sensory experience, which makes it more likely that the information will elicit emotion and remain in our memory.
Art’s power lies in its ability to make us feel before we act. By tapping into emotion, it connects intellectual awareness to moral responsibility. Art brings humanity to urgent political and environmental issues, allowing audiences to encounter them with new perspectives. This turns observation into involvement, inspiring people to envision how we might live differently in the future.
As one artist-scholar observed, “The universal language of art can encourage people from all different backgrounds to want to develop actions to help live more sustainably.”
Art, in this sense, becomes an act of resilience. It reminds us that that restoring our bond with the environment can be as creative as it is urgent.
Encountering Hundertwasser: A Philosophy of Color, Form, and Nature
My personal belief in the power of art as climate action was reinforced during a trip to Vienna several years ago. I had saved my pennies for several years and planned the trip around viewing works from my two of my favorite painters, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, leaders of the Viennese Secession Movement whose paintings shaped my understanding of creative freedom. But it was while I was in Vienna that I encountered a new figure who would expand my thinking even further: Friedensreich Hundertwasser.
My first encounter with his work was at the Kunst Haus Wien, where I was enthralled by the unusual curved lines and bright hues covering the face of the building. While visiting this magnificently strange structure and viewing the paintings inside, I learned that Hundertwasser was not only an artist and architect, but an ecological visionary and environmental activist as well.
His work merged creativity and activism into one beautifully radical philosophy. Deeply inspired by the Viennese Secession Movement, which sought to break away from artistic nationalism and the conservative art establishment of the Austrian Empire, Hundertwasser envisioned an art form that healed both people and the planet.
His work rejected modernist straight lines, which he referred to as “godless and immoral,” in favor of spirals, organic patterns, and radiant colors that celebrated life’s natural irregularity. He was a leader in the development of new techniques and the use of unconventional materials often using homemade paints made from organic materials while having mastered many graphic techniques including lithograph, silk screen, etching, woodcut and mixed media.
Hundertwasser believed that humanity had created a separation from nature that was detrimental to both people and the planet and that this “aberration” must be reversed. His artworks often depict structural, environmental, and human elements while advocating for harmony between them.
Hundertwasser summarized his idea of a life in harmony with the laws of nature in seven points which are outlined in his “Peace Treaty With Nature.”
Ecological Conservation Through Art
Hundertwasser created original posters in support of environmental protection efforts such as whale conservation and the promotion of public transport. He dedicated the revenue from these posters to various environmental organizations, which was a key component of his environmental protection strategy.
While visiting the Kunst Haus Wien, I was especially moved by Hundertwasser’s poster“Save the Rain – Each Raindrop is a Kiss From Heaven,” created for the Norwegian Nature Conservancy Association to raise awareness about acid rain and its impact on forests and fish. Seeing this work in person filled me with a deep, expansive gratitude for the miracles of the natural world.
The phrase “Each Raindrop is a Kiss from Heaven” overwhelmed me with how extraordinary our planet truly is—how every organism, from grasslands to glaciers, plays a critical role in maintaining the balance that allows us to have clean air, water, food, and medicine. These everyday miracles are sacred gifts. Protecting them is not just an act of care; it is a privilege and our responsibility as beings on this earth.
Manifestos for People and Planet
Hundertwasser spread his ecological positions in numerous manifestos, letters, and public demonstrations. His “Mouldiness Manifesto Against Rationalism in Architecture” from 1958 introduced ideas that remain profoundly relevant today, including the concept of “tree duty” which views integrating vegetation into architecture as a moral and ecological responsibility, promoting the idea that trees should grow on buildings as living architectural elements.
The 1958 manifesto generally called for humanity to restore its relationship with nature by returning to organic, evolving, and humanistic architecture. This vision foreshadowed current movements in sustainable design and biophilic architecture, which similarly emphasize harmony between humans, structures, and the environment.
Tangentially, Hundertwasser campaigned for forestation of the city through rooftop gardens and “tree tenants” that integrate greenery into urban architecture. He also developed and promoted eco-friendly waste management systems, including humus toilets and biological water purification that used aquatic plants to clean wastewater naturally.
His buildings, such as Vienna’s Hundertwasserhaus and Kunst Haus Wien, are living artworks characterized by vegetation and a jubilant embrace of imperfection.
In a world of homogenized cities and ecological neglect, his work proclaimed a rebellious return to nature.
Lessons from Hundertwasser: Honoring Non-Traditional Climate Action
Hundertwasser’s activism teaches several vital lessons. First, resistance to environmental degradation does not only require scientific credentials—it needs vision, creativity, and the courage to break away from conventional norms.
Hundertwasser’s “Everybody Must Be Creative” manifesto argues that creativity is a fundamental human right and necessity, not a privilege of artists. He condemned what he called “the new illiteracy”—the inability to create—claiming that modern civilization suppresses innate imagination through education and standardization.
Hundertwasser reminds us that solutions to complex problems such as the climate crisis demand imaginative engagement from all fields and backgrounds, making creativity an essential skill across disciplines.
His philosophy insists that ecological stewardship is a community responsibility, one that flourishes when everyone, from architects to artists and activists to ordinary citizens, claims a role in restoration and advocacy.
It is essential to recognize that climate action thrives through diversity of approach. Non-traditional methods like art, music, storytelling, and participatory design can catalyze real change, inspire empathy, and build movements.
By embracing creative resistance and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, we can expand our impact—making space for everyone to contribute, innovate, and inspire.
To honor Hundertwasser’s legacy means advocating for the importance of art alongside science and ensuring that sustainability remains a vibrant, imaginative movement.
Transition Towns are grassroots community projects that aim to increase self-sufficiency and build local resilience to global challenges such as climate change, peak oil, and socioeconomic instability.
The movement began at Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland, where permaculture teacher Rob Hopkins and his students developed an Energy Descent Action Plan to respond to peak oil. Hopkins later moved to Totnes, England, in 2006, where he helped found the first Transition Town– a community-led initiative to foster local resilience through projects focused on energy, food, and economy.
Since then, the Transition Network has expanded internationally to over 60 countries. Unique among environmental movements, Transition Towns emphasize not only practical solutions but also psychological and social change, nurturing skill development, connection, and collective action.
Skill Development and Behavioral Change: Building Lasting Climate Resilience
Central to the Transition movement is the facilitation of skill development as a key climate solution and resilience tool.
This process addresses the fact that many practical skills crucial for sustainability—such as food growing, clothing repair, and resource efficiency– have been lost over time as convenience culture has taken precedence over longevity.
Transition initiatives create hands-on workshops, courses, and community projects that revive these essential skills, enabling people not only to become more self-sufficient but also to share and pass these skills through families and neighbors.
For instance, in Totnes, the original Transition Town, a popular 10-week evening course called “Skilling Up for Powerdown” teaches participants about food, energy, water, and economics, all through the lens of enhancing local resilience.
An incredibly useful training for starting a Transition Initiative is Transition Launch, which teaches people how to set up and run a community-based change-making initiative right where they live.
Practical Workshops and Community Learning
There are also numerous smaller practical workshops, such as herbal walks, natural building, cooking, and cycle maintenance. These workshops are designed to be engaging and inclusive, drawing on the expertise of local elders, experts and practitioners to bridge knowledge gaps.
Through herbal walks, participants not only gain knowledge of local plants and wildlife but also strengthen their bonds with both their community and natural environment.
Natural building workshops teach participants how to construct buildings using sustainable, natural, and locally sourced materials like earth, straw, timber, and stone. These workshops emphasize eco-friendly techniques to build environmentally conscious structures that are energy-efficient, and healthy for people and the planet.
Meanwhile, cycle maintenance courses not only provide instruction on how to perform essential bicycle repairs and upkeep, but also help cyclists gain confidence and practical skills to be a safe cyclist on the road.
Skill-sharing fosters behavioral change by transforming abstract concerns about climate and energy into practical, achievable actions. Learning by doing builds a fundamental sense of “can do” and empowerment, replacing feelings of helplessness with tangible capabilities. These shared learning experiences help build adaptable, supportive networks essential for collective problem-solving and long-term sustainability.
By nurturing both individual skills and community connections, Transition Towns not only reduce ecological footprints but also strengthen the social fabric necessary to sustain environmental efforts over time. Furthermore, as skills are passed on within communities, they create a multiplying effect—giving the Transition Town movement a legacy of resilience that extends beyond any one person, project or generation.
Expanding Skill-Sharing Across the Network
Transition hubs across the transition network have run repair cafés, gardening courses, energy-saving workshops, local currency initiatives, and numerous practical projects that bring learning and action together. These efforts contribute to a culture shift where sustainability becomes normalized, encouraging ongoing participation and deeper engagement.
Repair Cafés: Repair Cafés allow community members to bring broken household items (clothes, small appliances, bikes) for free repair by skilled volunteers. The goal is to reduce waste, save money, and share repair skills. This promotes a culture of fixing rather than discarding, reducing landfill waste and fostering community sharing. Combined with the transition network’s focus on skill sharing, the number of skilled volunteers grows over time so no community member is overly relied upon to perform repairs. Transition Pasadena has run Repair Cafés in California since 2013, involving city staff and volunteers, and offering extensive repair activities for electronics, clothing, and household items.
Gardening Courses: Community gardening and food-growing courses equip participants with skills in organic cultivation, composting, seed saving, and sustainable garden design. In Transition Town Lewes, regular gardening workshops and community orchards help restore local food sovereignty while strengthening neighborhood ties through shared green spaces.
Crystal Palace Transition Town’s Community Garden offers another inspiring example. What began as a small local food-growing project has evolved into a thriving hub for gardening and food-related initiatives. Today, it regularly hosts events and workshops on composting, foraging, and permaculture, providing a space where residents can both learn and connect.
Energy Savings Workshops: Transition groups across the network have implemented hands-on energy projects that reduce emissions while empowering households and communities to take action. For example, Totnes, UK facilitated a street-by-street program where neighbors met in small groups to learn about energy, water, food, and transport. In its first year, around 550 households cut an average of 1.3 tonnes of CO₂ per year each (saving ~£570 per household).
Community Energy Cooperatives: Transition members in Lewes, UK helped establish OVESCO, a community energy co-op. Together they’ve installed around 6 MW of local solar power, and offer free energy-advice workshops and drop-in sessions on bills, home efficiency, and renewables.
Global Diffusion and Local Adaptation
From its UK origins, the Transition Towns model has spread to over 60 countries worldwide, including diverse contexts in Europe, North America, Australia, Latin America, and Asia. Each community adapts the core principles to its unique social, cultural, and environmental setting.
For example, in the US Southwest, initiatives in places like Joshua Tree, California focus on desert-appropriate permaculture and water conservation, while community efforts in Toulouse, France established “micro-forests” through the Miyawaki method to rapidly create dense, biodiverse urban ecosystems. The creation of these micro-forests expands on the city’s already established connection to Japanese landscaping as Toulouse is home to the remarkable Jardin japaonais Pierre-Baudis.
This flexibility allows the movement to thrive globally, making sustainability locally relevant while demonstrating how local priorities, cultures, and resources shape diverse transition projects worldwide.
Inner Transition: Emotional Processing for Collective Resilience
Transition Towns highlight that sustainable change requires transforming not only infrastructure and behavior but also values, emotions, and relationships.
“Inner Transition” is a concept and movement, often associated with the global Transition Network, that focuses on the psychological, emotional, spiritual, and relational changes necessary for people and communities to shift from unsustainable ways of living to more resilient, connected, and meaningful ones.
It emphasizes personal and collective well-being and aims to integrate inner work with external practical projects, ensuring the “head, heart, and hands” are aligned to foster sustainable change.
By integrating practices from psychology and social change with community action, they offer a holistic model of resilience. This approach unleashes collective genius, turning fear and uncertainty into hope and empowerment—a powerful narrative as communities worldwide adapt to global environmental challenges.
Confronting emotions directly helps participants build personal resilience, preventing burnout and sustaining long-term engagement. In this way, hope and imagination are cultivated as practical tools, inspiring members to envision and work toward a positive, sustainable future.
This emotional work transforms despair into “applied optimism,” motivating collective action.
How Transition Towns Foster Hope and Agency
Transition Towns empower citizens by fostering a sense of ownership over their community’s future and encouraging proactive, pragmatic solutions.
Participants develop new skills, launch local enterprises, and collaborate with community members to integrate resilience into local planning.
The movement encourages “doing stuff” and learning by experimentation, making resilience a learned skill.
The transition network offers online courses and events which can be found here with 2 upcoming webinars in October 2025.
Additionally, you can view where there may be transition groups, trainers and hubs near you with this map on the transition network website.
Cecilia was an embodiment of compassion, her quiet gaze falling on what others overlooked: the elm tree in the yard, the “othered” boy at a party, species facing extinction. In her presence, small details grew unbearably heavy, as if she carried the grief of the world before she had even lived much of it.
To be a compassionate person living through the sixth mass extinction and the rise of fascism is to feel that same weight—a witness to a civilization numbed by capitalism and distraction, yet burdened with knowledge.
Cecilia’s attention to suffering is not merely sensitivity: it is radical witness. She refuses to let the decline of the natural world or the pain of the vulnerable fade into the background hum of everyday life.
Watching The Virgin Suicides now, what lingers is not its pastel suburban nostalgia but the undercurrent of warning woven into every frame. The film feels like a mirror, revealing the mundane ways our own world ignores cries for help until monumental tragedy erupts.
“The Brazilian turbot frog was added to the endangered species list today. That’s the third animal this year.”
As scientific consensus declares our world is in the midst of its sixth mass extinction, society insists we carry on as though nothing has changed. Capitalism numbs us with relentless demands, leaving little room for mourning. Extinction becomes something to scroll past, something someone else will fix. It hums behind commutes and the tired sigh at the end of a shift. The weight of it is carried silently by those who still feel it, those whose compassion refuses to shut down.
In The Virgin Suicides, this dynamic is captured in miniature. Cecilia speaks with clarity, her words sharpened by her reserved demeanor, but her mother is distracted—hands busy performing unpaid domestic labor, mind splintered across endless obligations. It is not cruelty that keeps her from actively engaging, but exhaustion, the kind that dulls empathy. The Lisbon household becomes a metaphor for our society at large: a place where care exists but isn’t given the attention it deserves, where voices of warning are muffled by the ceaseless clatter of survival, societal expectations, and maintaining the status quo.
Unlike the five mass extinctions that came before—driven by meteors or volcanic eruptions—this one is driven by humans. Greenhouse gases emitted in the process of manufacturing unnecessary goods raise global temperatures, land-use change devours habitats to grow crops for animals that were bred purely for the sale of their dead bodies, and synthetic chemicals permeate ecosystems. Species are vanishing at 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural rate with nearly 40% of amphibians and a third of all assessed species now standing on the brink of existence.
To feel this devastation while living under the very system that creates it is infuriating. Capitalism steals our time and mental energy even as it drives pollution and ecological collapse. Simultaneously, our political and economic systems block climate solutions because they are not immediately profitable. Life on Earth is sacrificed for quarterly earnings reports.
During the Trump administration, this unraveling only accelerated. The EPA pursued the largest deregulatory campaign in U.S. history, rolling back more than thirty protections on clean air, water, and climate. Efforts were made to revoke the endangerment finding—the scientific foundation for regulating greenhouse gases—effectively stripping federal authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The Department of Energy expanded oil and gas leasing and expedited approvals for liquefied natural gas. By allowing for increased, unregulated emissions as scientists warn of irreversible tipping points, the administration made its position clear: profit will be protected, even if it means sacrificing life itself.
Meanwhile, the National Environmental Policy Act was hollowed out, cutting public input and oversight, giving corporations unprecedented access to public lands with minimal accountability. The Endangered Species Act was revised so that only direct killing of a species counted as “harm,” allowing habitat destruction from mining, logging, and development even in areas where species are facing extinction.
The result: expanded drilling and logging in once-protected areas, collapsing protection of land and wildlife, and increasing threats to species from the lynx to the cutthroat trout.
This is the disease that will kill the planet, the relentless prioritization of corporations and profit over living beings. Entire species were written off as collateral damage for short-term profit. It is the same logic that underpins patriarchy and fascism: that life—human or nonhuman—can be measured, exploited, and discarded when inconvenient.
Under U.S. law, corporations are granted personhood, giving businesses more rights than entire species of animals that are capable of feeling grief and pain as their food supply and habitats are destroyed.
Just as entire species are erased for profit, so too are people devalued when their existence doesn’t serve the dominant order.
“Everyone, look! His ears wiggle if you scratch his chin!”
At Cecilia’s party, a boy with Down syndrome named Joe becomes the target of thoughtless amusement. The guests chant for Joe to “sing [his] song,” laugh as they scratch under his chin to make his ears wiggle, and reduce him to a spectacle. Cecilia’s expression grows doleful before she quietly excuses herself to her room, for the last time.
The cruelty at this party echoes forward into our own time, where governments stage wars against those who deviate from the dominant mold. Fascist systems rely on this dehumanization—reducing entire populations to caricatures or burdens—to justify harm.
I do not blame the boys mocking Joe; they are children shaped by a society that rewards cruelty and punishes difference. In this world, vulnerability is branded as weakness, and to stand out is to invite ridicule. Cecilia, by contrast, represents those who refuse to fall under the spell of apathy—the ones who can recognize injustice without needing it explained and feel it too heavily to ever partake in being part of the status quo that upholds it.
The Trump administration echoed this mockery with severe, targeted campaigns against marginalized groups, including disabled people. It slashed workplace protections, undermined housing rights, cut critical disability services like Medicaid, and weakened equity in education—each policy signaling that disabled people were obstacles to profit rather than humans deserving dignity.
Executive orders called for forced institutionalization of people with mental health disabilities and the unhoused, while funding was cut from community-based, evidence-backed programs. Simultaneously, decades of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts were unraveled, rolling back protections for women, people of color, LGBTQ+ communities, and minority-owned businesses.
Dehumanization, once embedded in law, normalizes violence against the most marginalized. This has been a cornerstone of U.S. policy since the founding of our nation, enabling systemic oppression of marginalized groups for centuries.
To stand with Cecilia is to know the ache of compassion. To witness systemic cruelty with an open heart is to carry grief, to refuse numbness, and to choose solidarity over convenience, even when it hurts. It binds us to one another, insisting that we recognize injustice rather than look away.
“Elm trees. How many pages can you write about dying trees?”
As the boys sift through Cecilia’s journal, they dismiss her many entries on the elm trees in their neighborhood as boring. Yet her attention to the ordinary is a radical act.
Throughout the film, the dying elm trees stand as a symbol of decline—a slow disease spreading through the neighborhood, mirroring the suffocation inside the Lisbon home. The neighborhood’s impulse to cut them down reflects the desire to sanitize decay, to maintain a façade of suburban stability by erasing what feels uncomfortable.
Cecilia’s devotion to protecting the elms is her refusal to turn away from truth and suffering. She embodies what it means to remain present with loss in a culture that prefers distraction, denial, forgetting, and toxic positivity. To mourn openly, to name tragedy, to refuse normalization is itself resistance.
In our own time, being able to grieve climate and humanitarian crises is resistance: it breaks through the capitalist logic that tells us to keep working, keep consuming, keep scrolling. The girls’ ability to be present with the dying trees mirrors those who understand the magnitude of loss our planet is currently experiencing, yet continue trying to heal it.
Climate optimism divorced from grief is blind ignorance. To pretend that the reversal of climate protections and the acceleration of planetary damage under Trump’s policies are anything less than devastating is dishonest. But grief need not paralyze us.
When we allow ourselves to feel the weight of what has been lost, we clear the ground for informed action—organizing, advocating, voting, defending the vulnerable, and demanding policies that restore life and dignity.
“Given Lux’s failure to make curfew, everyone expected a crackdown. But few expected it would be so drastic.”
When Lux breaks curfew on the night of the homecoming dance, all the sisters are punished. Their brief taste of freedom collapses into total isolation. Lux is forced to destroy her rock records—ritualistically cutting off rebellion and self-expression.
This scene reflects a broader political truth: freedoms granted to women under patriarchy are always conditional. When women step too far outside the lines, those freedoms are swiftly revoked.
The Lisbon sisters’ confinement reflects the powerful backlash against feminist gains over recent decades. Throughout the 2010s, feminist activism surged globally: #MeToo exposed pervasive sexual harassment, more women entered parliaments and leadership positions, and advances in reproductive rights, education, and workplace protections expanded possibilities for women worldwide. Intersectional approaches linked gender justice to racial, economic, and environmental struggles, increasing visibility and solidarity.
However, the early 2020s witnessed a wrenching rollback. The Trump administration catalyzed a rapid erosion of women’s rights: abortion access was severely restricted in multiple states, federal funding for women’s health and family planning was slashed by billions, and research on women’s health was defunded. These efforts often weaponized “gender ideology” rhetoric to justify aggressive anti-rights campaigns, fueling a broader resurgence of fascist and ultraconservative forces globally.
The persistence of this backlash reveals a grim truth: women’s freedoms remain fragile, granted only on patriarchal terms. The Lisbon sisters’ punishment after their brief glimpse of freedom is a stark metaphor for our moment—reminding us that the struggle for bodily autonomy, justice, and liberation from patriarchal control is far from over.
“If the boats didn’t bring the fungus from Europe, none of this would have happened.”
As the landscapers prepare to tear down Cecilia’s beloved elm, the sisters cry out in protest. Bonnie reminds us that Dutch elm disease was not some inevitable act of nature but a byproduct of human trade and carelessness—fungus carried across oceans on ships, entwined with commerce. The landscapers’ solution, cutting the tree at its base, is cruelly ironic: it attacks the symptom while leaving the deeper systems of circulation and extraction that enabled the disease in the first place untouched.
Likewise, mainstream visions of “green growth” treat ecological collapse as a technical glitch to be patched with electric cars and renewable technologies—solutions often accessible only to the privileged—while ignoring the extractive capitalist, colonial, and industrial systems that drive ongoing environmental devastation.
The logic of infinite growth, heralded as progress, clashes fundamentally with the reality of a finite Earth. Humanity currently consumes natural resources at a rate equivalent to 1.7 Earths annually, outpacing the planet’s ability to regenerate.
Efficiency gains boasted about by green growth advocates often provoke more consumption rather than less, and “decoupling” growth from extraction remains illusory at the scale our survival demands. Overreliance on technological solutions and market-driven approaches risks perpetuating exploitation and inequality rather than remedying them.
True repair requires a reimagining of how we live with the land and with one another. A holistic response sees ecological, social, technological and economic systems as bound together, demanding solutions that honor planetary limits while centering justice and care. It means dismantling the conditions that created the climate crisis, and building systems rooted in reciprocity, not profit.
“Our daughter showed us an article. It’s a less aggressive therapy.”
While the sisters continue to protect Cecilia’s elm tree, their father recalls her suggestion of a less aggressive therapy than cutting them down and offers it to the landscapers.
The treatment Cecilia proposed echoes the values of ecofeminism. Ecofeminism critiques patriarchal systems that dominate and exploit both women and the natural world, offering instead an ethic of holistic care, reciprocity, and regeneration. It emphasizes that nurturing and healing are not sentimental choices but ethical necessities.
Cecilia’s quiet advocacy for regeneration over destruction mirrors this ethos. She resists the reflex toward violence and control, choosing repair and restoration instead.
Yet the suggestion is brushed aside, dismissed as impractical. The landscaper embodies the worldview of patriarchal capitalism: one that trusts only in domination and quick fixes, unable or unwilling to acknowledge the need for deeper transformation. From this vantage, technological solutions are enough, while the roots of exploitation—patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism—remain invisible, untouched.
This denial exposes the obstacle at the heart of our ecological crisis. The same system that isolates the girls and destroys the elms is the one that devours the earth’s resources and rescinds women’s rights when our presence threatens its control.
Without confronting the systems that train us to treat life as disposable, attempts at “repair” will replicate the same harm. True healing demands more: a commitment to regenerative ways of living grounded in justice, care, and respect—the very principles ecofeminism offers, and the wisdom the Lisbon sisters carried in their refusal to turn destruction into inevitability.
“It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them… and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time.”
After the sisters’ deaths, the neighborhood boys turn them into myth, stitching together fragments and half-memories.
This is how collapse is so often met: we romanticize what is gone rather than fight for what remains. We write elegies for species we failed to save. Memory becomes a poor substitute for justice.
The Lisbon girls did not need elegy; they needed to be heard. The same is true of our burning forests, our poisoned rivers, our sisters who are having their rights revoked and our neighbors who are treated as disposable by systems of profit and control.
The tragedy of The Virgin Suicides is not only the girls’ deaths but the silence that surrounded them—the refusal to recognize despair until it was too late. The greater tragedy would be to repeat that mistake now—to ignore grief, to dismiss the calls for change—until it is too late.
Have you ever associated going vegan with the fear of missing out on vital nutrients? You’re not alone—this myth has been circulating for years. But science, insights into propaganda used by the meat industry, and my personal journey—tell a very different story.
Typical American diets are often heavy in processed meats and low in fiber. In contrast, vegans get significantly more micronutrients like fiber, vitamins C and E, and minerals such as magnesium. These nutrients are vital in supporting heart health, immune function, and overall wellness. Contrary to popular belief, plant-based eaters consistently meet or exceed recommended protein intakes through legumes, tofu, tempeh, nuts, seeds, and whole grains. With variety, all essential amino acids are covered.
Meanwhile, omnivorous diets can ironically lack many of these key micronutrients, despite providing ample protein and calories.
Since I began pursuing strength training and body composition goals on a vegan diet—alongside other active hobbies like dancing and hiking—I’ve experienced firsthand how plant-based nutrition fuels athletic performance and aesthetic goals.
My personal experience reflects what the science shows: a well-planned vegan diet provides all the essential nutrients needed for muscle growth, sustained energy, and recovery.
What’s the Difference Between Micronutrients and Macronutrients?
Understanding nutrition is like maintaining a car—you need both fuel and sparts to keep it running.
Macronutrients are your fuel: carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Carbs provide quick energy, proteins build and repair tissue, and fats store energy and support vital functions.
Micronutrients—vitamins and minerals—are like the spark plugs and wiring. You need them in small amounts, but they’re essential for metabolism, immunity, brain function, and bone health. Without them, even the best “fuel” can’t keep the system running smoothly.
How Vegan Diets Boost Health
A vegan diet centered around whole foods like fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds is naturally packed with essential micronutrients. These include vitamins C and E, magnesium, potassium, zinc, copper, and antioxidants that help your body run clean and efficiently.
Collagen Production
Many of these nutrients support collagen production, which maintains healthy skin, joints, and connective tissue. Vitamin C stabilizes collagen fibers, zinc and copper support its synthesis, and vitamins A and E aid in cell renewal and protect skin structures. This profile not only bolsters heart health and digestion but also helps keep skin strong and youthful.
Muscle Growth and Function
Micronutrients play crucial roles in muscle function. Calcium triggers muscle contractions, potassium helps muscles relax and prevents cramps, and magnesium supports energy metabolism.
Great plant-based sources include:
Calcium: fortified plant milks, tofu, kale, bok choy
Iron and B vitamins (B1, B6, B12, folate) are essential for delivering oxygen and energy to muscles. Iron transports oxygen, while B vitamins convert food into energy. Find these in lentils, chickpeas, quinoa, spinach, pumpkin seeds, whole grains, legumes, nutritional yeast, and dark leafy greens.
Vitamins C and E and minerals like zinc aid post-exercise recovery and reduce oxidative stress. Sources include citrus fruits, strawberries, bell peppers, broccoli (for C), nuts, seeds, spinach (for E), and beans, lentils, and seeds (for zinc).
Vitamin D and zinc also support immune health and hormonal balance—key for consistent training and recovery. Vitamin D can be found in fortified plant milks, sun-exposed mushrooms, and supplements as needed.
In my experience, I’ve had more energy to pursue multiple sports—including weightlifting, dance, and hiking—on a plant-based diet than I did on an omnivorous one. Although I tracked my macronutrients more rigorously on an omnivorous diet, I’ve found it easier to reach my strength, stamina, and aesthetic goals by prioritizing nutrient-dense, plant-based foods. I attribute this to getting adequate macronutrients alongside a significantly higher intake of micronutrients. The boost in vitamins and minerals has also enhanced my focus throughout the day.
What About B12?
Contrary to popular belief, meat itself does not naturally contain high levels of B vitamins; rather, it’s produced by microbes and added to animal feed in industrial farming. This means most people consuming meat get B12 that was supplemented earlier in the food chain.
Fortified foods such as nutritional yeast provide a direct, reliable source for vegans.
Increased Immunity
Since going vegan, I rarely get sick and recover quickly when I do. I feel more energized and no longer experience the frequent colds I used to. Whether it’s due to increased vitamin C, zinc, antioxidants, or overall nutrient density, the shift has been profound.
And the data backs it up: A 2021 study in BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health found that people on plant-based diets had a 73% lower risk of moderate-to-severe COVID-19. Researchers attributed this to higher intakes of vitamins, antioxidants, and fiber, which reduce inflammation and boost immune defenses.
How Meat Industry Propaganda Fuels Nutrient Myths and Greenwashing
The enduring myth that vegan diets are nutritionally insufficient is not merely a misunderstanding—it is actively propagated and reinforced by coordinated marketing and lobbying campaigns funded by the meat industry.
This industry exploits a fundamental human instinct: the desire to protect our health and well-being.
By weaponizing legitimate health concerns, the meat sector promotes the narrative that meat is essential for strength, vitality, and overall wellness.
Each year, the meat industry deploys powerful advertisements that positions meat as the primary or exclusive source of vital nutrients such as protein and B vitamins. These campaigns use cultural symbols, linking meat consumption with masculinity, patriotism, tradition, and cultural identity.
Ironically, many nutrients long attributed to meat actually come from supplements administered to animals before slaughter, rather than naturally occurring in the meat itself—as noted above regarding vitamin B12.
Marketing tactics target young demographics and schools by funding educational materials that vilify plant-based alternatives as unnatural or overly processed.
Simultaneously, the industry promotes “net zero” sustainability pledges that omit critical emissions sources like deforestation linked to feed crop production, misleading the public regarding meat’s true environmental costs.
Beyond traditional advertisements, the meat industry has invested tens of millions of dollars into orchestrated misinformation and disinformation campaigns designed to obstruct transitions toward plant-based diets and challenge studies advocating for reduced meat consumption for human and planetary health. This includes providing funding to scholars, research centers, and public relations firms that produce and disseminate messaging aimed at undermining scientific consensus on the environmental and health impacts of meat consumption. For instance, the University of California Davis’s CLEAR Center has received nearly $12.5 million in meat industry funding to challenge studies advocating for reduced meat consumption and to lead campaigns such as #yes2meat.
In 2023 alone, the U.S. meat industry spent over $10 million on political contributions and lobbying. For example, Tyson Foods spent about $1.67 million on federal lobbying in the 2023-2024 cycle; WH Group spent $1.04 million; JBS, $440,000; and the North American Meat Institute, $186,767.
This intensified financial clout coincides with rising scrutiny of meat’s environmental and health impacts, as well as a cultural surge in traditional norms linking meat and dairy consumption to masculinity.
These campaigns create confusion. Many people wrongly believe beef is sustainable through inaccurate sustainability pledges and that plant-based diets are nutritionally lacking. Such misinformation is used to protect industry profits and delay the urgently needed policy reforms to reduce emissions and safeguard public health.
Recognizing this complex propaganda ecosystem is essential to understanding why nutrient deficiency myths persist and empowers people to make informed, health-conscious, and sustainable choices.
Vegan Diets Are Better for the Planet—And That Supports Our Health
Eating plant-based doesn’t just benefit your body—it helps regenerate the systems that sustain all life on Earth. Compared to animal-heavy diets, plant-based eating uses far less land, water, and energy while slashing greenhouse gas emissions.
Studies from Oxford and Harvard show that shifting to plant-based diets can reduce environmental impact by up to 75%, while also lowering risks for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and some cancers.
This shift reduces environmental pressures and restores ecosystems, which in turn provide cleaner air, purer water, and greater climate stability—directly benefiting human health.
It’s a powerful feedback loop: eating plants helps protect ecosystems, and thriving ecosystems support human health in return.
How Plant-Based Diets Restore Natural Systems
Water Cycle Support: Switching to plant-based diets could significantly decrease water use on a global scale. When less water is needed for crops, and less pollution enters rivers, this allows aquifers to recharge, rivers to flow, and ecosystems to recover.
Carbon Cycle and Climate Regulation: Vegan diets could reduce food-related emissions by up to 86% by retiring grazing land and monoculture feed crops to make space for forests and grasslands to regrow. This helps to improve air quality and restore carbon sinks.
Healthy Ecosystems = Healthy Humans: Intact ecosystems filter air and water, regulate temperature, prevent erosion, pollinate crops, and buffer natural disasters. These services reduce disease, support food security, and strengthen community resilience.
Fuel Your Body and the Planet with Plants
Vegan diets deliver both the robust fuel (macronutrients) and essential parts (micronutrients) your body needs—while caring for the Earth. They bust the nutrient deficiency myth by offering a rich spectrum of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants to support muscle performance, collagen production, immunity, and vitality.
By choosing plants, you’re efficiently fueling your body, fine-tuning your health, and creating a better world for everyone. I’ve felt this transformation in my own energy, immunity, and strength—and science backs it up.
Visiting Luvin Arms Animal Sanctuary, a nonprofit refuge for farmed animals, filled me with a complex concoction of emotions including joy, grief, sorrow, and hope. Each animal had a name, a story, a unique personality, and a desire to live. Often, their survival came down to just one person having the courage to speak up, and choose compassion over indifference.
Photo of Lily the pig during my visit to Luvin Arms, taken July 2025
I met Maybell, a cow who had once served the tormenting role of a “Judas cow” in which one cow is used to lead others to slaughter. Maybell had carried out this tormenting task for years until the day it was meant to be her turn. The farmer’s wife, who had formed a unique bond with her, couldn’t go through with it. In an act of rare mercy, she arranged for Maybell to live out her life at Luvin Arms instead.
Other cows had been saved by a truck driver who was transporting calves to be slaughtered for veal. There is an expectation that some calves will die en route, therefore it is common in the veal industry to overload transport cars in order to ensure that the correct number of calves will be slaughtered each day. On this particular trip, all the calves survived which meant that some were considered “extra.” They “excess” calves were scheduled to be returned to the farm, only to be slaughtered later. Unable to stomach their inevitable fate, the driver delivered the “excess” calves to Luvin Arms instead. That single act of conscience changed their lives forever.
As I walked through the sanctuary, I was struck by the stark contrast between the animals’ traumatic pasts and the peaceful lives they now live. Joy welled up in me as I watched pigs play together in sunflower fields and flop onto their sides at my feet, inviting belly rubs just like my dog does at home. It was incredible to witness their capacity to trust and love after surviving the systemic cruelty and abuse of factory farms. At the same time, I felt a deep sorrow for the countless animals who will never get to live the life they deserve.
Lily and Lizzie: The Right to Rescue in Action
Among the many powerful rescue stories I learned, Lily and Lizzie’s particularly stuck out due to their involvement in the historic Smithfield Trial. These two piglets were saved from one of the largest factory farms in the U.S., a facility run by Smithfield Foods in Utah.
In 2017, activists from Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) entered the farm and documented horrifying conditions. They found pigs in metal gestation crates unable to turn around, dead and dying piglets on the floor, and sick animals left without care. Lily and Lizzie were two of the weakest. Rather than leave them behind, the activists carried them out and ended up saving their lives.
This act of “open rescue” is a cornerstone of the animal rights movement. It involves openly entering facilities, documenting conditions, and rescuing animals who would otherwise suffer or die. Activists argue that animals in distress deserve the same emergency protections as humans and pets—and that compassion should override property claims when suffering is involved.
The defense didn’t just highlight animal suffering—it challenged the very idea that these lives could be reduced to property. These persuasive arguments even lead some jurors to make personal changes, such as refusing to eat ham after the trial.
Surveilled Like Criminals: The FBI and Industry Tactics
What came next was chilling. After the rescue, the FBI launched a multi-state search for Lily and Lizzie. They raided two animal sanctuaries—including Luvin Arms—looking for the piglets. They even took ear clippings, without anesthesia, from the pigs to test DNA in an attempt to prove which animals had been “stolen” from Smithfield.
Why would the FBI devote resources to chasing two sick piglets? The answer lies in the growing alliance between law enforcement and the meat industry.
A 2023 exposé by Wired revealed that the Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA)—a powerful industry group—worked directly with the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate to surveil nonviolent animal rights activists like those with DxE. Industry-aligned spies infiltrated activist events, secretly recording and photographing people, then passed intelligence to the FBI. One undercover informant even provided details of group chats, organizing meetings, and travel plans.
The FBI created a dedicated email tip line for industry insiders to report animal activists. Internal documents showed that factory farm operators were encouraged to label activists as potential “bioterror” threats—even when no violence or sabotage occurred.
This isn’t new. Since the early 2000s, federal agencies have labeled eco- and animal rights groups as domestic terrorism threats. Under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) peaceful civil disobedience—such as rescuing animals or documenting abuse—can be prosecuted as terrorism. This legal overreach is part of a larger campaign to silence dissent and criminalize compassion.
Meanwhile, the actual conditions in factory farms, including rampant untreated disease, pollution, and systemic cruelty, continue without consequence.
Why Animal Sanctuaries Matter
Sanctuaries like Luvin Arms are more than places of refuge. They are acts of resistance.
Animal sanctuaries give animals the chance to rebuild trust and learn how to receive affection after being abused. They allow animals to experience life through play, curiosity, and meaningful bonds—experiences they would never have while confined in cages.
Lily and Lizzie found a forever home at Luvin Arms. Lily, who I got to spend more time with during my visit, became a sanctuary ambassador. She is playful, sweet, and deeply affectionate. She formed loving relationships with her pig family and the people who cared for her, showing every visitor what pigs are capable of when given a chance to live their lives freely and fully. She is living proof of a truth the industry hides: pigs are emotionally complex, intelligent, and deserving of care.
Animal sanctuaries also challenge the dominant view that animals exist for human use. They serve as living arguments against speciesism, the belief that lives of certain species inherently matter more than others. Every rescue challenges a system that commodifies life. Every animal is someone, not something.
The Power of Compassion
If you ever doubt that one person can make a difference, remember Maybell’s rescuer. Remember the truck driver who rerouted calves to sanctuary. Remember the activists who risked prison so Lily and Lizzie could live. Lives were saved because someone refused to look away.
Animal lives matter. And the right to rescue reminds us that sometimes, doing the right thing means breaking the rules, because rules are often written to protect cruelty—not compassion.
If you feel moved by the idea of open rescue, I encourage you to visit the Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) website where there are a number of opportunities to support this kind of work or donate.
As the sun swims through the sign of the Crab, we enter a season ruled by the Moon, the celestial body that commands the oceans’ tides. A primordial longing flows through us. We’re drawn to rivers, lakes, beaches, and streams, urging us to return to the planet’s circulatory system: water, the lifeblood of Earth.
Cancer calls us to care for what nourishes us. As sunflowers reach for the sky and peaches swell with sweetness, the gifts of summer rely on the same water we seek for solace, are made of ourselves, and depend on to survive.
But what happens when this essential element is in crisis?
Water stress now affects over 4 billion people for at least one month per year. Climate change, poor water governance, and pollution are diminishing both the quantity and quality of our freshwater reserves. In many parts of the world—including the western U.S., India, the Middle East, and regions of sub-Saharan Africa—demand has begun to outpace supply.
It’s easy to separate the ocean from the stream near your home, or the tap in your kitchen. But they’re part of the same story. Over 80% of ocean pollution originates from land—carried downstream by rivers stripped of their buffers and wetlands polluted by industrial development.
This is why caring for rivers, lakes, and wetlands is also ocean conservation. It’s why holistic water management—across the entire hydrological and industrial supply chain—is essential.
The Hidden Water in Our Consumption
The water supply chain is a vast and intricate system:
Water is drawn from rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and aquifers.
It’s filtered, treated, and conveyed—often through aging, leaky infrastructure—to homes, farms, and factories.
Used water becomes wastewater, which must be captured, cleaned, and either discharged or ideally, reused.
In US cities across Georgia, Illinois, and Michigan, up to 80% of treated water is lost before it even reaches a faucet due to degrading infrastructure. And a far greater share of water is invisible to us, embedded in the products we consume daily.
This is known as virtual water, or more precisely, a product’s water footprint. It measures the total volume of water used across a product’s life cycle—from production to disposal. The average water footprint of a pound of beef is around 1,800 gallons. A single cotton T-shirt? Nearly 3,000 gallons.
To understand these numbers, it helps to break water footprints into three components:
Blue water refers to surface and groundwater from lakes, rivers, and aquifers that is used for irrigation, manufacturing, and household needs. It’s the most visibly extracted and often the most contested.
Green water is the rainwater stored in soil and used by plants. It supports crops and forests and is essential for agriculture that relies on rainfall rather than irrigation.
Grey water, in this context, measures the volume of freshwater needed to assimilate pollutants and restore water quality to safe levels. It’s the hidden cost of contamination—how much clean water must “dilute” the waste we’ve introduced.
When we consider this fuller picture, it becomes clear: water scarcity is not limited to deserts or drought zones. It is built into global trade, stitched into textiles, and woven into the very infrastructure of modern consumption.
Within this tapestry, our choices ripple outward.
Responsible Consumption
A shift toward veganism is not merely dietary—it’s a profound act of water stewardship. Producing plant-based foods generally requires significantly less blue and green water than animal agriculture, which demands irrigation for feed crops and vast volumes for livestock upkeep. By embracing more plant-forward meals, we ease nature’s burden, allowing water to remain in wild places, nourishing ecosystems and communities alike.
The same applies to the clothes we wear. Growing crops like cotton requires significant amounts of blue and green water, while dyeing and processing fabrics contributes to grey water pollution on a massive scale. Yet when we choose reused or recycled textiles, we can avoid unnecessary resource extraction.
Capitalism and the Privatization of Water
To speak of water scarcity as a matter of personal virtue alone is to mistake the tributary for the river. The burden of sustainable consumption, so often placed on individuals, obscures the deeper currents of exploitation that shape our present crises.
Under capitalism, rivers are dammed and diverted, aquifers drained, and watersheds sacrificed at the altar of growth. Market logic privileges extraction over renewal, severing water from the web of life it sustains.
“Capitalism turns material abundance into socially constructed scarcity. No resource—not even water—is exempt from that violent process.” – Meg Hill
Corporations and states, in their quest for capital and control, privatize and siphon water from the commons which leaves communities deprived and ecosystems depleted.
In the U.S., nearly 73 million people rely on private water companies, which often charge rates nearly 60% higher than public utilities. While some claim privatization brings efficiency, many of these companies are less accountable to the public and have been criticized for underinvesting in infrastructure while extracting steady profits from a basic human need.
Meanwhile, financial markets have begun treating water as a speculative asset. In 2020, the CME Group launched a water futures market in California, allowing investors to trade on scarcity itself.
Michael Burry, the investor known for predicting “The Big Short,” has publicly stated that the best way to invest in water is through food production—growing crops in water-rich areas and selling them in water-poor regions—not by buying water rights directly. The growing involvement of private investors in water rights and infrastructure raises concerns about balancing profit with public access, especially as many communities face water shutoffs, contamination, and drought.
Corporate Water Consumption
In many places, water is not a right but a privilege. Its availability is governed not by need, but by wealth, geography, and political power. For example, in Mesa, Arizona, a desert city facing prolonged drought, Meta and Google have built massive data centers that rely on millions of gallons of potable water daily for cooling. These facilities can use as much as 4 million gallons per day, which is enough to supply water to tens of thousands of people. Residents and tribal groups are left scrambling to secure remaining resources, highlighting how access to clean water is granted to those with leverage, not need.
This is not an anomaly. Across the world—from avocado exporters in water-privatized Chile, where entire rivers are diverted to serve export markets, to Coca-Cola bottling plants in India that have drained local aquifers and left surrounding villages parched—access to water increasingly flows toward corporate greed, not ecological need or human rights. This global economic order, built on the extraction of “cheap nature,” externalizes its costs onto the most vulnerable. Through these examples we can see that the ultra-wealthy are positioning themselves to profit from water while millions face shutoffs, contamination, and drought reveals the brutal logic of commodification: water flows not toward life, but toward capital. Those least responsible for water degradation often suffer its gravest consequences.
Water as a Weapon of War
Water injustice also takes political and colonial forms, with one of the most extreme examples occurring in Palestine, where control over water is wielded as a tool of occupation and exclusion. These layers of oppression deepen the global struggle for water justice and remind us that water is inseparable from broader fights for freedom and dignity.
Water Justice Advocacy
Yet acknowledging these systems is not to surrender. Our choices—how we nourish ourselves, how we dress, how we show up for what we believe in—still create ripples in the current.
Water carries us across oceans, through summers, and through survival itself. To honor water is to protect what sustains us. Not just in moments of drought or disaster—but daily, collectively, deliberately.
This means rejecting the myth of limitless extraction and embracing an ethic of reciprocity. True transformation won’t come from consumer virtue alone. It demands systemic accountability, collective action, and a reimagining of our relationship with water—and with one another.
We must advocate for public water stewardship, invest in resilient infrastructure, and support movements fighting for environmental and social justice. Because water is not a commodity. It is a life source. A right. And its fate is inseparable from our own.
As we reflect on Juneteenth and its legacy of freedom, we must also reckon with the ways systemic racism still permeates our society—especially in how we prepare for and respond to climate disasters. Today, one of the most egregious examples of this injustice is playing out in real time: while the federal government dismantles environmental protections and disaster infrastructure, it increasingly relies on the underpaid, or often unpaid, labor of incarcerated people—disproportionately Black and brown—to fight wildfires. This is not just a policy failure; it is a modern form of environmental slavery.
Climate change has intensified the severity and frequency of wildfires across the United States. Over the past 40 years, the average number of acres of forested land consumed by wildfires each year in the United States has increased by 1,000%.
Rather than addressing this crisis with the urgency it deserves, the Trump administration has actively undermined the nation’s ability to prevent and respond to climate disasters by:
Defunding Disaster Infrastructure: Trump has pushed to phase out FEMA, shifting responsibility to under-resourced state governments.
Withdrawal from Climate Agreements: Exiting the Paris Agreement and cutting $3.7 billion in clean energy and carbon capture funding—including California decarbonization projects—further isolates the U.S. from global climate efforts and abandons marginalized communities to worsening environmental risks.
Unequal Disaster Aid: FEMA’s funding formulas often require local cost-sharing, leaving low-income communities behind. Studies show that as the proportion of people of color increases in a region, the amount of federal disaster aid tends to decrease.
The Rise of Exploitative Prison Labor
As federal climate infrastructure erodes, the state turns to prisons—not prevention. In California and beyond, incarcerated people are increasingly relied upon to fill the labor gap in wildfire response. These individuals—often Black or brown—are paid as little as $1 a day, if anything, to perform life-threatening work without proper training, gear, or protections.
This isn’t rehabilitation or opportunity. It’s exploitation. Incarcerated firefighters are frequently barred from post-release employment in the very field they risked their lives to serve. They are often denied parole, early release, or livable wages. Meanwhile, the state profits from their labor during climate disasters caused in part by the very same policies that left their communities unprotected.
This system is not new. It is a direct continuation of America’s long history of racialized labor exploitation. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime—and this loophole has been systemically weaponized to maintain racial hierarchies through incarceration. For example, Black Americans—just 13% of the U.S. population—make up 37% of the prison population. Over 80% of arrests are for low-level, nonviolent offenses, and Black youth are disproportionately targeted for surveillance and criminalization.
The more fires we face, the more bodies are needed. And because of systemic racism in policing and sentencing, those bodies are overwhelmingly Black and brown. This creates a feedback loop: environmental neglect feeds incarceration, and incarceration becomes a substitute for climate policy.
The same communities that are over-policed, under resourced, and left behind in public health planning are then called upon to clean up the very disasters they were never protected from in the first place.
This is not just an environmental issue—it is a racial and human rights crisis.
Why This Matters for Juneteenth
Juneteenth commemorates the day when enslaved people in Texas finally learned of their freedom—two and a half years after emancipation was declared. It is a day of resistance, celebration, and reckoning. But it is also a reminder: freedom was delayed, and it remains incomplete.
In 2025, Black Americans are still being forced into unpaid labor under deadly conditions. Still disproportionately policed and imprisoned. Still left out of disaster response while being asked to carry it on their backs.
To honor Juneteenth is to demand more than symbolic freedom. It is to fight for a future where Black communities are not over-policed, over-incarcerated, or overexploited—but are protected, resourced, and central to our vision of a world that is prioritizes peace and prosperity for people and the planet.
