I consciously decided to become a vegetarian my freshman year of high school after watching several documentaries about the meat industry. My young innocent self was horrified by the films’ portrayal of the meat industry’s inhumane treatment of both the animals and the workers that it employed. At the time, my decision was based off of ethical and social justice reasoning, but since then I have begun to focus more on the environmental impacts- such as deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and pollution- of the meat industry. I believe this dimension has been severely under argued in predominant vegetarian arguments.
This is what my solutions project is focused on, the utility (or uselessness) of vegetarianism as a means of fighting against the meat industry’s environmental degradation, not as an ethical solution. I want to research if this individual action actually has an impact, or if it is just a means to placate individual’s environmental guilt. I predict it will be in between- neither a pacifier nor a panacea. And if it is one or the either or neither, how should people react to that? Is it still logical to become a vegetarian as a means to commit oneself to environmentalism, is that futile and energy should be shifted to more useful solutions?
ENVS has taught me to be skeptical of every clichéd environmental idea that I was fed in my life, vegetarianism is one of those platitudes. We read about individual action, and its potential flaws, even specifically about food politics and how individual action discourse can have negative repercussions on the complex work that is going on. But it also makes me wonder if individual action can actually be a positive individual step, even if it is just an incremental one.