 Hello, hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Today with us, we have two and hopefully three great speakers that I'm going to announce pretty soon. I'm Dushan Pajovic, I'm the coordinator of Green New Deal for Europe Campaign for DM25. And welcome to our session where we are going to host progressive ideas you won't hear anywhere else, and especially not on COP26, which turned out to be a big flop. So let me introduce our speakers first. With us here today, we have Dr. Steven Best, who is an award-winning writer, noted international speaker, public intellectual and seasoned activist with decades of experience in diverse political movements. He's associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas El Paso and Best has published 14 books and over 200 articles and reviews on wide range of topics. He was a co-founder of the Animal Liberation Front Press Office, a co-editor of two key volumes on animal and virtual liberation and the founder of Critical Animal Studies. For his uncompromising advocacy of total liberation, humans, animals and the earth, Best has been denounced as an eco-terrorist before the US Congress abandoned from the UK for life. In his opposition to abstract terrorizing, divorced from the urgent ecological and social issues of the day, Best aspires to show what philosophy means in a world of crisis. Thank you very much, Steve, for being here with us today. Now our second speaker, Anita Krines, who is a co-founder of Toronto Big Save and executive director of the Global Animal Save Movement. The groups use a law-based community organizing approach to mobilize activists to bear witness to animals at front gates of slaughterhouses. In 2019, Animal Save Movement expanded to include youth climate save, climate save and health save movements, moving the group's focus beyond animal videos to include campaigns such as Plant Based Treaty Initiative and Stop Animal Gifting Campaign. Anita holds a PhD in political science and has taught university courses on social movement strategies and is a follower of Leo Tolstoy and Gandhi's philosophy of love and non-violence. Thank you, Anita, for being with us. Our third speaker, who is hopefully going to join us soon, is from the Animal Party for the Animals Netherlands. And Christine Tennyson studied history at Leiden University from 2012 to 2014. She was press secretary for the Party for the Animals Fraction in the House of Representatives. Since 24th March of 2014, she has been a member of municipal council of the Hague and member of senate of Netherlands for 2018 to 2021. She was the youngest member of that senate session. Like I said, hopefully Christine is going to join us, but let's kick off this important session by saying that we demand justice for all beings, animals, non-human animals, humans and the earth itself. So because we assume that non-vegan leftists and non-animal liberation-orientated leftists are joining us, are watching us, sorry, why do you think that animal liberation is important? What would you say to the non-animal liberation-orientated leftists? Steve, maybe we can start with you and then Anita can add. Please feel free to take as much time as you need because this question is the central point of the event probably. Sure. All right, thank you. It's really terrific to be here. This is a great program. And I appreciate the enlightening thinking behind it. So the question is, should we include animals in the GMD or any particular progressive program? And the answer is another equivocal yes. We can and we should and we must include animals in any truly progressive politics. Now, the traditional approach on the left is to disparage the importance of the animal question or just ignore it all together. And I argue that this question needs to be elevated to a place of central importance. In our politics of thinking and our practice. I should say up front that I have much personal experience with this issue in my own personal and political evolution, starting off as a Marxist, becoming a vegetarian against my will, having kind of an epiphany or a religious experience, eating a double cheeseburger and that flipped me immediately. And I worked in both human and animal rights communities and I recognize that they devalued each other, each other, usually for bad reasons. But some people, like the three of us, I guess do have feet in both the communities. And we know how hard it is to get one community to talk to the other. So for instance, one day I would try to get leftist to acknowledge animal rights and maybe even attend a vegan dinner. And the next day after that, I would argue with a vegan animal liberationist about the importance for radical social theory of being involved in a political movement and not just making this a personal or a health issue by being a vegan. So I came to see that these two worlds need to come together and certainly environmentalists too. And I had equal problems trying to talk and work with their environmental camps. Now the progressives must engage animal issues for two key reasons that I'll focus on today. First of course is the moral issue. And second of course is the environmental issue where we recognize that the role that animal exploitation plays, factory farming in particular, plays in every environmental problem we have very much in the climate change. I just want to say something quick about animal studies and radical animal studies, which is a politicization of this. It's not a single issue matter at all. It's the social, political, radical issue at heart. And I want to just mention the concept what I call the animal standpoint. And here my argument is that there are many perspectives to look at history. A Marxist perspective is Ronald Feminist perspective is another race perspective is yet another. And they all illuminate really important things about history, certainly for me, the Marxist of viewpoint had much to say. And Marx said that history is a riddle and that his theoretical framework will resolve that riddle. Well, I don't think it can resolve that riddle or any other perspective alone, unless it also has the animal standpoint. And if we look historically at the way that humans interact with animals, sometimes benevolently, mostly in exploitative ways, we can understand history in a way that no other viewpoint can illuminate. And so this is an essential theoretical and methodological perspective on history. I'll give you one example. And this is the social construction of hierarchy and domination of one group over another. I would say arguably this has its roots in speciesism. The, of course, the discriminatory viewpoint that the humans are superior to animals for one particular reason or another. If we want to understand the underlying logic of social hierarchies and polar relations, I think we have to grasp the long history of human domination over non-human animals and how speciesism informs other modes of social power. I think speciesism provided the prototype for hierarchical domination and a battery, a range of tactics and technologies of control. Because humans have traditionally, since they're certainly the Western tradition, define their essence, their nature, their identity as rational beings. And that is in opposition to non-human animals and basically forgetting that till we are animals and which they erroneously define as irrational. So that is entirely devoid. Animals are entirely devoid of the qualities that we deem to be human, which make us unique and therefore separate from other forms of life. Now once animals became the measure of alterity and the irrational, they are the irrational, the non-rational. And that is the contrast to the rational essence of humanity. It was just a short step to begin viewing different exotic dark skinned peoples as brutes, beasts, savages, women, the mentally ill, anyone that didn't fit the category of rational and normal. Got put into the category of the non-rational. And they got reduced, in other words, to the moral basement. And the main group in the moral basement is animals. So if we can somehow define animals as non-rational and non-human and devoid of reason or complexity, which they are not, as recent science tells us and very persuasive evidence. So if we can put animals in the moral basement, and say that's where there's no moral value because they're non-rational, all we gotta do is drag any other group into that basement we want and then treat them like animals, reduce them to animals. Now if we had not put animals in the moral basement in the first place, there would be no category to stigmatize and exploit these other people as some kind of animality, Bruce, beasts, savages or something else. Now the animal standpoint also is going to reveal, I think the root causes of the climate crisis and I'll say some things about that. But let me get onto the moral argument real quick. Philosophers like to make this very complicated, I don't. I think the moral argument for animal rights or animal liberation is pretty simple in essence. It's what I would call an analogical argument. It's based on an analogy that depends on the substantive life traits and conditions that humans share with other animals. And at root, the argument for animal rights is if we humans have rights, animals have rights for the same reason, and to deny them rights is to be logically inconsistent and therefore to undermine our own case for rights in some significant way. So let me remind everyone of the obvious that we are animals, we are advanced apes with sophisticated forms of thinking, technology, and culture, all of which originated in and is impossible without a pre-existing biological and social basis in animal communities. We didn't get our qualities from nowhere. So that means we have important commonalities with other animals. And the argument for animal rights or animal liberation states in essence then that these commonalities are morally significant. And to think otherwise is to express a form of discrimination, bias, and prejudice dominant in Western culture since at least ancient Greece. And that is speciesism. It's really the last remaining socially acceptable presence, discrimination, form of discrimination. The last socially accepted form of discrimination certainly amongst the left, which unfortunately has been influenced by this traditional speciesism just as much as anybody else. And I know it's again from experience. Now speciesism is rooted in two fallacies. One that only human beings are rational or intelligent beings and animals are just dumb brutes. Science tells us that they are sophisticated. They are complex in their emotions, their feelings, their ability to think and analyze the world in their ways. And there are social interactions with another. They're remarkably complex and interesting. And it's just we who are too stupid to understand that. So that's the first premise of speciesism, that only we are rational or intelligent beings. And the second premise is the possession of rationality alone qualifies for superior moral status and privileges over so-called non-rational human beings. Now, isn't that a nice coincidence that because we take ourselves by definition to be rational beings, almost sapiens, that we elevate rationality to be the supreme moral arbiter? Well, what if giraffes legislated morality? That all of us short-naked people would be in some very serious trouble. In the 19th century, a utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, made a very partial reply to this rationalistic argument. And then I quote him, you might be familiar with this quote. It gets right to the heart of the matter and cuts through all the bullshit really in a one sentence or so. And he said, the question is not, can animals reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer? And why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive beings? So that's a bottom line argument for species equality that proclaims sentience, not reason, as the necessary and sufficient condition for what we need to have rights. And that goes against the entire philosophical tradition from Aristotle to Kant, all the rationalists who had this really weak, essentialist definition of humans, and Nietzsche and Freud and many others, and certainly contemporary science that show us how false this definition is. Now, of course, humans are different from other animal species. The definition of those species is to be something unique from other forms of life. It's pathological. All humans are different from one another. But that fact does not give one human more rights or value than the other. The point is that we can acknowledge factual differences without thinking that they are morally relevant. So yes, we have differences with animals. These are factual differences, but are they morally relevant? Do they really matter? Are they as important as we think they are? I would say no. And I would also say that we should not focus on our differences, but we should focus on our commonalities. We all are sentient. We all experience pain and suffering. We all have preferences. No one wants to be caged, tortured, or killed or denied freedom of movement and happiness of life. Our most basic moral intuition is that it's wrong to cause another being pain. And if pain is pain and suffering is suffering, then when I must ask, when is it necessary to cause pain of suffering to another living being? And the answer is almost never. Simply because they lack rationality? Well, on that criteria, and many humans would not have rights either, because I think we're a very irrational species, where after all destroying our planet. Now, I showed that I think species is only strongly analogous to racism and sexism. They're hierarchical systems of domination. They involve a dualistic separation of one thing is radically different from the other. Men from women, whites from people of color, humans from animals. And it's the same logic of domination in each case. And we ought not to be particular about which prejudices we accept and which we reject, because so many people, I'm against racism, I'm against sexism, pass me that hamburger. As hopefully enlightened people, we ought to throw out all forms of prejudice and discrimination into the trash bin of history and not accept our favorite form of discrimination. I think that we are enlightened, egalitarian people. Now, traditionally, the left has been behind the moral and political curve for more advanced movements. This was true in the 19th and 20th century, when Marxists ignored issues such as gender and race. It's true in the 1960s, when socialists thought environmentalism was a bourgeois concern. And now it is all true, true with many other progressive and leftists. And they're used for animal rights and veganism. For the most part, they just don't get it. And just as it once did with environmental issues, the left has rejected animal rights issues as bourgeois or merely reformist or single issue. And just sometimes they are, but they remain blind to the myriad of severe social and environmental problems caused by things like factory farming and meat consumption. Now, speciesism in theory informs speciesism in practice, including the globalized industrial system that kills over 70 billion land animals a day. That's more than 200 million victims killed each day. And there's really no other word for this. This is an animal holocaust. And it's a gigantic stain on human history. The barbarities that we inflict on animals ought to be a profound concern for anyone who claims they have compassion and empathy and moral values. Here in the United States in the 1960s, Martin Luther King, the great humanist, articulated a vision of universal humanism and equality when he denounced tribalism. And he advocated what he called a world house no longer divided by hatred and prejudice. And it's a beautiful vision, this humanistic utopia, but missing a qualitative leap to another realm that we must include. And that is animals. We must bring animals into the moral community of concern. And he left them out as so many other eloquent humanists have. But this world house in any system is still a goddamn slaughterhouse so long as we exploit billions of animals every year for human food consumption. So long as we think that our palate tastes merit the death of another being. And so long as we turn our eye to the environmental cost of eating our meat. So lettuce will not truly change anything fundamental about that system. And by extension other systems until left thought like enlightened anthropocentrism in the environment, we must undergo a Copernican revolution. And it's a bit spiritual, if I might say. And that is the recognition that the earth does not belong to us, but rather we belong to the earth. And we must conduct ourselves as respectful citizens in the planetary eco community. We must not weight and pillage the habitats of other animals and put them on the torture racks of suffering for our really unjustifiable tastes. Now animals aren't the only victim of this Holocaust perpetuated by the global meat and dairy industry. What I call the global meat and dairy complex they go together. This is deadly serious for us as well for our ability to create peaceful and sustainable societies. But can I identify one problem? One problem at the center of some of our most critical social and environmental crises. And I could not choose capitalism because that would be first. And it's grower dialogic, which is unsustainable. This one problem would be the global agricultural system and its focus on meat production. The math water. We can go back to that in the next questions. Thank you. Thank you. This review has been really thorough and great. I couldn't agree more. Anita, do you have something to add from the perspective of civil society and social movement? Do I? I'm happy to leave it in your hand. Okay, thank you. That was like, yeah, very profound and I agree completely. That was an incredible analysis. Just from my own journey and perspective with the animal safe movement, we've been very influenced by Tolstoy and Gandhi and his approach, which is deontology or doing the right thing in the present or focusing on duties. And when you're bearing witness to animals at slaughterhouses, your sense of accountability is much higher than if you're watching a film. A film can make you do the right thing and not harm or exploit animals and become vegan. And an activist. But when you're in the presence of the victims, it's profoundly transformative. And you realize how the scale of the problem and also your responsibility and the community's responsibility to stop these death camps. So one of the things that we found is when we bear witness, a lot of the focus is on individual duty. And when we started the campaigns, we didn't focus too much on system change. We focused on just like conscientious objection to the outrage of slaughterhouses and animal exploitation. And people like Tolstoy and Gandhi, they always said, well, the first step in social change is looking at yourself, like self-perfection before trying to change society. And I think there are some lessons in that. And I think when you look at environmental groups today, they like to just say, it's all about system change. Don't talk about consumers. Don't talk about individual change. It's actually both in sociology and other disciplines. We talk about agency and structure. And to change a system, you need both agents to act morally, be conscientious objectors, create a social movement, create bottom-up pressure, people power. There's a whole field of theory about that. And then you also need to just focus on advocacy and system change. And so that's something that we want to bring to the table when we're moving beyond just doing vigils. So as Dushan mentioned, animal-saving movement is now broadening to climate and health and other social and environmental issues. And we recently launched a campaign called Plant-Based Treaty. And in it, we want to focus on individual change and system change. And it arose after beating with Sephora Berman. She's with Stand Earth. She was Greenpeace International's energy campaigner. She's a hero of mine. Like in the 90s, I was part of the environmental movement and I got arrested in civil disobedience and old growth rainforest campaigns in Clackwood Sound. It's in Vancouver Island and the Great Bear Rainforest, which is the mid-coastal part of British Columbia. And we were just trying to protect these thousand-year-old trees and these, you know, that were homes to many species, including many endangered species. And so I knew her in the 90s. And then I contacted her in April with Janelle, who's Genesis Butler's mom. Genesis Butler, if you don't know, is a social media influencer on climate and veganism. And Nicola, our climate communications person with our movement. And we asked her, like, okay, how do we get animal agriculture on the agenda in these climate talks? And she goes, well, I've been watching animal rights groups for decades and I still don't know what you want. It's just like, go vegan. Because she said, governments are the most powerful actors. You really know how to target governments. And then she said, oh, then she showed us the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty or fossil fuel treaty. This was in April of this year. And then we looked at it and we go, oh, okay, well, let's create a plant-based treaty. So we just copied their model. Because as you know, environmental, the environmental movement has thousands of times more resources than animal rights, the animal rights movement. So they have a very sophisticated model of bottom-up pressure, where they're trying to get million individuals, 10,000 groups, businesses, 50 cities to endorse to create bottom-up pressure for system change. You know, for national governments to negotiate a global fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. So when you look at their model, it's a lot of system change, but we wanted to adapt it because we believe in individual change and system change. So, and we are going to try to inject that into the debate because that's one of the ways they try to keep us out, the environmental movement. Because they say, it's not about consumers. It's not, you know, it's not about, you know, what you eat as an individual. It's about system change and policy change. So anyways, that's one of the challenges that we have. In our plant-based treaty, we made it science-based, but it's also very, it's very interesting because the science very much overlaps, I would say, completely with the ethics. And I agree with what Professor Best said. It's like the, you know, sort of the world view that we need is that we're part of this earth. We, you know, we're not, we're, you know, a very holistic ecological point of view where, and that focuses on interdependence. And Tolstoy said, in a really beautiful short moral tale that he wrote called King Asardum of Assyria. It's a very Buddhist tale and he says, when you wish to harm others, you really do evil to yourself. And I think if you look at the science, when, you know, with us harming pigs, cows, chickens, fish, all the other different animals, us putting, you know, pigs in gas chambers, you know, where they suffocate with carbon dioxide poison, the incredible irony is that, you know, we're injecting this CO2 and we are going to suffocate from, you know, CO2 the way we're heading. You know, there could be runaway climate change. So, yeah. So, you know, have we made some progress? Like with, you know, these two communities, environmental and animal rights or climate justice or social justice and animal rights, there have been some inroads and I agree with Professor Best that we, it's both communities that have to move towards each other. Like a lot of animal rights communities might have, might not be aware of social justice. There might be, you know, or not, there's a lot of learning that needs to take place in that community as well. Although, and I agree with Professor Best that in general, the left is more, you know, aware of, you know, just generally the different sort of moral issues there. In different communities. But, but yeah. So I think there are some indications of progress. Like for example, because of all the slaughterhouses, slaughterhouse workers that died or were hospitalized because of COVID, it raised awareness with a lot of sort of people on the left or a lot of liberals about the problems with slaughterhouses. You know, unions were calling for slaughterhouses to be shut down in Alberta, Canada, where I live. Cargill has a huge cow slaughterhouse and there, and the union and workers asked that the slaughterhouse be shut down. The Cargill, one of the biggest multinationals that works on animal, that produces animal feed and slaughterhouses. They worked with the Alberta government and prevented the slaughterhouse from being shut down. So they kept it open. So, you know, killed more workers, there was more hospitalization. And it became the COVID epicenter in Canada. And a lot of slaughterhouses, that was true for a lot of slaughterhouses in the United States and Europe all over the world. These were issues. And it's like marginalized communities that are exploited to work in slaughterhouses. So like clearly there, and a lot of people on the left, including in the US politics began to listen to the issues that we've brought forward. So there is that important intersection of worker rights. And historically, there's been some awareness, like Ray Rogers, who developed killer co-campaign, very progressive vegetarian. He worked with slaughterhouse unions in the 80s when Reagan was trying to destroy the different unions in the airline sector and slaughterhouses and so forth. He was just generally had a campaign against unionization in the private sector and the public sector. But so there has been some recognition historically, like Ray Rogers, why are you vegetarian, yet you're working with unions for slaughterhouse workers? So it's like, obviously those are tricky issues there. But I guess the general argument is increase the laws and the regulations against that industry. So that it can't, it's wrong to have it completely unregulated. And they're completely, they're subsidized, which means that people consume more meat, dairy and eggs for animal flesh. And we have to be careful with the species language as well. But yeah, so anyways, I agree with what Professor Bess said. And yeah, we've had some interesting experiences over time. And we think there's more traction now than ever for our issues. We see it in the climate field. Let me just emphasize the plan-based treaty campaign, which you mentioned, it has been also endorsed by DM25. And this is a call for our viewers to endorse it themselves. And we are working towards making plan-based treaty demands into the policy. So if you'd like to work with us on that, our moderator is going to attach a link in the chat for joining our movement. Thank you, it means a lot. Yes, sorry, again, Professor Bess, for interrupting you previously. It's because I have this as the next question. What's your take on COP26? As you know, they mentioned methane pledge to cut by 30% methane emissions with no word about animal agriculture. And they said that they are going to stop deforestation and they said it also in 2014, though, but nothing happened. And even in that, we don't see anything about animal agriculture. There has been a leak document which shows that animal agriculture has been buying off people and lobbying not to be present in the reports. So my question is, is COP26 a lost chance or did you not have high hopes in the first place? What's your take, Professor? We've been talking and talking for decades about this. There have been so many conferences and promises that go nowhere. So this will never change until we have really forced social movements. And I'm surprised, I'm so proud of the people involved in this. But I don't know why these movements aren't strong. I don't know why there aren't revolutions in the street. I don't know why animal groups are not exploiting the climate crisis more to promote veganism and the animal question. I do think this is getting better amongst the left. I think we're finally starting to see what a disaster meat eating is for the planet. And so this is a total liberation issue where we understand the interconnections. And the basic point here is what we do to animals, we do to ourselves, we do to ourselves comes back to us and nothing is more obvious than the environmental impact of meat consumption. Everybody knows that the giant fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil is a huge contributor to a climate change. But the world's top five meat and dairy companies emit the same amount of greenhouse gases as ExxonMobil. A recent study showed another really astonishing fact. And that is that the 20 top livestock companies together emit more client greenhouse gases than Germany, the UK, or France. So animal products are responsible for about 60% of all food related emissions. They account for 18% of greenhouse gases, which is more than the entire transportation sector, which is about 14%. And we pay a lot of attention to the problem of carbon dioxide, but of course methane gas is about 37 times more potent. And cows and other ruminant animals emit 30% of the world's methane. And if we go on to look at how many resources are needed to feed this system of killing animals for food consumption, how much land is stripped, how many rainforests are chopped down, how many indigenous people are affected consequently, how many social conflicts this all creates. We start to see even more connections. And it's really, I said, it's the one issue. If we can greatly scale back on meat production, ideally eliminated, we will make so much progress. Now we're starting to see this in some movements. For instance, in October, just in October of this year, a group of leading scientists warned that meat production must be reduced by 50% to meet the goals of the Paris Accord. And they advocated replacing this with foods that are more environmentally friendly and minimize public health problems. And that of course would be plant-based foods. Another study found that if the US slash meat consumption in half and switch to eating more plant-based foods, the result would be a 35% decrease in US diet-related emissions by 2030. In other words, this is one of the most powerful things that we can do for the environment is to reduce or eliminate our meat consumption. Let me just give one more example. Progressive and environmental groups are catching on. And I think I'm really happy to see this as part of your programs because they need to be. And we need to put a new, we need radical new social institutions, but we also need a whole new agricultural system. And this must be at the forefront of our programs and politics. For instance, in 2018, a Greenpeace called for a global reduction of 50% in the reduction of 50% in our consumption of animal foods by 2050. And they envisioned a system of ecological farming that would promote animal welfare and be much less harmful to the environment. That's nice. And I think that would be a great step forward, but it's morally problematic because it's just polishing the chains of animal slavery. And what an animal liberation is caused for is not the reduction in their suffering, but the elimination of their suffering, the elimination of all forms of exploitation, the exploitation of humans, the exploitation of the earth, and the exploitation of animals. And you see that all of these things are connected. So Greenpeace is talking about animal welfareism and minimizing the amount of suffering we cause animals. We don't talk about minimizing the suffering in gulags or in Auschwitz, and we shouldn't talk about minimizing it in factory farms. And I get that this would be a tremendous step forward for reducing the impact of greenhouse gases on the environment. But we really need to take that qualitative leap forward to position while we recognize each other as equals in the bio community and really get in touch more with values of compassion for every sentient life, which are fundamental to Eastern religions, but not to ours. And let me say that in our contemporary framework that animal rights and animal liberation, leftists, I don't think understand this. It involves the deepening and logical evolution of left progressive values. We have the values of non-discrimination, anti-hierarchy, inclusiveness, community, rights, and autonomy. And we also claim to represent the weakest and the most exploited people or beings, the most vulnerable members of our society. I don't know whose weakest are more exploited than animals. And I consider them members of our society and our eco-community. So other foreign, it might strike some. Animal rights is in fact a logical growth and outcome of left progressive values. And we have a lot to say about climate change and I hope that we can make a greater impact in this. Thanks, Steve. Yeah, let's have a conversation about it. First, let me just emphasize that our viewers can post questions in the comments and in the end we are going to have a small Q&A session. Anita, you were at the forefront of the COP26. What are the news from there? Yeah, I'm in Toronto so I wasn't there. But we had team members from Britain and some from Europe that went to COP. And we had a giant cow that said, stop animal farming. And I just want to share the image because I think this image has value. The Getty image actually has value added. I don't know, let me just share screen. There we go. So here it is. So you see the stop animal farming. It has the world map on it. And the backdrop is the conference centre. So I think I just think it's a great image. So thank you. Yeah, so we did some direct action on the streets. We joined the march. We developed the plant-based treaty guide to Glasgow and with all the vegan restaurants circulated that. We were at Strathclyde University. There was a conference of the youth which was just before COP and Greta showed up there one day. So we were there giving out samples and signing up people to endorse the plant-based treaty. We have 18 members of parliament in England that have been endorsed the plant-based treaty and they're proposing or support the plant-based treaty and are calling for an early day motion to debate the plant-based treaty and the role of animal agriculture in the UK parliament. One of the things we're doing with the plant-based treaty is it's about individual change, like the plant-based guide to Glasgow. But it's about system change as well and we're very much targeting governments. We have email actions that you can take on the website. The website is plant-basedtreaty.org and you can write to your city councillor and mayor and ask them to the city to endorse. So what we're trying to do is create bottom-up pressure on national governments to negotiate a global treaty. So we're trying to get 50 cities and we already got a couple of cities endorsing. Boynton Beach in Florida and Rosario in Argentina. We're looking at some cities in England that have a lot of green members. So like Edinburgh, Glasgow, Brighton, Bristol, and a few others. I just wanted to add to some of the points that Professor Best made. So there's this agreement, as you mentioned, Dushan to Methane Pledge to reduce methane emissions from, I think it was 2020 levels by 30% by 2030. It's quite meaningless. The target, it's just a target and it's an inappropriate target. If you look at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sixth assessment, which came out in August, that's the place to go. A lot of the numbers are old. Do not look at old numbers from 20 years ago about FAO. Those are old numbers. Look at the IPCC sixth assessment because it's much worse than it was before. So there are two IPCC vegan scientists that we're consulting with. Professor Danny Harvey at the Department of Geography, University of Toronto, and Dr. Peter Carter, Canadian doctor in British Columbia. He's amazing. They're both amazing. Basically, Professor Danny Harvey said, in order to meet the Paris Accord targets, methane would have to be cut by 75% according to the IPCC sixth assessment. And he showed us which graphs in that assessment that show that. This goal of cutting emissions by 30%, it's quite meaningless by 2030. It's like, we need to do that now, cut by 75%, not to have these long-term goals of minimal goals. Absolutely meaningless. There is a methane emergency. And as Professor Bess mentioned, like the global warming potential of methane and nitrous oxide are much higher than carbon dioxide. They're short-lived gases. So if you deal with them, you can help avert a huge climate catastrophe, crossing tipping points, possible runaway climate change. So we have this huge methane emergency. According to the IPCC sixth assessment, 30% of methane emissions come from animal agriculture. So there's no way you're going to get the 75% reduction of methane now without quickly phasing out animal agriculture and fossil fuels. That's the conclusion of Dr. Peter Carter. We need to quickly phase out those two industries. And the IPCC sixth assessment said we have five years at best to make major changes or we're heading towards climate catastrophe. For us, being at COP was very important. We made a lot of links to progressives and we worked with environmental groups. We're beginning to make those connections. So like we have the endorsements of Friends of the Earth in Hull, not the US. One campaigner said they wouldn't endorse. We have extinction rebellion in some countries that have endorsed. We have Fridays for Future in some countries that endorsed. And then Fridays for Future Digital endorsed. So Greta Thunberg doesn't speak much about it, but as we're getting more Fridays for Future chapters, Fridays for Future Digital, we're hoping that the leadership speaks out. Because she said she is vegan for ethical and climate and environmental reasons, yet is not speaking out generally. We recently got some prominent scientists to endorse. Professor Best mentioned the scientific warning, that letter, which was organized by Professor Bill Ripple. He's a very famous scientist on the West Coast. He endorsed the treaty just now. And we also have George Mombiet, very incredible spokesman for climate and justice. So he just endorsed. So we've got three Nobel laureates. The Fossil Field Treaty has more than 100 Nobel laureates and the Dalai Lama. So we always look to them for like, oh, what do we do next? And there are a guide. The other thing we did during COP is we had four letters, again, copying the Fossil Field Treaty. They have like, so we got an interfaith letter, a youth letter, a scientist letter, and a politicians letter calling for COP to take the major actions and put animal agriculture on the agenda. And that was in terms of the topic of today, that we've never had so much success in reaching out to different communities with so much purpose. Like we should have done that when we were just doing vigils for animals because they deserve, it's a moral baseline. Like they deserve all our support 100%. They deserve us doing proper community organizing and working with all the different communities. But now we're 10 years old, now we're working on Plain Phase Treaty and we're finding it lends itself in a way to community organizing that others understand more than that they did for the animal rights issues we were fighting for, like bearing witness in front of death camps basically. So now because they see the impacts, people feel the impacts of climate change all over the world. Like it's more than ever. And according to Dr. Peter Carter, there's been three mega events and we're going to see more mega events. And he said one, which is associated with animal ag, is that the Amazon is now a net producer of carbon dioxide instead of a sink. That's a huge event. That's like unthinkable. Like in 10, 20, 30 years ago, would anyone have ever even imagined that? And it's happened. The Guardian reported it this summer. Another mega event was the Siberian fires, forest fires. Dr. Peter Carter said that's like melting the permafrost and releasing methane and carbon dioxide. And it's scary and it was unforeseen. And then the third mega event is just the way the Arctic summer ice is disappearing faster. And that would lead to domino effects of like, you know, the, it would affect the conveyor belt, the transatlantic conveyor belt. It would just affect a lot of different like Greenland ice. Because with the melting of the ice, the surface becomes dark and then absorbs more of the heat. And that is like a positive feedback which makes the change worse and faster. So like that's where we're heading into like these positive feedbacks where we don't have control anymore. Like we started it anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, but then at a certain point, nature reacts with positive feedbacks that make the change is not non-linear. Like we were going to see all, it's very scary. And I don't think people realize how huge this issue is. It's truly an existential threat. And we, all of us, we're living in an era where this might be the end. And, you know, and it faster than we had foreseen. So did COP do what it, you know, it was, it was, it was, it was horrible. And they're not responding to the, what it, what the UN secretary general called, you know, red code for humanity. They're not responding to it. And so some of the conclusions from that, like Greta and trying to think there was some other, other institutions that said, basically, we got to do things outside COP and really do the right thing outside COP and create all this pressure. So that hopefully COP eventually negotiates with, you know, and shows some leadership rather than, you know, stalling. Okay. Thanks, Anita. Well, I have multiple questions and we have some questions for the audience. So let's try to be quick regarding the next one. Well, we tried a lot of things to liberate animals and we are pushing from different perspectives. For example, DM 25 now included the abolition of animal agriculture in our green new deal, which is our policy for the movement and also where we have political links, electoral links. We are going to include them in the program, political program itself as well. What do you think are the next steps towards abolition of animal agriculture and other industries that exploit animals? Professor Best, sorry you are muted. Getting the problem of factory farming and understanding its relationship to climate crisis, species extinction, every other major environmental problem, I absolutely think this is critical. And again, I wish animal groups would exploit this. They're in a perfect position to do this. I mean, I really think things are going the wrong way and it's like the scheme shift that needs to turn around. We know that climate emissions are soaring, increasing. And we have a population right now of nearly 8 billion people on the planet. And meat consumption has doubled in 20 years. It's expected to rise another 13% by 2028. So this problem too, the population growth, modernization of countries who want more meat consumption and the production of more meat consumption. This is truly we're heading to a world of something like four degrees warming by the end of the century. And if we see what's happening already at about 1.1 degrees Celsius, what is going to happen to four? It's going to be astonishing. I'm reading a lot right now about human evolution. I find this fascinating. I'm reading very early into our human history. And people might be interested to know that there were many human types and many human ancestors who were hominids and somewhere between apes and humans as they evolved. And we interacted. And somehow about 30,000 years ago, when Neanderthals died, we are the only surviving human species. And there were many. So it makes me wonder what would happen if another species had survived. And we didn't, could easily have not. But I'm struck by how adaptable humans were and how much they outcompeted other human species and other life forms to become the top predator that they are now. And I see that we're not adapting to this problem. And it's not a matter of learning because if you look at every past empire, these empires have all collapsed. And they've collapsed in large part for many causes. But one key cause has been they degraded their environment. And they ran out of resources, food, et cetera. And they collapsed. And we're facing this collapse now, not just of any particular empire, say the U.S. empire, but the human empire. The human empire. Because we lured over this planet in such a way that we have created a new geological epic. I mean, I don't think in historical terms anymore. It's too limited. I have to think in geological terms in epics. And everybody knows that the Holocaust epic is over. We're a witness to it. It's over. This was 10,000 years as epic lasted in geologic time. It's the epic in which agricultural society emerged. It's the epic in which everything we know about human society became true. Everything good and bad. And that epic and that epic is over. The term is problematic, but it tries to mark a new geological break for it now. And that is the Anthropocene. And we are the dominant force in this Anthropocene world. And so no other species has had such an impact on this planet. And so again, we have to adapt, but we're not adapting. It's not a matter of learning from our past mistakes because we have all the knowledge we need. It's a matter of economic and political powers are going to exploit every last fossil fuel in the ground they can are going to take this planet down with them. So it's a matter of social power that has to be overturned. It's an institutional issue. So of course, going vegan is not going to change this issue by itself, but it's we have to join social movements and struggle for radical social change. But yes, we have to connect those structural and personal issues. It is, I think, the most powerful thing that we can do. It's the one thing I know that benefits us and our health. It benefits other animals and it benefits the climate. So you really need to get this onto a mainstream political map. We're failing. We're failing as a species. We're going to fail. And the consequences of failure are not just for our civilization, as we know it, but for all biodiversity and all the webs of life. And nature has always regenerated itself after every extinction crisis. The last one, of course, was 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs were wiped out. Mammals got and knew he was with niche primates evolved and we evolved. But we keep hitting the earth over and over again. That asteroid that hit the earth 65 million years ago, it only hit at once. And life was able to regenerate and re-speciate and biodiversity became greater. But we keep hitting the planet where that meteor that doesn't stop crashing into it. So that's why I think that we are on a fatal collision course with nature. Culture has become elaborated from nature, but in contradiction to nature, we have to harmonize our societies with natural ecosystems. We have to recognize the limits of nature. And God damn it, we've got to overturn this global meat and dairy complex. Cutting meat reduction by 50% as a lot of groups are asking for, that's a good start. But we need to go further morally, strategically, politically. Thank you, Professor Anita. Do you have anything to add to that? No. Okay. We can go straight to the questions from the audience then. I guess this one has been replied actually by Professor Best, but maybe we can give it to Anita then. There was a question saying, and I quote, we should just eat local and stop industrial meat production, go back to small farming and cut down meat intake when our biomass allows for that. Yeah, I would say that this is one of the things we're up against. And in our plant-based treaty, we said no new animal farming. We did not say no new industrial animal farming. And the thing is, I don't think we should grant anyone that privilege or that exception of eating meat when we have 8 billion people, as Professor Best said. If you look at companies like Cargill, they have a strategy that is bypassing industrial animal agriculture in India. So they have partnered, Cargill has partnered with Hepher International, for example, in a project called Hatching Hope. And what they're trying to do is get 100 million people to engage in backyard chickens operations. More than 60 million of those would be in India. They're working with the Indian government, trying to get per capita consumption of chicken and eggs to increase by three and four-fold. They are exploiting plant-based tribal communities going in Odisha, it's the eastern state of India, going in there and offering backyard chicken operations and goat passing, gifting goats. And it's leading to, there's a forest that's a UN protected forest. There are now intrusions in the forest, forest fires. A number of UNESCO forest sites, there's a recent report that showed that they are being burnt. Often the link is because of animal agriculture. So I don't know if you're in the United States or I don't know where this question is coming from. This is the wrong model. We need to completely get away from meat, dairy and eggs, completely. Because it's not sustainable for the world. There are no exceptions. You know, there shouldn't be an exception for Europe or the US or Canada because there are companies like Cargill that are exploiting it. Can you imagine 100 million backyard chicken and increasing chicken per capita chicken and egg consumption? So in the state of Odisha, they've gone into schools and introduced eggs into their lunch program. You know, whereas before they would be eating chickpeas and healthy food, there is now a diabetes epidemic in Indonesia, in India, because these Western companies have gone there and tried to change their diets. If you look at China, Cargill went there for their pilot project with Hatching Hope. You know, China used to be mostly plant-based. India used to be mostly plant-based. Latin America had a very strong plant-based tradition. It's these slaughterhouse companies and these animal feed companies from the West. And so you do need a capitalist sort of imperialist kind of analysis, which shows that these companies are so greedy and selfish and they're like the cigarette tobacco companies where when they're marketed in the West shrinks, they go elsewhere. You know, and you know, unfortunately, this is a story that has been told over and over, whether it's armaments from, you know, World War I and the whole, you know, the story repeats itself of the greedy, you know, capitalism going amok. So we absolutely have to do the right thing. It's not a time for half measures. You know, absolutely not. We have to go completely vegan, plant-based, be a model and an example and start being the problem. Absolutely. Let's not forget about the current COVID crisis. After all, that started from live markets and various forms of animal exploitation. This is a great example of how what we do to animals we do to ourselves and how animal exploitation is an absolute nightmare for human health and for the environment. 75 percent of all of our diseases, including recent diseases like AED, Ebola, et cetera, come from animals. They're called zoonotic diseases. And the exploitation of birds, in particular, creates things like bird flu, which has killed millions of people. So is it really worth it to exploit animals in live markets and even, in fact, reforms, breed pathogens and diseases and release these new pathogens into the environment? Is this the price we want to pay to shut down society to lose millions of lives so that we can sell birds in live markets? And we're destroying the habitat of animals. And so we're coming ever closer contact with animals. And these viruses jump. They jump into our populations. And so we get these viruses because we're invading animal spaces. So this is a total liberation issue. This understands the interconnection between human liberation, animal liberation, and earth liberation. And all of these different systems and communities need to blend together into one holistic, non-exploitative paradigm. Thank you both. This next question can be taken by Professor West, I think, but I'm not sure I fully agree with how it was pronounced. It's easier to sell the idea that meat eating is unhealthy compared to the idea that animals suffer needlessly. Do you see dangers in taking the utilitarian approach to animal rights advocacy? I'm not sure if you are the one taking the utilitarian approach, but here. Yeah, I'm not taking the utilitarian approach because the right-based approach is different. So the utilitarian approach is associated with animal welfareism, which is concerned with the reduction of animal suffering, not the elimination of animal suffering. So we don't want better factory farms or farms of exploiting chickens and other animals for human food consumption. We just need to stop eating animals. And we'd be healthier. Animals would surely be happier, and the environment would be better. There are so many arguments for veganism. The health argument is very powerful. We'll persuade many people because so many of our diseases come from consuming meat and dairy products. They're carcinogenic. They promote heart disease, and just about every major disease that we have stem from meat, dairy-based diet. But other people, you know, they're interested in the environment, and if you tell them the impact of global meat production and consumption on climate change and on the rainforests and on indigenous farmers, that makes sense to them. And then, you know, other people are very concerned about animals and may not know what goes on inside the factory farm, and that will convert them immediately. So we have many perspectives for veganism and for animal liberation. And we need to deploy all of these perspectives, and one will be more persuasive to other people than another. I just started because I had a religious experience eating the double cheeseburger. One time, I was so grossed out by this, and I was about 24. I stopped eating meat, and then I started learning. So I had some moral center inside of me that became awakened somehow against my will. And, you know, we can try to find people's moral centers. You know, that's why I try to appeal to the left, sometimes just as a moral argument, as a consistency argument. You know, why are we against capitalism and exploitation while we're eating chicken and meat? Don't you guys get it? You know, and these are made by gigantic corporations that exploit their workers. And we're consuming their products. We're talking about social chains at McDonald's. Come on. You know, let's make the connections. You know, going back to COVID, I'd like to say one other thing that I think is interesting. Look at how this world has tried to deal with the COVID crisis. Look at how inept this is. Look at how many weaknesses that it exposes in our society. It's a crisis, right? But wait till climate change really hits. Are we prepared to deal with climate change? We can't even deal with COVID. And we're going to deal with climate change with our mass refugees hundreds of millions of people with the collapse of social systems and medical systems. This gives you some indication of how unprepared we are for what's coming. And it's coming quickly. I agree that the various tipping points are going to come together. And you know, when ecosystems collapse, they can collapse immediately. And Baudillard, the French philosopher, he had a great quote. He said, it would be wonderful to be alive at the beginning of the world. But it would also be wonderful to be alive at the end of the world. And he's being ironic, but we are alive at the end of the world. At least at the end of civilization, as we know it. We're witnessing it. We're witnessing a geological epic past before our eyes. We're witnessing the last death gasp of the Holocene epic and this new human dominated epic and what it's going to be like. And we can't even handle COVID. We can't even wear masks without political arguments and political division. Wow. Exactly. Exactly. The next question is from the chat as well from Oranita. What would be your advice when you face backlash when advocating plant-based diets and agriculture? There's one similar question to that which says, I come from Balkans where meat eating is huge and I sometimes face real aggression from me, Peters, for talking about animal rights. So how do you guys usually deal with that? Maybe Anita can start and then we can go to Steve and his chat. This is a real animal friendly conference. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, good questions. Thank you. Yeah, my parents are from the former Yugoslavia or Slovenia. And I understand. Yeah, the cultures change. I think you can use so many different methods to try to convert people. So often people have pointed to documentaries. I myself was converted after seeing the animals film narrated by Julie Christie in the 90s. A lot of people have been converted by watching game changers, house piracy, what the health films like that. So the power of film is enormous that it does change people very quickly. There's earthlings, there's dominion. I mean, those are very profound films. So, you know, most people are, I believe if they're not sociopaths or psychopaths, like they have to take care. So it's a question of how do you get people to watch these films like dominion and earthlings? How do you get people to come to a vigil because it's transformative? So that to me is the challenge. That's why I feel working full time in a social movement is where I need to be because I just feel like that's the mission. How do you get more and more people mobilized to get more people to see this stuff? That's on an individual level, on a systems level. I would suggest that you organize as a community. So engage in community organizing strategies, build a team and then do street actions. We know from Professor Chenoweth that she studied revolution, say, if you get 3.5% of the population mobilized, that's very important in terms of success and also getting majority public opinion. Like you can't just have that. You also need majority public opinion. So there will be a day when we ban, meet dairy and eggs. What I'd suggest to you is just have that goal in mind. Like we're in it to win this and to outlaw these egregious violations of rights of animals. And there are so much progress. You're just influencing people. Hold the screening of one of these films. Organize a group. If you go to Plant-Based Treaty, we're asking people to organize local Plant-Based Treaty teams, try to get their city to endorse, get businesses to endorse. There was a Polish Green MP that endorsed the treaty. He said he was an omnivore, but his son was vegetarian and he knows that going Plant-Based is the right thing. So like 40% of our endorsers are not vegan. We have already over 20,000 endorsers, hundreds of businesses and group. So I think we all need to recognize that we face an existential crisis. And in order to survive, we need to quickly phase out animal egg and fossil fuels. And we just get that narrative out. Now, if I may, the other encouraging thing to see is the increase in plant-based alternatives to meat diet. It's incredible what they're doing when they make plant-based chicken, meat, fish, everything, all the milks, all the cheeses. And they're getting really sophisticated, these products. And some people, I guess you call them flexitarians, are gravitating to these products more and they're becoming more available. And here's a contradiction. Big corporations are pushing these products. And so they're starting to flood markets and all the very popular in England, they're gaining popularity here in the States. So this is an important movement that we can make these alternatives to people and make them available to people. And they taste pretty good. So I wonder why do people eat meat because they like the way it tastes? So if we could make other alternatives that taste just as well, I could give somebody an impossible burger and ask them and just not taste good or like a hamburger, as you recall it, maybe a little too much, they're going to like it. So we should be pushing these plant-based alternatives too. And lots of corporations and lots of animal activist groups are doing this. So this is one promising development, but that's not by itself going to change animal agriculture, but it's a good development. Thank you very much, Boat. We don't have much time left because we have another session after this. So let me ask you, Boat, if you have any final words for our audience. Anita? Yes, thank you. It was such a pleasure being on this panel with Professor Bast and you, Dushan. I would say if you could please go to plant-based-treaty.org and endorse the treaty. I'd invite Professor Bast to be a really great honor for you to endorse it. And I know Dushan already has and DM 25 has, so thank you, DM. You could endorse it as an organization, as a business, as a city. We also have tools on the website, so like how to lobby your city, a draft motion to present to your city. We have email actions that takes a moment, just like send it to your city and ask your city to endorse. In Canada, we got our first MP to endorse. In Toronto, we're so happy. And then we learned so many things about what that MP is doing. And there's so many initiatives happening and we just got to organize. We got to create massive bottom-up pressure and we need to change at the grassroots level and then get a global agreement on switching to a plant-based future ASAP. And we really need to phase out animal agriculture and fossil fuels soon if we are to survive and have a livable world for us in our own time, but also for future generations of plants and animals. Thanks, Professor West. You are muted, sorry. I do want to encourage people who are not vegan to become vegan. I like a quote by Chris Edges, a US radical writer. He says, we can, by becoming vegan, refuse to be complicit in the torture of billions of animals for corporate profit. And we can have the well-documented health benefits associated with a plant-based diet, especially in the areas of heart disease and cancer. And I want to finally say that social movements and environmental movements really need to engage animal rights, liberation, and veganism. They would profit immensely by this. We're not only engaging, stimulating ideas when we consider the animal standpoint, and that not only deepens our spiritual and our moral consciousness, it provides new perspectives on social and environmental crisis. As much as I would say is the Marxist class lens as illuminate a history for us, I think the animal standpoint can tell us so much about history. And if you doubt it, just read any number of historical treaties from the genre of so-called animal studies and the light that this sheds on human being, sociologically, psychologically, et cetera. And so we not only get a stimulating perspective, but we deepen our social movements and our environmental movements. We incorporate new people. We grow bigger. We grow broader. We grow more diverse. And this is what I would like to see for a radical movement for the 21st century. We're in the 21st century and the politics of today has to be alliance politics. We need to connect the dots there. We need to connect them theoretically and we need to connect them politically. And that means that we incorporate animal, human, and environmental perspectives into a one holistic social movement on alliance of different social movements. It is hard to build alliances with other people. I know Anita would agree with this. I've had some frustrating and some good experiences. But this situation is so dire with the planet right now in such great crisis that perhaps this is a time that we can start building what I would call a total liberation movement. And the alliance politics that's deeper and broader than anything yet created. Not, for instance, social ecology or environmental justice movement sees put together social and environmental movements and social and environmental issues. But where is the animal standpoint in issues? Let's build broader alliances and deepen and grow our movements. Thank you very much both. It has been a great pleasure for me. Anita has been my dear colleague and Professor Best is one of my favorite philosophers. I've written the thesis in the critical animal studies area as well. So I really enjoyed this session. Thank you for being here with us. And let me just say to our viewers that we have two more sessions today. The next one is the same both different storms about Global South with Manon Obri and Harper Paul. And the one after that is about beyond capitalism, the green future with Yanis Varoufakis and Pettifor and Non-Chomsky. Of course, both of you, Steve and Anita, are welcome to join us and see that on YouTube. And we are going to have one more event after the cop-off with our viewers and supporters because we are grassroots movement. We are building our policies with you guys, with you people, sorry. And that's why we want you to get included in the cop-off talks, which are going to be focused on making the policies out of all of the sessions that we talked about. So we are going to include even more the animal rights after this session, I hope. The moderator will put the links on chat. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.