Glenn's blog

For a few years now I've considered myself an activist. But lately I've been wondering what it really means to be an "activist."

Initially it meant that I was taking part in protests, leafleting, and other kinds of public, on the streets sorts of activities. Now it's feeling more like it means that I'm simply aware that my actions have impacts and I'm not only working to change myself, but I want to influence the rest of the world too.

I've been struggling with feeling like I don't accomplish much. Like I'm lazy and inefficient. Like I'm not working hard enough.

Part of the attraction of protests and other kinds of action-oriented activism is that they feel like you're doing something. Now, while I may be "doing" less, it's possible that I am accomplishing just as much. I mean, even though you spend 20 hours working on a project and someone else spends 5 hours working on the same project doesn't mean that you've done more. They might have actually accomplished more and been more effective in that short time.

It's all about trying to choose activities that will have a larger impact, or will build a foundation for a greater return. Looking at problems in the long term versus the short term can sometimes help to see that value of seemingly less action-oriented activities.

But I'm still struggling with my own activism. Where does it go from here?

Every now and then I come across someone who says and lives what I have been trying to articulate for so long.

My friend Paul just posted an essay announcing his exit from the "vegan community."

It is, at the very least, challenging. Especially to me - since so much of my identity is wrapped up in being an animal rights activist. The vegan community is one that I value as a way to support people in moving away from animal products and towards a lifestyle that respects the animals' right to live their own lives.

But, like any community, the people in that community define rules to regulate its members' behaviour. People bring many diffeent definitions of what vegan means and how people should live.

This leads to a lot of arguing about who or what is vegan, a lot of judgement, and potentially a lot of arguing. The focus becomes the rules rather than celebration of living a life of compassion - or, as Paul puts it, "love."

Because, really, being vegan is an act of love. Yet people who decide to go against the grain of the world around them and announce that they are now "vegan" face intense pressure - from inside the vegan community as well as from outside. Living vegan means more now than simply striving to live a life free from animal products - it has become in invitation to be measured, to be judged, to be critiqued for one's mistakes, definition of vegan, and so on.

For sure, it makes sense to have a strong definition of the word vegan. I mean, who among us hasn't faced a waiter who has proclaimed that it's ok for vegans to eat fish? Or the aunt who asks us if it's ok for us to eat garlic, or potatoes, or mushrooms, or chocolate? So I get the frustration of someone calling themselves vegan while wearing a wool sweater or someone being 99% vegan but having an egg once in a while, or any other of the infinite variations we see.

Being vegan then becomes something that we not only live ourselves, but a word, a way of life, that we need to defend from becoming diluted (like has happened with "vegetarian").

Does this hypersensitivity to what's vegan and what's not really help at all? Or does it create an environment where we are tied to a label, forgetting why the "vegan" way of life was conceived in the first place? Do we forget the animals?

And do we also forget the love? What would it mean to really and truly embody "veganism"? Peace, love, compassion. How would that be manifest?

I tend to think of Gandhi as the ideal vegan. He lived a compassionate life and concentrated inwards, working towards perfecting himself and leaving the lives of others alone.

But he was also an activist, standing up for the sanctity of life. He was non-violent in word and deed.

Today's vegans are a mean and angry bunch, quick to attack and slow to forgive. I'm primarily talking about how I see veganism reflected in myself.

The challenge then, is how we can be animal rights activists while living a vegan life. Maybe the word is a mistake, maybe it does make sense to toss it out and work on a world where we are not bound by labels but are instead dedicated to an ethical life and our ethical responsibility to each other (and all life by extension)?

What do you think?

P.S. once again I have to apologize for the haphazard nature of my thoughts. I hope you are able to glean a bit of what I am trying to say.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how vegan and animal rights activists treat each other. We seem to have this tendency to forget that we are each sensitive, feeling beings who can be hurt.

Those of us who are more theoretical and appreciate a good "debate" (I'm raising my hand here) are prone to call into question the tactical and strategic decisions of others. While we may regard our "critiques" as constructive, are we actually causing harm by ignoring any psychological effects our words may have?

In certain environments debate of ideas seems to be standard and expected, but outside of academia, courtrooms, and political campaigns, how much bad feeling, resentment, and anger might it generate?

Sarah Palin represents so much of what is wrong with the world. She's wealthy but playing at being "of the people," doesn't care about the natural world, enjoys killing animals for sport, is divisive in her rhetoric, religiously avoids logic or intellect.

But, she is somehow very popular and her popularity has grown in spite of (or possibly because of) all those negatives.

What can we learn from her? And what can we learn that we would be willing to actually apply to our own lives and our own activism?

• Understand that you can't please everyone. Palin actually embraces this and uses it. She knows that she will appeal to a certain audience, and appeal to them strongly, by not trying to please everyone. She really embraces the love/hate dichotomy - the more one side hates her the more the other side loves her. We might consider this divisive, but do we as animal rights activists worry too much about trying to appeal to everyone instead of building our base of support by appealing to our strong supporters and accepting (even possibly using) the hate generated by the other side?
• Speak your mind. Palin doesn't worry about offending - and because of this she actually does offend some people but speaks directly to the heart and emotions of the people who will be her strongest supporters. Are we too worried in our activism about speaking what we truly believe? When asked about veganism are we afraid of offending someone by saying that we think all animal exploitation is wrong?
• Make yourself impossible to ignore. We might actually do a good job at this already, but Palin is always ready to speak to issues from her own strong perspective.
• Stick to your ideals. If there's one thing that Palin does effectively, it's sticking to her ideals. Possibly even in the face of empirical evidence. (Note: one thing she would never do is use the word "empirical.") Do we really do ourselves and the animals a service when we compromise our beliefs to appeal to a wider audience?
• Speak plainly. Palin knows the right language to use to appeal to her core audience and always speaks that way. Animal rights activists have this tendency to speak like academics - which is fine if we are trying to appeal to university professors and PhD students - and pay very little attention to the actual audience we are trying to reach.

Are there any other lessons we can learn from Palin?

I've just started this course with the Institute for Humane Education. Here's the course description from the website:

Learn to tap into your deepest values and help create a peaceful, just, compassionate, sustainable world while cultivating your own inner peace and joy. Join us for a month of inquiry, introspection and transformation. Through our A Better World, A Meaningful Life course, you’ll have the opportunity to assess your life, examine your values, explore new information and make a difference in the lives of others while improving your own life at the same time. This course will educate and inspire you to do more good for yourself, other people, animals, and the environment.

I'm going to do my best to post my responses to the exercises on this blog. Feel free to post any responses or thoughts in the comments.

On my recent trip to Texas I read the book Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. They are the founders of 37 Signals, a small and very successful company that makes applications for project management and CRM, along with some other things.

This isn't a book about activism, but I found many valuable ideas in it that can be applied to activism and small organizations that can potentially make us more effective and powerful.

37 Signals has built a successful business by breaking the normal rules of business. They've stayed small, opting for sustainability over growth. They embrace constraints, simplicity, and have flipped the traditional software development process on its head. Their first book, Get Real, was a very fun-to-read look at their software development process and is worth reading for anyone working on projects of any kind. (If you follow that link you can read the whole thing online for free.) A lot of the ideas from that first book are contained in this second book as well, but more refined and with broader application.

Rework focuses on the authors' ideas about starting and building a business – ideas which can be very easily applied to animal rights projects and organizations. Here are some of my favourite little gems of brilliance, but I'll leave it to y'all to think about how you might apply this to your own activism (or any aspect of your life).

Stanley Kubrick gave this advice to aspiring filmmakers: "Get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all." Kubrick knew that when you're new at something, you need to start creating. The most important thing is to begin. So get a camera, hit Record, and start shooting.

If you want to do something, you've got to do it now. You can't put it on a shelf and wait two months to get around to it. You can't just say you'll do it later. Later, you won't be pumped up about it anymore.

Don't make up problems you don't have yet. It's not a problem until it's a real problem. Most of the things you worry about never happen anyway.

The most common excuse people give: "There's not enough time." They claim they'd love to start a company, learn an instrument, market an invention, write a book, or whatever, but there just aren't enough hours in the day.

Come on. There's always enough time if you spend it right. And don't think you have to quit your day job, either. Hang onto it and start work on your project at night.

Instead of watching TV or playing World of Warcraft, work on your idea. Instead of going to bed at ten, go to bed at eleven. We're not talking about all-nighters or sixteen-hour days—we're talking about squeezing out a few extra hours a week. That's enough time to get something going.

"I don't have enough time/money/people/experience." Stop whining. Less is a good thing. Constraints are advantages in disguise. Limited resources force you to make do with what you've got. There's no room for waste. And that forces you to be creative.

Forgoing sleep is a bad idea. Sure, you get those extra hours right now, but you pay in spades later: You destroy your creativity, morale, and attitude.

Keep in mind that the obvious solution might very well be quitting. People automatically associate quitting with failure, but sometimes that's exactly what you should do. If you already spent too much time on something that wasn't worth it, walk away. You can't get that time back. The worst thing you can do now is waste even more time.

When is your product or service finished? When should you put it on the market? When is it safe to let people have it? Probably a lot sooner than you're comfortable with. Once your product does what it needs to do, get it out there.

You can turn a bunch of great ideas into a crappy product real fast by trying to do them all at once. You just can't do everything you want to do and do it well. You have limited time, resources, ability, and focus. It's hard enough to do one thing right. Trying to do ten things well at the same time? Forget about it.

So sacrifice some of your darlings for the greater good. Cut your ambition in half. You're better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole.

A strong stand is how you attract superfans. They point to you and defend you. And they spread the word further, wider, and more passionately than any advertising could.

Strong opinions aren't free. You'll turn some people off. They'll accuse you of being arrogant and aloof. That's life. For everyone who loves you, there will be others who hate you. If no one's upset by what you're saying, you're probably not pushing hard enough. (And you're probably boring, too.)

I'm on my way back to Vancouver from Texas, waiting for my flight to board. Reading through my rss reader I saw a new post from Seth Godin that caught my eye.

This post is titled "Sabotage!" but has nothing to do with the Beastie Boys song. What it is about is how we often undercut our own potential by doing what's safe and comfortable.

This paragraph in particular:

Or consider the way we resist opportunities to lead, to connect, to do work that matters. We don't resist because we're not capable of it... we resist because if our marketing fails, if we don't get the job or earn the trust, then we're off the hook. No promises made, which means no promises to keep.

I see this happen in animal rights activism a lot. I've seen people come up with an idea but immediately start thinking about ways that it won't work, reasons why they shouldn't even start working on it.

I've listened to conversations about how people would do more if only they could quit their job, if only they could work for an animal rights organization, if only they could win the lottery. What they're doing is creating fake constraints that prevent them from working hard and taking risks and possibly failing.

It's all self-sabotage.

I've done more than my share of this sort of thing over the years. It's hard not too. It seems like it's a part of our very nature.

But that still doesn't excuse me from taking those risks, from working on projects even if I don't feel like I have enough experience, from doing things that are uncomfortable and a lot of work.

This post reminded me of an activist here in Vancouver who recently decided to start tabling at events, even though she had never done it before. She's really taking this to heart – when something needs to be done, we can't wait around for someone else to do it, we have to get in there and make things happen ourselves. We're the only ones we can count on. And by we I mean each and every one of us.

What great projects and ideas are you sabotaging?

I found this photo of me the other day.

It got me thinking about being willing to jump.

As a child I was often climbing up trees, taking jumps like this, doing all sorts of things that seemed as if they could have gone terribly wrong. Of course, I was pretty safe. I climbed trees I knew would hold me. I jumped onto areas that didn't contain old boards or junk. I checked around before I jumped.

But I still had to make the leap – and there is always uncertainty when jumping. Maybe I could have slipped right as I was jumping and hit my head. Maybe I could have misjudged the terrain and could have landed in a hole.

My point is, no matter how much I checked before I ran and jumped, I was still taking a risk by making that leap.

I'd like to get back to the spirit of that little boy, ready to jump. But not just off of buildings – I want to have that spirit in life. Am I as willing to take on projects where I might fail? And now that failure means losing money or possibly being embarrassed, am I less willing to leap than I was when it meant breaking a leg?

And not only leaping, but leaping with joy.

Over the recent years more and more information has been coming out about how harmful the production of animal products is to the environment. But by and large the environmental movement has worked really hard to sidestep this whole issue. When they do talk about it they end up advocating for "local" or "grass-fed" animal products, which also have marginally less environmental impact.

Why is this?

Environmentalists provide a continual sense of betrayal to animal rights advocates. We are so aligned on so many issues – and veganism is a step we all have to take if we hope to deal with the problem of feeding the world without a whole new planet – but they are constantly showing little to no concern for the animals involved in their "environment."

Here's my hypothesis. Environmentalists will hardly ever agree with animal rights activists because they are starting from a position of use. The world and the environment are ours to use, and animals are simply a part of that environment.

That's one of the reasons why some of the largest conservation groups were originally "sportsmen's" groups (hunters, fishermen, and other forms of animal killers).

As animal rights activists, we need to see that the environmental movement is founded on an ethic of "use" rather than "care" or even "justice." In other words, the environmental movement is still largely an anthropocentric movement. The world and its inhabitants have value only insofar as they have value to humans. In this sense they are exactly the same as any mining corporation or hunting group. The difference comes in terms of how far into the future they look to determine value and what strategies they employ to conserve resources.

Does this mean that I would suggest we abandon our efforts to reach out to environmentalists? No, but I think we should be more cautious with our belief that environmentalists are our natural allies. To them, abstaining from animal products is just a strategy for conserving other important resources for humans, and they are highly unlikely to ever advocate an end to the exploitation of animals.

I think that we neglect potential alliances with social change movements that are based on rights and an end to exploitation. I think animal rights shares a lot of common foundation with other rights movements. I don't mean to say that we are entirely neglecting these issues, but rather that it does not get the focus and attention it deserves.

I see multiple articles each week discussing the environmental impacts of meat and other efforts to reach an environmental audience, but I hardly ever see articles drawing out the possible connections between social justice issues and animal rights. There are a few, of course, and one great example of some really good content on this topic is the Animal Rights & Anti-Oppression blog. There's also the Food Empowerment Project.

One of the local events in Vancouver that we (Liberation BC) table at is Justice Rocks, a music and social change event. We've been the only animal rights (and the only animal-focused group) there. But the audience is amazingly receptive to the message of animal rights – the fundamental message of non-exploitation, that animals have a right to lead their own lives, just as we do.

I think there are some really strong alliances that could be formed if we support other social justice causes – with or without promoting animal rights to them. Let everyone see that our ethic of non-exploitation really applies across the board. Find and support workers' rights, women's rights, fair trade, and so on. As it becomes more and more apparent that systems of oppression are linked, any work anyone can do to weaken those systems will benefit us all.

At least, that's what I think...

Seth Godin just posted a blog entry (Betting on smarter (or betting on dumber)) that begins:

Marketers fall into one of two categories:

A few benefit when they make their customers smarter. The more the people they sell to know, the more informed, inquisitive, free-thinking and alert they are, the better they do.

And most benefit when they work to make their customers dumber. The less they know about options, the easier they are to manipulate, the more helpless they are, the better they do.

This reminds me of the strategies of animal rights activists and the opposing strategies of animal agriculture.

On the one hand animal rights activists work to provide information about what happens to animals and the truth about animals. We work to see animals as they really are, rather than how we want them to be.

Animal rights activists risk their own safety to document the conditions inside factory farms, labs, puppy mills, fur farms, and so on. Our strategy is basically to give people the information they need to make honest choices about our use of animals.

On the other hand, most of animal agriculture takes the opposite approach. After each undercover investigation is released, the industry responds by locking down tighter, denouncing the activists, and misleading consumers into thinking that these are isolated cases.

They build higher walls around slaughterhouses, use misleading imagery on their packaging and marketing materials.

As an example, the dairy industry always leaves out the fact that cows need to be impregnated yearly to produce milk and that the resulting calves are taken away immediately. They also leave out that cows are considered "spent" after just a few years of producing many times more milk than they did half a century ago, and are sent off to slaughter.

The very use of the word "welfare" coming out of the mouths of animal agriculture advocates is a smokescreen designed to take attention away from the reality of the conditions these animals face.

Who will win in the end? Are most people open to making informed decisions or do they want to be hoodwinked by a profit-driven industry?

I'm optimistic, but it still dismays me when I talk to people on the street who wave away information with an "I don't want to know."

But that just makes it so much more important that we keep pushing to reveal the truth. That's our job as animal rights activists - tearing down those walls, revealing the dirty truth behind animal agriculture, spreading information about who these animals really are.