Vegans vs. Palm Oil; Agriculture vs. Habitat. (Veganism)

begin quote now even as a person who
knows very little about modern farming I know crops can strip the soil of nutrients and in fact the problem is about a hundred times more complicated than that balancing nutrients with organic work with organic or synthetic fertilizers and resulting pollution soil erosion etc which I learned by doing only the most rudimentary research so I wrote a message to the tumblr mentioning a few of these things stuff that seemed like it should be particularly interesting to vegans as it was to me given the complications that present to our hope of a vegan world and how I found this information in less than 5 minutes of basic googling this is the part that perhaps came off as a little surety anyway when the owner of the tumblr replied they basically said well I'm not going to do five minutes of research for every question I get asked for which ok the [ __ ] part is fair enough this is the attitude at online vegan activism quote quote unquote activism that I seriously cannot relate to at all wouldn't you want to learn more about this when someone cuts your attention particularly before you speak on something you have so much of this didn't piqued your curiosity at all as a vegan I think activism implies a certain responsibility to be aware of and educate yourself on the issues you are acting on particularly when you've got an audience so many of these lifestyle blogs are channels claim to want a more vegan world but ignore or even openly dismiss the practical concerns or strategy of making that happen beyond just making veganism look cool on Instagram so close quote at the end of Alexa's message or that's that's the end of my reading it so many vegans as Alexa complains just have no way to cope with the reality of Agriculture including plant agriculture and you find this in the hysteria over palm oil and you know palm oil is a crop okay let's get real vegans like to eat mangoes do you think that a mango plantation is less Jenna Seidel to the wild animals that live there than a palm oil plantation no I mean palm oil ok it happens to be orangutangs are the among the animals who are being destroyed by palm oil plantations well you know you can literally replace the palm oil with mango you'd have mango plantations in the same climate in this basically the same soil conditions I don't know if they'd be perfect butts all right and you're still killing the orangutans you know but vegans look at this and they're so unprepared to deal with these issues that they think the problem is palm oil and they have to ban palm oil or even say that palm oil is not vegan now some of the most respected vegan activists some of the most respected vegan youtubers people on YouTube who are considered highly intelligent have said this and it's shockingly stupid you know why would you blame palm oil rather than any other crop and again with this specific example of jumbo palm oil in Malaysia you know we grow palm oil and Thailand also stick with Thailand because I've lived in Thailand so much if I buy the property that's currently growing palm oil and I change to another crop it doesn't help any of the animals even if we're talking about the original forests being purchased ok so you have intact old-growth forests and there are some monkeys living there maybe there are some wild elephants living there but there may be orangutans whatever species you're you're interested in okay you have a patch or well forest it doesn't matter if I cut it down to grow palm oil or if I cut it down to grow mangoes many vegans by the way have been horrified by visiting durian farms durian farming involves killing animals and sometimes people you may not believe me on that but I've been to durian farms durian you know is uh it's it's a fancy crop as works like to say every durian farm has a mean old man with a shotgun or a rifle or or a machine gun sitting there watching at all times and he will be having to shoot feral pigs that come to steal the durians pigs can smell their ends just as well as humans can he may have to shoot monkeys they come to see the steel the durians again monkeys want to climb up the tree and and eat the crops and above all else he's there to shoot people in a country like Laos there was one durian farm by the side of the side of the road so people could access it you know wasn't isolated in the mountains or something and they always had to have an armed guard because durians are worth money if one guy rolls up in a truck with a machete and you know hacks now and a bunch of durians and drives away that's a huge loss of the farmer so he guards and they all get shot and this is durian farming this is the celebrated luxury fruit at many vegans ironically by the way I've never understood this high carb low fat vegans all advertised durian durian is a high-fat food it's one of the few fruits that is astoundingly high in fat you can really gain weight eating durian but anyway look you know that's farming farming is created and sustained by acts of violence I've said that in the YouTube channel before you are constantly engaged in low-level violence to prevent the land from returning to the state of being a forest or a jungle or whatever it naturally would be if you weren't farming those crops there it takes violence to create the farm in the first place and you will indeed have violence against other animals and to some extent against other human beings in the way I've described so what is the solution the solution is not to think of veganism as being I rescue my dog I rescue my cat now I want to rescue the cows and then to have an incoherent air SATs approach to trying to ban and cope with banning you know particular crops like you know palm while it just makes no sense what you have to recognize is look for animals not for human use we need to have a line on the map and say inside this little square the human beings have drawn on the map that land exists for the trees for the monkeys for the elephants for the wild dogs for the Wildcats this is in effect not our land it's not for us you can let some scientists go in with a video camera once in a while or whatever but the point is this is not a jungle being created for tourism it's not being created for sports it's not being created for kayaking that you have habitat conservation that exists for the reason of habitat conservation period that is its whole purpose that's the only thing that will help those orangutans doesn't you stop eating palm oil so what what do you seriously how could anyone be so stupid as to imagine that if they use a different type of cooking oil instead of palm oil that will save the lives of orangutans absolutely the only thing you can do to save those orangutans so okay there are two things one you can have zoo programs you know you can have captive breeding programs just to try to stop them from going extinct obviously I've mentioned that in my channel before and a couple of vegans have attacked me obviously when the alternative is extinction we have to have you know zoo like captive breeding programs because sometimes the only alternative is to kill the animals or let them die which is even worse so of course there's a vegan I'm a critic of zoos and I'm a critic of all these things you talk to anyone who's done real charity work related to endangered species they criticize zoos but they also rely on them they you know it's that it's that or extinction from any species so yeah zoos are morally murky lot of grey areas but sure got to work with them that's that's thing one and in the short term you can take an orangutan and put them in a put them in a captive breeding program try to stop them from going extinct but thing two is habitat conservation that's it that's the only solution is to have land that is absolutely reserved for non-human use where the trees are not being grown to be turned into paper not now not ever that it's not lumber it doesn't exist to make furniture the trees exist just to be trees where the animals don't exist to entertain us they're not there to be pretty for us the orangutans are not there to put on a show where you have some land reserved so that those animals can exist now ultimately this is again you guys already know I'm not an anarchist the only way you can achieve this is through cooperation with governments in the modern world in reality in very very few cases habitat conservation comes about because of a multi-millionaire you know somebody like Bill Gates someone with millions and millions of dollars can directly do the work that governments do you know by a huge area of land and really operate it in a habitat conservation way that is possible but for most countries around the world what we absolutely need are governments and international agreements to put pressure on governments to have real habitat conservation I think the the fundamental stupidity that's being addressed here by Alexa is is really the the paucity of this habitat conservation approach in veganism today and a made of videos in the past starting with that it hasn't always been this way things have changed a lot since the year 2000 people just forgotten about this and you know what I don't know why because many of the things we face in veganism are hopeless you know there are many of these problems when you look at them and you think god this is never gonna change or it's never gonna change in my lifetime or I'm I'm never gonna see the outcomes of this but habitat conservation is quick it is quick and dirty you can really rapidly draw some lines on a map and then the government or a charity employs some men with guns to patrol that area you know to make sure there isn't illegal logging to make sure there isn't illegal poaching that stuff is easier than ever now because of video cameras you know digital video cameras you set up a bunch of hidden cameras in the forest you're trying to preserve makes it much much easier to enforce those regulations and to put people in prison when they come in illegally chop down lumber or illegally kill animals that is it quick overnight fast you can have a profound impact on the world's ecology and on the lives of animals you can preserve you know a place where any of these species really have a chance to thrive and not to thrive as an ornament to human civilization not to be a toy sleeping on a couch watching television in a language it can never understand not an animal that it's had its will broken its testicles chopped off you know an animal with its fangs and claws removed yeah sickening to me but you know this to me is the the contrast between myself and I would say the majority of vegans in 2016 and I don't know I mean am I am I still going to be in the minority ten years from now 20 years from now I don't know