Northern California’s Sonoma County has been known historically as part of the natural Redwood Empire. Wine industry lobbyists re-branded it as the commercial “Wine Country.” Its economy has been so colonized by outside investors, who extract water and resources from the environment and export them, that re-branding would be appropriate. A more accurate description would be that Sonoma County is now part of the multi-national Wine Empire.
Michael Blake died last week.
You probably don’t know the name.
You probably don’t know about his life.
You probably don’t know most of what he wrote. That’s probably because he didn’t write diet and exercise books. Or cookbooks. Or “feel good” books. Or books about celebrities. Or books that advanced junk science or conspiracy theories.
Michael Blake fused history and social issues, writing about social justice. Writing books that mattered. Writing screenplays that were never produced and then discarded.
My heart bleeds, my soul is sick and my land is broken and dying. How else can I describe how I felt when I learnt that the dis-United Kingdom was back in the greedy and unfeeling grasp of the ‘nasty’ party, the Conservatives. I was not alone.
“I was quite happy this morning – until I saw a newspaper on my way to work… I hope to God my children end up living abroad,” was one acquaintance’s reaction, her face still shocked hours later.
Once upon a time—in 1973, to be precise—Peter Singer suggested birth control for free-living animals as part of the “animal liberation” philosophy. Parenthetically at first. Publicly asked whether gazelles should be protected from lions, Singer replied in a letter for the New York Review of Books:
In Britain hunting with hounds has for generations been done for pleasure, particularly that of the landowners. But for many years it has been a very divisive subject, with one side citing ‘tradition’ and the other cruelty towards animals.
Back in 2004 the British Parliament finally passed a law curbing the hunting of foxes and other wildlife with packs of hounds. Unlike nations that have vast areas of wilderness Britain is a small and crowded island and the majority of its people are against this form of hunting.
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon.
Today the United States is changing its relationship with Cuba and the rest of the world, and we are beginning a project to lift the veil on the reality of our brutal and audacious imperial arrogance that has brought so much misery and suffering to Cuba, the hemisphere, and the world.
Who will remember what this age was like? And how will it be remembered? For the abyss of silence at the center of all the noise? The fierce shadow cast by all the blazing lights that never went off, that shone night and day?
Pathological cruelty and neglect have to be dealt with so that animals do not fall prey to the farming trade’s worst practitioners. This means that the meagre welfare laws and regulatory restraints currently in place must be strengthened and enforced. But no-one should imagine that either regulated or unregulated suffering can be banished from animal farming and slaughter. Meat, egg and milk production are pitiless, bloody activities that are predicated on industrial-scale animal exploitation and killing.
– Animal Aid
There is no admittance at Craig Watts’ Perdue contract chicken farm in Fairmont, North Carolina. Nor is Watts allowed to open the barns to admit air or sunlight. But, fed up with the abuse to farmers, consumers and animals he has tolerated for too long, Watts allowed cameras into his barns so the public could see what Perdue calls “humane.” It is “not as advertised” says Watts, an understatement.
Asked how human beings get the Ebola virus, National Institutes of Health infectious-disease director Anthony Fauci described, in a radio interview, the scenario of someone in Africa using a fruit bat “for protein nourishment.” The virus spills over to humans from nonhuman animals, to invoke David Quammen’s informative book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.
