Month: August 2018

I became a vegetarian in my mid-twenties, shortly after deciding to become a Zen Buddhist. It was the 1980s, the dawn of the “New Age,” and spiritual cultural appropriation was all the rage. But Buddhism was different. The spiritual part was optional. It was not a religion in the sense that I had previously understood the term; and the Zen variety was decidedly atheistic, a kind of applied philosophy that, as with most other Buddhist schools, highlighted an equality of worth among all sentient creatures. The last meat I ate after deciding to go vegetarian was a hot dog, actually three hot dogs, three greasy overcooked tubes of random animal flesh from the snack bar at a powerlifting contest. And, interesting side note, exactly a year later I competed in that same powerlifting contest as a vegetarian—something that my steak-and-chicken-breast-fed lifting buddies said would be impossible—and went home with a third-place trophy and a personal best deadlift.

Vegetarianism in the 1980s was nowhere near as popular as it is now, especially not among the working-class crowd I hung out with, and when people found out that I didn’t eat meat, their first response was usually a stunned “why the hell not?” I eventually amassed several stock replies to that question that I would vary depending on the circumstance. Sometimes I would simply say “because I’m Buddhist,” but that was rare, and almost guaranteed to lead to a further barrage of questions about Buddhism that required more time and energy to answer than I typically had patience for (I never did get very good at the whole Zen thing). Usually I gave some variation on the “animals are sentient beings too” moral argument against eating meat, a response that frequently led to a knee-jerk dismissive reaction, usually a flat denial that an animal’s status as a conscious, pain-experiencing being was at all relevant—followed by a “besides, bacon tastes good!” or the quasi-tongue-in-cheek “but plants are living creatures too!” Occasionally I would get a more extreme response. For example, I had one person call me a flaming hypocrite because I was wearing a leather belt and leather shoes and driving a car that ran on the combustible remains of once-living beings. I obviously didn’t really care about animals.

At the time, I didn’t understand the power of cognitive dissonance, and how most of the negative reactions I got were aimed at reducing the uncomfortable mental state that a moral argument for vegetarianism might be expected to elicit in meat eaters who considered themselves to be morally-grounded persons, otherwise I would have been far more careful to explain my meatlessness in ways that were less likely to be interpreted as pretentious or confrontational. It’s a joke these days, a running meme, that vegetarians are militant assholes, that they want to shove their vegetarianism down other people’s throats (pun intended) the way an evangelical Christian wants to infect you with their undying love for Jesus. And while there is no shortage of vegetarians who are like that, cognitive dissonance only aggravates the desire to put them in their place.

The potential for dissonance is also exacerbated by the fact that the moral argument from sentience is compelling, and, at least so I thought at the time, airtight. If you eat meat, you are saying that you are more important than the animals you are eating. You are saying that their pain and suffering is subservient to your pleasure. You are claiming that you have some kind of preordained right to kill and consume other experiencing beings. If that’s so, then where does this right come from? Every answer I got to that question was some variation on “might makes right.” “Why do I eat animals? Because I can: humans are at the top of the food chain.” I would also frequently get lectured on how a vegetarian diet was not healthy, a lecture for which I had a good stock of logical rebuttals and all sorts of data to the contrary. Hell, I placed in my weight class as a powerlifter after a year of zero meat consumption; physically, as a lean and muscular twenty-to-early-thirty-something, I looked to be the very opposite of unhealthy.

In the name of full transparency, I should mention that I am no longer vegetarian. And, just for the record, the reason I am no longer vegetarian has nothing to do with no longer calling myself Buddhist (although that happened too), or a change in my beliefs about the sanctity of nonhuman life (if anything, I hold these beliefs with even more conviction, although my thoroughgoing atheism makes me uncomfortable with the word sanctity), or the unjustifiable exercise of human death-dealing power (again, my convictions here are still as strong as they have ever been). The reason I am no longer vegetarian is because those things had nothing to do with why I became vegetarian in the first place. I am no longer vegetarian because I am no longer in my mid-twenties-to-early-thirties. With age I have become more adept at questioning my true motives, and at accepting the answers at face value despite how uncomfortable they might be (although the later capacity is still very much a work in progress). I have become better able to contend with my own cognitive dissonance, better able to live with ambiguity and contradiction in my thoughts and actions. The truth is that I was vegetarian mostly because most other folks weren’t. Vegetarianism was a safe way for me to express my deeply entrenched contrarian nature. It was the same reason that my car in high school was a small, gas-efficient pickup when all the other kids were into muscle cars. Being vegetarian allowed me to be different, to stand out from the crowd, to show that I wasn’t just another mindless sheep, to show that I was sophisticated, someone who lived intentionally. Or at least it allowed me to think these things about myself; it provided plausible support for a delusional narrative—a story woven as camouflage, ultimately to hide a seething mass of insecurities.

Continue reading “Too many vegetarians (or why plastic straws don’t matter)”

Drumheller’s Spring was the official name, posted in large yellow letters carved into a brown wooden sign near the sidewalk, but everyone I knew called it Spring Hill. Spring Hill was a marshy area atop a sullen outcropping of basalt, still brooding after being abandoned for eleven and a half millennia by the glacier that brought it there. It was bounded on the south and east by a broken line of steep moss- and lichen-encrusted cliffs that plunged at various points from ten to perhaps forty feet before being absorbed into the sloping bush-covered alluvium. A half dozen or so small springs trickled out of the rock face. The largest spring was corralled by a time-worn concrete trough that channeled the water alongside a broad steep footpath to a small collecting pond, where the overflow was siphoned into a grated sewer drain for a two-mile trek south to the river. The path next to the concrete trough was adorned in spots with rusty ruins of an iron-pipe handrail, and littered at irregular intervals with slick angular rocks that served as natural stair steps. A large field lay above the spring and across a dirt road to the northwest. The field was flat, broken in irregular intervals with small grassy mounds and rock outcroppings, and almost treeless. It was home to three small ponds, the two smallest of which were seasonal and disappeared in midsummer. The largest pond supported a wide variety of aquatic and semi-aquatic creatures, including fairy shrimp, turtles, a variety of frogs, and a small species of salamander with an indigo body and an almost iridescent yellow-green stripe down its back.

Spring Hill was surrounded on all sides by residential neighborhoods, and positioned along a major traffic corridor consisting of north and southbound one-way two-lane arterials—both of which were forced to make an abrupt guardrail lined curve to accommodate the cliffs. I made the five-block journey from my home two or three times a week, starting from when I was eight or nine, until we moved to the far north side of town when I was fifteen. It was the running water that first attracted me. My friends and I would have races with pieces of bark starting from where the large spring emerged from the pipe down to the collecting pond. Some days we would build tiny dams or gouge small tributaries into the hard clay of the banks in spots where the concrete had eroded away. The animal life was next on my list of interests. Pond water is teaming with alien creatures. And it was not uncommon for me to have a mason jar of Spring Hill pond water sitting on my bedroom window sill. The salamanders were the big prize, though. One day I collected over twenty in a single hour.

As I got a bit older, the cliffs themselves started to beckon. The tallest rock faces were along the south side toward the western edge of the area. My friends and I spent many afternoons daring each other up the lichen-encrusted basalt. There were a variety of routes, some easy enough for my little sister, and others that had overhangs and bald surfaces that would challenge a veteran rock climber. At the base of the most formidable cliffs, stood a wooden plaque next to a couple of well-weathered stumps of charred lumber that announced the area as the site of The Chief Garry School before it burned down. Garry, whose real name was Slough-Keetcha, was sent by his father the Chief of the Spokane Tribe to a missionary school in Canada when he was fourteen. He came back as a young adult, built and taught at his own school, and fought to maintain his tribe’s rights to live along the Spokane River. He lost his fight and his school.

Both the wooden plaque and the charred remnants of the school are gone now, absorbed into the backyard of one of the many houses that have been built along the Cliffside. Instead, there is a five-foot rectangular granite obelisk with rough-hewn edges next to the road that runs along the field where the smallest of the seasonal ponds used to be. The highlights of Chief Garry’s life story along with some of the physical details of the school are carved into the face of the stone: “The school house, 50’ X 20’, was constructed of pine poles covered in yule mats, sewed together by Indian women.” There is something about the choice to include that last detail, that Indian women did the sewing of the mats, that bothers me, but I’m not sure why.

I am at a loss to describe the personal significance of Spring Hill. To say that it was formative seems to trivialize its impact, and to discount the influence it has on me even now. Medical researchers have found that childhood exposure to outdoor environments protects against later development of allergies and asthma. Other studies have shown that childhood exposure to the natural world is linked with environmental concern as an adult. I suspect that these two sets of findings are not unrelated, and that early exposure to natural spaces enhances both physical and psychological immunity. I suspect also that the connection between early nature exposure and later environmental concern is not simply due to the workings of nostalgia. One of the most general features of human psychology as it relates to our understanding of the world around us is something cognitive psychologists refer to as WYSIATI: what you see is all there is. Despite the unwieldy acronym, the idea is rather straightforward. We can only work with what we have experience with. If we stumble upon something new, and there is nothing in our past to hang it on, if it falls outside of our experience or our current understanding of the world, it may as well not exist. As civilization continues to expand its global expression, wild nature will fall increasing outside of everyone’s experience, and no one will ever know what it is, exactly, that is missing, but they will feel its absence nonetheless.

Today Spring Hill is an urban anomaly, a tiny time-forgotten microcosm of wild nature surrounded by busy streets and residential neighborhoods. For the women who sewed the yule mats for Chief Garry School, however, Spring Hill was nothing special, nothing unusual, probably even mundane. Then the entire valley that now contains the city of Spokane—which has long since sprawled up and out of the valley, and is rapidly spreading in all directions like a malignant skin cancer—was Spring Hill. The entire world before civilization was Spring Hill.

And, although neither you nor I will be around to see it, we can take some solace in knowing that, with time, the entire world after civilization will eventually become Spring Hill once again.