It’s a common viewpoint among vegans that systems that depend on animal exploitation should be abolished. On the other hand, systems that contain animal exploitation should be improved.
I’ll give two examples with human animals so it can be clear:
Slavery? Should be abolished.
People getting ran over and killed by cars? We should improve that.
The ones I always come back to are pollinator-dependent crops such as fruits and tree nuts. Wild and feral pollinators are not abundant enough to sustain the level of production we presently demand in these crops. Presumably, if more people were to become vegan then we would demand them even more.
From what I know, vegans oppose the transportation of pollinators for pollinating these crops. Yet it seems most vegans eat plenty of them (apples, peaches, plums, almonds, avocados, etc).
You definitely could bring the wild pollinators back. I do that with my own garden in my backyard. But that means you’d have to remove parts of the orchard to provide a habitat for the pollinators, lowering the density of the trees. Lower density => lower production => smaller crop => more expensive almonds (or peaches etc).
If we want everyone to be vegan that’s gonna mean mostly giving up the luxury products that many vegans currently enjoy and switching to staples (beans, squash, corn, root veggies).
Lower density only means lower production of the usable land remains the same. Which would not be the case if the world became vegan: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Do you have a link to a discussion of some of the problems?
I’ve often been suspicious of bold claims about land use that lump all the numbers together into one huge hectare or km^2 number, ignoring all of the nuance of climate, water access, soil chemistry, or other broad geographical issues that severely limit what kind of crops can be grown on the land.
One thing people ought to recognize is that large farmers can be just as greedy as any big business. If they could buy up a bunch of cheap pasture land and start growing pistachios or almonds they would. The amount of money to be made by doing that is astronomical, which should be a clue that the land is simply not available.
my issue is with the methodology. if you read the references in the poore-nemecek paper for the LCA data, they explicitly state LCA data should not be combined, since it is gathered using disparate methodologies. those studies themselves do combine LCA studies, but poore-nemecek goes on to combine multiple meta studies, and never even acknowledge the problems with this methodology.
Do those crops depend on transportation of pollinators? To me it seems like they don’t.
By your own admission, there are natural pollinators. We can also manually pollinate them, which reinforces my point that systems that *contain* exploitation should be improved.
Manually pollinating thousands of almond trees is definitely possible. But then you should expect almonds to be in the same price range as vanilla pods, another manually pollinated crop.
Thanks for conceding. Now to your new point: once the majority of people are vegan, we can focus on those systems that can be improved. Currently the majority does not even care about animal exploitation, so there’s very little value in trying to change systems that don’t depend on animal exploitation.
Those two counter examples that I provided aren’t all possibilities to replace open pollination. Surely experts in the field can come up with better solutions once this problem actually becomes a worry in the minds of the majority.
The question is: can you turn it into a product? Would people be willing to pay $100/lb for hand-pollinated almonds? It’s potentially something to explore on a small scale.
I would love to know how many vegans would pay that much for an ethical product.
As I’ve said in the above comment, hand pollination is not the only alternative. Fixing this problem is a bridge we’ll cross when most people are on board with veganism.
Can you give some real world examples of systems that contain animal exploitation that vegans would want to see improved? I’m not sure I completely follow that point.
It’s a common viewpoint among vegans that systems that depend on animal exploitation should be abolished. On the other hand, systems that contain animal exploitation should be improved.
I’ll give two examples with human animals so it can be clear: Slavery? Should be abolished. People getting ran over and killed by cars? We should improve that.
The ones I always come back to are pollinator-dependent crops such as fruits and tree nuts. Wild and feral pollinators are not abundant enough to sustain the level of production we presently demand in these crops. Presumably, if more people were to become vegan then we would demand them even more.
From what I know, vegans oppose the transportation of pollinators for pollinating these crops. Yet it seems most vegans eat plenty of them (apples, peaches, plums, almonds, avocados, etc).
and why might that bee??? 🔪🪿
You definitely could bring the wild pollinators back. I do that with my own garden in my backyard. But that means you’d have to remove parts of the orchard to provide a habitat for the pollinators, lowering the density of the trees. Lower density => lower production => smaller crop => more expensive almonds (or peaches etc).
If we want everyone to be vegan that’s gonna mean mostly giving up the luxury products that many vegans currently enjoy and switching to staples (beans, squash, corn, root veggies).
Lower density only means lower production of the usable land remains the same. Which would not be the case if the world became vegan: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
that relies on poore-nemecek 2018, which is problematic. you might be right but your link isn’t good evidence.
Do you have a link to a discussion of some of the problems?
I’ve often been suspicious of bold claims about land use that lump all the numbers together into one huge hectare or km^2 number, ignoring all of the nuance of climate, water access, soil chemistry, or other broad geographical issues that severely limit what kind of crops can be grown on the land.
One thing people ought to recognize is that large farmers can be just as greedy as any big business. If they could buy up a bunch of cheap pasture land and start growing pistachios or almonds they would. The amount of money to be made by doing that is astronomical, which should be a clue that the land is simply not available.
my issue is with the methodology. if you read the references in the poore-nemecek paper for the LCA data, they explicitly state LCA data should not be combined, since it is gathered using disparate methodologies. those studies themselves do combine LCA studies, but poore-nemecek goes on to combine multiple meta studies, and never even acknowledge the problems with this methodology.
If we eliminate animal ag we will have more than enough space for lower density production, here Seppoland as an (albeit extreme) example:
And since we won’t be eliminating animal ag under capitalism the profit motive is gonna be moot point anyway.
Oh honey, I have no idea
Do those crops depend on transportation of pollinators? To me it seems like they don’t.
By your own admission, there are natural pollinators. We can also manually pollinate them, which reinforces my point that
systems that *contain* exploitation should be improved.Manually pollinating thousands of almond trees is definitely possible. But then you should expect almonds to be in the same price range as vanilla pods, another manually pollinated crop.
Thanks for conceding. Now to your new point: once the majority of people are vegan, we can focus on those systems that can be improved. Currently the majority does not even care about animal exploitation, so there’s very little value in trying to change systems that don’t depend on animal exploitation.
Those two counter examples that I provided aren’t all possibilities to replace open pollination. Surely experts in the field can come up with better solutions once this problem actually becomes a worry in the minds of the majority.
The question is: can you turn it into a product? Would people be willing to pay $100/lb for hand-pollinated almonds? It’s potentially something to explore on a small scale.
I would love to know how many vegans would pay that much for an ethical product.
As I’ve said in the above comment, hand pollination is not the only alternative. Fixing this problem is a bridge we’ll cross when most people are on board with veganism.
Can you give some real world examples of systems that contain animal exploitation that vegans would want to see improved? I’m not sure I completely follow that point.
Animal manure as fertilizer in farming. We can use fertilizers that don’t depend on animals to be made.