The problem is a more general one, beyond this particular terroir. Why are so many figures on the bien pensant Anglophone left adopting anti-ecological politics that advocate technologies that are as inseparable from their funders as the looms were from the mill owners in the age of the Luddites ? Why are these positions serially platformed by allegedly critical podia, time and again, even as their logics are symmetrical to those underlying efforts to force meatpackers back to COVID-infested processing plants, where all that labor is « saved » ? There’s a through line from Trump to what counts in much of the Global North as the far left.

Clearly the interminable omission reflects an inability to center the voices of the actually existing ecological and anti-systemic movements in the core and periphery alike. Soul Fire Farms, the Savanna Institute, and the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance in the core are rendered invisible, as well as the more discomfiting and openly anti-imperialist La Via Campesina, which expresses solidarity with crucial fortresses for humanity’s struggle for a better future such as Venezuela, Cuba, and the now-fallen Bolivia.

Compare such calculated disappearances with the Minnesota Farmers Union’s recent efforts to breach the rural-urban divide in the other direction :

You’ve no doubt heard about the killing of George Floyd this week by a Minneapolis police officer. This horrific act and ensuing protests and property destruction have been hard to process, not just for those living and working in the Twin Cities Metro, but all Minnesotans and Americans.

There’s a lot to reckon with and soul-searching to do to ensure that, at an absolute minimum, nothing like this ever happens again. We have to do more than say that we condemn it, which we do. This comes on top of a deadly pandemic that has disproportionately harmed people of color, including in agriculture and food sectors.

As always, we are here as a community, ready to listen to whatever is on your minds and hearts. Do not relegate this to simply an urban issue. We can’t go back to the previous « normal » post-COVID—this makes it even clearer why. We call on our public officials to fight back against all injustices they can, and for everyone to reflect on why injustice persists.

Perhaps such soppy sentiments make us agroecologists « appreciate simplicity, » not to say clarity, to borrow a condescending aphorism from a « radical » anatomy in favor of the Bolivian coup. We leave that for others to judge, if in the glare of a bank of bright bulbs shining light therapy right to left upon the pandemic.

The bad takes on COVID wend across the political continuum into the more recognizable left. Superficially more grounded anatomies of the crisis have leapt atop the backs of the dead animals and broken landscapes that did indeed help produce the pandemic. But in a classic riding trick, the acrobatics suddenly switches mounts mid-ride to characteristically Eurocentric hobbyhorses from which to herald imperium-old edicts on how to live, eat, and die.

Should we eat meat, with source livestock an apparent driver in the emergence of deadly pathogens ? Documentarian Astra Taylor, environmental historian Troy Vettese, and political scientist Jan Dutkiewicz—TVD, for brevity’s sake—answer in the negative : « Individually, we must stop eating animal products. Collectively, we must transform the global food system and work toward ending animal agriculture and rewilding much of the world. » With anthropogenic global warming already taking carbon dioxide levels through the roof, meat was already an easy target. It’s a synecdoche for effete gluttony, the emblem of a global class divide, an easy piece of fat—and protein—to trim from wealthier consumption baskets, and a neat way to merge individual ethical consumption and world ecology.

The anti-meat crusade has apparently received an unintended and misused push from recent ecological and epidemiological work on the likely origins of the pandemic. These analyses traced how the interaction across confined animal feeding operations, monoculture doppelgangers, fading forests, and antimicrobial marination has produced a petri dish of new diseases. Out of this combination, one virus after another easily jumps from animal populations to humans.

Pre-pandemic, TVD fellow travelers rejected such political ecology, which in their psychologizing dismissal « often romanticizes what are seen as anti-modern subsistence livelihoods on the margins of global capitalism. » But now, given the obvious realities on the ground, a pandemic strain that hopscotched from bat caves on the other side of the world into the lungs of urban workers they champion, the ecomodernists (again to no reputational damage given their golden tickets) have turned to folding in the analyses they previously characterized in the most scurrilous terms as if they approved all along.

Such systems—these incubators for viruses, huge biological emitters of CO2 and methane, rampant deforesters, and living beings suffering amid the cruelty of enclosed industrial animal camps—merge into a pithy command from TVD : No, don’t eat meat. The team suggests we plow « public-directed investment » into « both plant-based meat alternatives and cellular agriculture, » or, in other words, lab meat, a product that so far exists primarily among venture capitalists, a few labs, and red-washed ad copy lauding it as a socialist wonder food from Keynesian Green New Deal cookshops.

Key questions are greased over, restricting, as sociologist Andy Murray describes, the very discourse lab meat proponents claim they wish to open up. Who is this « we, » for one, and even, what is meat ? Veganism and animal rights, to which one needn’t object as ethoses on their face, are reflexively deployed here to conflate objects and processes. There is no thing, meat, that has uniformly negative ecological, social, or epidemiological consequences. Meat only has in common that it comes from living creatures, and animals, just like people, can only be fundamentally understood in relation to the material environments within which they live, are loved and cared for, or maltreated and abused, and, in the case of most food animals, killed.

The question of « Should we eat meat ?, » therefore, appears very different among different sets of « we » and the different relations « we » have with such animals.

There are millions who might bridle at, or whose lives would be simply upturned and devastated by, enforceable commands that they simply cease meat production and consumption. Tunisian camel herders in the semi-arid steppes of the Jerid who rely on herding for day-to-day survival, or Bedouins in the northern Gaza Strip, have not been consulted about how they feel about an order from the Global North—in this case from Harvard and Johns Hopkins direct—to stop eating meat or engaging in the meat trade. Nor, in the other direction, have these researchers asked if such meat is substantively identical to the confined feedlots they rightly condemn.

[…]

A herd of examples stampedes to the horizon, but the point on that front is clear enough. Advocating intervening in the Global South and blithely demanding adopting capitalist technology in the name of a socialist Half-Earth, as does Vettese, who orders that it « must be from pasture that an eco-austere world will derive the land needed » for tree planting, is a form of « natural geo-engineering, » developed according to specific values, specific devaluations, and pathological externalizations. These are not the no-brainers their advocates presume. Compulsory veganism and lab meat, endorsed by prominent social democrat Green New Dealers, among them UPenn sociology prof Daniel Aldana Cohen, consents to the brute confiscation and erasure of peasant and pastoral particularisms in the name of « universal » ideals : rewilding Earth upon the bones of supposedly atavistic peoples poor and brown.

Even before COVID-19 arrived in the United States, it was apparent that in deploying the virus as a propagandistic parry against China, conservatives and liberals alike would make matters worse by imposing an opportunity cost. By crowding the social space with saber-rattling, the United States would fail to take notes about the outbreak and China’s responses pro and con—so as to make adequate and internationally teamed preparations.

Certainly it’s a bipartisan miscalculation borne more out of structural decay than mere hubris or bad data, but the problem extends across the sweep of respectable politics. These broader cultural pathologies, entwined into the literal pathologies of the pandemic, are on full digital peacock display beyond Chang and his ilk. The near entirety of the chatter sphere manifests a primal incapacity to adapt a holistic social and ecological perspective. Little subtle, flexible, and capacious thought—capable of encapsulating both the technical-policy-public health sphere of prevention and prophylaxis and the social-ecological-civilizational domain of responding to the problem from the bottom up—is on offer. No one is caught dead taking the lead of the world’s most affected dispossessed, who might know something about such thinking.

One instead traces a long arc of incompetence, reductionism, social triage, capitalist Mad Hatter logic, technicist tomfoolery, and rank opportunism. From the privatized right to the public left, influencers political and academic have been studiously incapable of responding to the crisis. Against all notions of political ecology, the pandemic is a « Chinese virus » on the right wing or an « act of God » on the left, removing off the board any notion of refounding our agrarian practices or the other modes of social reproduction that together drove the emergence of COVID-19.