When people talk about the rights of animals and plants to exist on this planet, diet is a topic that always comes to the forefront. One argument people have is that eating meat is exploitative and unnecessarily cruel to the animals that have to be farmed. The opposition may argue that being vegetarian or vegan is being similarly exploitative and cruel to the plants. Of course, in reality, no one can subsist off of air and sunlight and the two parties will have a back and forth about the whole thing.

Instead, what we should be thinking about is the bigger picture, coexisting with each other and the environment around us. Too many people are discriminated or hurt because of who they are or what they look like. Too many of Earth’s resources are squandered on single-use, novelty items or wasted on goods that we don’t need. Too many fruits and vegetables are throw away before they even reach supermarket shelves because they do not meet the visual standards we’ve come to expect. Instead of focusing on one aspect, we need to focus on all of them and recognise that we are all pieces in this machine we call Earth. We all play our part, human, animal and plant alike.

As Rob Blakers put so eloquently in his article,

We are alive at a time when greed is seen as good – where selfishness is the foundation of the dominant global economic system of capitalism and where injustice, exploitation and abuse within the human and upon the natural world is normalised. Where our commerce, our lifestyles and what we choose to eat inflict great and needless harm on people and planet.

Instead we should focus on exercising restraint and avoiding over-consumption. If your solution to that is to remove animal products from your diet then go for it! If it’s to increase the zoom on your emails so you can read them better without having to print them out, then keep it up! If you’re helping out in a soup kitchen, or limiting your summer wardrobe expansion to 2 items of clothing instead of 20, or turning off the lights in a room when you’re no longer using them, whatever it is that you can do to keep as much of the people, flora and fauna of this earth safe then continue doing it. If we can start small and move together, we can keep building momentum to reach milestone after milestone until we hit that equilibrium where we can still live comfortably, without having to exploit other beings to do so.

All it takes is that first push.

If you’re interested, you can read Rob’s full article here. For more information about how reducing the amount of animal products in your diet could actually be helping out the environment, click here.