Global problems: Ideation, discussions, never ending idea iteration (Part 2)
The second brainstorming session revolved around the idea of challenging people’s assumptions of the value of animals as "ends-in-themselves, rather than means to an end" (according to Kantian ethics). It's an idea that animals shouldn't be seen as things the sole purpose of which is serving people in one way or another, such as food or clothing, but rather that their life is intrinsically valuable in itself, that they can exist without any purpose, just like humans.
This neatly ties into Speciesism - a prejudice or bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species.
We started brainstorming by thinking what is an extrinsic value of animals in our society and specifically looked into the most popular New Zealand's uses of animals, the biggest of which is agriculture (being the 2nd biggest export after tourism).
That led us to an idea that bringing awareness to the issue of using animals isn't enough. People can be aware, but have no idea as to how they're supposed to act. Same thing with an economy - an alternative needs to be proposed. An important point to consider is that animal agriculture is a big part of NZ's identity and tradition and stripping it away, especially without providing a worthy alternative isn't possible.
We decided to still stick with agriculture, just eliminating animals from the equation. Growing only crops is more sustainable than growing crops and feeding them to animals because 36 percent of the calories produced by the world’s crops are being used for animal feed, while only 12 percent are consumed by humans (Cassidy, 2013).
Because we, as students, can't make an impact on country's agriculture, we decided to tackle this issue on a local, university level scale - AUT Community garden.
This garden, as envisioned, would provide AUT with enough produce to feed the university, at least partially; food grown in a garden can supply local cafes or potentially, a fully vegan cafe can be opened.
However, after further research, we found that a traditional garden will be required too much space in order to provide enough food and therefore alternative methods need to be explored, such as vertical aeroponic or hydrophobic growing. But in that case, that wouldn't be exactly of a community garden, because the majority of the people wouldn't know hot to look after one and one of our unspoken goals is to create a university symbol of sorts, that can connect people, which a community garden could embody. Therefore, both ideas should be explored: a community garden for fostering connections and a vertical farm for actually growing food.
References:
Cassidy, E. S., West, P. C., Gerber, J. S., & Foley, J. A. (2013). Redefining agricultural yields: from tonnes to people nourished per hectare. Environmental Research Letters, 8(3), 034015.
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