but it changed as the food industry learned that veganism becomes more "popular" and started making vegan products that are processed and ultra processed
the "old school" veganism (not the way boomers say "in my days everything was better!") was a balanced plant based diet full of nutrients
no fried oil, no processed sugar at all, no chemistry at all, no instant things, no junk
because it did not exist. the products that contained this were not vegan but now there are vegan variants of junk food
another sad thing is that the fruit and vegetables today are not as nutritional as they used to be because of the breeding
you all probably saw how watermelon changed through centuries
but it happens to all fruit and vegetables
for example peaches now contain 2 times more (natural) sugar than before and even in some zoos they stop feeding animals fruits because they became obese
they became obese from fruit that used to be an absolutely normal amount of food for them in the past. And so the zoos started to feed them green veggies more often. No fruit anymore at all
also now you would need 8 oranges to get vitamin A that our grandparents got from 1 orange
if you want to keep being on a vegan diet (and there's a lot of reason to do so) do not be ashamed to stretch your hands for vitamins and multivitamins
every person is an individual and so changes the needs of specific nutrients for you all
it affects not only vegans but everyone. The whole food industry is producing less nutritional food. Lemons full of chemistry to smell better. Chickens grow extremely quickly to look more "delicious" yet it makes them suffer and the meat is full of shit because they eat shit.
Less nutritional food that is poisoned... What is this world about? so many herbicides and pesticides are banned, but still the food is becoming worse and less nutritional
of course if you have a garden, the food you grow there will not be as bad as the one in the grocery store, but how many of us can afford a garden? how many of us can afford to buy food from local farmers? and bio still doesn't mean chemistry free, it's just a lie. organic is the same lie
the world is making us weaker, especially the rich who own factories, but if we become weak enough, there will be no one who will have the needed strength to change it
how much time do we still have to change it until it's not late?
polluted water and the ground and also the air, global warming, animal extinction, malnutrition, fascism in rise, illiteracy, holodomor, wars, poisoned water, poisoned food, fake comfort through social media that makes us bond with unnatural dopamine, fast fashion and consumerism, people locking in themselves due to poverty and lies and "social war" while the class war is solution that we don't realise we should commit
do we even have time anymore? isn't it already late?
Conservationists say amount is ‘nothing like what’s needed’ to achieve 30x30 target and address nature crisis
"However, it was met with scepticism by some. “It’s obviously welcome that the UK starts to think about putting money on the table, but we all know this is nothing like what’s needed – either to address the nature crisis or to unlock the diplomatic process,” said Craig Bennett, CEO of Wildlife Trusts, who is at Cop15."
I wrote this for my Deep History course in uni. It is from the perspective of an immortal, who is seeing the world change around them, enamored yet baffled by humanity.
On AO3.
Warnings: extinction of animals and climate change.
~~~~~~~~~~~
The world is smaller than it once was.
I remember a time when the world was vast and I felt small. A time around campfires as we heard beings much bigger than ourselves roaming free, creatures so large, they seemed to fit much better into this world than us.
Have you ever seen a herd of woolly mammoths pass? Have you ever stood in awe of a mighty animal that could crush you without realizing? Have you ever felled one and stood next to its corpse, knowing that in spite of your smallness, it was you, who brought this giant animal to its knees?
But most of all, have you ever had so much respect for the things you eat?
Still, not all is meant to last and the vast world I had first walked in, became smaller and smaller. I saw how these giants, who carried much of what I knew, disappeared. Yet, they were not the only ones that left. With them much that once was changed as well, they were intertwined with the landscape, the animals, us.
I mourn their loss and all the losses that came with theirs. I mourn when I eat a fruit that they used to eat and when I look up to see birds so small. I mourn like the plants that have defenses against an attack that will nevercome.
It’s easy to forget how much you get used to seeing their silhouettes on the horizons, to see the predators creep around while you hope you are too small to be considered a snack. It might be long ago, but back then the world was bigger and time slower.
When I walk through busy streets now, surrounded by buildings of stone, rising out of the ground, I can only think of how fast it all happened. How fast all I had learned became obsolete. How fast people forgot what they once knew. How short of a time was needed for something to become all they had ever known.
Yes, I remember when I watched the first of my neighbors sow a few seeds, for they had seen in a village how food would grow in its place. I remember going there myself and seeing a house, sturdy and long, people and animals living together, a woman passing with a strange vessel decorated with bands of art and a man making an sickle.
These strange people, who did not live like I had seen in all my millennia of life. I was fascinated. They were willing to trade with me, willing to take me into their village. They showed me how they lived alongside animals and how those animals took to them and when other animals showed up, they let them be unless they caused active harm.
For the first time in my life, I pet what is now a dog, whichlooked much different then. I lead an animal willingly to an altar where it would be offered to gods that had never been worshiped before, asking them for good harvest, a thing I had not needed yet.
I learned how to built houses, grind the wheat and care for the animals. They taught me how to make the vessels from the earth and I sat with them as they turned wool into clothing.
And I watched how slowly they forgot what I had always known.
They no longer knew which plants were safe to eat, where they might find shelter and where the herds that passed would move to next. Instead they learned when the seeds needed to be put into the ground, how they could transport the wood needed for their houses and how to trade with their neighbors and procure items from over the long distances they no longer traveled.
But I do not view them negatively. For all knowledge they lost, they gained new insights. I have watched in amazement how we spread over the world and reshaped it with fields of crops and cities that rise out of the landscape that has been so reformed since when I first looked upon it.
Everything in this world is large, though it feels small. The feeling of not being made for the huge world that seemed more fit for the megafauna has faded as we reconstructed the world to fit us through a series of choices we made.
Yet, there are things I mourn.
I mourn as I again see animals disappear, their lives no longer impacting ours on a scale we can see, as they are merely a piece in the puzzle of our earth changing once more. I mourn as I watch people forget what they once did, no longer able to recognize how knowledge of the past can be used now. I mourn as I watch them get trapped in thinking that what they remember is all there has ever been, while they are build on generations of people, of choices, of lives and deaths.
I have watched so much of the earth, this species passing me by. I was there at our beginnings and will be there at our end.
And I know I will see things change and people forget who made those changes. I know I will see generation pass and the names of those that first started a tradition be forgotten. I know I will see developments in technology that I could have never dreamed off and be in awe as those around me will some day regard them as normal. I know I will watch humanity be itself until the end.
What I don’t know is when that end will be and I don’t know if humanity will remember that her greatness lies in her memory, in her ability to evolve and develop, to combine and grow.
I don’t know if humanity will become to big for her small world or if they will once again make sure to fit in what they have created, but I am trilled to see what happens next.
~~
A/N:
I am giving you the sources this was based on and I highly reccomend checking them out, also if any of my professors find this bc of plagerism (which I hope won't happen bc I finished this course and got my grade lmao), then hii it's me, pls don't come for me, I swear I wrote it XP
Bogaard, A., Allaby, R., Arbuckle, B. S., Bendrey, S., Crowley, T. C., Denham, T., Frantz, D. F., Gilbert, T, Karlsson, E., Manin, A., Marchall, F., Mueller, N., Peters, J., Stépanoff, C., Weide, A. & Larson, G. (2021): Reconsidering domestication from a process archaeology perspective, World Archaeology, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2021.1954990
Boivin, N. L., Crowther, A., Denham, T., Erlandson, J. M., Fuller, D. Q., Larson, G., Petraglia, M.D. & Zeder, M. A. (2016). Ecological consequences of human niche construction: Examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions. PNAS, 113(23), 6388–6396. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1525200113
Galetti, M., Moleón, M., Jordano, P., Pires, M. M., Guimarães, P. R., Pape, T., Nichols, E., Hansen, D., Olesen, J. M., Munk, M., de Mattos, J. S., Schweiger, A. H., Owen-Smith, N., Johnson, C. N., Marquis, R. J. & Svenning, J. (2017). Ecological and evolutionary legacy of megafauna extinctions. Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 93(2), 845-862. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12374
Robb, J. (2013). Material Culture, Landscapes of Action, and Emergent Causation. Current Anthropology, 54(6), 657-683. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/673859
The Sumatran rhinoceros has become extinct in Malaysia, after the last of the species in the country succumbed to cancer on Saturday.
The Sumatran rhinoceros has become extinct in Malaysia, after the last of the species in the country succumbed to cancer on Saturday.
The Wildlife Department in eastern Sabah state on Borneo island said the rhino, named Iman, died of natural causes due to shock in her system. She had uterine tumors since her capture in March 2014.
Department director Augustine Tuuga said in a statement that Iman, who reportedly was 25 years old, was suffering significant pain from growing pressure of the tumors to her bladder but that her death came sooner than expected...
It’s easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo, we are now sadder and wiser, but there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.
Wilderness areas buffer species against the risk of extinction, reducing it by more than half, a new study shows. Places with lots of unique species and wilderness with the last remaining sections of good habitat for certain species had a more pronounced impact on extinction risk.
Excerpt from this Nation of Change story:
Plant and animal species living in wilderness areas are less likely to go extinct, a recent study has found.
Defined as intact habitats that haven’t been affected by human use on industrial scales, wilderness “buffers” the life it supports against the threat of extinction. In fact, it slashes the risk on average by more than half compared to that faced by species living outside these areas, Moreno Di Marco, James Watson, and colleagues reported Sept. 18 in the journal Nature.
“This research provides the evidence for how essential it is for the global conservation community specifically target protecting Earth’s remaining wilderness,” Watson, an ecologist with the University of Queensland, in Australia, and the Wildlife Conservation Society, said in a statement.
In an earlier study, Watson and a team of researchers reported that 3.3 million square kilometers (1.27 million square miles) of wilderness — an area the size of India — has been lost since the 1990s. At the same time, a recent report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services found that 1 million species are staring at the prospect of extinction.
Currently, however, the focus of a lot of conservation is to protect heavily impacted “hotspots” that are disappearing as a result of human use and where many of the species are sliding toward extinction, Di Marco, the study’s lead author, said in an interview.
“That’s OK if your objective is to prevent the extinction of species that are highly threatened,” said Di Marco, an ecologist at CSIRO Land and Water (Australia’s national science research agency) and Italy’s Sapienza University of Rome. But that approach doesn’t account for the benefits that intact wilderness areas provide for biodiversity, he added. Until now, no one had tabulated the role that wilderness plays in the survival of species.
Wilderness landscapes span the globe, from the high Arctic to equatorial rainforests. It turns out that the “buffering effect” of wilderness on extinction risk holds across a wide range of these habitats.
“There wasn’t just one ecological or biogeographic region where wilderness areas were important,” Di Marco said.
Today is a rainy day and the only thing I could think of to draw was a passenger pigeon. The date on the ribbon was the day that the pigeon was officially declared extinct.
Europe and North Africa’s lion population was wiped out by the early 1900s. However, it is possible that one species of North African lion survived. The Barbary lion was often presented as a token of fealty to the rulers of Morocco by the indigenous Berber people throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and in 1970, King Hassan II transferred his lions from the royal palace to Rabat Zoo – arousing great interest among zoologists.
Several lions originating from the king’s collection still remain, and the questions continue to swirl around whether the sub-species should be restored using these lions. Barbary lions are now extinct, yet many researchers believe that they could be resurrected using the lions in Rabat Zoo.
It has been claimed, however, that sultans' lions were often brought from West Africa on the trans-Saharan trade route – which raises doubts as to their origins. It is fairly likely, therefore, that the king’s ‘Barbary lions’ are only part-Barbary.
Further and more detailed research, propelled by advances in biotechnology, should be able to tell us more about these mysterious lions, which will either finally dispel the myth of the Barbary lion, or pave the way for a major restoration project.
Image credit: ‘Barbary lion’ by Alfred Edward Pease. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
