Climate Change Denial is a Policy in Support of Genocide

On the last day of my Environmental Literature class this semester, I learned that our president-elect had named Scott Pruitt as his director of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt, an avowed climate change denier, is as well a man who has asserted that he is “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.” Pruitt, like ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, is beholden not to the American people who elected Trump but rather to the fossil fuel industry that has dumped millions upon millions of dollars into generating the bogus science behind climate change denial. 

Here's your president, "blue collar millionaire," declaring that the Trump way to live is the only way. Those people under the billboard are in Mumbai. And they are homeless.

I don’t really have the patience or the stamina to trace the narrative of how these guys have funded scholars producing bunk science that denies climate change, a tactic undertaken to support their bottom line. I don’t have the patience or stamina because the facts that prove my point have been readily available for some time. You can read about how the fossil fuel industry, led by Charles and David Koch, manufactured an inaccurate and dangerous narrative that maintains that the jury is still out on climate change. My education into nature of Koch Brothers’ the dark money began when my university accepted a $2 million gift from the Koch Foundation for the establishment of a so-called center for the study of Free Enterprise and my opposition to that money lead to this. 

Koch Bras, beatch.

With regard to climate change, the jury is not out: it’s real, and we are causing it.

I’m an English professor who has done National Science Foundation grant-based work with three scientists to develop a teaching module that uses both literature and science to talk about the reality of global warming. Literature and science give us different kinds of truths about the situation: science gives us the facts, and fiction gives us narratives of the potential toll of those facts.

In my Environmental Literature class, I had a mix of students from a variety of disciplines including nursing, business, economics, anthropology, and criminology, all of whom were required to read works of literature that examined humanity’s relationship to the natural world. My class was made up of mostly first-year, first-generation students, a mix of Republicans and Democrats, students of various socio-economic backgrounds, people with complex and varied life experiences. 

I began the semester with the white men, the conservationists and creators of the narratives of the American wilderness and its virtues: Emerson, Thoreau, and Bartram, a writer who recorded his travels throughout my native state, North Carolina, where my family has lived since the 1700s. The class moved then to my colleague Ron Rash’s 2008 novel Serena, a Depression-era historical novel about clear-cutting, timber barons, and the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Serena shows us the power of capital to foment environmental damage and the power of art – in this case, the writings of Horace Kephart and the photographs of Jim Thompson – to counter that destruction. But the story is not that simple, not just a narrative of conservationists defeating capitalists; for the national park to come into being, people living on the land that became the park had to be evicted from it. The loggers, who function as a chorus in Rash’s novel, work to understand their role in the devastation, the creation of the park, and the displacement of people:

“We had to feed our families.”

“Yes we did. What I’m wondering is how we’ll feed them once all the trees is cut and the jobs leave.”

“At least what critters are left have a place they can run to.”

“The park you mean?”

“Yes sir, trouble is they ain’t going to let us stay in there with them.”

“Running folks out so they can run the critters in. That’s a hell of a thing.”

One of Jim Thompson's photos of the land that became the park.

There were native peoples here first, of course, displaced first; they show up as shadows, working on the logging crew, voiceless, abject.

After losing all of his money during the Great Depression, my father’s father worked to clear-cut the mountains where I live and work. The narratives of environmental destruction and salvation are never simple, never just a matter of preservation in the face of needless consumption. My father told me that his father made one dollar per day in the early 1930s doing some of the most dangerous work imaginable.  He lived in a logging camp, away from my grandmother. He never put his money in a bank again.

In Rash’s novel, after the logging crew cuts down the last tree, as the men stare at the devastation, one says, “I think this is what the end of the world will be like,” and none of the other men “raised his voice to disagree.” My students noted over and over again that this is a novel about the end of the world, the apocalypse it must have been for the southern highlanders. And we discussed the notion of apocalypse, the almost but never arriving end, the most powerful metaphor of the environmental movement that is still, it seems, not powerful enough to stop the devastation that continues to happen all around us.

After Serena, we read Edwidge Danticat’s 1998 work The Farming of Bones, a novel about the historical Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic in 1937, a five-day period that constituted the genocide of 20,000 plus Haitians at the hands of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, the dictator who pedaled fear of the Haitian immigrant population to the residents of the DR.

Here's an image of Trujillo.  I'll spare you pictures of the massacre.

In Danticat’s novel Trujillo speaks: “Tradition shows us a fatal fact . . . that under the protection of rivers, the enemies of peace, who are also the enemies of work and prosperity, found an ambush in which they might do their work, keeping the nation in fear and menacing stability.”  The Massacre River, the environmental space between the two countries on the island of Hispaniola, is the space of the genocide: the wall and the safe passage. The Haitian pronunciation of “pési, perejil, parsley” was the shibboleth that determined whether one was killed, cut down with machetes, or lived. The similarities between Trujillo’s pronouncements of the Haitians and Donald Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants were not lost on my students who wondered if such a thing could happen here.

One of my students is from the DR. Her grandfather was tortured by Trujillo’s regime; she told us how while interrogating him, Trujillo’s men pulled out her grandfather’s fingernails. “My grandmother has more stories, if you want them,” she said.

Such a thing could happen here, I said. 

And here's why it could happen here.

We ended with Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, a 2003 novel that feels all too real right now. Atwood’s dystopian work of speculative fiction engages with catastrophic human-made crises that are already happening: mass extinction, global warming, and human trafficking. Crake, the evil genius who, via a bioengineered virus, brings out the near end of humanity, tells his best friend Jimmy, “break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it's game over forever.” And that’s what he does: breaks the link, destroys a generation, and rewrites the rules for human civilization.

***

Let me get to my extremely problematic point: such a link is being broken now – not as the result of a physical virus, but as the result of viral misinformation, fake news, and propaganda. Scott Pruitt and other politicians denying human-caused global warming aren’t denying it because they actually don’t believe it; they are denying it because they know that the fossil fuel industry and our consumption of fossil fuels is causing the earth to warm, but they simply don’t care. Your life, my life, our students’ lives, the lives of every other human and every other nonhuman being on the planet don’t matter one iota to these guys so long as one already-rich man in the western world can be made richer by our continued dependence on an industry that is ruining our planet and killing us.

The denial is not based on bad data; it’s not based on actual belief, either. Donald Trump, Scott Pruitt, and the rest of Trump’s anti-fact, white supremacist cabinet are denying facts to convince the rest of us that global warming is not happening, that we are not implicated in its happening. They are doing so because they don’t care about your life or the lives of your children, your students, your friends and family. They don’t care about you. At all.

The DAPL protestors.  He doesn't care about you either, but you already know that.

So: to be clear, the denial that this incoming administration is perpetuating amounts to the sanctioning of genocide. It is a tactic taken by those who deny the holocaust, the deadliest genocide in history, an event that claimed somewhere upwards of 10 million people. This genocide is different; it is what Rob Nixon calls slow violence of a kind that is and will continue to happen over a long period of time; it’s harder to see and, therefore, easier to ignore. There are seven billion humans on the planet at present. What does the climate change denial genocide look like?  How can we even comprehend it? In Atwood’s novel, Crake tells Jimmy that “Homo sapiens sapiens was not hard-wired to individuate other people in numbers above two hundred, the size of the primal tribe.” 

Yeah.

He’s right, of course. This is why we have trouble processing the enormity of past genocides: 10 million people in Germany, 20 thousand in Haiti. These numbers are beyond our human ability to comprehend. But I can understand 200. This is roughly the number of students I teach in a year. This is the number of people in my tribe; these are my charges, the people for whom I am in many senses responsible.

Let me assert once again that reality is actually reality: human beings, via their production and use of fossil fuels, are causing the earth to warm at an alarming rate. This is a fact, whether we live in a post-fact world or not. Not believing it doesn’t make it less true, even as, for now at least, it’s been easy for those of us in the so-called developed world to ignore this reality; global warming is a slow moving monster, and we are the frog in the pot, coming to a slow boil without realizing it. For the last eight years, we have lived under an administration that has worked to protect us, to set in place some limits on the amount of carbon that we are producing. But such limits are not good for the bottom line of billionaires who only want more, so now that we’ve put one of those in office, strap in and wait for the pot to boil with all of us in it.

Next semester, I will teach this course again to a new tribe of students. And next semester we will read Octavia E. Butler’s 1998 novel The Parable of the Talents, a tale of an apocalypse – the Pox – that begins in 2015, a calamity brought about by “our own refusal to deal with the obvious problems” in “coinciding climactic, economic, and sociological crises.” In this novel, Butler’s narrator writes of a presidential contender with marauding bands of murderers. He’s a narcissist who tells his increasingly violent and disenfranchised followers to join him: “leave your past behind and become one of us!  Help us to make America great again.”

Science shows us the facts; literature shows us the future when we disregard them. As educators and as global citizens, we should pay attention to both, particularly now.

Why Margaret Atwood Should win the Nobel Prize in Literature

I came home last night after dinner with friends (at Plant, of course) and collapsed on my sofa, wanting nothing more than to watch something mindless on television.  So I flipped channels, landing first on 127 Hours, Danny Boyle’s self-proclaimed "action movie with a guy who can't move," the story of Aron Rolston's ordeal trapped by a boulder that falls and pins his arm to the wall of a canyon in Robber's Roost, Utah. I've seen it, several times, so I flipped more, and caught the end of Sean Penn's Into the Wild, an adaptation of Jonathan Krakauer's biography of Christopher McCandless, the Emory University graduate who abandoned his family in 1990 and headed into Alaska, where he eventually died. 

McCandless's last self-portrait

I sat there watching for a minute, thinking the rather ungenerous thought that men get immortalized, their narratives becoming part of the mythology of masculine individualism, for doing some stupid, selfish shit.  Rolston went out on his own and told no one where he was heading; early in the film as he prepares to leave his house, his mother calls.  He listens as she leaves a message, asking him to call her.  He ignores it.  McCandless is even worse, as he cuts all contact with his family, leaving them worried and desperate to find him.

And then there's a pang of envy on my part as well: as a woman, I know that I'll never feel free enough to embrace such adventure, however misguided and stupid it may prove to be.  And I feel relatively certain that if I did, and if the results were the same, the narrative that would be told -- if any narrative was told at all -- would be much more lurid, more gruesome (if anything can be more gruesome than James Franco's portrayal of Rolston severing his arm to escape), more about the idiocy of placing oneself in harm's way and less about the spirit of individualism that makes heros of men who do just that.  

The tourniquet and dull knife Rolston used to sever his arm

By the time I got to HBO and Martin Scorsese’s portrait of George Harrison, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, I was just annoyed.  And this is not to say that I don't think Harrison deserves a biopic; my sense is that he does.  But by then I was just tired of the mythology of men, so I kept flipping.  What I landed on finally was a Dateline ID show, something about Canada; I caught the image of a rope on a bed and flashed immediately to the opening pages of Margaret Atwood's 1981 novel Bodily Harm, in which the narrator comes home to find police in her house, men who let her know that someone broke into her home: "we don't think he was a robber. . . .  He made himself a cup of Ovaltine" (5).  They then escort her into her bedroom and show her "a length of rope coiled neatly on the quilt.  It wasn't any special kind of rope, there was nothing lurid about it" (5). 


As it turns out, the Dateline show was about Russell Williams, the Canadian Air Force commander who was jailed in 2010 for rape and murder and some 80 other counts of breaking and entering and stealing women's underwear.  Williams confesses, on videotape, to police, in part, he says, because he is worried about his wife. 

Here's part of the confession.

I thought of Margaret Atwood's poem "Marrying the Hangman," that begins thus: 


She has been condemned to death by hanging.  A man
may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a 
woman by marrying the hangman.  

The women Williams killed: Marie-France Corneau and Jessica Lloyd

Atwood's assertion that women find themselves in the precarious position of depending on men to protect them from men is as much a part of my daily thought processes as is her claim that "men are afraid that women will laugh at them.  Women are afraid that men will kill them."  Atwood's words, her narratives, fictional characters, and politics are so much a part of my everyday existence that they form much of the fabric of my consciousness, indistinguishable, in many ways from my very sense of self.  And this has been the case since I first encountered her work in the form of her 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale, which I read in 1989.  I was in college; I wanted to be a novelist myself.  I read Atwood's work and realized that everything I wanted to say at that point in my life had been said by her already.  And had been said better than I ever could have said it.  Reading that novel destroyed me.  


Reading Atwood's work -- her novels, short stories, and poetry -- has always made me feel this way, that she's somehow already charted the territory that percolates in bits and pieces in the semi-conscious parts of my brain; her writing is by turns terrifying and prophetic, satirical and funny. Atwood plays with language, ever conscious of the power of words, both to create and destroy personhood, nature, and society.  In the poem "You Fit into Me," for example, she takes apart a seemingly innocent image, a clothing fastener, to reveal a disturbing duality:


You fit into me
like a hook into an eye


a fish hook
an open eye  


And Atwood's work is filled with this duality, with the problematic and imbalanced nature of relationships -- heterosexual, national, interspecies.  Her female characters are often initially complicit in their victimization, even as they ultimately cast off such a subject position.  As Atwood's unnamed narrator states at the end of Surfacing, “this above all, to refuse to be a victim.  Unless I can do that, I can do nothing” (222). 


I have long wanted Atwood to win the Nobel Prize.  The sheer volume and scope of her writing, its variety, its quality, its prescience, its astute examination of gendered, national, and species based power politics, and its deconstruction, via both satire and scathing critique, of our contemporary world warrant her winning it.   


Perhaps more significantly, though, than even her subject matter, in writing Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), Atwood in many ways articulates and, more importantly, authorizes, via a thematic analysis of Canadian literature (based on the inclusion of certain works and the exclusion of others), Canada’s national narrative.  In this work, Atwood states that the central theme in Canadian literature is survival and she locates in Canadian literature four “victim positions”—ranging from denying that one is a victim, to acknowledging that one is a victim, to becoming a creative non-victim. These victim positions, according to Atwood, are universal, “whether you are a victimized country, a victimized minority group, or a victimized individual” (46).  It is, therefore, not only through the trope of survival that Atwood reads Canadian literature and interprets Canadian national identity, but also through the trope of victimization.  Indeed,  in order to survive, one must first be a victim of something else.   

Atwood’s work not only established Canadian literature as the articulation of a survivalist mentality, but it also established Canadian literature as a legitimate entity; Atwood, I contend, "invented" Canadian literature.  As she remarks:

The few dedicated academic souls who had cultivated this neglected pumpkin patch over the meager years were affronted because a mere chit of a girl had appropriated a pumpkin they regarded as theirs, and those who had taken a firm stand on the non-existence of Canadian literature were affronted because I had pointed out that there was in fact a pumpkin to appropriate. (4)

As Atwood notes, teaching Canadian literature “is a political act” (21), and Survival conceives of such literature not only as a mirror for Canadian identity but also as a map, “a geography of the mind” (26). 

I'm currently teaching Atwood's Year of the Flood, her most recent work, and the second in a series of what will be three novels (the first being Oryx and Crake), that explores a potential apocalypse delivered in the form of the BlyssPlus pill, a pharmaceutical that delivers excellent sex and protects takers from STDs...that is, until it kills them.  The work, set sometime in the near future, includes much of what is already familiar -- genetically engineered animals and food, rampant global warming, viral internet pornography -- as it leads us to some logical and horrific conclusions about what might be probable.  As Toby, one of the God's Gardeners, a sect of vegan preapocalyptic hippies, notes, "how easy it is, treachery.  You just slide into it" (217).  After the world ends, so to speak, Adam One, the leader of the Gardeners, realizing that veganism may be impossible in the current moment, preaches to his flock, "which is more blest, to eat or be eaten?" (346), even as he entertains the idea that survival may, at some point, depend on cannibalism.

We're told by Ren, another of the survivors, that "Adam One used to say that people can believe two opposite things at the same time" (229), and I asked my students to speak about this idea.  There was silence, and then one offered, "it's like watching 'Toddlers and Tiaras.'  You know it's wrong, but you can't look away."  Good point.  And that's why I ended up watching a TV show about Russell Williams's victimization of women instead of any number of shows about the accomplishments of men.  Men are immortalized, and women are murdered; at least that's what last night's channel surfing showed me.  Men act stupid and become mythological heros; women get killed for leaving a window open...  A man comes in, with a coil of rope, and it's curtains.  And we all revel in the grotesque aftermath.

Atwood's writing acknowledges and then resists this reality; it always has.  Today, I'm happy, I guess, for Tomas Transtromer, whose work I don't know at all, but who, I have no doubt, deserves the Nobel as much as the next guy.  And I'm sorry for Atwood who, I feel certain, deserves it more.  As she says, "a word after a word after a word is power."  Maybe next year.

* And I realize that this post has next to nothing to do with veganism.  

ASLE, Animals, Contextual Moral Vegetarianism, and Me

Part 2: Things go Dark and Creepy

Now that I’ve ruminated about all the productive and positive things that happened at ASLE, here’s a bit about what I presented: an essay on the role of contextual moral vegetarianism in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi. To be clear (again), ASLE is about literature and representations of the environment in literature, but, perhaps, because I have had limited experience in the real world, literature functions for me as a way of accessing the real world, and this is one of the main themes that I incorporate in my teaching: that nothing one reads in a fictional work of literature is any less true than what one reads about and learns in a history class.  As Nobel Prize winning South African author Nadine Gordimer states in “Living in the Interregnum,” her 1981 James Lecture presented at the Institute for the Humanities, “nothing I say here will be as true as my fiction.”

In Life of Pi, the title character is an ethical vegetarian…until he’s stranded for 227 days on a lifeboat, adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, his sole companion a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. In terms of my essay, it’s largely based on a bit of theoretical shifting that is a part of the realization that being vegan/vegetarian makes no sense in certain contextual situations (duh, right?).  What is one to do, for example, on a lifeboat in the middle of an ocean?  Such a scenario is the extreme case, but Pi’s ability to contextualize his diet, to partake of sea creatures (and possibly even to partake of the flesh of another human) situates vegetarianism and veganism as dietary choices that can only be made in certain (privileged) circumstances.

 

Here’s the start of the essay:

Perhaps nowhere is the conflicting nature of the Western rhetoric of species preservation more apparent than in much of the current debate surrounding vegetarianism.  In conjunction with the twentieth and twenty-first century Holocene extinction spasm has occurred the rise and commercialization of a vegetarian diet as an ethical imperative and as a presumed reaction to and proposed remedy for environmental destruction – including species decimation.  Arguments in favor of such an ideology often cite, among other factors, the environmental damage done by factory farms and the depletion of arable land as a result of overgrazing.  Despite Anthony Bourdain’s limited claim that "vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit,” arguments in favor of a vegetarian diet focus on a politics of compassionate consumption, the health benefits of eschewing meat, and the positive environmental impact to which such a diet contributes.  Bruce Friedrich offers one such argument: the amount of land used to satisfy the food requirements of a vegan for one year is 1/16 acre; for a meat eater, the figure is 20 times as high.  Similarly, “it requires 300 gallons of water to feed a vegan for a day.  It requires about four times as much to feed a vegetarian, and 14 times as much to feed a meat eater.”

OK, all well and good.  But despite such statistics, vegetarians are the “enemy” and vegans are “Hezbollah.” (by the way, that’s the worst analogy ever in the history of faulty analogies.  Seriously: hez·bol·lah [Arab. khes-bah-lah]–noun a radical Shiʿite Muslim organization in Lebanon engaged in guerrilla warfare against Israel. veg·an [vej-uhn; especially Brit. vee-guhn]–noun a vegetarian who omits all animal products from the diet).  So, if this is the general perception (and I kinda think that it is), how do we crazy animal rights people convince the rest of the world that being veg matters or is helpful (or is healthful or that being compassionate to animals – the ones that aren’t pets – is necessary)?

 

Intermission.  Consider Scott Adam’s assessment in Dilbert for more on the crazy:

Oh, and by the way, a big fat fuck off to Anthony Bourdain, who capitalizes on being a vegan hater.  Anyone can cook with meat; it takes talent to cook without it.

The Ramones tee-shirt notwithstanding, he’s still a dillweed. 

Here’s Deane Curtin on the subject of contextual moral vegetarianism – and Deane Curtin is a major source for my thinking in this essay: In Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World, Curtin has claimed that he can imagine saying “to a dominant white culture, which has perfected the global food market and excelled at industrial farming, that we have an obligation to be vegetarian,” but he notes that

as a ‘contextual moral vegetarian,’ I cannot refer to an absolute moral rule that prohibits meat eating under all circumstances. There may be some contexts in which another response is appropriate. Though I am committed to moral vegetarianism, I cannot say that I would never kill an animal for food.

Mostly, I tend to agree with Curtin’s statement that in the West, we white folks have a moral obligation to be veg – and I also recognize the racial implications of such an assertion.  I’d argue a bit differently, that perhaps race may be a part of the contextual picture, but socio-economic status is probably a bigger factor.  Carol Adams deals that the contention that veganism/vegetarianism is a particular form of racism – an argument often posited in order to support the cultural significance of a subordinate (read as “nonwhite”) population’s ancestral and familial connections to a meat eating – by linking the oppression of nonwhite groups to the oppression of animals.  And that’s an argument I get as well – and I’ve written about that idea all over the non-blog world, so I won’t rehash my sentiments here. 

In terms of who should be and who has a contextual right not to be veg, I prefer not to make pronouncements beyond the fact that I’ve never understood the reasons offered by people who have given me (almost always uninvited) their opinions as to why not.

But I also understand the contextual argument, particularly given all kinds of racial, socio-economic, and global circumstances that do not support vegetarianism or, on the more extreme end, veganism.  For example, Curtin goes further to discuss the Makah nation of Washington State; the Nation asserts that it has a right to hunt gray whales, a species that was removed from the Endangered Species List in 1994 (Curtin 137).  For the Makah people, whaling’s cultural significance has become a key aspect of their cultural renaissance.  Despite the United States government’s allocation of 20 gray whales to the Makah over a four-year period, however, animal rights and environmental activists have protested Makah whaling and denounced the practice.

OK: so back to ASLE.  Here’s me trying to discuss this contextual vegetarian ethos, and then there’s this bumper sticker displaying a precise example of such an ethos:

I can’t find any information that links this organization, the Fur Harvesters of North Bay, Ontario, to native peoples, even though the image on the sticker is of a stylized image of a native person, a trapper, disenfranchised by the whites who invaded North America (there are links on Fur Harvesters’ web page for such things as “furisgreen.com” and “Origin Assured," which, while arguing for the green and sustainable nature of fur, convince me of absolutely nothing).  

The image, for whatever it’s worth, capitalizes not only on the concept of context, of native people’s cultural history of hunting and trapping but also on the (false) belief that hunting and trapping is a way of protecting women from harm.  By such logic, if one hunts and kills animals, one is less likely to hunt and prey upon and kill women (little old ladies in this case).  The sexual politics of fur.  What a problematic phrase, in oh so many ways.

But there is much evidence to support a counter-argument, that there are connections between the killing/abuse/hunting of animals and the killing/abuse/hunting of humans – predominantly women and children.  So let’s start with Ed Gein a hunter, who gutted his female victims like deer. 

I get that Gein was batshit cuh-raaz-ee, so perhaps his example is not exactly representative. 

But here’s an article in Newsweek on the subject of the links between animal cruelty and the murder of humans and another from PETA on the connections between animal abuse and domestic violence.  Lastly, CBS News has this 2009 story of a deer hunter who shot and killed six other hunters – one of whom was female. 

Canadian author Margaret Atwood's novel Surfacing makes clear the connections between hunting and trapping animals for fur in Canada and the objectification of women and nonwhite minorities: “‘Do you realize,’ David says, ‘that this country is founded on the bodies of dead animals?  Dead fish, dead seals, and historically dead beavers, the beaver is to this country what the black man is to the United States’” (46).  And later, when the unnamed narrator doesn’t understand David’s joke that “a split beaver” (141) should emblazon Canada’s flag instead of the maple leaf, he responds, “where’ve you been living?  It’s slang for cunt” (141). The narrative that kids who hunt animals grow up not to hurt women or other members of society, well, that’s specious logic at best, no matter what the context.

I’ve written too much and still managed not to say anything about Lauren Spierer, who’s still missing.  And then there’s Crystal Grubb, who isn’t missing anymore. Yep, context – here as well as in matters of vegetarianism/veganism – matters.