A self-serving argument for carnivorous eating

(Or omnivorous, per Michael Pollan in "Omnivore's Dilemma"...)

If you care about animals, you should eat them. It is not just that you may do so, but you should do so. In fact, you owe it to animals to eat them. It is your duty. Why? Because eating animals benefits them and has benefitted them for a long time. Breeding and eating animals is a very long-standing cultural institution that is a mutually beneficial relationship between human beings and animals. We bring animals into existence, care for them, rear them, and then kill and eat them. From this, we get food and other animal products, and they get life. Both sides benefit. I should say that by ‘animals’ here, I mean nonhuman animals. It is true that we are also animals, but we are also more than that, in a way that makes a difference...
https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-care-about-animals-it-is-your-moral-duty-to-eat-them?utm_medium=Social

Trees also breathe

How Do You Mourn a 250-Year-Old Giant?

Protecting trees in public areas is a no-brainer. Protecting them on private land is a far greater challenge.

We need to stop thinking of trees as objects that belong to us and come to understand them as long-lived ecosystems temporarily under our protection. We have borrowed them from the past, and we owe them to the future... Margaret Renkl

This Is No Way to Be Human - The Atlantic

...we need to be more mindful of what this technology has cost us and the vital importance of direct experiences with nature. And by "cost," I mean what Henry David Thoreau meant in Walden: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run..." Alan Lightman

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/01/machine-garden-natureless-world/621268/

An Evangelical Climate Scientist Wonders What Went Wrong

Katharine Hayhoe doesn't see the love in many of her fellow Christians. She still has hope we can all do better.

Such is the grimly politicized state of science these days that the descriptors typically used to explain who Katharine Hayhoe is — evangelical Christian; climate scientist — can register as somehow paradoxical. Despite that (or, indeed, because of it), Hayhoe, who is 49 and whose most recent book is "Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World," has become a sought-after voice for climate activism and a leading advocate for communicating across ideological, political and theological differences. "For many people now, hope is a bad word," says Hayhoe, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy as well as a professor of political science at Texas Tech. "They think that hope is false hope; it is wishful thinking. But there are things to do — and we should be doing them."

... nyt