Wanna See a Polar Bear in an Orchard?

As we're now getting into winter I'm beginning to face the same conundrum I face every year; leave the heating off or kill the polar bears.

With my bedroom being in the attic of the house it can get a little cold, but flicking my little heater on feels like a guilty luxury. So I'm always quite mindful.

It got me thinking though. I always tend to see these things not so much through an environmental lens, but more through a work done lens. I tend to be more mindful of the fact that it requires human effort to produce these things I'm using. So the guilt partly stems from the sense that I'm being a selfish burden by being so profligate.

Someone somewhere is doing manual labour in a hi-vis, so I can be toasty while I sit at my laptop.

In fact, it reminds me of when I first became a vegetarian back when I was a teenager. What pushed me over the edge to becoming one was not so much the animal suffering but the fact that people had to work 40 hours a week in a slaughterhouse.

I remember thinking what a horrific job that must be. One that I could never ever do myself. So the logic followed. If I wouldn't do that job why should I expect someone else to do it on my behalf? Every time I ordered a burger I created a reason for someone to be stuck in that environment.

If I just ordered an apple pie instead I'd be creating a job in an orchard. Much more wholesome.

(This is supposed to be a polar bear in an

orchard - looks a little Christmassy though)

I'm not sure if I'm in a minority when I think like this. You don't often hear vegetarians make this human-focused argument for the cause. The focus tends to be on the animals, which I guess makes sense. I do think the appeal to work done would probably be a more effective argument when it comes to many of these things though. Especially the environmental arguments, where the logic is often contested and contorted.

This highlights another paradoxical problem we have as a society. We want to create jobs, because people obviously need employment to support themselves, but by doing so we're literally creating more work for people. Which aside from generally not being fun also leads to more resources being consumed. So it's like we're chasing two contradictory dreams.

A life of leisure ..but in full employment.

I wonder, will we ever see a politician who says; "Vote for me, I'll create fewer jobs" ?

I guess some parties have moved a tad in this direction with '4 day weeks', etc, but still, it's all a little muddled. It's a hard mental bind to escape from.

I remember once seeing the actress Liza Tarbuck on TV telling a story about how she had told a guy off for littering and his response was, "..but I'm creating a job for someone." Obviously that's a bit of an extreme example, but we do have this attitude where creating employment is so desired that making work for other people, even in the most menial and pointless sense, is often viewed as a net good.

Perhaps The Great Reset is already on the case to tackle this? What with UBI and so forth.

Come to think of it, we often talk about how we're heading into some sort of dystopian future. Which in many ways I don't doubt. However, if we return to the above mentioned slaughterhouses I think they can be taken as pretty good evidence that we're already in one.

I'm not one of these vegetarians that's totally against eating meat. I'm sure if I was starving in some African village I wouldn't quite have the same reservations about it. Plus it is quite normal out there in the animal kingdom, and a human hunting an animal through the jungle scrub isn't too dissimilar to a lion hunting its prey. So it's hardly something that can be considered unusual or unnatural.

When we moved into mechanised slaughter I think we crossed the line though. We had the intelligence to create all these wonderful advances. Yet used them to create relentless conveyor belts of doom, for already captive animals. It really is quite a cold and barbarous use of technology. An obvious indication that our morals lag behind our wit.

"We're heading into a dystopia!" people cry. Tell that to the cows.

Perhaps if we want to stop people being sheeple we should start with the actual sheep.