Martin’s post last week describing the first slaughter (and I use the word “slaughter” advisedly) in our new endeavor as purveyors of bison meat elicited a comment that urged us to consider the ethical fault line (presumably) running through every conscience, that unsteady place where we find ourselves rationalizing our actions to ourselves or to whatever audience our imaginations conjure up.

Martin tried to make his/our unease clear with the post’s title: Bloody Hands. So I’m wondering once again about the ethics of carnivorocity, as visible and treacherous a fault line as abortion, euthanasia, gun control, climate change, or cloning: when you stand on one side of the fault line, it’s easy to think that the earth itself will justify you when it opens up and swallows the dummies over there, proving that you were on the right side, at which point you can stop worrying all the time, for heaven’s sake, and go on your merry way without thinking about the issue ever again.

As usual, diving into the conversations available on the internet just sucked me deeper into the murk. A defense is available for every possible position and offered with wildly varying degrees of civility: meat-eaters supporting vegans and trashing vegetarians; meat-eaters sneering at any thought of self-restriction; vegetarians and vegans calling meat-eaters all sorts of names; vegetarians acknowledging that some meat-eating is environmentally acceptable; meat-eaters acknowledging that American meat production and consumption is for the most part grotesque. What’s a utopian-minded bison rancher to think?

Serendipity, as usual, is my guide: in chasing internet rabbits down their holes, I found a momentary resting place in a review of Maggie Kozel’s book The Color of Atmosphere: One Doctor’s Journey In and Out of Medicine. After describing a flummoxing patient she had as a second-year medical student, Kozel said, “[I] devoured the answers without asking the right questions.”

Of course, if you’re obsessive the way I am, then you’ll immediately begin worrying about what the right questions are, as in, if I’m “right” then others must be “wrong.” One of the hallmarks of the debate about meat-eating and its impact on the environment or the individual soul is the array of statistics and science that each side has amassed to prove the objective superiority of its argument. I’ve been persuaded by both sides and neither side, depending on the time of day, what I’ve just read, the weather, my most recent meal, and/or the health of my family, among other random criteria.

In other words, I don’t think science and statistics by themselves allow us to ask the right questions, since apparently convincing evidence can be found to shore up either side. Eating is one of those human activities rich with multiple levels of meaning; expecting questions directed at a specific level to adequately address the full range is a little like expecting a monoculture to support the diversity a polyculture allows. Although science poses some vitally important questions when it examines the issue of meat-eating, the nature of its inquiry must ignore other equally pressing but less quantifiable questions, such as, what conditions allow a multi-species community to flourish? Does eating meat (by humans) contribute or detract from our community’s flourishment (a word coined by our friend Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison)?

I hear the howls of protest even before I finish typing this sentence: how do you measure flourishment? Who decides the standards? Invalid! Too subjective! Well, yes. That’s what makes this a fault-line issue: it addresses the limits of our humanity and so necessarily includes subjective experience. To be honest, I don’t know how to measure flourishment; I suspect you just know it when you see it. And when you see it, you’re moved to describe it, knowing that the urge will be frustrated to at least some degree because flourishment, like all fruit, is the result of such a complex interaction of elements in space and time that any description will be incomplete. And of course it’s not a steady state; it waxes and wanes as circumstances change and sometimes double back on themselves.

In this context, the question of whether meat-eating is ethical can be answered unequivocally: it depends. One of the preconditions for flourishment is a sense of justice, a perspective that includes but also rises above the immediate tit-for-tat concerns of fairness. The scope of justice includes not just humanity but the earth itself—and perhaps the cosmos. It unrolls over the course of history, recognizing that particular injustices sometimes take generations, centuries, or millennia to wither, even with the powerful witness and effort of prophets and their followers. As I said in an earlier post, it may be that vegetarians and vegans are living forward into a time where justice is more fully realized. At the same time, issues of fairness and justice press at us every moment in this world where the lion and the lamb cannot yet lie down together, where predators are a vital part of an ecosystem that has developed in sync with domesticated animals.

Can meat be produced and consumed in a way that encourages justice and, hence, flourishment? I think it can. There are multiple instances of communities and societies that eat meat and live within that delicate balance that looks to the long-term well-being and dignity of the system as a whole, places like Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm, although there are many, many others. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.) There are multiple instances of communities and cultures flourishing without eating meat, most notably for the purposes of this post the Hindu cultures whose vegetarian cuisines I eat with great pleasure. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.)

Likewise, there are communities and cultures that eat meat without flourishing, including most of the industrialized world, where concern for short-term profits and their consequent incitement of unrestrained appetite smother any hope of flourishment under mountains of animal excrement and anguish. Those places that encourage us (in the industrialized world) to measure the value of food in one way only—cheap is best—smother flourishment. Food is at the center of family, of community, of myth, of life. To reduce its essence to a single component is to denature its multivalent nutritional value.

Back to the ethical fault line, that place we stand uneasily, knowing that we may be swallowed: may those of us who recognize the fault line join hands—bloody or not—across the chasm and help each other seek the firmer footing of justice as our foundation. Flourishment will surely follow.

What we’re reading
Heather: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (still!)
Martin: Rodney Crowell, Chinaberry Sidewalks

Joel Salatin, a farmer in Virginia, has developed a philosophy and practicum of farming that is simple and radically countercultural: use the needs and desires of the land, the plants, and the animals to direct farming decisions. As a consequence, his Polyface Farm is not only phenomenally productive, it annually increases the amount of chemical-free topsoil on the land and allows its animals to lead comfortable, healthy, chemical-free lives.

Here’s the real point of interest: the farm consists of about 550 contiguous acres, and Salatin and his family intensively farm only about 100 acres. The rest is “unused” forest; his pigs do forage for acorns there, and some of the trees are selectively milled, but about 80 percent of his land is apparently ignored.

This unused land is considered wasted by conventional farming standards, which would have Salatin cut down the forest and expand his operation, but he’s convinced that the productivity of his actively farmed land requires all those unused acres. They provide the ecological ballast for his doughty craft, helping reduce evaporation in the fields, providing wind breaks, permitting the existence of a complexity of interaction between flora and fauna that supports the entire operation.

Salatin’s insistence on the need for this apparently unproductive forest seems to have a parallel in the rhythms of sleeping and waking and the perception in our culture that sleep is time wasted, time that could be used “productively.” While some people seem to have a genetic mutation that allows them to sleep less than the general population and still function well, most of us become significantly less productive, not more, when we try to cut back on our sleep. Studies show that people become psychotic when deprived of uninterrupted sleep over extended periods; forced wakefulness is a well-known torture technique. (Any college student can tell you this.) Even so, our out-of-kilter culture continues its assault on this maddeningly “unproductive” necessity.

Just as they need to eat, to work, to worship, people—and maybe all creatures—need time dedicated not just to sleeping, but to dreaming as well. People whose sleep is subtly interrupted at the dream phase eventually develop the symptoms of those denied all sleep. (I don’t think I’m making this up.) Dreaming time, like Salatin’s untouched acreage, is necessary to the health and integrity of individual organisms and their ecosystems. I’ve come to think of the planet’s shrinking wilderness as its dreaming time. The list of activities or places declared unproductive by the market culture has grown significantly during my lifetime: time to cook, to play (if you aren’t a child, and sometimes if you are), to make music or art (if you’re not an expert), to observe a sabbath, to allow plants and animals to grow at their own pace, to make money that benefits whole communities rather than just a few individuals. By consciously using the word “rest” in our mission statement, we want to mount the ramparts and defend the borders of dreaming time.

What we’re reading
Heather: Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith
Martin: David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football