SANTA CLARA, CA: Delivering a presentation to an open and engaged audience, Sailesh Rao, Executive Director of Climate Healers, promoted a message of peace and sustainability to attendees of Dharma & Yoga Fest. Before I spoke with Mr Rao, he had been speaking at another event in the East Bay and had plans on going to Los Angeles.
Veganism was the charge he sought to bring to the audience, believing that a single change in this lifestyle choice around food could set off a larger conscious network and bring solutions to numerous other environmental problems. He compared such a shift to the Khadi movement under Gandhi, under which the British Empire’s cotton mills and production were subverted by Indians not buying British cotton. This part of the conference was about Karma Yoga, social action and reform, with Gandhi being the peaceful instigator to an oppressive system.
He sent a poignant and rather controversial message to a mostly Hindu, Indian-national audience, about the necessity for a movement to end the consumption of meat and dairy due to the pervasive issues it presents. Cows suck forested lands dry, and especially because of their cultural eminence in India (a place that was once covered in lush forest) cows live far longer and are crowding out land which would otherwise be habitable by a wide variety of species as well as providing a carbon sink. Industrial systems have also augmented the dairy process in a way that exploits and extracts from the cow’s natural cycle to satisfy our unnecessary and massive need for milk and dairy products.
He told me most of his message has been delivered at universities, but he hopes to engage more with media outlets to educate individuals about the devastating nature of livestock production. His vast array of knowledge, including numerous statistics and facts based on scientific data, made the many arguments from the crowd easy to challenge.
“This time is unlike any other in history; our patterns and habits affect and constrain resource for close to 7 billion others, many of whom are seeking carbon intensive lives that match our own. Industries and consumption patterns around food, meat and dairy have been driving factors such as reduced soil fertility, desertification, and deforestation with far-reaching ecological consequences that take much more time to heal than human corporate time-scales can comprehend,” he said.
Climate Healers is spreading the provable message that humans are the only mammals who drink milk which is not necessary for good health. That dairying is extremely cruel to cows and that vast swaths of land can be reforested if people made the one choice to shift their diets away from dairy consumption.
It seeks to begin a reversal of the single-minded destruction we perpetrate on the planet daily. He believes that this would bring about much reconciliation with the planet and its other animal species, as well as send a democratic push against an extremely unjust system of industrial practices and the effects they are having on a dying planet.
Varun Pande
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