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Nick is joined by environmental activist Mark Allen from the 3CR radio show City Limits. We discuss some tensions between animal rights, which values individual animals, and conservation, which values ecosystems and environments as a whole. More specifically, we discuss whether possums should be released from captivity into the wild if they almost certainly won’t survive; Oscar Horta’s hypothetical ‘The fox, the rabbit and the vegan food rations’; and Sydney Fox Rescue. There is also a return of the segment ‘When Karl Pilkington Makes Sense’ – this time on interfering in nature to help individual animals.
The episode also features Nick’s talk ‘Cowspiracies about Meat Eating Environmentalists, A Critical Examination of the Environmental Vegan Movement’. You can view the PowerPoint for this talk here and it is also embedded below. This talk was recorded at the most recent Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) conference – you can find links to all of the talks from this conference in the show notes of episode 152.
Also covered throughout the episode is: the importance of taking the climate emergency seriously; you know things are bad when the Doomsday Vault is being compromised by climate change; and Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich – covered on Cracked podcast and by The New Yorker.
We finish the episode by touching on the importance of the animal advocacy movement acknowledging and addressing the ongoing discrimination people face.
A common message in the animal advocacy movement – ignoring the fact that people continue to face racism, sexism and homophobia!
Book Recommendation:
Impact of Meat Consumption on Health and Environmental Sustainability edited by Talia Raphaely and Dora Marinova. Nick has a chapter in this book called ‘Environmental Concerns and the Mainstreaming of Veganism’. For more information about the book and some photos from the launch, see here.
Nick at the launch of this book.
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Clips:
Shock Octopus ‘Safe Room’; Ricky Gervais podcast; Ricky Gervais, Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington Bonus Podcast; Nick’s talk ‘Cowspiracies about Meat Eating Environmentalists, A Critical Examination of the Environmental Vegan Movement’; Petrol Girls ‘Harpy’.
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