I'm a member of a small fairly new vegetarian political group called Banshee, for those who don't know, a banshee is a female spirit believed to exist by the people in Ireland and the Scottish highlands. Legend says that these spririts wail in mourning outside houses whenever inhabitants of the house are dying. Anyway, the subject of this post refers to literature published by the group, entitled "the Bloodless Revolution". It predicts that if the current rate of of population growth is sustained, meat products will inevitably cease to be the major protein source of even Western societies by halfway through the next century. This is because rearing meat is unproductive -it takes 12 acres of good country to support a single cow, while the same land could support several thousand fruit trees, or produce up to 26 tonnes in grain crops per year. Thus, land resources being finite and global populations escalating, by 2045, it is estimated that plants will support over 70% of protein to Western people, with milk forming a large part of the remainder. Such changes will invariably influence culture -the consuming of meat will progressively come to be seen as pretentious and barbaric, much as it came to be in India, where it was more productive to conserve cows for their milk, rather than meat. While the precise points could be debated, the principles seem sound. Such a revolution could be observed as already happening in places like Nigeria, where the average consumption of meat has plummeted from 85 kilos per person per year, to 6 kilos per person per year. Accompanying this is the appearance of small devoutly vegetarian groups of people, mainly Moslems.
By the way, Banshee is considering whether to contest a place in the New South Wales Senate. Does anyone here reckon that they'd vote for us?
