I remember reading Vasile’s “Green” Eggs and Ham? The Myth of Sustainable Meat and the Danger of the Local” in the Journal for Critical Animal Studies and being blown away by the analysis. When I finally got to meet Vasile at last years Critical Animal Studies Conference at Brock University it was evident that Vasile can not only write but he is also a really great speaker. I’ve followed Vasile’s work since, both his academic work and his activist work, and he is a constant source of inspiration. I am really glad that Vasile took the time to answer some questions for us and happy to share his work.

Can you talk a bit about your background in animal advocacy and your entry into the academy?

I have been vegetarian since I was nine years old and vegan since college so it has been, pretty much, a life-long affair with me. However while it has been life-long the type of advocacy has tended to change. In college I was more focused on personal direct action. I still do that type of work but I am now focused on thinking through how else I can make a difference in helping more people to confront speciesism and anthropocentric privilege. So I now focus more on teaching classes, publishing essays, making speeches, and providing interviews on the topic. I think, at least at times, it helps me to reach a wider, or at least a different audience in a more sustained and nuanced manner. For example, right now I am teaching a course entitled “Eating Animals,” which allows me to explore these issues with my students for an entire quarter. Speciesist ideology is so ingrained in many people that it is difficult to confront in a single flyer or demo (much less that awkward conversation about “Why are you vegan” over dinner that we have all had). So I have found the type of long-term, in-depth, and nuanced conversations that I am now able to have very helpful for both my own learning and for others. This is not, in any way, to criticize direct action, which I still support. It is to say that I am currently trying to think of new and different ways to continue to be an effective advocate for animals.

Can you tell us about what drew you to the Institute for Critical Animal Studies?

In essence there were three factors that drew me to the Institute. First, for me the most important aspect of critical animal studies is the way in which it can be used to help the lives of individual animals. So I appreciated the permission for a firm normative commitment—I don’t have to hide my views. Secondly, I care, deeply, about the idea of “intersectionality” (how the oppression of nonhuman animals is related to the oppression of human animals) and unfortunately even within animal studies this idea is still highly controversial. So I appreciate the ability to investigate, say, how fighting against classicism and animal liberation can be mutually helpful worldviews. And I appreciate the clear linkages to animal activism, in both directions – both how can we use insights in the academy to help activists on the ground? And how can activists actually help us to work on different and more intelligent questions in the academy? But honestly what most attracted me were the people themselves. In ICAS we have a sense of shared purpose greater than ourselves. We aren’t just trying to get another article published, or another line on our curriculum vitae. We actually want to change things and it creates a feeling of camaraderie, solidarity, and shared purpose that I crave and is what I have been search for since I first entered the academy.

You have written about the Green Scare and Locavorism in the Journal for Critical Animal Studies. Do you see a connection between these two issues/narratives? You point out the right wing ideas that root the Locavore movement – buying local and xenophobia, a defense of animal use and human supremacy, etc. and it seems as though locavorism is a counter narrative to the animal/earth liberation movements that can serve as a repressive force in itself.

This is less a question than a claim that you are forwarding, but I think a brilliant one. Just to agree with you, “locavorism” is, in part, an attempt to appear to remember issues of environmentalism (i.e. a romanticized notion of “back to earth”) without really confronting the issues that are confronting us. In other words it is a type of intentional forgetting that purport to be remembering of the issues. I don’t know if you have ever actually heard Joel Salatin speak but he is actually very conservative. I mean he is radically pro-life, makes comments in which he calls himself “really sexist”, and he’s very open about the fact that he is anti-evolution and anti-science. And these are not somehow unrelated comments or aspects but part of single coherent and highly conservative worldview. So yes, he is opposed to, say, genetic engineering, Monsanto, and factory farming, which are also views that we share. But the reason that he is opposed to these practices is because he believes that they are an aberration from a God ordained “natural order.” And it is this really Aristotelian idea of an “natural order” which is behind so many conservative’s views of men over women, parents over children, and humans over animals (even if such “dominion” is suppose to be “protective”). For example, when Salatin gives a talk entitled “ Food: the cornerstone of our Christian Credibility” at Patrick Henry College in which he critiques science and evolution and claims that the current industrial food system is a “trick by the Devil” designed to “keep Christians apathetic and lethargic” it is hard to know how to respond to these claims or to see in that a helpful response to our current environmental crises.

Two other important points about “humane” farming and locavorism. It touts itself as a “return” to an earlier time in animal agriculture. But this is a false myth. Almost all “humane” farms, including Salatin’s, uses genetically modified “poultry” whose lives are short and, necessarily, painful. Selective breeding and genetic modification of animals isn’t less control than a small cage, in many ways it is more. But that control is now simply more hidden. So when someone comes to visit a local farm everything looks more open and freer without, necessarily, being more open or free. It is in many ways similar to the move in zoos in which the cage walls were removed for the viewing public. But while the diorama where the animals live may look more open, in reality it just helps to hide the ongoing reality of their captivity. So locavorism and humane farming is not, to my mind, a step “back” at all – it is a step “sideways” (if you will) to try to create something which can look like a romanticized notion of an open and bucolic farm while, in reality, relying on the type of selective breeding and genetic manipulation which “local” or “humane” farmers, such as Salatin, purport so much to oppose.

The second point is that while “humane” farming purports to be a critique of the factory farm system it is, in reality, part of the same system. Factory farms have a problem, which is that they can never allow people to see what actually occurs on these “farms.” Humane farms have the problem that they can never actually feed the world’s population (at least in terms of animal products.) So the two work together—synergistically. Consumer can go and visit a “humane” farm and feels as though they are seeing and experiencing what animal husbandry is “actually like” (even if, in reality, what they are experiencing is nothing like typical animal husbandry). And, at the same time, those who purport to eat “humane meat” can feel as though there is still plenty of meat for everyone to consume by consuming factory-farmed flesh the rest of the time. So the “humane farms” actually help to render the brutality of the factory farms as invisible and the ubiquity of the factory farm system helps to hide the inability of the “humane” farms to ever “scale up” in any meaningful sense of that term.

So all of these ways in which the local or humane farms represent a sort of “active forgetting” or a way of seeming to confront issues of genetic modification, environmental degradation, or the factory farm system, while, in reality, merely helping to hide these issues even more thoroughly. So yes, you are exactly correct. It is a way of, in fact, supporting a highly conservative worldview while at the exact same time hiding the reality of the need for truly progressive or radical action. Someone who goes to Salatin’s Polyface farms and personally kills one of “his” own chickens may feel like they have “gone beyond the bar code” fought against the factory farm system, and helped to save the environment. But these views are entirely false. In reality all they have done is– kill a chicken.

I know you have made a point to be involved “in the streets” with the Occupy Wall Street Movement – specifically Occupy Oakland. Can you speak a bit about your involvement and why you think it is critical for academics to be involved and also for advocates to be involved?

Of course. And I think this is critical on two levels. On the first level it is hard to actually understand what is occurring in a social movement (such as “Occupy”) if you do not have first hand, or “ethnographic” experience. On the second hand if you are studying a social justice movement and it does not move you to action then I think there is some failure in the purpose of your thought.

From where I am there is a definite romanticism when talking about Occupy Oakland. The strength in numbers, the response, the tactics being used, have all brought a lot of attention to Oakland. Do you feel like anything has been overlooked in this? Are there things people can learn from Occupy Oakland and if so, are we taking away the right messages?

You are exactly correct that the movement has been greatly romanticized. From the very beginning we have had the idea of being involved in something far larger than ourselves (captured in such phrases as “the whole words is watching” while filming police brutality). As scholars we are trained to be highly critical of “romanticization” and I think rightly so. But as an activist trying to build a large scale and successful grassroots campaign I think it has an important part to play in maintaining morale, particularly against harsh police repression. So I think romanticization itself has an important place in activism.

The question of are we taking away the right message is an interesting one and, to be honest, no I don’t think we are. The real message, I think, is the manner in which the police actively serve and protect capital accumulation (the manner in which the market and the state have become one). So unarmed protesters who are, in fact, protesting against economic inequality are responded to with overwhelming police violence. This, to me, is a powerful if still little understood message. But instead, what I see being reported is a conversation about whether protesters threw paint, or who threw what, etc. The question of whether we are “nonviolent” or not to my mind is missing the message. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were exceptional and powerful figures but I don’t think they should represent the only way in which protest can, or should, be understood and supported. It is not unreasonable that when someone is being tear-gassed that we will throw back tear gas canisters. But if throwing back the tear gas canisters counts as “violence” what does the tear gas itself constitute? That point is that we are unarmed. After the first crackdown (where Scott Olsen had his head fractured) the claim was that we caused it by throwing balloons filled with paint. I’m serious—paint. And in the most recent mass arrest the police focused on how someone had thrown a bicycle at the police while he was being tear-gassed. A bicycle? Paint and bicycles are supposed to be our violent weapons? And this is supposed to somehow justify indiscriminate tear gassing, sound cannons, pepper spraying, police beatings, and mass arrests? There is simply no proportionality in the response. None.

The other point that people need to understand and take away from Occupy is that our “civil rights” are purely theoretical—and this applies to animal activism as well. We may seem to have them, but the moment we attempt to actively to exercise them, in any meaningful sense, the crack down is fierce and determined. The vast majority of Occupy’s actions have consisted of exercising constitutionally protected rights like “assembly” and “free speech” and the response has been severe police repression. Even if someone does not support any of the redistributive justice ideas of the Occupy movement that alone should give them pause. And, as you have mentioned earlier, we see a very similar type of response in regards to animal rights activism. Even basic and clearly protected forms of free speech—like hosting a webpage, or engaging in “whistleblowing”—can now come with felony jail time. The idea is that we are suppose to accept economic inequality, a large military, and so many actions because it “protects” our “freedoms.” But, in practice, we appear to not even have these supposed rights in the first place.

Finally, let me end with just a personal memory. Of everything I have seen and saw in the last several months one story stands out in my mind more than any other. It was the evening of the General Strike and a small group had liberated a foreclosed-on homeless nonprofit in order to provide housing for the occupy movement for the coming winter. It was announced that 500 sheriffs were on the way to force us to leave. The General Strike had called on students to walk out of school and Deborah (my wife) and I were standing beside two high school aged protestors when this was announced. One of the girls said to other “remember to stay nonviolent.” I told them that I agreed that they should stay nonviolence but they needed to understand that was not going to keep them safe. She said that “It was still the right thing to do.” I told her that I agreed but she needed to understand that the police were going to come in and tear gas everyone all together at once and she needed to be prepared. If she had a bandana or scarf she should dip it in water and wear it over her mouth and nose. If she got hit with tear gas or pepper spray too hard she needed to yell “medic” and one of the volunteers would come up help. She needed to make sure she did not get too close to the front of the police line because the police had been known to hit people who got to close to them with their batons. She needed to know the number for the lawyer’s guild and she needed to remember it because if she was arrested they might take away her phone so she needed to memorize it. She and her friend looked at us with disbelief and horror and ending up leaving early. That was not our goal and in a way I am sorry that they did. But it did point out to me that even some protestors have romanticized notions of what is going on and what will happen to them. We need everyone to come but people also need to be knowledgeable and prepared so everyone can stay as safe as they can. So everyone does need to get involved but, at the same time, be smart, be prepared, and stay safe.