I wrote the following as part of an assignment for my Environmental Biology course this semester. This is a topic that I am quite passionate about and could write about for days, but I only needed one page, and here it is. Part of my personal brand is hating cows. The initial reason for this is multifaceted and honestly a little embarrassing, but it has since evolved into a deep distaste for the cattle industry. After learning about the scope of related destruction to rainforests in a class in 2018, I even stopped eating beef for a year. My husband’s dairy allergy has limited the amount of “baby cow growth fluid” I consume. Of course I had to watch Cowspiracy the second I discovered its existence. It was an interesting documentary. For the most part I already knew the base facts, but I did learn a few things. For one, no environmental officials seemed to have expansive knowledge or interest in the topic of agricultural destruction. Unlike the documentarian, however, I don’t think this is part of a mass conspiracy. There may be an element of fear in the lackluster reactions—agribusiness is powerful, and as I also learned from the documentary, can be murderous in South America—but I think it has more to do with the fact that animal agriculture is so important. America—civilization in general—depends upon agriculture. Humanity depends upon agriculture. Environmental organizations and government agencies can afford to go after big oil because it is not a fundamental component of the human existence. We’ve only dealt with fossil fuels for a couple centuries. Agriculture has been around for millennia. This extends past the fact that all humans have to eat, and towards the fact that attacking agriculture attacks the everyman. There are no small family oil rigs. There are, always have been, and always will be, small family farms. Fighting the negative environmental effects of animal agriculture is not just hard to market and fundraise with, as said in the documentary, but also political and social suicide.
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Last year was a year of powerful women. My network of feminine was loud and strong and full of driving energy. We were exploring our feminism through the firm knowledge that we could do it alone, together out of love and want but not necessarily out of necessity. It was a year of independence and autonomy and needing no one. We celebrated the women who spoke out, who held their heads high, who accomplished the large. We were validating and we were loving, but mostly we were strong. This year is a year of powerful women, too. But this is a softer power, one that celebrates the nurturing sides of the feminine. This year is about a mother and her new child, about the embrace between a girl and her grandmother in Moana, about grace and unconditional love. The fire has not gone out, but it is simply a warm, life-giving one now, not one that rages and destroys. This fire is about flowers and holding hands and quiet tears. It is about long nights discussing the intricacies of our deepest desires, about seeking the most good. It is about Rachel Hunt Steenblik’s Mother’s Milk, and seeking a connection with our Heavenly Mother. It is about finding the divine feminine in each of us, about embracing and unlocking our purest energies of love and acceptance and sisterhood. It is still brave and it is still strong, but it is also gentle. I remember when Katrina hit.
I remember sitting in my second grade classroom on the ground floor, where the first graders usually lived. In the corner, mounted to the ceiling, was a little black box of a TV, and when Katrina hit, my teacher never turned it off. For the next few months — and maybe for the whole year — the hours of news footage I had watched out of the corner of my eye stayed vibrant in my mind. I saw the floods again, the pain again, the sorrow again every time I went into the school office and saw boxes full of donations, every time I walked into the school library and saw the containers asking for money to help the children of New Orleans rebuild theirs. I'd lived through many a tornado, but I knew that what we were talking about now was something so much larger than that. I remember when Katrina hit, and I remember how terrible it all was. For ten years of my life I lived in a small town in South Central Pennsylvania, just a hop-skip-and-a-jump from the Appalachian Trail and Michaux State Forest. I have grown up walking through those woods, smelling those flowers and playing in those leaves. I have jumped in those puddles, squished my way through that mud, hopped and danced and climbed in and over and around those trails, those rocks, those trees. In just ten short days I will hop on a plane to take me back to Penn’s Woods for the summer, where I will rejoice in the rain and the mountain laurel and the fireflies once more. But today I am thinking of my tulip poplar and lilies and dogwood tree not because I will get to see them so soon, but because today is a day reserved specially for that line of thought. On every April 22, we are asked to take a day—one measly little day—to consider our Earth and all that makes it glorious. One of my favorite pictures of myself was taken this past summer, by my sister and her little Fujifilm instant camera. In this picture I stand, body twisting to smile back at the camera, on a path by the banks of a stream that winds through what can best be described as a meadow. You can barely see the edge of my brother in the background, hopping along the path on rocks he seems to blend into, mountains and pine trees and grass cluttering up the landscape. The colors are vibrant, but even they don't do justice to the beauty and wonder my family saw that day, as we meandered like the wild goates we are through Rocky Mountain National Park, only maybe an hour west of my father's birthplace. It's one of those pictures that you love not just because you like how you look in it or because you're with your favorite people, but because of how it makes you feel. And it's one of those pictures that makes you feel good not just because of the memory of that place or that moment or that day, but because the picture itself brings back those feelings of wonder and amazement, of breathing fresh air and being free. Simply seeing that picture does not make me miss it, it makes me excited for all of the times I get to do that again. |
I'm Audrey, a college student and existential rambler.
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