Room: 5E4

Time: 11AM-12:15PM

Description:

Join activists combating obesity, heart disease, and diabetes in communities of color by encouraging healthy, animal and earth-friendlier plant-based diets and increasing access to fruits, vegetables, legumes and whole grains in neighborhoods where healthy food is largely unavailable. Discuss culturally sensitive approaches to promoting healthy eating and strategies for overcoming access and economic barriers to life-sustaining foods.

Moderator:

Ruth Santana, Global Justice for Animals and the Environment

Confirmed Presenters:

Bina Ahmad, Legal Consultant, National Lawyers Guild,  will discussing veganism and animal rights from her perspective as a Muslim woman of color.  She will discuss the challenges and strategies in reaching out to Muslim communities of color and her experience being a member of this community while also advocating for animal rights from within these communities.

Doris Lin, Legal Director, Animal Protection League of New Jersey, will discuss offensive race- and ethnicity-based animal rights campaigns, and recognizing one’s own privileges.

Donnie Smith, blogger, Blackveganism, will be talking about veganism in communities of color and access to food. At the same time he will be talking about race, class and other issues that are connected to food.

Terry Hope Romero, Author, Vegan Latina

Konju Oruwari, graduate student and blogger, Green Chimurenga, will discuss the need for critical thinking and consideration of the broader dynamics of social injustice and imposed human inequities when imagining and advocating wider adoption of plant-based lifestyles.

Tools, Skills and Messages Participants Will Take Home:

Audience members will gain an understanding of:

- the problem of food deserts and access to healthy foods

- obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related diseases facing communities of color

- cultural barriers to accepting plant-based diets in communities of color

- why the approach to plant-based diets presented by white and middle class vegan advocates isn’t practical for many people of color (expensive processed foods only sold at health food stores that don’t exist in many communities) vs. CSAs working to provide healthy, affordable, whole foods in communities of color

- how people of color can work to promote plant-based diets and eating in their own communities and how white allies can support them.

- how white advocates for plant-based diets can avoid turning off people of color with condescension, self-righteousness, unwillingness to listen and dialogue, and a failure to see the world from outside of their own cultural experience and privileged position to consider other people’s realities.

Doris will look at when an animal rights campaign becomes a race- or ethnicity-based campaign.

Bina will address Islam and how it intersects with animal rights, and how to reach out to Islamic communities by approaching the animal rights narrative in an Islamic, culturally sensitive manner.

Donnie: “It’s not just about people becoming vegan.  We need to understand that veganism is made up of a very privileged group of individuals in our society. I want people to be open and understanding.”

Konju: Participants will be prompted to consider more deeply the consequences of deep inequality, injustice and the status-quo social violence of discriminatory and inhumane policies upon the pursuit of vegan consciousness. They will consider how the priorities of human liberation and justice may complicate considerations for non-human liberation, and begin to contemplate ways to reveal to others how an overarching culture of violence intertwines both issues. Participants will begin to consider skillful means of communicating how a plant-based lifestyle itself can liberate both humans and non-humans and promote social justice, health and a more sustainable human civilization in better harmony with non-human plants and animals.

About the Moderator:

Ruth Santana is an activist in the animal rights, Latin America solidarity, and trade justice movements.  She works as an occupational therapist and teaches metalwork / jewelry making at the School of Visual Arts.

About the Presenters:

Bina Ahmad is an animal rights activist, a member of the Muslim Defense committee, and an Executive Committee member of the NYC National Lawyers Guild, focusing on Occupy Wall Street criminal and civil cases.

Terry Hope Romero: Cornell Certificate in Plant Based Nutrition.  Books: Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, and Viva Vegan!: Authentic Vegan Latina American Recipes.

Donnie Smith is a vegan living in Brooklyn, NY.  He has been involved in the animal rights movement for 5 years or longer. He believes that food is power and that is something that he’s working towards.

Konju Oruwari is a Pan-Africanist and third-world internationalist writer and activist. He has been vegan for 13 years. He currently studies occupational therapy at Columbia University. His blog, Green Chimurenga, can be found at africanvegans.com.

Description:

Our culture is in deep denial about our relationship to the animals we eat.  We condemn Michael Vick as cruel for fighting dogs but hide away the violence that brings meat to our tables in slaughterhouses and factory, delegating the dirty work of killing animals to an exploited workforce.

Moderator:

Katie Pryor, NYC Regional Outreach Coordinator, Vegan Outreach

Presenters:

Gary Francione, Rutgers law and philosophy professor and author: Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or Your Dog, will discuss the literally delusional thinking that characterizes our animal ethics, as discussed in in his controversial 2007 essay, “We’re All Michael Vick.”   We regard animals as having a moral status but we use them in ways that are wholly inconsistent with that view.

Timothy Pachirat, assistant professor of politics at the New School and author, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight, brings to life the massive, routine killing of animals for human consumption from the perspective of slaughterhouse workers.  Drawing on five months undercover on a slaughterhouse kill floor, he explores the slaughter industry and how our society facilitates violent labor and hides what we find too repugnant to contemplate.

Victoria Moran,  author of Main Street Vegan, will discuss how the animal food industry is unique in depending upon such brutality that laws exist to keep consumers in the dark. Moran will share her slaughterhouse experience, explore the spiritual deficits of the status quo, and alternative approaches.

Tools, Skills and Messages Participants Will Take Home:

Pachirat: Participants will:

- Gain a concrete understanding of how industrialized animal slaughter works in the contemporary United States.

- Gain an understanding of how the work of industrialized killing is organized to fragment moral and experiential responsibility for killing.

- Reflect on the possibilities and limitations of a politics of sight, defined as concerted, organized attempts to produce social change by collapsing distance between consumers of meat and the realities of industrialized killing work.

Francione:  Participants will be exposed to the idea that there is no difference between Michael Vick and the rest of us in that there is no difference sitting around a pit watching dogs fight and sitting around a summer barbecue pit roasting the corpses of animals.

About the Moderator:

Katie Pryor is NYC Regional Coordinator for Vegan Outreach. A statistician with a B.S. in Mathematics and M.S. in Environmental Sciences (May 2012), Katie works to end suffering and environmental degradation caused by factory farming.

About the Presenters:

 Victoria Moran, CHHC, is the Oprah-featured author of books including The Love-Powered Diet and the new Main Street Vegan.  Among the VegNews “Top 10 Vegetarian Authors,” Moran is director of  Main Street Vegan Academy, training Vegan Lifestyle Coaches in NYC.

Timothy Pachirat, Assistant Professor in The New School for Social Research’s Department of Politics and Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts, is the author of Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight.

Gary Francione, Distinguished Professor Law and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy, Rutgers Law School, authors books and articles on animal ethics and law, including Animals as Persons and The Animal Rights Debate.

Presenters:

Timothy Pachirat, Department of Politics at The New School for Social Research and the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School for General Studies; author, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight

An account of industrialized killing from a participant’s point of view. Political scientist Timothy Pachirat, was employed undercover for five months in a Great Plains slaughterhouse where 2,500 cattle were killed per day—one every twelve seconds. Working in the cooler as a liver hanger, in the chutes as a cattle driver, and on the kill floor as a food-safety quality-control worker, Pachirat experienced firsthand the realities of the work of killing in modern society. He uses those experiences to explore not only the slaughter industry but also how, as a society, we facilitate violent labor and hide away that which is too repugnant to contemplate.

Through his vivid narrative and ethnographic approach, Pachirat brings to life massive, routine killing from the perspective of those who take part in it. He shows how surveillance and sequestration operate within the slaughterhouse and in its interactions with the community at large. He also considers how society is organized to distance and hide uncomfortable realities from view.

About the Presenters:

# 1: Corporate Power, Diet, and Animal Agriculture

#2: Animal Agriculture’s Impact on Global Climate and the Environment

Description:

Do animal welfare laws effectively prevent suffering for animals used for food?  Should we work to enact humane laws – or are they ineffective in a global food economy?   Join animal welfare, law and public policy experts to explore these questions and discuss strategies for action to prevent animal suffering.

Presenters:

Adam Weissman of Global Justice for Animals and the Environment  will address how the deadly combination of offshoring facilitated by liberalization of agricultural tariffs and WTO challenges to import bans on cruelly produced foods threatens to render humane laws irrelevant and even counterproductive.

Tools, Skills or Messages Participants Will Take Home:

Weissman:

Participants will learn that whether they take the position that activists for the welfare of farmed animals should focus on industry regulation, advocate veganism, or both, they must pay attention to international trade policy, which helps producers offshore production to escape domestic regulation and lowers princes on animal-based foods globally, incouraging increased overall consumption of animal products.  Participants will learn how they can join the fight against future free trade agreements and hold elected officials accountable for their votes on these agreements.

About the Moderator:

About the Presenter:

Adam Weissman works with Global Justice for Animals and the Environment, opposing trade agreements that endanger animals, ecology, food safety, and human rights, and TradeJustice NY Metro, an activist group coalition fighting NAFTA-style trade agreements.

Join activist-artists for a visual presentation confronting corporate power and the exploitation of animals and workers in the global food system.

Moderator:

Ruth Santana

Presenters:

Louie Gedo, a NYC artist and activist, will focus on creative, artistic ways that aspiring activists can get a message across by displaying some of his multimedia and artwork.

Sue Coe, creator of art books including Dead Meat, will address how Animal Rights is on the last frontier of social justice. Will illustrate the connections between labor, and the meat industrial complex, and the consumer, examine conservatism in animal ‘protection’ organizations that reflects the structure of corporate america, address legislation that helps animals, vs. legislation that perpetuates the meat industries. Take a look at the global movement of animal rights, which does not deny class struggle. The goal, is to end animal exploitation completely, by the means of abolition not reform, and understand that the economic system of capitalism in its end stage, is at its most lethal, and expands human tyranny and cruelty over other species, as well as our own, like no other time in history.

Tools, Skills and Messages Participants Will Take Home:

Louie: My hope is that participants who are activists or aspiring activists will benefit because they will see that there are ways for them to increase their effectiveness as campaigners simply by using their creative talents.

Sue: I can explain to you how to draw! (its easy, its the thinking part that is hard) A pencil is always good to have around, and a bit of paper, you can travel with it anywhere in the world, its cheap and non threatening. We all ‘see’ the world in different ways, and your vision is unique, it can be explored and shared. How to document the secret lives of animals, to refute and dispute, the depictions of animals in our culture, either regarded as property, or who have gone willingly to their deaths, sacrificed for human power and control. What we all can do now? Become vegan today, then help a friend become vegan, who promises to make one more. You may become a reportage artist who is a vegan after this panel too, but that is not a guarantee.

About the Moderator:

Ruth Santana is an activist in the animal rights, Latin America solidarity, and trade justice movements.  She works as an occupational therapist and teaches metalwork / jewelry making at the School of Visual Arts.

About the Presenters: 

Louie Gedo: A part-time activist for human and animal rights for more than ten years in NYC, Louie asks himself daily, “What can I do today to best improve the lives of those being systematically victimized?”

Sue Coe: Artist, double parked on the highway of life.  My work is in books, museums, pamphlets, those images have their own life, and find their own way through the world.

What are the reasons behind factory farming? What are “humane,” local and organic animal products, and what are their costs and benefits? Are they the solution to factory farming? Is there an alternative to supporting agribusiness altogether? 

Presenters:

Zaac Chaves, farmer, forager with CT/Westchester Mycological Association, author: Less Harmful Sustenance: How to Avoid Killing Animals in Hungry Times

Calla Wright, Working Families Party

What They’ll  Be Discussing:

Calla: I will explore what the feel-good labels (i.e. free-range, grass-fed, etc.) used to market animal products to caring consumers really mean.

Zaac: I will be sharing information and resources regarding an abundance of invasive edible plant and fungus options which can provide viable options for human caloric fulfillment, while benefiting the environment.

Tools, Skills, and Messages Participants Will Take Home

Calla: Participants will walk away with a better understanding of what all the labels they read on animal products actually mean. After the presentation, they will be more equipped to eat according to their own ethics as opposed to eating based on a marketing strategy.

Zaac: The “No Farms, No Food” slogan forces a dichotomy.  I will be stressed to participants the acknowledgement real and existing alternatives to acquiring food that do require farming or other disruption to habitats.  To the contrary I will be urging people to feed themselves elsewhere, such as through foraging exotic and prevalent species of plants which are disruptive to native environments.

Bios:

Calla Wright is particularly interested in the intersectionalities of social injustices. She holds a BA & MS from The New School. During her studies, she explored the connections between animal agriculture and other forms of institutionalized oppression.

Zaac Chaves coordinates mushroom tours at schools, farms, and animal sanctuary’s.  He authored and will have copies of the pamphlet Least Harmful Sustenance aimed at helping others learn about the edibility of common and invasive plants and fungus.

Description: 

Learn how the Obama administration and Congress are helping corporate agribusiness use NAFTA-style free trade agreements to create markets worldwide for genetically modified crops and factory farmed animal products at the expense of consumers, farmers, workers, animals, and the environment.  Find out what we can do to stop it.

Presenters:

John Maher, Touro Law,  will discuss globalization of GMOs – Do such technologies cause an unacceptable economic and political imbalance between supplier, grower and consumer  in terms of  environmental safety, labeling and consumer choice and environmental conservation. Is there any choice at all to avoid use of or exposure to GMOs under the political economy and legal system?

Adam Weissman, Global Justice for Animals and the Environment, will explore:

- How agribusiness is creating global markets for factory farmed animal products by  pushing for agricultural tariff elimination and sanitary standards harmonization

- the use of World Trade Organization challenges to attack import bans on foods produced by methods that compromise food safety, endanger wildlife, and cause animal suffering and to prohibit product labeling that helps consumers avoid unsustainable, inhumane, and dangerous foods.

-  how first world factory farm exports are driving agriculture in the rest of the world in the direction of factory farming to remain competitive

- why this threatens farming communities, the environment, animal welfare, and global health.

Tools, Skills or Messages Participants Will Take Home:

John: The method, globalization, by which the neo-liberal pan-nation states have eliminated “choice” while propounding that humans live in an era of expanding freedoms will be explained.”

Adam: Participants will learn how, by driving the factory farm globalization, free trade agreements threatens animal welfare, public health, family farms, and the environment and learn how they can take action at a grassroots level to advocate for fairer international trade policies.

About the Presenters

John Maher is an animal lawyer and adjunct professor of Animal Law at Touro Law Center. He represents Best Friends Animal Society and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) and NYLS.

Adam Weissman works with Global Justice for Animals and the Environment, opposing trade agreements that endanger animals, ecology, food safety, and human rights, and TradeJustice NY Metro, a coalition fighting NAFTA-style trade agreements.

Do animals have a right to not be eaten? What are the ethical implications of tanimal agriculture’s contribution to environmental destruction and food scarcity?   Join a panel of distinguished ethicists and legal scholars to discuss the ethical issues surrounding the use of animals for food.

Moderator:

Marianne Sullivan,  Program Director, Our Hen House

Presenters:

Julian Franklin, author, Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy, will offer a very brief prospect on the history of animal rights thought.  He will crtically explain the positions of Peter Singer and Thomas Regan and will conclude very briefly with some suggestions of my own.

John Maher, Adjunct Professor of Law, Touro College will present, a discussion of the possibility of rejection of Speciesism as the only possible prototype for animaljustice.

Gary Francione,  author, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or Your Dog?,  will challenge the idea that although animals matter morally, we can still use and eat them because animals don’t have an interest in continued existence and explain how modern theorists (Regan, Singer) don’t address the problem.

Lori Gruen,  author, Ethics and Animals:  An Introduction, will discuss the ethical implications of food choices including, but moving beyond eating animals and animal products (including impact on climate change, environmental destruction, food insecurity, and endangering wildlife).

Tools, Skills or Messages Participants Will Take Home:

Gary: Participants will be exposed to the idea that “happy” meat makes no more sense than “happy” human exploitation.

John: Participants will learn that in the neo-liberal consumer state all ethics are situational and morals are a luxury good which are both dispensed with through the paradigm of ‘convenience.’

Participants will be encouraged to challenge their assumptions and think critically about their government and whether “choice” continues to exist in the neoliberal state in terms of food or political dissent as concerns animal interests.”

Lori: Expanded sense of the ethical complexity of our food choices.

About the Moderator:

Mariann Sullivan  is the program director and co-founder of Our Hen House, a multimedia hive of opportunities to change the world for animals. She also teaches animal law at Brooklyn, Cardozo and Columbia Law Schools.

About the Presenters: 

Gary Francione, Distinguished Professor Law and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy, Rutgers Law School, authors books and articles on animal ethics and law, including Animals as Persons and The Animal Rights Debate,

John Maher is an animal lawyer and adjunct professor of Animal Law at Touro Law Center. He represents Best Friends Animal Society and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) and NYLS.

Julian Franklin is a professor emeritus in the  Columbia University Department of Political Science. After he retired, he became deeply interested in animal issues and taught an undergraduate course in animal rights as an adjunct.

Lori Gruen is the author of Ethics and Animals:  An Introduction (Cambridge:  2011).  She is Professor of Philosophy, Environmental Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality  Studies at Wesleyan University.

Join a panel of experts in law and public policy to discuss efforts to use civil and criminal law to silence activists working to expose unsafe and inhumane farm conditions and the use of free trade agreements to attack Country of Origin Labeling on meat and the Dolphin-Safe Tuna label.

Presenters:

Rachel Meeropol, Staff Attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights, will discuss the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act’s impact on the ability of animal rights advocates to investigate and educate the public on factory farming and food safety and her work to declare that law unconstitutional

Tools, Skills, and Messages Participants will Take Home:

Rachel: Participants will gain an understanding of current criminal provisions punishing lawful activism and peaceful civil disobedience across social movements as acts of terrorism.

About the Presenters:

Bina Ahmad is an animal rights activist, a member of the Muslim Defense committee, and an Executive Committee member of the NYC National Lawyers Guild, focusing on Occupy Wall Street criminal and civil cases.

Rachel Meeropol, Center for Constitutional Rights staff attorney on First Amendment and prisoners’ rights, is co-editor and author, “Jailhouse Lawyers Handbook”, and contributing editor, “America’s Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees, and the War on Terror.”