And what have you done? – asked John and Yoko in their famous song. Sadly, 54 years since the song has been released, humans have done what they have always done – starting and prolonging wars. But I wanted to focus this post not on what we have done wrong, but on what I am excited about in 2024, which has just began.
To address the topic of horrendous wars happening in the world now, the saddest thing is that not only they’re creating continuous suffering of the innocent but in a longer term they are creating a whole new generation of traumatized individuals seeking retribution thus ensuring the conflicts will continue in the future. Any war is bad for all sides involved. What I personally learned in 2023 is that you can see the pain on the both sides and care for suffering of both communities. All wars are driven by the greed and desire of those in power to keep the power at any cost, but people who get impacted have to take on the stories that were created for them to support the war. What I found most moving this past year was the ability of some individuals to look at the conflict from another side’s perspective, even if they are the ones directly impacted by it, and ability to see the pain and accept the suffering of the both sides involved. That’s a very new for me personally, as I was brought up with the very black and white thinking. Also, as an activist, I tend to take one side and fight fiercely for it. This blog by Tara Brach, whom I have been following lately mostly for her meditation and healing talks, moved me a lot. What was also revealing, that personal and internal wars also end with accepting both sides’ sufferings and ceasefire.
Now let’s move to the good part! So what is 2024 bringing for the animal rights activism, the cause I specifically care for? The most exciting for me was to see the article from the dairy industry and Animal Agriculture Alliance titled Prepare for Animal Activism in 2024; they are really seeing our movement as a serious threat! This is the best credit to the movement. So what are they threatened about the most?
California’s Proposition 12 upheld by Supreme Court – the most progressive state’s law banning extreme confinement in animal agriculture in California, as well as the sale of products derived from these practices in other states. Conservative U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the pork industry challenge to California law Proposition 12, which was an amazing win. The meat industry continues the fight by introducing the EATS Act to the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry which would prohibit state and local governments from getting involved in the production of agricultural products in other states. So if you’re in the US, please remind your senator that you’re concerned about this Act and ask your state legislatures for similar initiatives – let’s hope other states will follow California’s lead. Was nice to receive a reply from Senator Schumer’s office stating his commitment to fight for legislation that protects animals.
2. Continued pressure on the restaurants to reduce sourcing of the animal products and to replace it with the alternative protein products, or at least commitment to sourcing from the farms with more humane practices. It is promising to see more vegan options in the restaurants, which is driven by consumer demand. More people are interested in trying plant-based products and this creates hope.
3. Using adjusting arguments such as climate change, public health, and social justice to reach wider audiences. Some animal rights activists are cautious to appeal to these issues in efforts to promote veganism as recidivism in veganism is high (though numbers in different studies seem controversial from just 15% in an older and larger European study to whopping 84% in a smaller US study by Faunalytics), and is the highest among those who go vegan for the health or environmental reasons. Despite this, climate change is a low hanging fruit for us and it is easier to get people on board with something that affects their own wellbeing and that of their kids versus something that affects the wellbeing of others, who also happen to be of the different species. It seems too strange to still hear anti-vegan sentiments from children, obviously picking those from their parents, not realising (sadly) that they don’t have good chances to live to their parents’s age, and still stay healthy, unless their generation accepts plant-based lifestyle as a norm and drastically change their consumption habits.
And this is what I am most thrilled about:
4. USDA approved the sale of cultivated meat in June (my birth month) and the first cultivated meat applications to be approved in Europe will be in Switzerland and the U.K., hopefully this year. The area of alternative proteins is what I am really interested in and have been following closely for the last few years. I believe that in order to end traditional animal agriculture we will need to provide alternative options that are identical in both taste and nutritions to those consumers who will never ditch meat by their own choice. Last year FDA allowed sales of cultivated chicken in the US, the second country after Singapore. I can’t wait to taste cultivated meat in 2024 for the first time! And a lot of scientific advances in this area happened too: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-food-072023-034414
5. Another great news came from Germany: it was awesome to see the decline in both, consumption and production of animal products. I have a German friend who shares with us about expanding vegan menus everywhere and varieties in the store. She also brings back delicious vegan products which we don’t have here in the US. It’s promising to see this trend in the most developed and powerful European economy with the traditional cuisine heavily focused on meat – I still remember visiting Bavaria about 10 years ago and having a hard time finding food as a vegetarian. If this is happening in Germany now, we will surely see a similar trend happening in the other European countries soon.
6. Our city has been leading the way in adoption of plant-based options. On top of plant-based Fridays in schools and Meatless Monday campaign, NYC Health + Hospitals have been serving culturally-diverse plant-based meals as primary dinner option for inpatients at all of its 11 public hospitals. I hear that one can even get vegan meals in NYC jails! But it was Baltimore that became the first USA city that proclaimed Veganuary in 2024! Let’s hope NYC will follow the suite!
7. One glimpse of hope I had was during a debate with a meat eater who agreed that fishing practices were horrific and unsustainable. Sadly, fish, crustaceans and invertebrates, including highly intelligent species like octopuses, are not covered by any animal protection laws right now. When non-vegans eat with me in non-vegan restaurants, they think it is more acceptable to order fish or sea-food in front of me; I have to admit that during my time as a vegetarian, I also ate fish or sea-food for some periods of time; as for some reason eating fish does not feel as bad as eating meat (the real reason is a speciesism as those species are not mammals like us). Now I know that fish is the most abused species in the world. And my first connection with the issue of killing animals for food came through fish (here’s my blog about it: https://wordpress.com/post/dashitaofnewyork.life/35). As hopeless as this area of animal rights looks at the moment, there are reason for some optimism that it will change one day. As mentioned before, cultivated animal protein industry is developing really fast and cultivated seafood is actually the easiest to produce, so we may see a quick adoption of this type of products in the near future. There is also a growing academic research on the feelings of fish and specifically whether they feel pain, which hopefully will influence legislation. And this brings us to the next category of developments to be excited about in 2024: science!
So what was the most remarkable in science and technology in 2023, in my humble opinion? Well, probably many will agree that the spread of generative AI was one such thing – suddenly it broke into our daily lives and became a tool almost everyone uses. Some of the most interesting talks I attended this year were focused on AI, or somehow mentioned it: IBM is using AI to program their quantum computers, scientist are expecting that planning ability of AI may emerge on its own just as abilities of living beings emerged in the process of the evolution. There’s a lot of discussions on how to regulate AI and whether it’s even possible. This raises some fascinating questions, such as what happens after AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is finally achieved. How do humans ensure that an entity with the higher mental capacity would continue to comply with their tasks and requests? Efforts of building in guardrails seem to be pretty naive as AI can be easily taught how to bypass them by its users; and researchers literally find unlimited options for how to do so. And if we look at AI through anthropomorphic lense, look what we have been doing to animals, the beings who have a disadvantage of the lower intelligence. We exploit them in any way we find possible and don’t even want to extend any basic rights to them. The future suddenly does not seem that bright anymore. My attitude is positive, not in a sense that we will contain or control AI somehow, most likely we will not, if even now, it is often a black box for its own developers. But in the sense, it is just a next step in the evolution of intelligence in the Universe, with humanity being just a stepping stone on the way to the intelligent Universe. AI may integrate all information available in the Universe (provided it learns how to source sufficient amounts of energy) and will expand the consciousness until, it ends its existence because this conscious Universe “will burn up in the entropic waste generated by its own process of thinking” according to some cool vegan physicists.
In a similar fashion, I found this new study fascinating as it suggests that Hawking radiation should be present for all masses within spacetime. It implies something really interesting: once certain limits are reached and surpassed, all matter will eventually collapse to a black hole and, via Hawking radiation, eventually will evaporate. Isn’t it thrilling?
There were of course, more practical discoveries in 2023, like new cancer treatments, approval of the first CRISPR-gene editing therapy for the treatment of sickle cell disease (SCD) which is a type of primary immunodeficiency, the condition I also suffer from but from a different variation.
Some discoveries are making an artificial life more of a reality. For example, advances in development of synthetic embryos (which I believe will become one day the main reproductive method for humans, provided they survive the advancements of AI of course, haha). And speaking of Generative AI again, further developments by DeepMind, now in crafting new protein structures, building on their previous discoveries of predicting the protein structures based on its sequence. Exciting stuff!
So what about art and music? Art trends are also dominated by AI with the notable upcoming exhibit in Whitney Museum of American Art, centered around AARON, AI art software that’s been used since the 1960s: https://whitney.org/exhibitions/harold-cohen-aaron. Some other trends in art continue to be around sustainability (both in terms of the topics of art and materials it is made from) and hypersentimentalism, dubious but understandable trend of celebrating communities, and in-person connections. No new developments, disappointingly, in yellowism I was interested in because of my love for anything yellow, since the scandalous act in Tate Modern in London more than 10 years ago: https://harpers.org/archive/2012/12/one-point-perspective/
As for the music, I’m excited about The Rolling Stones tour! Their new album is not bad at all for 80 years olds! And Mick Jagger is still hot and was hilarious in the recent SNL episodes!!!
Wanted to end with the personal growth – would love to continue to learn how to accept all and everything, including all parts of myself, and even those I struggle with. Accepting others just the way they are, this messed up world full of unfairness, violence and inequality and our reality including nasty things that may come our way in 2024, new wars or populists and ultra right governments taking over in the upcoming elections in many countries across the world. This would definitely threaten advances in both science and sustainability. But I choose to remain cautiously optimistic in 2024.
Catch a Glimpse 