A week ago I wrote about attending the SLC Veggie Fest and debating someone from the animal rights community about the importance of not just animal consumption but how animals help the planet. For that reason, I have been revisiting some of the very concepts that brought me to the dance some 22 years ago.
The concept of animal rights, in my opinion, is all about advocates charging down a path toward legally granting all animals personhood, or essentially citizenship equal to that of you and me.
Through the years I have read different animal rights group plans that lay out spending 40 to 50 years to achieve this goal of animals being granted personhood status. If you want to talk about long range planning, this is it. But that view and my interpretation of why they’ve chosen this endpoint has certainly evolved. I now fully understand that it has everything to do with controlling people, not sympathy or compassion for animals at all.
All of that brings me back to a group that I first discovered in 2019 based from London called RethinkX. I was granted an interview and recently re-aired it on radio stations talking about the future. Now this group claims to not be shaping the future but simply studies trends and looks for disruptions that will alter the future of humanity. On its website it has a tab for the future of food. Let’s look at a couple of the “key findings.”
First I will use a quote from the book that the co-founders of RethinkX put forth:
"We are on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential transformation of human civilization in history, a transformation every bit as significant as the move from foraging to cities and agriculture 10,000 years ago."—James Arbib and Tony Seba, Rethinking Humanity
So what do they see in getting us there?
By 2030, the number of cows in the U.S. will have fallen by 50% and the cattle farming industry will be all but bankrupt. All other livestock industries will suffer a similar fate, while the knock on the effects for crop farmers and businesses throughout the value chain will be severe.
By 2035, 60% of the land currently used for livestock and feed production will be freed for other uses. These 485 million acres equate to 13 times the size of Iowa.
Farmland values will collapse by 40% to 80%.
Environmental benefits will be profound, with net greenhouse gas emissions from the sector falling by 45% by 2030. Other issues such as international deforestation, species extinction, water scarcity, and aquatic pollution will be ameliorated as well. By 2035, lands previously used to produce animal foods in the U.S. could become a major carbon sink.
They predict new technologies could wipe out poverty and solve climate change in the next 10 to 15 years, and bring in a new “Age of Freedom.” While this sounds pretty phenomenal, they also warn that it could pose huge challenges for a world that still clings to outdated concepts such as democracy, capitalism and the nation state.
I think that last paragraph, which is actually from a podcast host of “Species-Unite” who had just interviewed Arbib and Seba, finally got to the heart of the matter. This reflects the one world view, where no one owns anything and everyone is “happy.”
That truly is the push we have happening, in my opinion, in every facet of this chaos we live in today. We must combat it by first recognizing the plan then by getting back to what God and our Founding Fathers granted to us as tools to maintain liberty and freedom. While we all consider their views as completely off base, unfortunately for us, they have been making great strides toward the end goal of their 40-year plan while we have been busy growing food for the world.
Editor’s note: The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not represent the views of High Plains Journal. Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.LoosTales.com, or email Trent at [email protected].