| Home | Eating Lower On the Food
Chain As you know many Pantheists are vegetarians. In fact some are quite militant about it. David Pearce has a web site where he has a picture of a lamb captioned, MEAT IS MURDER! Harold Wood, while not a militant, urges us to eat lower on the food chain. I am not exactly sure what lower on the food chain is. It has been shown that by measuring the electrical impulses to indicate the degree of pain felt; when you break a carrot it seems to feel more pain than when you break of an arm of a jelly-fish. Most of us panpsychists conveniently ignore whether plants are sentient or not. Yet both plants and animals have a similar genetic make-up. The energy producing mechanisms of the chloroplasts is very much like that of the mitochondria in animal cells. In fact mitochondria are found in plant cells too. I was watching the violent movement of trees outside my bedroom window during a recent wind storm and the trees certainly seemed to be alive. One time my brother and I cut down a giant Douglas fir and it let out a blood curdling scream before it fell. It was very unnerving to both my brother and myself. Now it is true Mr. Wood recommends eating bean sprouts, and I am sure someone has a bean-sprout cook-book, but even as delicious as they are, I might lose my enthusiasm for eating if they were a steady diet. Getting back to the mitochondria, every one of our bodies cells has at least a dozen and cells such as those found in the heart muscles and the brain and other parts of the body requiring a lot of energy have thousands of the little darlings. Most all pantheists are interested in ecology. How about thinking of the ecology of the body? The next time you pop a pill or have that second drink, think how the mitochondria may like it. Mitochondrial damage is associated with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and heart disease. There is a long list of environmental chemicals that are toxic to the mitochondria, and pantheists working to clean up the environment may be doing more good that they realize. So the next time you take a breath or write an article, stop and thank the mitochondria for producing the energy to do it. Also thank the chloroplasts for those delicious bean sprouts. As you may have noticed the tone of this page was often naughty and facetious, but what I was trying to say is, we should acknowledge there might be another side to our position. When we try to prove our point with too much emotion; (for instance that screaming tree) we often turn off the persons we would most like to convince. |