We’ve Moved to a New Site
![ET_logo_pic-only[4]](http://www.zoenature.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/ET_logo_pic-only4.jpg "ET_logo_pic-only[4]"){kind=logo}
We’ve moved to a new site. What was Zoe is now Earth in Transition. You’ll find our new posts, along with the Zoe archives, on the new site. We look forward to seeing you there.
(If you subscribe to the weekly Zoe e-mail, you’ll still get the weekly e-mail from Earth in Transition. Plus, we’re on Facebook, and soon on Twitter and Google Plus.)
Why a new site?
It’s increasingly obvious to people everywhere that our world is now in transition. We’ve crossed a tipping point, and there’s no going back.
What is this going to mean – for us, for our children, for all the other animals and for the planet? How did it come about? And as supposedly the most intelligent species ever to inhabit the Earth, how come we couldn’t even do the simple and obvious things to change our ways before it was too late?
Sure, there’s still time to stop it getting even worse, but not much evidence that that’s going to happen.
With a simpler format and a more focused content, Earth in Transition will be exploring all of this as we check out the daily news and dip into some of the psychology of our own species. (We’re primates, after all, and our behavior is no surprise to any primatologist!)
The failure of the animal protection movement
One particular thing we’ll be looking at is what’s working in the animal protection movement, and what isn’t.
Over the past 50 years, there has been enormous growth in the number of organizations involved in the work of animal rights and animal welfare. But the situation for animals has, in fact, gotten worse, not better. More animals than ever are being used and abused in factory farming, vivisection and the entertainment industry. Extinction rates in the wild are escalating to levels that now threaten the stability of life on this planet. The oceans are dying. Our climate grows more extreme.
Certainly, there have been some gains – like the fact that factory farms planning to phase in slightly larger cages for some of the animals. And there’s been significant success for homeless pets, with the number of dogs and cats being killed in shelters each year dropping dramatically over the past 20 years. But as “pets”, dogs and cats have largely been accepted into the human family (at least in this country), and they’re now in a very different category from all other kinds of animals, who are seen as little more than “resources.”
This is not to fault the animal protection movement. Rather, it is to say that something deeper is going on, And until we can take into account the true nature of our relationship to other animals and how it’s changed throughout our history, we’re inevitably addressing symptoms while the underlying dysfunction just continues.
One thing in our favor, incidentally, is that we humans are very good at pulling together in a crisis. The problem is that we may not recognize the crisis until it’s so far over the tipping point that there’s nothing we can do.
All of that is yet to be seen.
Meanwhile, we’ll try to bring you what’s most relevant in the daily news, too, along with some insightful guest posts and, of course, the fun stuff.
Thanks for being part of this work. We’ll see you over at Earth in Transition.
Posted July 18, 2012, by Michael Mountain
