Plants and fungus are every bit as much "life" as animals, but you don't hear their screams

[erronis]

This is such a great piece of thinking that I wanted to promote to its own OP. (It's not mine, but NullTuples).
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127153443#post69

Plant chlorophyll and mammalian hemoglobin are nearly identical molecules; one uses iron as the central functional atom, the other uses magnesium. One of us found movement via muscles a better route to survive, the other found staying still and using energy from the sun to survive a better route. That there is a balance indicates neither is in any way better.

Going deeper and yet higher in the taxonomic organization structure, meaning even more basic, at the first division of life on Earth:

Archaea, Bacteria, Eukarya - all life on earth uses the same encoding scheme, differing primarily in the ribosomal RNA flavor they use. DNA came from RNA; there's evidence that life on Earth was once RNA based (though considerably simpler than life now), and we eukaryotes keep a reminder of that past inside us with our ribosomal RNA, typically inside mitochondria or plasmids, essentially a symbiotic organism that lives in most of our cells, be we plant or animal. Plants and animals are very nearly the same at this level. Their source code if you will, is written in the same language and simply uses different variations of the details. We simply go about accomplishing the same tasks in slightly different ways.

My point is that life is life. Animals are no more worthy of that designation, nor the reverence it should impart, than plants. Like animals, plants show clear signs of physical distress when harmed and communicate it to each other - but you have to know what to look for, and we are so very human-centric we simply don't notice.

Like plants, we are omnivores (plants need more than just sunlight & water after all, and some of it comes from animal, fungus or bacterial carcasses). We get our nutrition from whatever we can. Does that mean we need to eat meat more than somewhat rarely? No, not at all. In fact we evolved to eat meat - but very little of it. The amount most Americans consume is very bad for both their health and the health of the planet. But we did evolve countless structures to enable us to live off meat and to a lesser degree, plants. Side note, we evolved mechanisms to identify & hopefully eject one way or the other plants we can't live off of, which is most of them. There are comparatively few plants we can live off of. Truth be told, most of our ancestors throughout our history likely ate whatever they could find ranging from foraged plants if they didn't make them sick or die, insects, and scavenged meat. The occasional fresh meat, though it had a large payoff in terms of protein and fats, was also the most dangerous (again, assuming one didn't pick the wrong plants). Our bodies evolved accordingly.

Raising meat under capitalism, where every penny invested must be maximized, is a part of what's killing off our ecosystem. Livestock ranches are akin to small cities of 1000 pound citizens constantly creating methane. Then their excrement creates more methane. The remainder of the excrement tends to contaminate and salt aquifers and waterways, and nitrogen loads rivers leading to unbalanced algae growth (which dies, depletes oxygen & kills off so-called higher life forms like fish & frogs). Methane by the way is 80x - 400x worse of a greenhouse gas than CO2. Then there's the water usage from growing feed to cleaning slaughterhouses; here in the West it's a substantial amount when it's added up, which is why it rarely is added up for people to see.

So yes, eat more plants and less meat. But do it to save all life, please.

[elleng]

1. INTERESTING that plant chlorophyll and mammalian hemoglobin are nearly identical molecules;

one uses iron as the central functional atom, the other uses magnesium. One of us found movement via muscles a better route to survive, the other found staying still and using energy from the sun to survive.

[nycbos]

2. "We get choose which from of life we feel are scared. And we get to kill the rest.

Pretty neat deal. You know how we got it. We made the whole fucking thing up."

[erronis]

4. Perfect. I wish George Carlin could take over as god. He'd be fun (and merciless.)

[Goonch]

3. ;-{)🖖‍

[uponit7771]

5. K&R, Sentient is to complicated concept for MAGA