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Attention All Earthlings

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For the documentary Earthlings, filmmaker Shaun Monson has compiled a stunning montage of footage that exposes various commonly used methods of killing and torturing animals for food, clothing, entertainment, and experimentation. The images are inherently unpleasant, but unlike most single-issue animal rights campaigns, such as banning fur in fashion or boycotting foie gras, the film eloquently narrates the story of the human race's collective iron fist, held unforgiving over the heads of Earth's non-human inhabitants.

While our species values its ability to speak language, the film points out our characteristic patronization of other species' grand expressions of consciousness.  For instance, is the ability to fly across continents any less magnificent in its complexity? Every species that inhabits the planet is simply a different evolutionary manifestation of life, though we've come to ignore our shared consciousness.  Monson asks his viewers to tune in to the life-force that illuminates all earthlings.

As Allan Watts put it: "Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit – to the 'conquest' of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature." 

You can watch the full-length film here.

Creative Commons Image by aus_chick on Flickr

Comments

I'm a Budhist nonvegitarian...

because I think plants have feelings too. There is so little respect for the end of life even among humans...we need to embrace death with virtue and honor and kill with passion that befits the dignity of the slain. So much is just gushy roadkill, when a predator brings down a beast at least there is a spirit of conquest. When I die I wish to be food for vultures...

I'm a Budhist nonvegitarian...

because I think plants have feelings too. There is so little respect for the end of life even among humans...we need to embrace death with virtue and honor and kill with passion that befits the dignity of the slain. So much is just gushy roadkill, when a predator brings down a beast at least there is a spirit of conquest. When I die I wish to be food for vultures...

Gracias

Thanks to both for your comments. vivifidal, I too believe that plants have a profound consciousness, and like animal's, it quietly interacts with our own. This is obvious to anyone who has ever grown their own food...even herbs grown with care in a windowsill pot in the city will return the gracious favor when their leaves are plucked and eaten.

And indeed, we have arrived at a moment in human evolution where honor and passion have been drained from our eating practices. Much of our food supply, vegetables, grains, meat, are produced and delivered with corporate greed as the very reason for their being. This can't be good for our health.

So at this moment, we are no longer a PART of the food chain, rather, we control it. I am no predator - I am, begrudgingly, a consumer. And much to my gratitude, I have the privilege to choose the way I interact with conscious life on Earth, as do we all.

Thanks again, keep up the dialogue.

"Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night." - Rainer Maria Rilke