October
1996
John
Robbins: A Man with a Plan
The Satya Interview
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John Robbins is
the author of the bestselling Diet for a New America (Stillpoint,
1987, $14.95), in which he detailed the horrific conditions
for animals on factory farms and the devastating costs to the
environment and human health of intensive farming. In his latest
book, Reclaiming Our Health (H.J. Kramer, $24.00), Robbins
takes on the medical establishment's extraordinary efforts
to eradicate natural childbirth, midwifery, non-toxic cancer
cures, and alternative medicine, all the while sponsoring tobacco,
radiation, and personal attacks. Satya caught up with Robbins
when he came to New York on a speaking tour.
Q: Next month, America will be going to the polls. What
do you think we should be telling our politicians?
A: I think we need to ask
our politicians to be responsible for the greater good. The
Iroquois used to talk about the responsibility to the seventh
generation hence as a criterion for all their decisions.
In our politics, our criteria generally are next quarter's
profit or this month's election. The result is short-term
profit, long-term disaster. The result is an economic policy
that's devastating the biosphere, violating the web of life,
and rendering the earth increasingly uninhabitable.
Q: These are large concepts. But how do you go about legislating
to create the mindset of the Iroquois?
A: One of the problems that
we have in our political structure is the degree to which
special interests dominate the thinking and the actions of
politicians. I find it stunning that Bob Dole's primary source
of campaign revenue is coming from tobacco. The tobacco industry
obviously thinks that a Dole presidency would be good for
their business, and I think that they're right. It's a frightening
thought from the point of view of public health.
Q: Yet how can we realistically expect to make a difference
when we do not have the revenue (and thus access) of the
tobacco companies, the American Medical Association, or agribusiness
corporations?
A: Norman Cousins said that
nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out of
his or her own conscience who's helping to bring the collective
conscience alive. I don't know that we can measure or grasp
the power or the impact of an individual's function connected
to a core value.
You know, the media report a certain level of event and call that news.
But there are other things occurring that the media doesn't notice
or recognize, things that don't get validated in our culture that much,
but may be even more important in the long run.
If we are going to survive, if we are going to transform our relationship
to ourselves and each other and the greater world, nothing is more
important than each of us taking responsibility for our lives and our
actions and our choices. Different ones of us have different fields
of action in which we find ourselves. Some of us may be in a position
of more public exposure than others. But we all interact with other
people a great deal.
I think that the fundamental unit of social change is the human heart.
Q: Living in a democracy, animal activists and vegetarians are told
we are entitled to our way of life. But when we try and persuade, we're
told not to preach. How do you square these two things?
A: People don't like to be
told that the way they are living is wrong. People don't
like to feel criticized. Yet the way we, as a culture, are
living is wrong in that it is ecocidal. As a society, we
live without respect for other forms of life. We live without
a sense of our interconnectedness with the rest of the Earth
community.
We define success in material terms, as the ability to acquire things
and consume resources. Our motto should be "shop 'til the planet drops." We
take pride in our ever-growing GNP, not realizing that this means ever
more gallons of gasoline burned, ever more toxic waste produced, ever
more forests converted into shopping centers, ever more pollution and
destruction of the life support systems.
I've had cynical moments in which I've thought that the U.S. citizenry
will only become concerned about environmental destruction when it
begins to interfere with their television reception. But, more and
more I sense that it will be the human health consequences that follow
upon ecological collapse that will awaken us. The depletion of the
ozone layer leads directly to higher rates of skin cancer and cataracts.
Air pollution causes lung cancer, emphysema, asthma, and other forms
of respiratory disease. Lead and other heavy metals spewed into the
environment by industry produce central nervous system poisoning. Pesticides
and other toxic chemicals cause birth defects, cancers, and autoimmune
diseases. So does nuclear radiation. Acid rain not only destroys our
forests, it damages all kinds of crop growth, and hence directly affects
crop yields, leading to more malnutrition and hunger. As the number
of malnourished and hungry people in the world rises, many infectious
diseases become more virulent, because these people are immune compromised,
and function as walking petri dishes.
Martin Luther King once said, "We will either learn to live together
as brothers," æ I would add, "and sisters," æ "or we will perish together
as fools." He was prophetic, not just in terms of social justice but
in terms of modern immunology and the health crisis of our time.
Q: Will the forces that make money from keeping society
pathological change?
A: It's true that the changes
that are needed to create a healthy planet run in a different
direction than the prevailing political and economic drift.
But, as Bill McKibben says: "That does not mean change is
impossible. All it means is that our politics is, temporarily,
out of step with the chemistry and physics of the earth."
Life is change. We're all always changing. And people tend to become
very angry when they realize that companies and individuals have made
tremendous profits by activities that destroy the health of people
and the environment.
Q: We are seeing that with tobacco.
A: Yes. And the next step
is to realize that it's not just cigarettes that are polluting
our lungs, but also the way we use our energy industrially,
in terms of relying on oil and coal and other polluting sources
rather than relying on renewable, non-polluting sources of
energy. And that's one of the great challenges of the next
decade æ to shift to renewable energy sources.
Q: What are for you the correlations between large corporations
profiting from people's illness and the large corporations
that create the American diet?
A: In modern agribusiness-dominated
agriculture, we have systems of producing meat that treat
animals as commodities, without any regard whatsoever to
their natures. The conditions are a total violation of who
these animals are. Every single one of their natural instincts
is frustrated: they have no space to move around, the diets
they are fed are deplorable from a health point of view as
well as a humane point of view, and the whole thing is propped
up with a tremendous amount of pharmaceuticals. We're the
only industrialized country that implants our beef cows with
artificial hormones; we now inject [recombinant] Bovine Growth
Hormone into our dairy herd. The degree of reliance on drugs
in modern animal products is really sad.
Similarly, in our medical system, the body is treated as a machine
rather than a sensitive field of energy, possibility and awareness.
Sick people are treated as a market from which to make money, rather
than human treasures to cherish and serve. In Western medicine, health
is defined merely as the absence of symptoms. So there is this treatment
of the human being as objectifying and exploiting.
Q: You emphasize women's health in Reclaiming Our Health.
Why?
A: Women bear the brunt of
the medical establishment's self-interested approach to providing
healthcare. We spend more money on what we call healthcare
(it's really "sickness care") in this country than any other
country in the history of the world. We're also number one
in malpractice suits. But we're 25th when it comes to infant
mortality and it's getting worse each year.
30 years ago, the cesarean rate in this country was only six percent.
Now it's 23 percent! Nearly a quarter of women who give birth in the
United States today have their babies surgically removed from them.
And the same obstetrical establishment that's responsible for this
trend at every opportunity denounces midwives and home births and free-standing
birth centers æ all of which show better outcomes for mothers and babies.
It's women who give birth, and it's women who go through menopause.
What our culture has done is to medicalize natural life processes,
like menopause and birth. Birth is an incredibly important event, because
if you violate the mother-child bond, if you remove a woman from her
experience of birth as a sacred act of immense power and instead make
her feel that she must rely on a physician to get her baby out for
her safely, you have disempowered her in her relationship with her
newborn at a profound level, and her relationship with her own body.
Q: Is there a specific plan that you would advocate for
getting America out of the health-care mess?
A: America is the only fully-industrialized
country in the world that doesn't guarantee minimum healthcare
to every single citizen. There are 42 million Americans with
no medical insurance, and another 30 million who are seriously
under-insured. Those numbers are both increasing. It is a
scandal.
Some form of national insurance, some form of universal healthcare,
is inevitable in this country, and I think it's a good thing. The other
side is that there are people who will say, "Well, I don't want to
pay, via my taxes, for the medical care of somebody who's lifestyle
is degenerate."
Q: I think that's something some vegetarians would say
about paying for healthcare costs for meat-eaters.
A: If we had universal healthcare,
then those people who don't take care of themselves and have
very high medical bills in effect will be draining the public
pool. Any good system will have incentives somehow built
into it that encourage people to take good care of themselves.
I would like to see a form of universal coverage, but with a substantial
deductible. The deductible would be based on income, so someone who's
poor would have a much lower deductible than someone who's wealthy.
The biggest cause of bankruptcy in the United States is medical care
costs, whereas in Canada no-one ever goes bankrupt due to illness or
injury. I think we can achieve that same level of compassion and have
everybody covered for catastrophes, or emergencies, or serious problems,
and yet, unlike Canada, build an incentive system, whereby you pay
the first bit and then co-pay for a while after that. So you can't
just merrily eat your bacon and eggs for breakfast and then take your
cholesterol-lowering pills and think all will be well.
Q: Would you advocate anything like taxing beef and dairy
manufacturers to pay for healthcare?
A: I would go further than
that. I would start taxing heavily all those products and
activities that have been shown to be damaging to human health
and to the health of the planet. The environmental polluters
would pay heavily, as would the tobacco industry. We should
be heavily taxing those products that are damaging. I'd like
to see a system where those activities that harm health are
discouraged, so there'd be less of them taking place. There'd
be less illness, less suffering, and lower medical costs.
And because people would be paying, by virtue of their deductibles,
for their maintenance care, they'd be in charge and could
avail themselves of holistic alternatives, rather than being
prisoners of their "benefits."
I think we've gone a little nuts expecting health insurance to cover
our maintenance and day-to-day needs. We have car insurance: if you
have a series of accidents there's financial cushioning for all that.
But you don't expect your car insurance to pay every time you change
your oil, and it would be insane if you did. Can you imagine the paperwork?
John Robbins is the founder of EarthSave.
To find out about EarthSave in your area, contact: EarthSave,
P.O. Box 68, Santa Cruz, CA 95062. Tel.: 408-423-4069. To
order Diet for a New America or Reclaiming Our Health, call:
800-DNA-DO-IT.
