Vegan / animal rights
I don’t really update this blog too regularly. If you want to read more of my recent writing, here are some links. I write occasional articles for New Frame, the organisation I work for: https://www.newframe.com/writer/aragorn-eloff/ There are a few recent pieces up on Medium: https://medium.com/@aragorneloff If academic writing is your thing, I have some stuff… Read More »
* A pamphlet I published several years to poke fun at all the insipid ‘how to live green’ type articles that are so popular in mainstream magazines and to point towards what a viable response to the ecocidal dominatorculture. 1a) Smash capitalism, the state and all other forms of hierarchy and domination opposed to the… Read More »
I recently presented at Earth Animal Communities – a conference organised by the Institute for Critical Animal Studies in Africa, of which I am a member. Here is the abstract of the paper I based the presentation on. The full paper is downloadable here. Abstract In recent years ethical philosophy has taken up a sustained… Read More »
It is rare to discover a book as trenchant, poetic and philosophically profound as The Garden of Peculiarities. Originally published in Spanish in 2002, translated into English in 2005 and now re-released by local alternative publisher Missing Books, this short work by Chilean anarchist and radical environmentalist Jesús Sepúlveda is nothing less than a manifesto… Read More »
When we look out at the sky at night, we’re also looking back into the past. The light from distant stars takes so long to reach us that we cannot really be sure that, in reality, they’re still there. Although the myriad things that surround us on Earth – rocks and rose bushes and… Read More »
NB: This is an updated version of an old article titled ‘it ain’t easy being green’. Introduction Few people now deny that many of the essential natural systems that sustain all life on Earth are profoundly threatened by human activity. Among countless other horrors, vast expanses of richly biodiverse rainforest have been decimated to make… Read More »
This piece was originally published on Thoughtleader.co.za in early 2011. When I visit a restaurant, my opening line to the waiter is usually ‘Hi, I’m vegan. What do you suggest?’ What I really mean when I say this is: ‘Hi, I was just wondering…I don’t eat meat and I don’t want anything with butter in… Read More »
Andreas Spath has written an article on News24 arguing that veganism is not a nutritionally sound diet, and that meat can be ‘green’. And here’s my rebuttal, in point form. I have tagged Andreas in this note [i.e., on Facebook] in the hopes that he will engage the points I raise in more detail. 1:… Read More »
This is a response to Lierre Keith’s argument in The Vegetarian Myth, a poorly researched, fallacious and dishonestly argued anti-vegan screed. It was originally written for www.thevegetarianmyth.com, a never-completed crowdsourced response to Keith’s book. Inconsistent animist ethics Keith defends her position with a confused animist-type ethics that veers unclearly and inconsistently between hylozoism (everything… Read More »
It’s lunchtime, and I haven’t brought anything with to the office today, so I decide to pop down to the supermarket across the road to find something. My requirements are simple: It must be vegan. I don’t eat processed bits of dead tortured animals – I’m weird that way. Because I like orangutans (and rainforests… Read More »