u/Square_Win_

It’s an astounding fact that animal agriculture takes up to 80% of the world’s agricultural land and provides just 18% of the world’s calorie needs. Yet most national policymakers tend to ignore it.

To fill this void, organisations like Plant Based Treaty and cities like West Hollywood, California are stepping up to sway their constituents’ eating habits and cut emissions. West Hollywood adopted the treaty in late 2024, increasing public outreach and organising community food events to help cut land, water, and carbon footprints.

The timing couldn’t be critical . Livestock are accounts for 30% of the greenhouse gas emissions and the way the world currently eats is enough to push warming past climate goals.

But it got me thinking - should climate really be the only reason to choose a plant-based diet?

I recently came across an insightful line by Acharya Prashant in his book Is She a Food to You?: “Turn vegan in your own self-interest. You’re not killing the other; you are killing yourself.”

It made me realize that environmental arguments only cover half the story. If we aren't alright internally, we will keep making choices that harm both ourselves and the planet.

When we already know what is right and what needs to be done, what is it within us that actually stops us from making the right choice?

जनक उवाच ।
कथं ज्ञानमवाप्नोति कथं मुक्तिर्भविष्यति ।
वैराग्यं च कथं प्राप्तमेतद्ब्रूहि मम प्रभो ॥ १ ॥

Janaka: How is knowledge to be acquired? How is liberation to be attained? And how is dispassion to be reached? Tell me this, sir.

The Ashtavakra Gita is far more direct than the Bhagavad Gita. In the Gita, Arjuna is confused, lost, and bewildered; the first chapter is entirely about his melancholy and attachments. Arjuna is ready to give up, so Krishna has to systematically break through his resistance.

Janaka, on the other hand, is clear-eyed. He isn't melancholic. Because the seeker is enthusiastic and completely ready, the teacher (Ashtavakra) can bypass the fluff and go straight to the absolute center of the matter.

Let's look at Janaka's three questions and what they mean for us today:

1. "How is knowledge to be acquired?"
   Since Janaka was a king, he already had the highest worldly education. What knowledge is he seeking here? Think about our own lives: after getting a degree and landing a salaried job, do we ever seek actual knowledge? For most of us, securing a paycheck is the absolute culmination of our learning. Janaka knew comprehensive knowledge was practical but useless for inner peace.

2. "How is liberation to be attained?"
   Liberation from what? A new job with a higher package, the new iPhone, a bigger SUV, or a 3BHK gives us a momentary high. But it is terribly short-lived. After that, a sense of void, takes over. So, we run after the next achievement: a promotion, an international trip. The same void returns. Janaka was ruthlessly honest with himself. He saw this vicious cycle of consumption and wanted out.

3. "How is dispassion to be reached?"
   If you look closely, people generally fall into four categories:
   * Those who live completely in the dark, unconscious of their bondage.
   * Those who suffer from a void without knowing why.
   * Those who realise the tempting objects in the world are the cause of suffering and try to be cautious of it.
   * The Rare Few: Those who understand that the problem is not with the objects, but with the one who suffers.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a promotion or a new car. But Janaka was wise enough to stop and ask: Why do I need it? If getting what I want still leaves me dissatisfied, then the problem isn't the object, it is my own tendency to consume, my own conditioning.
Ashtavakra speaks to Janaka directly on this high level of self-inquiry.

⁉️We all feel that void after achieving a major life goal. What was the specific milestone in your life (a job, a purchase) where you finally realized that material achievements were never going to fill the emptiness?

I was surprised to know livestock accounts for 60% of all mammals on Earth. Humans account for 36%, while all wild mammals, land and sea together, account for just 4%.

We are not merely breeding animals for our good; we’re doing the exact same thing to plants as well.

I recently came across a massive, beautiful plantation of eucalyptus trees. It looked like a thriving forest but I learned that it is not the result of a natural love for trees or restoring an ecosystem. Instead it was a plantation established for a plywood factory intended to be clear-cut after 3–4 years.

Eucalyptus trees are widely used in global "short-rotation forestry" because it grows incredibly fast. Replacing natural forests with eucalyptus monocultures designed to be harvested every few years often severely depletes local groundwater and degrades soil nutrients, destroying the local biodiversity that a natural forest would support.

Have we become incapable of viewing nature as anything other than an object for our own consumption ?

When a tree is no longer a tree and an animal is no longer an animal but simply potential inventory where does that leave the intrinsic value of the living world ?

~Posted by Gita Student

We are already at ~8 billion people and climbing, triple the number we had in 1960 and heading towards 10 billion by 2050. Overpopulation is not just a numbers game. It is an indicator of how unaware we are as a species. If already a million species are on the brink of extinction and wildlife populations have declined by over two-thirds in the last 50 years, then the problem is that far too many of us are living the wrong type of life.

Even as birth rates drop, our ecological footprint increases, so the scientist’s warnings should make us ask ourselves if adding new lives amidst a planetary emergency is not fuel to the fire.

The trap of overpopulation lies in its extremes:
• poor areas where children are seen as earning hands, forced into low-grade jobs due to a lack of education and healthcare
• and the rich who treat children as affordable possessions, a sign of their wealth and power

I recently stumbled upon an article where Indian spiritual teacher and environmental thinker Acharya Prashant was talking about it and what I like the most was he outlines a path forward :

1. Secure Reproductive Freedom
Free contraception, girls’ higher education, and old-age social security to take pressure off the expectation that one has to have children to have someone to care for you in your years. Political will is lacking because political parties benefit from cheap labor, increased consumer base, and higher voter counts.

2. Legally Limit the Top Ecological Footprints
The top 1% need to be legally limited in their ability to negatively impact the planet. Carbon emission taxes, already at a unnatural level for most developing countries, should apply to private jets, private water usage, and multiple mansion ownership – all to be invested in eco grids, circular economy projects, and social security. It is a matter of political will to enforce the former while the latter will provide the breathing room for cultural change to occur.

3. Change the Narrative, Change the Culture
Scorecards should replace GDP as a measurement of national success and prosperity while also introducing indices similar to Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness.

Unless we change the culture that puts consumption at the center of our existence and make people understand that the consumption is not an indicator of life, nothing will change. Beyond legal reforms, we need to make a cultural shift to decouple having children from sense of completeness and sexual gratification. Given reproductive freedom and social security, women will have smaller families on their own, and the reduction in population and consumption will follow, intelligently and voluntarily.

Read the full article here and share your thoughts.

Can legally limiting top ecological footprints buy us enough time for the cultural shift to occur?

The History & Hidden Details
Norwegian painter Edvard Munch created four versions of "The Scream" between 1893 and 1910 (two paintings, two pastels). Its original German title was "Der Schrei der Natur" that translates to "The Scream of Nature."
In his diary, Munch wrote that he was walking with two friends at sunset when the sky turned blood red, and he felt an infinite scream passing through all of nature.

A detail often missed: the face isn't screaming. Its ears are covered, trying to protect itself from a scream coming from outside.

Munch painted this around the time his sister Laura was admitted to a mental hospital, while he struggled with anxiety throughout his life.

In 2021, infrared analysis revealed a Norwegian sentence hidden in the red sky: "Can only have been painted by a madman."
Handwriting analysis confirmed Munch wrote it himself, likely responding to critics who called him insane.

Personal Take
We usually link our restlessness to something outside noise, circumstances, chaos and try to protect ourselves by covering our ears or cutting ourselves off.

But restlessness rises from within us, whether the outside is quiet or chaotic. It doesn't wait for an external event; it’s built into our existence.

Covering our ears doesn’t stop the scream because the source was never outside. When Munch wrote "madman" on his work, it was that same habit: an external label accepted so deeply that he inscribed it on his own art.

Food for thought
Recall a time you blamed your restlessness on an external cause a person, noise, or circumstance.
When that cause disappeared, did the restlessness actually go, or did it return in another form?

I took this mesmerisingly beautiful pic from The Cabo De Rama fort, Goa. The pebbles beach near the fort is also beautiful. Do plan a visit.

We often think of eyes as an instrument to see the world. Recently, I reflected on an exam question about the symbolic significance of Dhritarashtra’s blindness in the Bhagavad Gita and it made me look at his character through a completely different lens.

Often, people treat his blindness as merely a physical trait or a blanket metaphor for general ignorance. But does it actually signify the importance of eyes? Do we really SEE?

Does his blindness mean inability to see the war? Does it mean presence of a metaphysical vision when physical sight is absent?
Does it mean that not having eyes means inability to see dharma?
Or does it mean that only the enlightened one can see?

🤔 What do you think is the answer ?