Page 10
S I i p q I Roots • July
News
RAO, from page 5
them all off the face of the Earth, it’s
another 16 years. By 2026, they’ll be gone if
we continue doing what we are doing.
We are on ecological quicksand. Imagine
if a weight-lifter was lifting five times his
weight, and he was standing on quicksand
and he was sinking. Knowing this weight
alone is too much for the quicksand to bear,
what is the first thing he should do?
E.G.: Drop the weight.
" I t h o u g h t t h a t I c o u ld
s ie w r f i v e u p » i l k
beeaw se I l o w s iy m i l k
s w e e ts , I l o w « y
I l e w say y o g u rt« B u t I
b a d I b is s e n s e o f sb a site
w h e n I saw w b a t It was
d o in g te tb e e n v ir o n -
m e a t."
S.R.: Drop the weight! No
one is going to stand there and
say, I think I can lift three-
fourths of that weight, or half
that weight - drop it! Because
you are on quicksand. Get out of
the quicksand first before you
think about weight-lifting again.
That is what I’m talking about,
so when we frame it this way,
SAILESH RAO people do respond. Have faith in
them. They will respond.
E.G.: Have you always been
vegan?
S.R.: I became a vegan in 2008, when I
found out what it was doing to the
environment. I was lacto vegetarian (a
person who does not eat meat but who does
consume dairy products), but I thought that
I could never give up milk because I love my
milk sweets, I love my pizza, I love my
yogurt. But I had this sense of shame when
I saw w h a t it w a s d oing to th e e n v iro n m e n t.
B e c a u s e th e w a y th in g s a re fr a m e d fo r u s
V s c i e i r t i s t s , a n d V>y t h e m a i n s t r e a m m e d i a ,
is that lacto vegetarianism is just a little bit
worse than veganism, in terms of imparl
And that’s an accounting gimmick Because
if everyone in the world became lacto-
vegetarian, the planet would be destroyed
today. Because you keep impregnating dairy
cows to make milk, so you get new cows
coming out, and if you don’t kill them and
eat them, they are going to be running
around eating your forests for the next 25
years. I saw that in India. In India, a lot of
people are lacto vegetarian, and hardly
anyone ate meat, at that time. Very few
people eat beef, so the cows are
proliferated, and they have 10 times the
density of cows as the U.S.
o
Wild
E.G.: On the Climate Healers’ website,
there is a page about going vegan, and as soon
as you click on the page, a number ticker
begins to count all the animals, by species,
that have been killed for consumption since the
time you opened the page - which is really
disturbing. B u t I wanted to ask you, climate
change aside, the fact that hum ans kill about
56 billion animals a year for consumption
(according to Food and Agriculture
Organization o f the United Nations FAO STAT
2008), what does this mean to you spiritually?
S.R.: I will tell you a story about what
happened to me in Marrakesh, Morocco. I
was speaking to a high school - 250 high
school students were there, and it was about
veganism and climate change. I asked, “How
many of you are vegan?” And only one child
raised his hand. It was clear that he had to
raise his hand because everybody knew that
h u r t a n in n o c e n t a n im a l,
unnecessarily?” Nobody raised their hand.
WEDNESDAYS 2-7PM
This slide from Sailesh R ao’s lecture shows the distribution over time
o f E a rth ’s wildlife compared to hum ans and livestock.
And I told them, by definition, all of you are
vegan in your heart. But who you are in your
heart and what you do in your mind don’t
match. So we are bringing that into
alignment. That is spirituality.
E.G.: Going back to your
second book, “Carbon Yoga, ” what
is the connection between carbon
and yoga?
S.R.: Yoga means unity. It’s
union. True yoga is really about
getting what you think, what you say and
what you do in alignment with who you are.
What we do as yoga here in the U.S. is
really the third step of an eight-step
p ro c e ss . A nd i t ’s just the calisthenics part of
km
what they call posture. It’s been
h e w as vegan. T h e y w e re all looking a t him .
T h e n I a s k e d t h e m , “H ow m an y of you
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o
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