Ecocide law is not about diet but about mass destruction of ecosystems

Jojo Mehta, co-founder of Stop Ecocide, addresses the confusion around ecocide and veganism.

Some recent media coverage has implied that making ecocide a crime would automatically criminalize eating meat. This is not the case.

Ecocide law is about protecting natural living systems, which is to say the natural playing out of the interaction of ecosystems and their inhabitants, of all species. This includes the predator-prey relationship throughout the natural world. Nobody would try and stop the lion hunting the antelope, for example, or the bird catching the worm, and there are many indigenous cultures where living in harmony with the natural world includes the deeply respectful hunting or raising of animals for food. Many small mixed farms in the developed world also retain this deep respect and care for the animals they raise and the land they farm.

Ecocide crime is rather aimed at any industrial practice, from fossil fuel extraction to deep sea overfishing, which causes mass damage or destruction to these natural living systems, and there is no doubt that industrial farming will be affected by this law, as indeed it should be.  Ecocide could undoubtedly refer to damage caused by large-scale meat farming (deforestation, pollution, animal cruelty) - but equally to that caused by large-scale mono-crop farming (deforestation again, depletion of topsoils, collapse of insect populations). Of course, meat farming often involves both kinds of destruction (due to growing of feed crops), but going vegan is not a solution to ecocide in and of itself.  When farming neither respects the land nor the animals, nor the natural balance of living systems, that is when ecocide arises - it is ultimately about the "how" not the "what"...

We would of course strongly urge all of us to investigate the provenance and production methods of what we eat, so as to understand whether it encourages ecocidal practices, and to make choices accordingly. For many, that may well mean eating considerably less meat. We also respect that vegans may have beliefs leading to a plant-based diet irrespective of farming methods.

However we believe that legislating to protect nature - and our place in it - is ultimately far more practical than legislating for specific isolated issues. Indeed our failure to effectively do this has brought us to the current crisis point. Quite apart from the range of current destructive practices the law will address, we do not know what ecocidal practices may be in development now or be dreamed up in the future, whether in plant crop cultivation or indeed any other arena. Outlawing mass damage and destruction by criminalizing ecocide therefore acts as a legal life insurance policy for humanity and the wider Earth community… not as a way of punishing individual consumers or small mixed farmers.