Call for Roundtable Speakers!

Eco-Carnivorism: Can Meat-Eating be Sustainable?

Proposed Roundtable to be held at the Annual Meetings of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada & the Canadian Political Science Association…

… in conjunction with Congress 2016, at the University of Calgary

Conference Dates: May 31st - June 2nd, 2016

The detrimental ecological impacts of industrial meat production are well known: intensive livestock operations draw heavily upon precious land and water resources and often result in the release of harmful pollutants and greenhouse gases (GHGs). Yet meat consumption – on a global level – is increasing. Livestock accounts for the single largest anthropogenic use of land, and the FAO predicts that meat production will double by 2050. Canadians are amongst the largest per capita consumers of meat on the planet. Clearly the existing trends and trajectories in both domestic and global meat consumption are unsustainable… but does it have to be inevitably so?

This Special Roundtable confronts the relationship between carnivorism and the environment from a normative political economic and socio-cultural framework focusing on the notion of the possibility of more sustainable futures. As a core research question it seeks to answer whether meat-eating can be made sustainable, and if so, what would an alternative to industrial meat look like?

We are seeking speakers who will confront this broad topic from distinct disciplinary/methodological frameworks and present different angles for thinking about a more sustainable future and the role of the human consumption of animals.

This Roundtable is the first of two panels that the organizers are coordinating as part of a broader project titled “Green Meat?”. The second is a panel of invited speakers to be held at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Food Studies, in conjunction with the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society, in Scarborough (June 22-26, 2016). The project organizers ultimately aim to bring the two sets of panelists together in a short edited book slated for publication in 2017 (the organizers are currently in the process of soliciting an academic publisher).

Speakers are encouraged to consider these additional questions:

• What are the ecological benefits of smaller-scale organic livestock production,  or does small-scale organic meat production merely hide the ‘incontrovertible fact’ that meat cannot be produced sustainably?
• Is it possible to imagine a sustainable agricultural model without animals who provide fertilizers and other ecosystem services? If not, how then are farmers to make a living without fully integrating those animals into their operations by converting their flesh into meat?
• Has meat merely taken the lion’s share of the blame for what is essentially a broader problem with the unsustainability of all industrial-scale agriculture?
• To what extent should the eco-carnivore debate consider the socio-cultural and gastronomic importance of meat, the health implications of meat consumption, or the geopolitical impacts of global inequality, poverty and malnourishment?
• Would it help to shift people’s cultural perception of meat to that of a “benign extravagance” (as Fairlie 2010, has argued) – a delicious and nutritious source of protein which should be eaten less, and could be produced in a more ecological way?

Those interested in participating in the Special Roundtable in Calgary are asked to send the project organizers a preliminary statement of interest (including a very short bio and proposed framework of analysis) by email to Sarah Martin AND Ryan Katz-Rosene (sarahjmartin@mun.ca AND rkatzros@uottawa.ca) by October 10th, 2015.