Martin Rowe

The short answer to that question is, “I don’t know . . . yet.” Our goal with the Vegan America Project is not to answer all questions or to have a solution to every problem. It’s to generate policy papers, briefs, speculative essays, and perhaps ultimately a full-length book—or some combination of the same. We’d like to approach a university and/or institution to publish our writing and expand our material on an interactive website, assigning moderators to encourage further analysis, debate, research, and thought in and across academic disciplines—a natural correlative to Human–Animal Studies.

In this way, Vegan America can expand with the wisdom of the commons and inspire discussion among students, cultural creatives, businesses and NGOs, social change agents of all types, and policy makers to make possible a genuinely humane and sustainable American and global future: i.e., Vegan Brazil, Vegan China, and beyond. We should be encouraging innovative and creative thought around human identities and our relationship with non-human animals and the natural systems on which we all depend, and higher education can be at the leading edge of that thinking.

The second goal is to encourage artists and writers to use our material to generate possible scenarios so we as a society can imagine our way to the future. Our aim is for Vegan America to be taken up by creative types of all kinds, who could see Vegan America as a TV series, film, computer game, fiction, fan fiction, and bring them to the marketplace of goods and ideas. In other words, a vegan America would be the backdrop, the sitz im leben within which storylines, characters, scenarios, and the moral imagination would be engaged and inspired.

The Vegan America Project may seem daunting. It may well offer ideas that seem unachievable, unpalatable, and/or impractical. It may well conclude with questions that need answers, technologies and businesses that need to be developed, and political and social realignments that have yet to be achieved and seem unachievable. But that is precisely the point. We cannot change without conceiving a future; and we cannot implement that future without starting somewhere. Our planet is changing, and faster and more dramatically than we can currently imagine; our adaptive strategies will need to be larger than our current political, social, and technological resources can encompass.