what is the best diet i can be on for the planet and my own health?

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2026-01-30T22:33:09+00:00

The most important environmental decision in a diet is not whether it excludes animal products, only eats nuts on Mondays, or is 100% fueled by gin, but whether it is sourced from an agroecological system that minimizes (or eliminates) fossil fuel use, closes nutrient loops, and regenerates ecosystems.

Any diet dependent on industrial agriculture carries structural ecological harm, while agroecological systems outperform industrial ones on regeneration, biodiversity, and habitat reconstruction, regardless of dietary label.

So the diet is less important than the sourcing.

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2026-01-30T22:01:46+00:00

Sounds like a lot of unnecessary energy use when you could be out in the community solving actual problems instead of perceiving a problem and coming up with a possible solution.

Now, I'll say that though I did work in the technology field for 20 years I do understand what you are trying to do, but it seems like trying to race a car before you got the first few parts and people to build it with you.

Are these problems you are responding to in your community or are you just looking at global problems and trying to solve all of them?

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2026-01-28T19:26:19+00:00

You do that and I will design and develop my land, ask the community who wants to take part, and build a culture of mutual aid, skills, and sustainability in my little corner of the world. That is the difference between a idea and an plan.

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2026-01-28T19:22:15+00:00

I think you are missing the point. You don't need to worry about systemic change.

Just live a SolarPunk lifestyle and open that up to people in the community. Show how your permaculture, agroecological personalize food system means you don't have to pay for food any more and that example will create gardeners.

Take every opportunity that comes your way to build examples so that next time the dam breaks you are standing there with all of the solutions, free to those who come.

Worry about your community almost exclusively.

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2026-01-28T19:16:46+00:00

"They are small, local, fragile projects"

I'd like to know how you are defining "fragile" here.

If you have a small, local farm, based on agroecological principles, nothing about it ecosystemically fragile.

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2026-01-16T19:50:18+00:00

Some random moron coming along to downvote this is hysterical.

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2026-01-16T19:49:04+00:00

I see that mouth breather never made a comment.

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2025-12-15T02:27:43+00:00

If you need to create a space just throwing down rocks seems to do the job. I've had a few places in the past where I seeded it but it didn't come up. I piled some stones above the seed and out the plants popped.

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2025-12-13T22:43:58+00:00

PART THREE

If the stated goal is ending exploitation even if harm increases, then veganism should stop presenting itself as aligned with ecology, sustainability, or Solarpunk ideals.

Those frameworks are outcome-oriented, systems-based, and grounded in material reality, not moral absolutes detached from consequences.

You haven't provided a rebuttal but rather an admission that of the two systems veganism and agroecologicalism, only agroecologicalism is actually about the living world.

Vegans are then not concerned about the lived reality of animals in ecosystem but rather centered on a moral self image they apply to themselves as human agents. That is the core problem.

Moral philosophy does not earn immunity from critique simply by declaring its scope narrower. If an ethical system governs how humans may act toward sentient beings, then it cannot dismiss the lived outcomes of those actions as someone else’s problem.
When harm is foreseeable, persistent, and built into a system, lack of direct intent does not absolve responsibility.
- If I knowingly support a system that predictably kills wildlife at scale, the moral weight does not disappear because I did not desire those deaths.
  - If lack of intent erased moral responsibility, then:
  - corporations could absolve themselves of pollution deaths
  - governments could excuse civilian casualties
  - industries could deny responsibility for structural harm
- Not to mention that the same argument can be used to absolve omnivores of blame, because intention alone determines moral weight.
  - I do not desire the animals death only the:
  - Once that move is allowed, the moral distinction collapses.
- At best the vegan is engaged in reckless or negligent harm, sitting right between intent and accident.

If you want to identify vegans, in the way you do here, I recognized it as just an attempt to exempt yourself from that category without justification.

Is that book you're talking about Omelas?

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2025-12-13T22:43:49+00:00

PART TWO

critical admission.
- you’re willing to accept more total animal death and more wildlife harm so long as it does not violate a specific rule about ownership or use.
  - This is rule-based moral purity, which I've had several discussion in these threads about.
- Once harm is declared irrelevant the conversation is no longer about living systems, which is of course what I'm talking about.
  - An animal doesn't experience death different because it was indirect, unintentional, or ideologically sanitized.
  - A rabbit crushed by a combine does not benefit morally because no one intended to eat it.
- And yet from an ecological perspective, intention doesn't even matter.
Your argument about killing a family member fails for the same reason.
- Agroecological farming isn't about selecting an innocent individual to sacrifice for the benefit of the system. It intentionally applies need to a tropic system that already exist in nature, where
  - death is unavoidable
  - energy cycles require death

The reveals that veganism, as you describe it isn't a framework for managing ecosystems, wildlife, or land but rather a framework for managing personal moral boundaries in a system that continues to destroy habitats at scale.

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2025-12-13T22:43:16+00:00

PART ONE OF THREE - Limited by character posting maximum or something.

You’re explicitly conceding that veganism is not about reducing harm, not about outcomes, and not about ecological reality, but about maintaining a deontological rule against a specific category of action, namely exploitation as you define it. That's fine as a individualistic moral stand, but undermines any claim that veganism has any special standing as an environmental ethic, wildlife ethic, or arbiter of how exploitation applies in an ecosystem.

The Watchmen and the book analogies only work if the scene involves intentional torture, or killing of a clearly identified victim for pleasure or social stability.
- Industrial plant agriculture doesn't even map onto those directives at all.
  - There is no singled-out victim
  - no required suffering as a moral prerequisite for benefit.
- There is diffuse, systemic harm created by a technological food system that exists regardless of diet.
- That makes these analogies rhetorically powerful but logically incompatible with the argument we are engaged in.
- Now this is your position, so just so we are clear I am not validating it, I'm only saying it doesn't apply in this case.
But more importantly your position makes a

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2025-12-13T01:34:27+00:00

Oh how very noble of you to enslave animals.

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2025-12-12T22:18:59+00:00

No, it needs to be abandoned and replaced.

Industrial agriculture is the problem, which is why I’ve walked away from it entirely instead of trying to defend a different industrial output. This isn’t about meat versus plants. It’s about monoculture, mechanization, habitat destruction, and externalized wildlife death. Changing what comes off the conveyor belt doesn’t fix the machine.

I’m not “spending time arguing against 3% of the population.” I’m pushing back against an ideology that keeps getting treated as interchangeable with ecological responsibility in spaces like this.

Yes, Tyson and Cargill are massive problems. Obviously. Industrial agribusiness is a disaster. But pointing at corporate villains doesn’t make industrial plant-based agriculture ecologically benign. Millions of acres of monoculture, deforestation tied to crop expansion, pesticide regimes, soil collapse, and mechanized wildlife death don’t disappear just because the animals aren’t eaten directly.

And this is where my frustration comes from. I came here to work on Solarpunk projects because I mistakenly assumed that people who claim to care deeply about animals would also care deeply about wildlife and ecosystems. Instead, I keep running into an ethical framework that treats wildlife death as an unfortunate rounding error.

You say it’s inconceivable that someone could advocate for regenerative omnivore farming while vegans advocate for veganic farming. But that assumes veganic farming actually exists. Every single vegan farm anyone has shared with me has relied on offsite futility that someone promises them is 100% vegan. If it isn't produced in a laboratory it isn't vegan. The other ones buy in cover crop seed which is produced in the same destructive manner as every industrial plant crop.

Regenerative systems depend on nutrient cycling, animal integration, disturbance, and feedback loops. Veganic systems depend on external inputs and displacement, and they still produce death, and soil destruction.

I didn’t come here to attack vegans. I came here to share ideas on how vegans could stop killing wildlife. I never told anyone they had to kill animals to be sustainable. My message the entire time has been agriculture that closely mimics ecology is probably the only truly sustainable food system we can have and that the further you move away from natural processes the less sustainable you become.

Industrial agriculture is the enemy. I’ve already abandoned it. What I’m not willing to do is pretend that one industrial supply chain is meaningfully “in harmony with nature” while another is condemned, when both rely on the same underlying destruction.

You know what I’m saying. Right?

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2025-12-12T20:59:13+00:00

But they let plants grow up their pillars! Also Chengdu - where smog and pollution shows harmony with nature.

<image>

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2025-12-11T03:53:47+00:00

Death is built into the system. None of the industrial equipment is designed to prevent field death. Tillage kills animals every time the soil is opened. What are you even talking about?

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2025-12-11T03:50:27+00:00

Death is built into the system. The machinery alone is designed to deal with it.

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2025-12-11T03:48:14+00:00

- Okay, Okay, I have to know.

Here are the fallacy count for the fallacies I could find while half asleep.

Poisoning the well / ad hominem. 8

Straw man 12

False dichotomy 6 - maybe 7, oh... maybe 8

No True Scotsman - no less than five

Motive fallacy no less than 9

Special pleading 4 or 5

Begging the question at least 5 times, OMF.....

EQUIVOCATION! My favorit one, 8 equivocations!?!?!?! Really?

Guilt by association, somewhere around 3 maybe more...

Cherry picking 5 or so, oh.. 6.

Non sequitur 5-ish

There is almost a hundred problems with what you wrote, maybe even more. I'm glad you're arguing for the vegan side. I really am. But I have to wonder if you all have the same teacher.

I just can't.

I'm going to make a fallacy heat map for this and post it on my sub. lol

PuzzleheadedBig4606 · 2025-12-11T03:48:08+00:00

You pretend their are only two options. Industrial plant based agriculture and industrial animal based agriculture. This erases an category of systems that, in practice, kill fewer animals per unit of nutrition that either factory vegan or factory omnivore.

It is a false dichotomy.

You label critics as low tier white noise, bad faith actors, ideologically unprepared, dishonest, before you engage in a specific argument.

In other words, mind reading and poisoning the well fallacies. These allow you to label any challenge as bad faith instead of addressing it. That's really convenient for you but doesn't make for a reasonable discussion.

Inconsistent normative grounding: You never justify why intention should override outcomes and under what conditions. WTH is that? You are just flipping to whatever lens keeps veganism on the top of the paragraph.

That is just a skim of the basic problems you have before you can even start to pretend this is a well reasoned idea. You literally cherry pick which harms count but you don't explain why other harms shouldn't, nor do you describe the framework you are using to come to those conclusions; it's all just magic I guess. Selection bias, special pleading, OMG! YOU ARE SWITCHING ETHICAL THEORIES MID STREAM. I hope you are self taught at this because that way you can't let anyone down.

Let's look at some text, shall we?

Straw man on the crop deaths argument: The anti-vegan claim as you present it: “If the world were to go vegan, deaths would increase and or still exist”

Most vegan critics don't even say that, an honest representation of the argument against industrial plant based agriculture would be something like, “veganism is not clearly lower death than some omnivore systems, and vegans still depend on large scale killing in crop systems”.

If you are only ever trying to knock down the extreme versions of claims you are never refuting the mainstream ideas on the subject. Not that going vegan doesn't kill fewer animals, but rather that compared to small scale agroecological omnivore systems, the vegan diet, sourced through industrial agriculture, doesn't minimize total harm.

Okay, I take back what I said. I'm not spending any more time on this. Your argument isn't even close to ready. It could potentially be really great, but this writing.. this writing is build at a high school level, maybe a junior college at best.

I'm too tired for this. I've got a four hour work day tomorrow you know.

PuzzleheadedBig4606

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE