Compassionate Spirit & Embracing Limits: interview with Keith Akers (vegan), Part 1 of 2

Keith Akers (vegan) is an American writer and vegan activist. First, Mr. Akers expounds on the problem of limits on our planet, as addressed in his book “Embracing Limits: A Radical and Necessary Approach to the Environmental Crisis,” released in 2023. “We live on a finite planet with finite resources, and our economy depends on those resources. Right now, a lot of that’s going for livestock agriculture.” “Electric cars aren’t that much better than gasoline cars. All these technologies require a lot of metals. By putting up renewables, by building renewable energy infrastructure, that’s good. But it doesn’t really set an answer to the problem of limits.” “There’s a lot of biodiversity problems that we’re facing just right now. And the basic problem is that humans and their livestock have overrun the planet. About two-thirds of all the megafauna on the planet are livestock animals. And the other third is mostly humans. So, we have to ask, ‘What’s going to happen to all these animals, and what’s going to happen to us?’ Because these extinctions have a funny way of working their way back up to us. That takes up two-thirds of our agricultural land. If we didn’t have livestock, you could return that to wilderness. There would be plenty of area left for wild animals to survive, perhaps even to start to increase.”

In 2000, Keith Akers released his book “The Lost Religion of Jesus: Simple Living and Nonviolence in Early Christianity.” “We do know from Josephus that there was a group of Essenes in about the time of Jesus who were against animal sacrifice, and who shared everything in common and tried to live simply. These people seem to be very much both like the early Christians, who lived communally, and also like Pythagoreans. Pythagoras also was vegetarian, and that’s clear. So, we think that there’s a continuous line of influence.”