Article 2 of our UU bylaws, newly revised this summer, lists the first of our shared values as interdependence, proposing, “We honor the interdependent web of all existence. With reverence for the great web of life and with humility, we acknowledge our place in it.” When you contemplate the interdependent web of all existence, how do you think of it? How expansive is it? What does it mean to “honor” it? What is “our place” within it? And how do we acknowledge that place with “reverence” and “humility?”
Join Katie Williams as she explores these questions in the quest to make this web of all existence less abstract and more concrete by considering the place that factory farmed animals occupy in the anthropocentric world we live in. Facing this culturally-induced, culturally-enforced problem is neither easy nor comfortable, but, with an open heart and an open mind, challenging the mindset that underlies it can help us make a more compassionate world, even as it enlarges and liberates us spiritually.
In 1988, when Katie Williams first saw the term speciesism—the belief system that orders species in a hierarchical order of value and importance, placing humans at the top—she scoffed. Two years later she was in the streets of Washington, D.C., protesting the exploitation of animals in the March for the Animals. She’s been passionate about and ever mindful of the plight of animals living in a speciesist world ever since.
