Welcome concerned viewers to Planet Earth: Our Loving Home. Today's program is the first in a three part series examining the complete destruction of many Japanese coastal communities following the March １１, ２０１１ Tohoku earthquake centered off of Japan's northeast coast.

Measuring ９.０ on the Richter scale, the quake was the world's fourth-largest since １９００ and generated an immense, destructive tsunami that hit the coast just minutes after the seismic event. Entire seaside towns were flattened as they were directly hit by the tsunami, which had waves up to ２４-meters high. Of the ３０ coastal towns wiped out, ２４ or ８０％ were fishing ports. With many fishing and trawling ships left badly damaged or completely gone in the wake of the tsunami, a spokesperson for Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market, the largest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world stated, 『The entire fishing industry has disappeared.』 This event not only resulted in widespread loss of human and animal life, but also caused radiation to be released from the severely quake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Fukushima Prefecture, elevating radiation levels in cities far from the site such as Tokyo.

Even １０-days after the massive seismic event, magnitude-６.０ and higher aftershocks have been recorded in Japan, rattling the nerves of already traumatized survivors while raising risks of landslides and further destruction. As of March ２６, ２０１１, over ２７,０００ are dead or missing, with more than ３６２,０００ displaced and／or evacuated from their homes. Over １８,０００ buildings were totally destroyed and nearly ９８,５００ damaged by the catastrophe.

This is the most expensive natural disaster in history and the Japanese government estimates that the cost to rebuild is around US$３１０ billion. Due to the intervention of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in mid-February ２０１１, Japan's whaling fleet ceased whaling in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica a month earlier than scheduled, arriving in Tokyo Bay on March ２１, ２０１１.

Owing to this early return home, Japanese officials were able to immediately redirect one of Japan's largest whaling ships, the Nisshin Maru, to deliver aid to the hardest hit prefectures in the northeast. Sharing his heartfelt thoughts about the tragedy in Japan, Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society wrote the following in his March ２３, ２０１１ online report:

Wednesday, March ２３, ２０１１: VOICE １(m): 『Our hearts and sympathies do go out to the men and women in the whaling fleet who may have lost family and friends to the disaster. I personally know how frustrating it is to be at sea when there is a loss in the family. We do not know what the Japanese whalers knew of the disaster or even when they knew it, but we can only imagine the anguish some may have suffered.』

HOST: Many coastal towns in the worst-affected northeastern prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima had economies primarily based on the fishing industry. These communities have been completely shattered by the earthquake and tsunami leaving the survivors traumatized, helpless and destitute.

IWATE PREFECTURE

Iwate Prefecture, the northernmost of the three northeastern prefectures, is a popular tourist destination for hiking, boating, camping in the summer and skiing in the winter. The fishing port of Otsuchi Town, was literally swept away by the immense tsunami.

Of the estimated population of １６,０００, １０,０００ are missing, with most presumed dead. The mayor of Otsuchi Town, Koki Kato, sadly lost his life to the tsunami. The city of Miyako with a population of more than ５７,０００ suffered extensive damage, including the small fishing village of Taro that is part the city.

The village was ravaged by the waves despite a １０-meter high sea wall that was built to protect Taro from further tsunamis after the １９３３ Sanriku earthquake. Homes and buildings have disappeared, debris is everywhere and ２,０００ are missing or dead.

Ofunato, another fishing port in Iwate, reported a ２３.６ meter high wall of water thundering down on the town, engulfing and flattening most of the buildings and taking many residents out to sea. As of March ２４, ２０１１ nearly １０,０００ have perished and over １６,０００ people are missing.

One of the very few buildings that were left standing and virtually undamaged was the town's theater, which now serves as a shelter for survivors. The same devastation was repeated in the fishing town of Rikuzentakata where ５,０００ houses and buildings were completely swept away. On March １８, ２０１１ the mayor of Rikuzentakata, Futoshi Toba, made the following somber announcement.

Futoshi Toba, Mayor of Rikuzentakata City, Iwate Prefecture, Japan (M): As we have informed you, at １４:４６ today, we have decided to call off our investigation activity of lifesaving. The Governor of Iwate prefecture has announced this. Because we have to move ahead.

We hear that a lot of remains have been discovered. However, the figure has not been announced yet at all. After that, missing persons are １,７８３ people. The number of shelters is ６７, and ９,５４７ people are taking shelter. We, the city government, must also think about the future of the citizens who are alive and taking shelter. Therefore, we think that we have to work further for them.

Well, to tell you the truth, at this moment, to comment on what kind of town or how we are going to revive is impossible. I think that it is our number one obligation to enable those people to live at least in a state close to normal.

HOST: A Rikuzentakata tsunami survivor tells of his harrowing experience.

Tohoku earthquake and tsunami survivor Rikuzentakata, Japan Victim (M): The shakes were so tremendous that I could not keep standing. So, I suspected these earthquakes were catastrophic, and I decided to escape from where I was. I escaped on foot instead of using a car, carrying my grandchild on my back.

It was within １０ minutes after I had reached a refuge area that a huge sheet of spray went up and a tsunami rose up into the air, exhaling jet-black smoke as if it was a wind. Thus, the evacuation site became dangerous, too, so I ran up a mountain. That's all.

MIYAGI PREFECTURE

HOST: Miyagi Prefecture's capital is Sendai, the most populated city in the prefecture with more than one million residents. Sendai specializes in electronics and appliance manufacturing and food processing. Much commerce flows through its large port.

The earthquake's epicenter was １３０ kilometers from Sendai. Just over an hour after the massive temblor struck, the resulting tsunami swamped Sendai Airport, washing away cars and airplanes and flooding many buildings. Though the tsunami did not reach the heart of Sendai itself, the force of the quake caused substantial damage to infrastructure such as cracks in buildings and roads.

Minami-Sanriku a major fishing center in Miyagi was entirely inundated by the tsunami. A staggering ９５％ of the town was destroyed and fishing vessels were either completely obliterated or smashed beyond repair. More than half of the population of approximately １７,０００ remain unaccounted for.

One witness characterizes the town as a 『submerged cemetery.』 A similar story was repeated in Iwanuma City. Prior to the disaster, the municipality had a population of around ４４,０００.

Tsuneaki Iguchi, Mayor of Iwanuma City, Miyagi Prefecture (M): A massive tidal wave warning was given, so we tried to call out many citizens as possible to evacuate. Unfortunately, because the tidal waves were much more overwhelming and fierce than we had expected, they robbed a great number of peoples' precious lives and homes away with waves without mercy.

We were really shocked by this disaster, which was the most catastrophic incident that ever happened to Iwanuma City in history.

HOST: Other coastal communities in Miyagi Prefecture that incurred major destruction and had their fishing industries wiped out include Kesennuma, Ishinomaki and Shiogama. Prior to the catastrophe, Kesennuma accounted for ９０％ of Japan's shark fin trade.

In ２００９, nearly １４,０００ tons of shark went through this port town. In the coastal whaling base of Ishinomaki, a whale-processing facility was swept away.

FUKUSHIMA PREFECTURE

HOST: Many residents of Fukushima Prefecture's coastal region are involved in the fishing and seafood processing industries as well as carp aquaculture production. The fishing communities of Minamisōma, Soma and Namie, like many others, were largely laid to waste by the earthquake and tsunami.

At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, located in the prefecture's Futaba District, a major crisis unfolded following the Tohoku earthquake. Due to releases of radiation, a mandatory evacuation order was issued for residents within a ２０ kilometer radius of the nuclear power plant, and a voluntary one issued for those within ３０ kilometers of the complex. Citizens as far away as Tokyo are being affected with the Japanese government warning that the city's radiation-tainted tap water is unsafe for infants to drink.

Since March １１th, local and international humanitarian relief organizations have been working tirelessly around the clock to serve the numerous victims needing care and comfort. The ordeal of the survivors continues with many of the displaced staying in overcrowded shelters and enduring freezing temperatures while facing shortages of food, water, medicine, and other necessities.

In the midst of all the chaos and the suffering, the mayor of Iwanuma City noted the following:

Miyagi Prefecture (M): Sorry to say, but there is still a possibility that every place can be affected by any earthquake or tsunami. So we would like those who live in other areas to listen to what we have experienced this time, so that everyone will be able to avoid such tragedy from happening ever again.

If we can serve any contribution through our experiences, we are very grateful.

HOST: Supreme Master Ching Hai has often spoken about the many natural disasters occurring around our world such as in this August ２００９ videoconference in Thailand.

Supreme Master Ching Hai: On one hand, yes, it is alarming to see so many crises erupting one after another

But if we stop to remember what our religions have taught us and what our scientific observation shows us, these problems are not without their causes. It's all about the energy. Negative or positive, like energy attracts like energy.

From this viewpoint, we see that we have produced a lot, a lot, and a lot of negative energy by killing billions and billions of innocent sentient lives, and killing millions of our fellow humans even, over millennia, directly or indirectly.

how could we escape our own conscience and the collective murderous energy that is emitted and hangs in the atmosphere until it is forced to manifest again - as wars, as disease, as the unstable climate and its disastrous consequence？ It is not a coincidence that the main cause of global warming is meat eating. It's not. And the main cause of many of the leading health problems in our world is also derived from meat eating. So, meat eating is cruelty to animals, meat eating is cruelty to our well-being, meat eating is cruelty to our children's wellbeing, meat eating is cruelty to the planet.

If we don't change our way of life, things will only speed along in this destructive path. So, in order to go toward a positive destination for ourselves and the planet, all we have to do is change the direction. Be vegan, make peace with one another and our co-inhabitants, create peace, emanate compassion, then the future will be peaceful and we will never have to suffer many of these kinds of consequences ever, ever again.



HOST: Please join us next Wednesday on Planet Earth: Our Loving Home for part two of our three part series examining the devastation to coastal towns in northeastern Japan following the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

Greetings, insightful viewers, and welcome to Planet Earth: Our Loving Home. This week we examine the wasteful taxpayer-funded subsidies given to the livestock industry. We'll also look at the efforts to tax animal products to lower consumption and help reduce global warming, revive Earth's eco-systems and enhance public health.

The onset of the Industrial Age in the early 1800s brought about major changes in human activities in areas such as manufacturing, mining, transportation, and agriculture. And over the last 50 years, especially in developed countries, consumption of animal-based foods; namely, meat, fish, eggs and dairy products has been on the rise. Specifically, back in 1950 world meat consumption was 47-million tons and by 2005 it had risen to an incredible 260-million tons, or over five-times the 1950 amount.

During that same period the human population had only doubled. Today animal-based foods are typically inexpensive. In fact, relative to production costs, in many cases animal products cost even less than plant-based foods, whose production cycle consumes very little of our planet's resources. How can this be?

LIVESTOCK SUBSIDIES

Governments worldwide provide the animal agriculture industries direct and indirect funding that enables consumers to buy their Earth-destroying products at low cost. In other words, we the taxpayers, whether we approve or not, whether we are vegans or not, are paying for the enormous subsidies that sustain an industry renowned for its enslavement and cruel treatment of land and marine animals and is primarily responsible for climate change, enormous environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, oceanic dead zones and ill health in humans.

In the European Union, for example, direct subsidies are given to farmers raising a certain type of land or sea animal or producing a particular animal product, and to farmers producing animal feed. Then there are market interventions, which include financial aid for those exporting a given animal product outside the European Union, buying and storing surplus supplies of an animal product at a specific price so that the producer is guaranteed a certain profit, and marketing of animal products to increase sales.

As the Nutrition Ecology International Center, an interdisciplinary scientific committee established with the purpose of investigating the impact of all stages and methods of food production and consumption, points out what's even more astonishing and incredibly illogical is that when zoonotic disease outbreaks occur, such as mad cow disease, avian influenza or swine flu, and a government heartlessly orders thousands to millions of possibly infected animals killed, livestock farmers often receive compensation from the government even though these illnesses have arisen due to intensive farming practices.

In recent years, Swedish Parliament member Jens Holm has been active at the political level promoting the message of dietary change to reduce environmental devastation and climate change. In 2007, while a Member of the European Parliament, he co-wrote the report, “The livestock industry and climate - EU makes bad worse.” In the report Mr. Holm and Dr. Toivo Jokkala investigated how increases in meat consumption affect climate change, and the role of the European Union in this process.

They concluded by presenting the following specific demands that can be carried out on both the European Union and national levels:

“Abolish meat subsidies, let meat bear its own environmental costs and work to make modern vegetarian food cheaper.”

The report also discussed the subsidies and other market intervention measures designed to benefit the livestock industry in the 2007 European Union budget - an amount totaling approximately €3.5-billion. In November 2010, Jens Holm and Sweden's Left Party submitted a bill to the Swedish Parliament calling for action to reduce national meat consumption.

Leaders Preserving Our Future: Pace and Priorities on Climate Change

Jens Holm: In the Swedish Parliament, my party, the Left Party, released a bill just a couple of weeks ago, which is called, “Reduction of Meat Consumption Bill,” and that consists of a few important factors. The first is that we set up a reduction target of meat consumption. We would like to reduce the Swedish consumption of meat, with at least 25%, by 2020.

This is a very, very modest reduction, I have to acknowledge, but there is a lot of negotiations behind this target. But it is, at least, a reduction target. And you should bear in mind that in Sweden and in the whole world, meat consumption is increasing.

So for the first time ever, we could have a curve where it's decreasing. We need an action plan to reduce meat consumption. That action plan needs, of course, to include the phase out of the subsidies to the meat industry.

TAX ON MEAT AND DAIRY

Jens Holm: It could also include taxing meat. Personally, I think this is probably the most effective tool, if we put a price on what pollutes.

Well, we do that in a lot of other aspects, but we don't do it with meat. In Sweden, we have huge taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, for instance - that is because we want the people to consume less of alcohol and tobacco, and I think that's excellent. But why don't we do the same with meat? If we do that with meat, I think it's important to use the money we raise from this meat tax, in order to subsidize, cut the VAT, for instance, on vegetables. So normal households, they should not be punished by such a tax.

HOST: In 2007 the Dutch Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis advocated a tax on meat in the Netherlands and projected that such a tax would decrease the nation's meat consumption by two-thirds. Dr. Jan Terlouw, the former deputy prime minister of the Netherlands, spoke with our Supreme Master Television correspondent about his thoughts on taxing meat.

Jan: When you look how we keep animals, just to be able to eat them, how we give them no life, totally removed from what is natural to such an animal, that is certainly a reason to say, “That is not the way!” On top of that is eating meat -- when it concerns energy use and in general the use of the Earth - is tremendously more expensive and worse than eating grains or fruit, etc.

If you would introduce a consumer tax on meat, then it will repress meat eating. And I am an advocate for that, for reasons which I mentioned.

Supreme Master TV: I quote the article by you and Hans Baaij: “Meat is not a primary necessity, but decreasing the consumption of it is indeed a basic necessity.” What is your argument to establish taxes? Would it have an effect?

Jan: How much effect it has you never know. But we see that governments have taxes on alcohol, taxes on tobacco, mainly to discourage the use of it, to reduce it. Something similar also applies for meat. There are many more people in our prosperous countries who are too overweight rather than too thin.

There are many more people who get sick because of obesity - by eating too much and too heavy or too fatty foods and eating too much protein - than people who are skinny because of lacking nutrients.

So there's every reason to put that under the microscope. And if you would note that eating a lot of meat is definitely not healthy, why would you then not use the same means that are being used for alcohol and tobacco to discourage this?

So I find taxing meat, that can be possible and besides, under European (Union) laws there are already restrictions for many things, but you are allowed as a country to charge taxes. So I am in favor to do so.

HOST: Hans Baaij, Director of Pigs in Peril and Animals and Rights and a lawyer from the Netherlands, now discusses the artificially low prices for animal products.

Hans: In general, the animals have a bad life. And it costs a lot of water, it costs a lot of space and people eat much too much meat. You can diminish that by making meat more expensive. Meat is much too cheap. So if you look, for instance, at chicken meat since 1960, it has become seven times cheaper. Pork meat has become two-and-a-half times cheaper, while we ourselves have become much richer since 1960.

So meat costs compared with earlier days are ridiculously small. The advantage of taxes is that The Netherlands can impose them unilaterally. So you are not dependent on the European Union. The advantage is that it is very easy to control. It is a simple way to levy. And if you for instance make it one euro per kilogram, then we have calculated, it yields one and half billion (euros) per year.

The European Union gives a lot of money for advertising (of meat). So what they actually promote is again, more meat consumption, while we have seen how bad it is for the environment, bad for the animals, and people eat much too much meat. So this is absurd, wasted money.

HOST: To recap, when calculating the bill for animal products, the tab is long: Earth's gifts of sweet water, fertile soil, and pure air are utterly befouled, animals are systematically exploited and abused, climate change is accelerated as producing and consuming animal foods is the largest source of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions on the planet, and healthcare costs continually rise from people eating artery-clogging meat, dairy, and eggs.

To save our planet is this critical hour, not only must all governments remove subsidies and economic incentives promoting animal products, those funds should be redirected to encourage eco-friendly occupations such as organic vegan farming. In turn there will be a rise in demand for plant-based foods, creating jobs in other food sectors that are truly kind to our Earth and animal co-inhabitants. One way to enact such reforms is citizen action.

HOST: On many occasions, Supreme Master Ching Hai has encouraged people all over the world to contact their government representatives to inform them about the benefits of the vegan lifestyle so that these leaders are aware that a switch to animal-free foods is the quickest way to stop climate change and that society wants their help in making this transition a reality right away.

Supreme Master Ching Hai: We need all the help from the government.

We need you also to write letters to your government or any government that you think fit, any government at all. Everybody please write.

The government leaders and media can be most powerful and helpful in spreading the message to the most people about saving the planet through being vegetarian.

The government leaders need our faith and encouragement more, because we really need their leadership to bring about wide-scale change.

HOST: May a beautiful and peaceful vegan planet soon come to pass through the enlightened leadership of governments across our world.

For more information about Jens Holm's bill to reduce meat consumption,
please visit: www.JensHolm.se/2010/11/03/reduction-of-meat-consumption-bill/