Gill is an author, coach & counsellor. She was a UK parliamentary candidate for the Green Party. She focuses on helping people live in balance with themselves & the rest of the living world. Her books include “The Trembling Warrior”, “Hearing our Calling” & “The Game”.
In these Sentientist Conversations, we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”. Sentientism is “evidence, commitment & compassion for all sentient beings.”
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We discuss:
- Leaving the corporate world to focus on “what really matters”
- The nature of meaning in work (“Hearing our Calling”), personal activism (“The Game”) & being a sensitive idealist (“The Trembling Warrior”)
- The resilience of undercover slaughterhouse investigators
- Growing up Christian (CoE/Quaker)
- Not meeting other kids until school & forming relationships with nature
- Is having a “soul” similar to being sentient – a reflection of unique experience?
- Recognising that non-humans have their own experiences & value
- Benchmarking other living things against humans
- Stepping away from Christianity but retaining a sense of an unknowable transcendence/the transpersonal
- Distinguishing between naturalism as “what we know” & as “what is conceivably knowable through evidence and reason”
- The supernatural as being completely inaccessible through evidence
- The abitrariness and dogma of believing without evidence
- Naturalism doesn’t mean ignoring emotion & personal experience
- Spiritualism as an escape route from the trauma of reality
- Subjective perspectives as part of one objective universe
- Finding common ground between the rational & the emotional
- Respecting different perspectives without succumbing to nihilism & relativism (giving up on reality and morality)
- Parental kindness & “be kind” as a grounding moral principle
- Humans are baffling!
- Schumacher College
- Systemic, economic & social norm causes of harm
- How the animal farming industry wants to hide the reality from consumers
- When people find out the truth about animal farming, they do care
- “Free range” & “organic” as traps that allow “ethical animal product consumers” to keep causing needless harm & death
- The “natural” cycle of “life eating life” & humans deciding that owning non-human animals is OK
- Does a sentient being suffer any less because it’s killed “naturally” or “with respect” or “in balance”?
- Human categories used as justifications for causing harm
- Taking the perspective of the sentient being that is being harmed
- The potential for common ground against factory farming
- The end of animal farming
- Mitigating wild animal suffering
- Is slaughter in a factory farm more or less wrong than killing a “happy” animal?
- It’s individual beings that suffer, not species
- Environmentalism as another form of anthropocentrism
- Testing our animal ethics by applying it to human ethics (toddler farming?)
- Does plant/fungi communication and complex behaviour imply sentience? Does a cut hedge suffer as much as a pig in a farrowing crate?
- Is focusing on sentience another human-centred conceit?
- The need for prudence & humility
- Even if plants are sentient you still need to #GoVegan
- Addressing climate challenges by respecting non-human life
You can find Gill at gillcoombs.co.uk and on Twitter at @CoombsGill.
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” You can find out more at Sentientism.info. Join hundreds of others on our “wall” using this simple form.
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Thanks to Graham Bessellieu for his post-prod work on this video. Follow him at @cgbessellieu.