Isabella La Rocca González joins me on Sentientism episode 240. Find our conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism Podcast here.

Isabella La Rocca González is an artist, writer, photographer, teacher and activist. She describes her work as “part of a long tradition in art and photography: to bring to light and find beauty in the hidden, unconscious, or disregarded. As the daughter of emigrants from Mexico and Italy respectively, I strive to reconcile values from my Indigenous roots with my European heritage.” Her artistic work is richly entangled with her ecofeminist, total liberation activism.

Her book of photographs and creative nonfiction, “Censored Landscapes“, which exposes sites of animal agriculture, was published in December 2024 by Lantern Publishing. The book has been widely endorsed, including by previous Sentientism guests Jo-Anne McArthur, Marc Bekoff, Robert Grillo, Jonathan Balcombe and Lisa Kemmerer.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”

Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.

00:00 Clips

“It took me 11 years to create the book… I love the tradition of American landscape photography. So I decided to just find as many different kinds of farms where animals are bred, exploited, and slaughtered and photograph the context… When you photograph an animal or a person, it’s almost an act of empathy because you know when you’re really in the flow of it, you are the thing you’re photographing… My utopian world would be vegan. There’s just no way that a world that I imagined would exploit or slaughter animals in any way, shape, or form… The path to that was very imaginable.”

00:51  Welcome

Endorsements of “Censored Landscapes” by previous Sentientism guests Jo-Anne McArthur, Marc Bekoff, Mark Grillo, Jonathan Balcombe and Lisa Kemmerer.

02:55 Isabella’s Intro

Veganism, art, photography, writing.

Censored Landscapes: “It took me 11 years to create the book.”

“It started because I photographed an abandoned egg farm where 50,000 hens had been abandoned in a battery cage egg farm.”

“I don’t have the bravery to infiltrate these facilities and go in and expose the cruel practices of these facilities, but I love landscape photography.”

“I decided to just find as many different kinds of these kinds of farms where animals are bred, exploited, and slaughtered, and photographed the context.”

Photographing in sanctuaries: “So that these animals are represented as individuals”

“…You can’t wrap your mind around these numbers…they’re tens, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of animals.”

“Facts are good. It’s good to have everything backed up. But I think many humans, the water in which we swim is stories and poetry.”

07:03 What’s Real?

Mexican mum, Italian dad, “I grew up with a very Catholic worldview.”

“12 years of Catholic school… Mass every Sunday… my first communion… stations of the cross, Lent, fish on Good Friday, the whole thing…”

“… yes we’re Catholic but we don’t buy the whole thing”

 “…I liked the stories… I liked feeling that there was something out there that could make everything better… God was going to make everything better. If I prayed and I was good, you know, everything would be better.”

“…as I hit my teen years, I started some real deep questioning. And I was a big reader since I was a little, little girl.”

Reading “A Diet for a Small Planet” and “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair at 13/14 years old “…the descriptions of the meatpacking industry really just horrified me…”

“And so I became a vegetarian… I didn’t know any other vegetarians… My mom was very accommodating, very sweet.”

“Those two books set me on the path toward veganism.”

Reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus “That may have started me down this path of existential angst.”

“I became very interested in meditation and yoga. You know this was the 70s and… a kind of post hippie era… I also at that point decided I wanted to be an artist. And the thing about meditation and yoga and art is that they’re a practice.”

“What I concluded from all of that is that belief is not enough. That practice is what matters.”

“I think I pretty much rejected the whole Catholic [faith]… there’s great things about religion – community and, for some people it can be very comforting…”

“…but for me… there’s a lot of misogyny in Catholicism and a lot of shame around sexuality… I just decided that it was not a helpful worldview.

“…I pretty much rejected it, much to my mom’s sadness”

Existential angst: “…when I kind of dug down into the deepest roots of my anxiety, it was this terror that the qualities that I hold dearest, which are kindness, empathy, compassion, altruism, beauty, joy, love… I had this fear that those are all just human constructs – that we just made that all up… as Shakespeare wrote… just sound and fury in a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing.”

“This really this really got to me for quite a while… I would sit down to meditate and I get to that that fear.”

Does growing up religious create an expectation problem? Where we expect some perfect, externally defined purpose and meaning, then struggle if we don’t find it.

“I think you’ve got a really good point there… when I was a little girl, I prayed the rosary before I did sleep… I really wanted to believe in this kind of ultimate goodness.”

“There’s some so great stories about Jesus and doing unto others as you would have them do unto yourself and loving others and all of that really resonated with me… I think that’s why it was so important to me that these qualities, these experiences that we have, these kind of transcendent experiences like love are real and not just this kind of construction to make ourselves feel like life means something and that it’s all not just absurd.”

“I think probably Catholicism very likely set me up to kind of have that big fear.”

“But the good news is that I found an answer… in naturalism I think would be the short way of putting it.”

“I realized that our connection to each other and to non-human animals is… the evidence I needed that these qualities really exist beyond some kind of intellectual construct.”

“…Genetically… we are connected to all this other at least earthly life.”

“The more I read about animal cognition, animal perception, the more I saw all these connections.”

“…the hormone they call the love hormone, oxytocin… is also shared by all mammals. And that hormone has its counterpart in birds… in fishes”

“So we all have this biological imperative to love”

“Roosters call to other chickens to tell them if there’s danger or if there’s a good source of food… these, to me, are evidence of empathy and love and compassion.”

“These things are real things, right? You can actually trust them. And we are connected. It’s not just this intellectual human thing that we’ve created.”

“We are made of stars. It’s not just this like black hole unfathomable, you know, dark stuff out there. We are connected to everything in the universe. you know, we are made of the universe.”

“…that did a lot to kind of calm my angst and my existential worries.”

Carl Sagan

“When you really observe just the reality of what’s around us in the moment, that’s transcendent in and of itself. So I don’t feel like I need some kind of magical, hallucinatory experience because this reality right here is more than… anyone can perceive at any one time anyway.”

“I think photography… also confirmed and pulled me out of that existential angst especially photographing the animals.”

“I volunteered at the shelters and I went to animal sanctuaries and did photography for them.”

“…when you photograph someone… an animal or a person… it’s almost an act of empathy because when you’re really in the flow of it, you are the thing you’re photographing.”

“…doing that with non-human animals was just such a widening experience because I’d read about animal perception… I could sort of see how they were perceiving me”

“…of course, I’m never going to smell like a dog or see like a chicken… but I could put myself in their place and at least try to imagine it.

“…that kind of brought me deeper into a great connection with what I consider a greater whole.”

JW: “…we can never escape our own perspective. We’re always going to be trapped in it. But the ability to conceive of other people’s perspective and other beings’ perspectives and photography’s role in mediating that is an important part of having a richer appreciation of the reality that is probably out there.”

23:28 What Matters?

Being the oldest child: “I wanted people to think of me as good and I wanted to feel that I was good.”

“…As a child… following the Ten Commandments, doing as Jesus says, not taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain”

“…some of them are just so easy, like I’m not going to kill anybody.”

“…when you really look… the commandment is not ‘thou shalt not kill other humans’”

“…There’s a lot of goodness in those commandments, but there’s also some things… I’m never going to covet my neighbour’s wife.”

“…it always was important to me to be good. And I don’t know that it was just because of religion… there was probably a lot of conditioning…”

“…That still continues to be important for me… for whatever reason… I get meaning in my life from wanting to choose the right path”

“…a founding tenet of yoga is ahimsa, which is to do the least harm. And that just resonated with me.”

“…sometimes that’s not an easy choice… You might have to take difficult choices.”

“I don’t think that I can ever shed the desire to at least to be perceived as good. I mean, there’s some ego in there, too…”

“…maybe that’s a good thing about religion is this peer pressure to be good… when all else fails.”

30:29 Who Matters?

As a child “I loved animals… I thought they were cute.”

Living next to a horse ranch “…slowly the horse and I became friends”

“I grew up with… companion animals… we had hamsters… And then when we stopped moving so much, we got a cat. Loved that cat… then we got a dog. I loved the dog.”

“…it was just natural for me to see animals as other beings deserving of, kindness, compassion… I just didn’t see that there was a big difference.”

“As a vegetarian, I was quite lazy… if I went over somebody’s house, I wasn’t going to push the plate away if there was chicken on it or fish.”

“…it wasn’t until… the late ‘90s that I became aware of the reality… of all farmed animals, including dairy cows, including fishes, including… everything that vegetarians eat.”

“…it took me seven years from when I first… saw a short PETA video called Meet Your Meat”

“I was looking for meat for my dog because a veterinarian had told me that I needed to feed her meat… so maybe I should try to find a better meat source for my dog.”

“I saw that video and I was just horrified. And then I just… researched.”

“I didn’t know any other vegans… just… didn’t want to know… and then had to know… [I] went back and forth for about seven years”

“…it becomes this mental gymnastics where you’re like, ‘well, maybe Parmesan cheese from Italy, they treat the cows so much better in Italy.’ And then you think, ‘do they?’… And then you look…”

JW: “…and then you find out about rennet and gelatine and you’re like ‘oh my god!’…the gymnastics…  it’s a real mental effort…”

“Why am I trying so hard to do the wrong thing? This is ridiculous.”

JW: “but being willing to do the gymnastics at least shows you do care, right? because many people don’t even bother to try and do the gymnastics… my favourite tactic was just avoiding the topic completely… So then you don’t have to do gymnastics at all.”

“…it’s so liberating… not only not to have to do the gymnastics, but you… feel so without doubt this is the right path. There is no question about it.”

JW: “…it doesn’t mean it’s perfect or that the journey’s complete or we’ve found some magical way of avoiding any harm or exploitation in our lives but yeah the confidence that at least that is a big important step and you’ve taken it to the best of your abilities… it’s refreshing and a joy”

What did Catholicism say about non-human animals? “You know there was really nothing about how we should, as humans, treat other animals. Nothing at all… which now surprises me because there are passages in the Bible… that could be interpreted as… you shouldn’t be harming other animals.”

The Matthew Haltemann and David Clough Sentientism episodes.

JW: “The Garden of Eden… Isaiah… There is a line in the Catholic Catechism which explicitly says something like it is an affront to human dignity to needlessly be cruel to or kill any animal… that outlaws basically… all industrial animal agriculture and most of the rest of it as well.”

“I would love to see more veganism within religious traditions because there is nothing that that contradicts any religious tradition… it’s so much easier to be kosher if you’re vegan… Many of my kosher friends have become vegan because it’s just easier.”

The risks of photography romanticising both animal agriculture and the experiences of wild animals.

Coping with insects or other animals that come into spaces where humans or other animals already live… insects, raccoons, feral cats… “what is going to be the least harm?…

JW: “It’s so much more complicated than just ending animal agriculture.”

“Compassion is not a zero-sum game… it’s not like we need to choose compassion for this but not for that…”

“…with animal agriculture, the atrocity that the animals go through… But that has repercussions [for] the workers in the United States… it’s an issue that connects to immigration because the majority of workers in animal agriculture are foreign born and an estimated 25% are undocumented.”

“They’re suffering… let’s call it what it is, kidnapping… Even though they’re necessary for the economy, for the communities.”

“…animal agriculture hurts not only the animals, but it hurts the workers.”

“Human health… the evidence just mounts and mounts and mounts that, the healthiest diet for humans is a plant-based diet”

“and yet these corporations profit from making people believe that we need to eat animals for our health… it’s harming ourselves.”

“Industrial animal agriculture is a perfect petri dish for pandemics.”

“…they’re culling millions of chickens in the cruellest way possible, paid for by the government.”

Economic impacts: “…in the United States the federal government subsidizes animal agriculture to the tune of 72 billion dollars… Imagine what could be done with that money that is not cruel and destructive and that helps instead of hurts.”

“Compassion for those animals would spread… they shoot down wildlife in national parks to protect the interests of ranchers who graze their ‘livestock’ on our public lands”

“…this horror that we are unleashing on farmed animals is unleashing a horror on the world.”

Climate change: “an existential threat to humanity at this point”

“…the interconnectedness of this suffering that we are causing to everything else is really important.”

49:37 A Better World?

“Of course, my utopian world would be vegan. There’s just no way that a world that I imagine would exploit or slaughter animals in any way, shape, or form… I think the path to that is imaginable… and maybe it’ll happen in my lifetime”

“…there’s technological fixes, there’s natural fixes, there’s agricultural fixes… all sorts of good people working in different paths… cultured meat… precision fermentation.”

“We’re not going to survive even as a human species and continue the road we’re on.”

JW: “even from a completely selfish human perspective… the arguments are still absolutely overwhelming… if these industries didn’t exist and you suggested them today people would think you’d lost your mind… If you said, I’m going to come up with a food system where we lose 90 to 95% of the inputs while generating catastrophic water and land pollution, massive chunks of three different types of emissions. We’re going to deforest half the planet… Even before you mentioned what’s happening to the sentient beings that are its victims, you would be like… get this person out of my office!”

JW: “a battle of narratives and stories… the PR and marketing people in these industries deserve all of the gold medals… they have persuaded most humans that these industries are essential, good, natural, positive forces in the world… despite the fact that nearly all of their consumers would be absolutely horrified if they were ever forced to confront what they pay for every day… the most incredible marketing achievement the world has ever seen… more impressive than big tobacco… than big oil.”

“Basically telling lies. Telling a lie that this is healthy… milk is good for your bones… protein…”

“every time there’s a little bit of dissent, they come up with another story… ‘seed oils are bad for you… we need to use beef tallow… much healthier, much less processed.’”

“…what is more processed than eating an animal?… This is this is an animal who’s been bred, who’s been fed unnaturally, who’s been confined… gone through this heinous, horrible, cruel death… If that’s not processing, I don’t know what is.”

“…they are really good at putting out these stories and it’s easy for people to believe them because it means well that ‘I’m doing the right thing.’”

JW: “People are desperate to be conned… it’s really easy to convince us because we’re desperate to believe it.”

“…also it’s an economic story… it’s an immensely profitable industry for a certain powerful collection of people… money is power… in the United States, the guard rails between money and government are disappearing… And so they have the power to keep proliferating these lies.”

JW: “…that economic power and wealth is very concentrated into a small number of extremely large corporations… then they use this image of the common rancher and the ‘family farmer’ as a defense. The reality is, most of the people involved in actually doing the farming are not seeing any of that wealth and are often exploited victims themselves… it’s another aspect of the story that is sort of genius spin.”

Writing and photographing Censored Landscapes.

“I’ve been most delighted by stories… I just loved to read when I was a kid… Now it’s been supplanted a little bit with movies and television… there’s such great storytelling in television and of course cinema movies.”

“That was of interest… Tell stories about the animals that I was photographing. Tell stories about my experience in photographing these facilities. Tell stories about myself and how I was relating to what I was learning. Tell stories about the lies.”

“I have one essay… called grass-fed greenwash… the whole myth that somehow domesticated cattle could mimic the grazing patterns of ancient ruminants [regenerative animal agriculture], which even heartfelt environmentalists are buying hook, line, and sinker.”

“They’re just ‘oh great so we can keep eating beef and be environmentalists!’”

“And then of course poetry because it’s just so delightful… reconjecturing one’s experience with imagery and words.”

“…so all of those things… the arsenal… the resources… to make this this holistic view of… the reality of animal agriculture.”

Avoiding the risk that we don’t lose the connection with individual sentient beings as we look at the scale of animal agriculture.

“I think the numbers to a certain extent can help with that… on this chicken and turkey farm there are 300,000 animals in this warehouse… So that was one way I thought of representing the animals – and then of course the portraits of the animals”

“Occasionally I was able to photograph them on the facilities, but much of the time I went and visited animal sanctuaries where these animals, this tiny, tiny fraction of survivors of this industry, can live out their life in peace with compassion and love.”

“I’m very grateful to the animal sanctuaries… I hung out… I didn’t just come and click click click… I tried to help out to become part of the scene so it wasn’t just the stranger with a big eye, staring in at an animal.”

“I did not include any graphic images of cruelty. Number one because I don’t have the emotional bandwidth. I just don’t I don’t have the bravery… I can’t look, past a certain point. It gets into my head. It gets under my skin. Gets into my dreams. And I don’t think that I can be helpful.”

JW: “the sanctuary portraits are so powerful… you have this visceral contrast between looking at a sea of animals… and then being drawn to recognize each one is an individual being… and then there is the contrast in the brutal reality of what their lives are like and what a good life for them might be… very similar to the way you and I… we want to lead a long happy life with our families.”

JW: “The positive potential of… a great life in a sanctuary… is as important as… the moral imperative to end the horrible brutality of the slaughter house… that positive story is… as compelling and maybe even more compelling for some people.”

How does animal agriculture link to intra-human ethics?

“…as I was kind of researching and putting this book together… I realized that all of these social justice movements are interconnected… you can’t have one without the other.”

“I don’t know that you can have environmentalism and have animal agriculture. I just don’t I don’t see that there’s any overlap. There’s lies told about there being an overlap. But when you look closely, you see there’s no overlap.”

“…as individuals we have the power, every day, several times a day… we have the choice of what we consume… that makes a difference”

“…say you’re an environmental activist… well your choice of what you consume promotes your cause.”

“…women’s rights… the exploitation of the female reproductive system that overlaps between human and non-human… dairy, eggs, caviar… all of these ways of exploiting the female reproductive system… eco feminism draws that connection.”

“…racial harmony… in this country, indigenous people did not farm animals before the colonialists… They did subsistence hunting when necessary, but they were very good at plant agriculture… the irony is that now black and brown people are the people buttressing this industry with their often very poorly paid, poorly compensated, dangerous labour.”

“I don’t see how you can face the racial reckoning that we’re facing all over the globe, but especially in the United States, without an understanding of that.”

“The meatpacking industry is just horribly dangerous, terrible in terms of mental health and, terrible in terms of physical health, repetitive stress…”

JW: “You might choose a particular area to focus on or a particular cause, but you can’t do that effectively by pretending it’s completely unconnected from all of the others. The reality is they are actually linked. So even if you just want to address one cause, you have to engage with the others.”

JW: “I also like the fact that, in a way, that’s a more coherent approach to thinking about these things… If we’re against one form of oppression, why not all of them? And if we have solidarity with the vulnerable, why not all of them? And that that makes the problem bigger for us in some sense, but it also means we can actually see it more clearly and we can engage with it in ways where there are often powerful win-wins.”

JW: “… the impact of colonialism which obviously brought a lot of industrial animal agriculture to most of the places around the world… But it was also the voracious land hunger of animal agriculture and feed crop growth that was one of the motivations for the colonial land grabs and the settling and the invasions in the first place… that’s one reason some of these states needed so much land is because animal agriculture was so breathtakingly inefficient… those horrific stories of what humans have done to each other and to the environment through deforestation. I’m sitting here in the UK and people will criticize Brazil for the deforestation they’re doing… we [in the UK] just got our deforestation done early.”

JW: “That’s the good thing about a poly crisis… when you try and fix it, you can have lots of good effects”

“…that’s why, for me, Sentientism has been very important because when I do grapple with these moral issues sentience can be a rudder… to help us to connect to other beings, other animals who are not like we are but who we are deeply connected to.”

“…that becomes the beacon to lead us moralistically and ethically…”

JW: “…every sentient being, however simple, matters to themselves in some way… And that is where the moral obligation for us to care about them comes from. You matter to yourself. And therefore, if I want to call myself moral, you should matter to me. And that’s true even if you’re very different from me… Things can go well or badly for you. You can be harmed or benefited. Then you are a moral patient. And I might not know what to do about that. I might not have the ability to help. I might be conflicted about, you know, the best way forward. But setting that baseline of at least saying every sentient being matters, feels like an important foundation.”

“And it solves a lot of the problems that we’re currently facing as a whole, not just humans, but… the planet. So, it’s a really good starting point…”

JW: “Censored landscapes is a real triumph and I think it will help to shift the narrative in a more compassionate direction… and it’s one that I think most people want to go in in their heart of hearts anyway.”

01:16:00 Follow Isabella

“…my wish for this book is that it could be found in any library in the world… I would just love it to be freely accessible… so more important than buying the book is to request it at your library.”

Glissi.org
Censored Landscapes
@eyelarocca
Isabella on BlueSky

Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella, Steven, Roy and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon and our Ko-Fi page. You can do the same or help by picking out some Sentientism merch on Redbubble or buying our guests’ books at the Sentientism Bookshop. Sentientism is proud to now be part of the iRoar podcast network – go check out some of the other wonderful podcasts there.