Support the Earthly Origin of Commerical Materials Educational Organization
If you found the information on this web site to be valuable, I hope you will please consider making a contribution to the Earthly Origin of Commercial Materials Educational Organization, if you are in a position to be able to afford one. Ready availabilty of information about the Earthly Origin of Commercial Materials, and whether any material is animal, vegetable, or mineral, benefits humanity, in bringing us closer to a world where the ugly business of eating animals, and strewing their body parts throughout so many of the things that we use in our everyday lives, is a thing of the past.
We could use legal help in becoming incorporated as a not for profit organization. We could use money for web hosting services and to pay for computer equipment. We could use computer equipment.
In most parts of the world, it just seems to be rather unnecessary to cause any harm to animals, in order to live, and live well. It just isn't necessary. You can live, and live in style, without eating animals, and for the most part, without using materials of animal origin, for clothing, shelter, or entertainment. Not everyone knows this; we are trying to get the word out. We need your help to keep getting the word out. Not everyone knows a shakahari or vegan, living in style, who they can emulate. So we are trying to show people a little bit about our lives, and about how well we live. We need your help in showing examples of vegans who live well, that prospective vegans can emulate, and we need your help in encouraging people to emulate us. It would help if you could put a link to us, on your web site.
In addition to showing examples of vegans who live well, we also need to increase our well-being, improve how well we live, by helping each other, even making a special effort to help other vegans. As non-vegans begin to see more and more examples of vegans who live well, they will be increasingly less inclined to avoid being vegan, for fear of becoming outcasts.
We welcome contributions of money, materials, labor, and ideas. Can you help research, on the net, and in libraries, including materials engineering libraries, how various commercial materials are made, and whether animal products are involved in their production? This is no easy task, as the path from raw materials to finished product can be complex.
Beside maintaining our educational web site, eoMeo has in the past maintained a vegan garden, that demonstrated how an abundance of wonderfully delicious plant-foods can be grown without the use of animal tissues, or animal excrement, to amend the soil, and without the use of animal "laborers." The only thing that keeps us from maintaining a vegan garden today, is lack of land and lack of economic resources to buy land. Do you have land we can use for a vegan garden.
If you want to invest in a commercial vegan farm, I would be glad to contribute my expertise, and my labor.
A number of people have helped us to to get the word out, and get a glimpse of our lives out. We are extremely thankful for your help.
Send e-mail to us here soilman@shakahara.com
Click the button below if you would like to make a donation through PayPal. Or you can use a credit card or debit card.
Send snail-mail here:
eoMeo (Earthly Origin of Commerical Materials Educational
Organization)
34 Richmond Blvd, Apt 3A
Ronkonkoma, NY 11779
You may make checks payable to Theodore Zuckerman
landline:631 648 4464
cell phone: 631 681 2939
fax: 309 215 0062
Web sites are not expensive. Little donations of $5, $10, $15, are what help keep us going, and what help us to help others, to reduce how many animals are made to suffer, in order to provide flesh, bones, hair and skin, and other materials, for the activities of commerce and industry.
According to Vegan Outreach, about 9.8 billion (that's 9,800 million) animals were killed for food in the year 2000, while only 40 million were killed, in total, for fur, in shelters, and in laboratories. You might want to look at it this way: for every 4 animals killed for fur, in shelters, and in laboratories, combined, 980 animals were killed for food.
We thought you might like to see these two figures represented as 2 bars, shown side by side, and drawn to the same scale (Vegan Outreach's graph shows the bar for animals killed for fur, shelters, and laboratories, drawn to a different scale than the bar for animals killed for food. Plus their bar for animals killed for food is shown horizontally, and their bar for animals killed for fur, in shelters, or in laboratories, is shown vertically).
Bar 1: number of animals killed in 2000, for food: 9.8 billion
(9,800,000,000).
Bar 2: combined number, in 2000, of animals killed for fur, killed in animal shelters, and killed in research or testing laboratories: 40 million (40,000,000).
Having trouble seeing bar number 2? It's there. Look closely, to the right of bar number 1. Can you see it yet?
How about if we lop off some zeros? Will that help you conceptualize the comparison? How about if I told you that the number of animals killed for food, compared to the combined number of animals killed for fur, in shelters, and in research or testing laboratories, is: 980 to 4. Or how about if we put it this way: considering all the animals killed for fur, in shelters, and in researching or testing laboratories, combined — for each such animal — 245 animals were killed for food.
Some animal rights organization urge people to boycott the fur business. Some animal welfare or animal rights organizations try to rescue animals from shelters. Some animal rights organizations try to convince people not to use animals in laboratory experiments, and try to convince people not to buy products that were mass-produced, after small samples of the products (compared to the amount manufactured and sold) were tested on animals. Vegan Outreach urges people not to eat food of animal origin. Given the figures, they think that simply not eating animal food is likely to have a greater effect in reducing animal death and suffering, than anything else, and we at eoMeo agree.
What eoMeo does, is identify which ingredients in foods, and in all the various materials we use in our daily lives, in the industrialized world, have their origin in animal husbandry, and which materials don't. It isn't always obvious. Having this information enables people who wish to avoid harming animals, to make a knowledgable decision in regard to which products or materials to avoid buying, and which products or materials to buy -- especially if they need materials in large quantities, or plan to make repeated purchases.
The more people that see this eoMeo site, gather information from it, and decide not to use animal-origin materials, the more impact there is on the lives of animals.
So we have a two-fold goal: (1) get as many people to the site as possible; (2) get as much information as possible, on the site. We admit that we could be wrong, but we tend to believe that our approach has more of an effect in reducing animal slaughter, and animal suffering, than the approach of making a public outcry about cruelty to animals, and asking other people to change their habits. We provide people with information; we know, and accept, that people will make their own choices. We have some faith that they will reduce the amount of animal-origin materials they purchase -- because we know that people understand that all animals have a desire to live, and we know that people have a desire -- to let animals live.
We don't expect to make a dramatic difference in our lifetime. I don't think this is a realistic goal. What we think is a realistic goal, is that, by practicing ahimsa, perhaps we can nudge — just a little bit — agriculture, industry, and commerce, in a better, happier direction. Perhaps practicing ahimsa can help each of us become just a little bit happier as a person, or, if we are already happy, stay happy. Perhaps, by practicing ahimsa, the consciousness of each of us, variable from smaller to bigger — can be bigger.
Your Donations
We have file cabinets, bookshelves, a telephone, and computer equipment. We made some of the bookshelves ourselves. Money for lumber for the bookshelves was donated. Some of the lumber was scrounged from scraps. Most of our computer equipment comes from generous donations of new and used equipment, and we get cash donations that help us buy the stuff we have to buy. We assembled computers from separate circuit boards that were donated. Software was donated. We got a cash donation that enabled us to buy a scanner, so that we could scan in more pictures of our garden. A benefactor donated a telephone. We would not be able to keep our web site up without these donations, nor would we be able to publish pictures of our garden, without these donations.
Any extra money goes into paying some salary to our web site designer, who now has worked 8 years as an unpaid volunteer, because as yet, eoMeo has operated at a net loss. I have put many many hours into this site, and the contributions I have gotten have not been enough to pay even the annual expense of maintaining a web site with a web hosting company.
So far, as of 2006 Nov 01, we have taken in $80 in donations for the year 2006, and spent $129 dollars just for web site hosting and a domain name. Since the donations are getting close to $100, I am going to start making and publishing a spreadsheet providing more details so you can see where your donations are going.
There are some photos of the eoMeo veganic garden here.
Thank you for being so generous.
And please, we need to think about getting not-for-profit tax status with the United States government, once our donations reach a certain level. They have not reached this level yet, but it may be best to plan ahead. Any lawyers that can help us with this, I would sincerely appreciate your help.
Theodore Zuckerman
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