The Story of the Vegan Grandmothers and How they Healed the World by 2050
By Tami Hay & Paul P.
Once upon a time—the year 2022, to be more precise—a group of wise women began to gather from every direction in order to form A Million Vegan Grandmothers. Their mission was to transform the trauma created by a culture of violence into a force for love. They drew their warriors’ strength from ages past, maintaining their resilience in the face of the greed and corruption engendered by agribusiness, a world so upside down and backwards that the abnormal and un-Godly passed for normal.
“Enough! We have all had enough!” they cried. “No longer will we allow wildlife, oceans, and air to be poisoned, leaving no planet to inherit! The storms are raging, the heat is rising, as is the water, except where there is drought and famine. There, the planet is on fire. No longer will we let corruption paralyze the world into apathetic grief! It is time to return to love! It is time to protect the Grandchildren of all species!” Their voices were strong enough to echo through the infinite galaxies. Their thunder woke the other sleepwalkers from their trance, who looked up and saw for the first time the burning and killing machines at work around them.
Ancient prophecy said that when the earth had been thus ravaged, a new species of human—homo ahimsa—would reclaim the earth for all life. That time had come, the time of the sixth sun, when animal exploitation began coming to a close and we started to heal our war-torn, grief-stained hearts in order to create a new, love-based society, where whole plant food and herbs and healing water would be known as the medicine available to every being.
The grandmothers were wise and weathered, fresh and fiery, calm yet passionate. They alchemized their grief into the gold of purpose, and told new stories—love stories—from the depths of their broken, open hearts. They narrated in a collective voice, a community of truth re-generators who refused to let the carcasses be burned, bulldozed over, and
forgotten, but who planted and sowed the seeds of love in that same soil, redeeming it with life. They were the grandparents of us all, declaring and pledging to protect this precious land and every living being on it. In doing so, they laid the groundwork for the new species.
They had their work cut out for them. In those early days, humans had already transgressed six of nine planetary boundaries identified by climate scientists as critical to the stability and resilience of the Earth system. Climate change was just one of these. But whereas most of the mitigation efforts at that time were directed towards reducing fossil-fuel emissions, the Grandmothers began drawing attention to an even greater culprit: animal agriculture. In addition to releasing massive quantities of both methane and the (then) lesser-known greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, animal agriculture also destroyed an important carbon sink: namely, trees. By that time, the industry had destroyed half the world’s forests in order to create grazing land. The missing trees—3 trillion, by some accounts—were not there to store the excess carbon heating the planet.
This deforestation by the animal agriculture industry was key to another boundary transgression, land system change. Because forests are key components in the water cycle, bind soils, and provide habitat for countless species of plants and animals, to name just a few ecosystem services they perform, their loss caused desertification, erosion, and loss of wildlife globally.
Like falling dominoes, wildlife loss led to the transgression of yet another planetary boundary, biosphere integrity, which is dependent on a high level of genetic diversity. Largely as a result of animal agriculture, only 4% of mammal biomass on Earth at that time was made up of wild animals; the rest was a genetically homogeneous mass of livestock (62%) and humans (34%).
These transgressions, when combined with animal agriculture’s negative impact on the quantity and quality of the world’s fresh-water reserves, its unbalancing of nitrogen and phosphorus cycles with a glut of synthetic fertilizers, and its introduction of such novel entities as genetically modified organisms, added up to a level of planetary mayhem with the potential to end life as we knew it.
Thankfully, though, this seemingly intractable set of problems was susceptible to a single solution: end the animal-agriculture system. This was the logic behind Dr. Sailesh Rao’s proposition “This House Would Go Vegan,” which he eloquently defended in his now famous 2023 Oxford Union debate. The good news
was that, by going vegan, we had the power as individuals not just to avert our existential crisis but to undo the damage that had led up to it.
In the beginning, we relied more heavily on letter-writing campaigns to save millions of sick and dying animals from slaughterhouses, but by the end of 2025, 50% of the world had already gone vegan, and many of the concentrated animal feeding operations were repurposed, their buildings deeply cleaned and given over to the growing of mushrooms and microgreens. The liberated animals lived out their lives in sanctuaries, many feeling grass under their feet for the first time!
Wild animals’ lives improved as well. Over the course of the next few years, we began restoring 3-trillion-trees’ worth of wildlife habitat (sequestering enough carbon in the process to reverse climate change). And all we had to do was leave the land alone! Without animal agriculture’s insatiable appetite for grazing land, the forests grew thick and lush again. The old, dying model of extraction, which merely assumed infinite growth, was succeeded by the life-giving model of interaction, as the Aspen forests re-rooted and spread their truly infinite network of healing mycelium. Called back, wild animals wandered this wooded world without fear of bullet or trap. Some of these forests were food forests, on the model of Sadhana. Formerly desertified and degraded, they became providers of sustainable food security to revitalized local communities.
And it wasn’t just the land that began to recover. The ocean—its bottom once scraped clean by industrial trawlers, its coral reefs bleached by rising heat, its waters darkened and choked by runoff-fattened algal blooms—was finally able to catch its breath and regain its colour. The seabed, its coverings repeatedly torn off by ploughs pulled blindly from above, was finally remade with the return of sponges, anemones and sea stars. By 2029, the Captain Paul Watson Foundation had put an end to whaling, and by 2033 they had halted all extraction from the living waters.
And the people kept coming. More and more remembered their caretaking roles and joined the Grandmothers. Many wrote books: Tastes Like Love, Blackbelt in Tofu, EarthGut, HomoAhimsa, to name just a few. They advocated for, and succeeded in implementing, a plant-based curriculum in every school and university. They taught how to Eat for The Earth and make veggie soup for the chicken’s soul. They hosted podcasts and yoga retreats, and created vegan versions of everybody’s favourite grandmother dishes! By 2040, community kitchens existed in every neighbourhood around the globe, producing pots of unity stew and gut-healing ferments. The Vegan Grandmothers would not stop until all people of the world had nourishing vegan food and a place to grow it!
Once we stopped eating animal foods, we stopped delivering concentrated doses of chemical pollution into our bodies through bioaccumulation. Cancer and heart disease, along with so many other diseases that people had come to accept as inevitable, disappeared. And it wasn’t our bodies alone that we healed; going vegan rid us of the feelings of loneliness and despair that had arisen when we cut ourselves off from both our inner and outer ecology. Once veganic growing practices had restored the soil’s and our own microbial diversity, we became so healthy physically and spiritually that we found ourselves with infinite energy for love and service.
The Vegan Grandmothers went forth and taught their holistic health specialties to everyone! No one was left out. Physicians and professors joined forces and created an international plant-based system, and by 2040 these health teaching centres replaced the sick-care system hospitals, the latter now only used to treat accidents and injuries, which were less frequent in a calm, focused and cruelty-free world!
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So many earth-shaking—or, rather, earth-calming—developments….
Now it is time, finally, to sit back and contemplate them for a moment. For today marks the first day of 2050 and the fulfillment of the prophecy.
The Grandmothers have all arrived, infused with the purest unconditional love ever felt. Never on planet earth has there been such a force to be reckoned with; it is a power that resounds through the canyons and the grottos.
Over the last 28 years, they have fed, loved, planted, watered, and danced the world home, restoring right relationships in the true spirit of Homo Ahimsa, now and for all generations to come!
Make us a lighthouse,
The kind that cuts through all mist and grief so dense Even fog horns cannot sound through it
Or, better, make us in the likeness of a tree,
The kind that, while living, gathers community beneath its leaves,
But in death, gives life to those growing among its boney roots.
For once we can rest, we’ll provide compost for strapping, sapling grandchildren,
whose new mycelium will itself uncoil into the forever
from which new Grandmothers always rise,
inheritors of the wise, divine world of 2050!