Our house is burning.
Not metaphorically. Not someday.
Spain is burning. France is burning. Across Southern Europe, forests, homes, and entire ecosystems are being consumed by fires intensified by heat and drought.
Yet many of us still act as if climate change were an abstract debate about targets, technologies, and distant generations.
I am not writing this from a place of innocence.
I fly far too much for my work. I have reduced private flying to an absolute minimum, but my ecological footprint remains enormous. I can explain it. I can tell myself the work matters. The atmosphere does not care.
That is why one truth has become impossible for me to ignore.
There is one of the biggest environmental changes most of us can make today. It requires no new technology, no political permission, no corporate transformation.
We can stop eating animals.
For most of us, reducing or eliminating animal products is probably the single biggest environmental lever we control ourselves. Unlike so many climate solutions, we can start with our very next meal.
The science is no longer ambiguous. Animal agriculture is a major driver of greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, biodiversity loss, water pollution, and the destruction of natural carbon sinks.
Eating vegan will not stop the next wildfire. Complex systems do not work like that.
But every meal supports a system. And a food system built around raising, feeding, transporting, and killing billions of animals is environmentally devastating by design.
Then there is the part we prefer not to see.
The overcrowded sheds. Mothers separated from their offspring. Animals bred beyond what their bodies can sustain. The slaughterhouse. The fear. The gas chambers for pigs. Failed stunning. A production line that cannot slow down because compassion is economically inefficient.
We call it production because the word makes the suffering disappear.
I have written about veganism before, and I know the reactions. People point to private jets, smartphones, fast fashion—or my own flights—as if another inconsistency somehow erased this one.
It doesn’t.
My flying does not make eating animals more ethical. Your electric car does not make a steak sustainable. None of us has to be morally pure before we stop supporting something we increasingly know is destructive.
This is not about becoming an angel.
It is about refusing to use our imperfection as an alibi.
You may decide that becoming fully vegan is too much. Then eat far fewer animal products. Stop treating meat as the centre of every meal.
But make an honest decision.
The fires are no longer somewhere else. The animals never were abstractions. The question is no longer whether our choices matter.
The question is how much evidence we still need before comfort stops being a sufficient excuse.