86: "There's not a huge difference between how we treat farmed animals & how we treat people - as resources" Nandita Bajaj of Population Balance - Sentientist Conversation

Nandita is the ED of Population Balance which works to address the impacts of human overpopulation & overconsumption on the planet, people & animals. As faculty with the Institute for Humane Education, Nandita teaches a course “Pronatalism & Overpopulation” about the pervasive pressure on women to have children & the impacts on them, families, non-human animals & the planet. Previously, Nandita worked as a high school physics & math teacher & an administrator in both the public & independent school systems as well as an engineer at Bombardier Aerospace. She has a B.Eng. (Aerospace Engineering) from Ryerson University, a B.Ed. from University of Toronto & an M.Ed. (Humane Ed.) from Antioch University.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”

Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.

We discuss:

00:00 Welcome

01:10 Nandita's Intro

- Engineering to teaching maths/physics to studying & teaching at the Institute of Humane Education (animals, humans, environment)

- Pronatalism: The pressure to have children

- Population stabilisation

04:26 What's Real?

- Growing up in a fairly liberal household in North-West India

- Moving every 3 years. "Wired to desire change"

- Following Hindu religious holidays & traditions

- Transactional religious compliance: fear-based & conditional

- Tribalism & superstition "It didn't make a lot of sense to me"

- Moving to Canada

- Becoming non-religious was fairly straight-forward

- Dabbling in self-discovery & studying psychology: Realising "These pieces of my identity were for the most part socially constructed"

- De-constructing values & beliefs "Who I was made to believe I was was very limited & finite & self-serving." Reputation, wealth, success, family

- "What motivates me deeply?" rather than "what do people expect of me?"

- Exploring eastern & western philosophy

- "There is this deep reverence that I hold - not for a god... but for the entire evolutionary process" "There seems to some kind of a kind of miraculousness to it"

- Interconnectedness, scale, deep time, human humility

- "There is something much bigger going on." Mystery - driven by science - but not limited to evidence, because there may be things we'll never have evidence of

- Evidence might be limited but that's not an excuse for "making stuff up"

- How supernatural beliefs can warp compassionate ethics

22:18 What & Who Matters?

...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info and on YouTube.

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Thanks Graham.