Impact Room- For The Animals – Farmed Animals, Environment, Ethics, and Compassion
Eugene VeganFest has gathered a dynamic line-up of speakers in the Impact Room on a variety of topics that affect our natural world, our capacity for compassion, and our relationship to animals.
This room is organized and hosted by Compassionate Living.
Impact Room Speaker Schedule
11:00 – 11:50 am
7 Reasons to Live Vegan (That you may not have thought of!)
with Hope Bohanec, Compassionate Living
Hope Bohanec has been vegan for 35 years and active in animal protection and environmental activism for over 3 decades. She is the Executive Director of Compassionate Living, the host of the Hope for the Animals Podcast and the organizer of the Eugene VeganFest. Hope co-founded the Humane Hoax Project, the Ahimsa Living Project and has organized hundreds of online and in-person events including the Humane Hoax Online Conference, the Humane Hoax Chicken Webinar, and the Sonoma County VegFest.
Hope has also published two books on the subject of humanewashing and greenwashing: The Ultimate Betrayal: Is There Happy Meat? and The Humane Hoax: Essays Exposing the Myth of Happy Meat, Humane Dairy, and Ethical Eggs. Over the last three decades, she has worked for the national non-profits United Poultry Concerns and In Defense of Animals as well as contributed chapters to two anthologies.
12:00 – 12:50 pm
Food Justice: How Your Food Choices Can Change the World with lauren Ornelas
In this presentation, lauren will examine various interconnected abuses in our food system, which include not only non-human animals, but farm worker injustices, slavery, access to healthy foods in Black and Brown and Indigenous communities, and environmental racism. It will call upon all of us to use the power of our food choices to be a catalist for change.
lauren Ornelas has been a deeply involved animal rights activist since 1987 and is the founder and Senior Programs Director of Food Empowerment Project (F.E.P.). Food Empowerment Project is a vegan food justice nonprofit that promotes veganism, champions for the rights of farm workers, highlights the lack of access to healthy foods in Black and Brown communities, and raise awareness about the worst forms of slavery, including child labor, in the chocolate industry. Watch lauren’s TEDx talk on The Power of Our Food Choices.
1:00 – 1:50 pm
Seeing is Believing: Undercover Investigators Expose the Truth About Animal Farming with Erin Wing
Erin Wing is currently serving as the Deputy Director of Investigations for Animal Outlook and previously worked as an undercover investigator. Over the course of 2 years, she went on to complete 4 investigations in the dairy, chicken and aquaculture industries, including the first-ever undercover expose of salmon aquaculture in the U.S.
Erin’s investigations and her advocacy work shed light on the interconnection of human and animal exploitation that occurs on farms in the animal agriculture system. She will share personal accounts from her compelling investigations to illustrate the dangers speciesism poses to all sentient beings on the planet. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, The Guardian and The New York Times.
2:00 – 2:50 pm
Oregon’s Hidden Plant Based History and Promising Future
with Seth Tibbott, Mister Tofurky!
Seth Tibbott founded Turtle Island Foods in 1980, now “the Tofurky Company,” on $2500 savings from his 8-year career as a teacher/naturalist. For 15 years Seth pursued his dream while losing his shirt as a pioneer of the early plant-based foods movement. In 1995, Seth introduced the first nationally marketed vegan holiday roast named “Tofurky” which soon became the most well-known meat alternative brand in the United States. Seth has chronicled his “40-year overnight success story” in a new book, In Search of the Wild Tofurky. After appearing on NPR’s How I Built This, host Guy Raz said, “Seth Tibbott is an American original. His story is so outlandish, so unbelievable…you’d think it was fiction.”