"Being able to emotionally detach from all the self-righteous "causes" that people get so uptight about saves time and energy"

This is true, but only on an individual level. The same as a logger not worrying about his/her job cutting down rainforest or anything else. Certain practices in place within the industry of factory farming at the moment do have a negative impact on the environment and if people are worried about their children they might also choose to concider their(or their grandchildrens) future if they wish for them to enjoy the same level of environmental integrity(or even better) than we have today. It is for these reasons that many people choose to concider these things and if everyone just decided to not be so "uptight" about it noone would ever do a thing about it.

This is why some people dont support factory farming or mono culture crops when possible and maybe go hunt instead or try to grow food in permaculture gardens at home.

On a collective or species level being emotionally detached to such things is sort of self destructive.

if everyone stood up and did their part to change the world, collectively we would make a difference, but that's just not realistic.

I mentioned earlier the irritating term or tag "Angry Young Man," with which awkward types are put in their place as callow young rebels going through a "phase." In 'Look Back in Anger', the mediocre play by John Osborne that gave currency to the usage, the protagonist Jimmy Porter is going through one of his self-regarding soliloquies when he exclaims, rather tellingly for once, that there are "no more good, brave causes left." This utterance struck home in the consciousness of the mid-1950s, at a time when existential anomie was trading at an inflated price.

Within a few years, I need not add, millions of young people had forsaken the Absurd in order to engage with such good, if not invariably brave, causes as the Civil Rights movement, the struggle against thermonuclear statism, and the ending of an unjust war in Indochina. I was myself "of" this period, and have witnessed some truly marvelous moments at firsthand. (I shan't tell you my stories unless you specifically request them; I know that nothing is more tedious than the front-line recollections of a Sixties radical.)

Nobody in the supposedly affluent and disillusioned fifties had seen any of this coming; I am quite certain that there will be future opportunities for people of high ideals, or of any ideals at all. However, in the fairly long interval between 1968 and 1989--in other words in that period where many of the revolutionaries against consumer capitalism metamorphosed into "civil society" human rights activists--there were considerable interludes of quietism and stasis. And it was in order to survive those years of stalemate and realpolitik that a number of important dissidents evolved a strategy for survival. In a phrase, they decided to live "as if."

I'm never certain which author can claim the credit for this mild-sounding but actually deeply subversive and ironic decision. Vaclav Havel, then working as a marginal playwright and poet in a society and state that truly merited the title of Absurd, realized that "resistance" in its original insurgent and militant sense was impossible in the Central Europe of the day. He therefore proposed living "as if" he were a citizen of a free society, "as if" lying and cowardice were not mandatory patriotic duties, "as if" his government had actually signed (which it had) the various treaties and agreements that enshrine universal human rights. He called this tactic "The Power of the Powerless" because even when disagreement can be almost forbidden, a state that insists on actually compelling assent can be relatively easily made to look this stupid. You can't achieve 100 percent control over hyumans, and if you could, you could not go on doing so. It is--fortunately--too much responsibility for any human to assume, not that this keeps the control freaks from continuing to try.

At around the same time and alarmed in a different way by many of the same things (the morbid relationship of the Cold War to the nuclear arms race), Professor E.P. Thompson, whom I recommended to you earlier, proposed that we live "as if" a free and independent Europe already existed. Some people are still offended if yen mentions these two men in the same breath--and Thompson would never have claimed that they both ran the same risks--but actually the two movements for human rights and disarmament were latently symbiotic at the beginning and had become quite closely related by the end. And we know with certainty, from the memoirs of some of the "statesmen" of the period, that it was the stubborn, nonviolent, cultural and political rebellions of those years that impelled them to recast their assumptions. The process often involved an inversion in the usual relationship between the ironic and the literal. The "People Power" movement of 1989, when whole populations brought down their absurd rulers by an exercise of arm-folding and sarcasm, had its origins partly in the Philippines in 1985, when the dictator Marcos called an opportunist "snap election" and the voters decided to take him seriously. They acted "as if" the vote were free and fair, and they made it so. (The forgotten fact that the Soviet ambassador to Manila took the side of Marcos was also a portent of a kind.)

Again, I've slipped into recounting these legendary moments as if they vindicated dissenters, as they most certainly do, and as if they were self-evident "good, brave causes," which they most certainly were. But it's important to remember the many dreary years when the prospect of victory appeared quite unattainable. On every day of those years, the "as if" pose had to be kept up, until its cumulative effect could be felt. Many of the greatest "as if" practitioners--including Thompson himself, and men like Frantisek Kriegel in then Czechoslovakia--did not live long enough to see the grand production for which they had kept up the optimistic but phlegmatic rehearsals.

One could add further examples. In the late Victorian period, Oscar Wilde--master of the pose but not amere poseur--decide to live and act "as if" moral hypocrisy were not regnant. In the Deep South in the early 1960's, Rosa Parks (after some arduous dress rehearsals of her own) decided to act "as if" a hardworking black woman could sit down on a bus at the end of the day's labor. In Moscow in the 1970s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn resolved to write "as if" an individual scholar could investigate the history of his own country, and publish his findings. They all, by behaving literally, acted ironically. In each case, as we know now, the authorities were forced first to act crassly and then to look crass, and eventually to fall victim to stern verdicts from posterity. However, this was by no means the guaranteed outcome and there must have been days when the "as if" style was exceedingly hard to keep up.

All I can recommend therefore (apart from the study of these and other good examples) is that you try to cultivate some of this attitude. In an average day, you may be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.

Detachment is giving up hopes, dreams, comfort, etc.

I hear a lot of new age talk of being detached, by people who live comfortable and extremely selfish lives - people who are deeply attached to their cravings, ego picture, pleasant food, drugs, sex, comfortable beds, hopes for the future, speaking with aliens, etc. It's easy for us to miss the ego-comforting attachments and notice the ego-injuring ones.

It's fine to talk big about detachment, but walk the walk then. Give up everything which is "yours", and spend all day every day working to help those who do not have the option to spend all day thinking about how not spending time working for the benefit of others is the meaning of life. That is true detachment. The other side is lazy self delusion.

But aside from doing what one's heart screams out is right,

I'm using detachment in a different context here. I feel I've been pretty clear so I won't repeat myself.

Hopefully you're not stereotyping me based on a few words. Obviously you don't know me and it's quite possible I don't fit into your idea of "detached" new agers.

Right and wrong is relative. You and I see things differently, that's all.

Plants appear to lack the centralized nervous system individuating an entity, for the most part. I do like Mckenna's observation of the mushroom as a good example of what a future race would modify itself into - a bottom feeder which truly essentially harms nothing.

Also, I think it's more moral to eat a silverback than a human, a dog than a silverback, a mouse than a dog, a fish than a mouse, a cricket than a fish, and plants and plankton than fish.

And of course, many many fruits, seeds, etc., DO want to be eaten, it is how they have evolved to pass on their seed

A complex question.

Love and peace

Seed dispersal via ingestion by vertebrate animals (mostly birds and mammals), or endozoochory, is the dispersal mechanism for most tree species.[13] Endozoochory is generally a coevolved mutualistic relationship in which a plant surrounds seeds with an edible, nutritious fruit as a good food for animals that consume it. Birds and mammals are the most important seed dispersers, but a wide variety of other animals, including turtles and fish, can transport viable seeds.[14] The exact percentage of tree species dispersed by endozoochory varies between habitats, but can range to over 90% in some tropical rainforests.[13] Seed dispersal by animals in tropical rainforests has received much attention, and this interaction is considered an important force shaping the ecology and evolution of vertebrate and tree populations.[15] In the tropics, large animal seed dispersers (such as tapirs, chimpanzees and hornbills) may disperse large seeds with few other seed dispersal agents. The extinction of these large frugivores from poaching and habitat loss may have negative effects on the tree populations that depend on them for seed dispersal.[16]

I think at a certain point it can become too idealistic with this sense of morality as linked to how little other forms of consciousness we consume, each assigned a value according to this chart."

The reality of the universe is that it works on cycles and one of the most prominent is that of life and death. We will always be actors in this play."

I'll copy/pasta the wiki to add the seed-dispersal aspect of some seed evolution to proto-pax's comment, I think it's valuable info for this discussion:

Even in a universe in which consciousness is primary, and we are just a reflection of our own single collective dream, the separate individual is a beautiful thing, a thing of "god" if you will, and should be respected as such.

I would direct this to my previous Charles Manson argument. I think this can be boiled down to one question: "Does an individual life matter?"

Again I just want to say that I basically agree with you, but picking at the nuances is more fun than silently nodding so...

I can't imagine you're saying you only eat these types of seeds are you? Otherwise the point is rather mute. I also don't think you're composting in the forest. The toilet is not a good soil for these seeds.

I think this is my point. I think a fish harvested and eaten with respect is just as moral as a cob of corn harvested and eaten with respect. It's the attitude going into the situation (in my opinion) that defines the morality of it.

I can't say I really sign onto that comparison. Again it deals with respect. If a person is eating someone against their will, then obviously there's a moral failing in that. If a person is crashed in the mountains and has to eat his dead compatriots to survive, I don't think that's a moral failing on his part.

The significance of this is relative to killing something which does not want to die. The plant grows parts of itself which it wants to be eaten. I don't know of many animals which desire to be eaten, the male black widow being the closest to come immediately to mind, and of course the animal in the restaurant at the end of the universe.

If something does not want to die, and we kill it to keep ourselves alive, the truth of the matter is that we consider our own individual existence and desires to be more important. If I have to kill something less alive than myself to survive, I will do so, with appreciation, sadness, and a commitment to take action to prevent it from happening again. But I won't try to make myself feel that's it's ok because that's just the way things are.

I do however consider becoming a geneticist and working towards improving the human genome such that we can get all our nutritional needs met from such things

If we're talking about intention and desire, I really fail to see how a plant has any more intention or desire to die than an animal does. Even in the case of the seeds, the plant wants to reproduce, not be flushed down the toilet. And again I see an unjustified split between plants and animals. It still seems like tying morality to a sense of individuality is a subjective hierarchical distinction of value. Why are you more special than a seaweed?

I think by your definition of morality the closest we would get to a moral source of food would be if we acquired photosynthesis.