FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Global Initiative Launches to Avert Civilizational Collapse Through Social Diffusion of Plant-Based Diet
#Plantist mobilizes humanity to eliminate the primary driver of planetary emergency — the consumption of animals — at the speed and scale required to prevent ecological catastrophe.
January 2026 — A major global initiative has launched to halt what scientists now confirm is not a distant threat but an imminent emergency: Earth's life-support systems are collapsing, driven by a land-use imbalance so extreme that raising animals consumes nearly 80% of all global farmland while all of humanity occupies only 0.0016% of land by comparison. With irreversible collapse projected within the next decade, #plantist represents the only intervention capable of operating at the required speed and scale.
This concerns your future directly. Without collective action now, the systems that sustain your life will fail.
#Plantist operates as a decentralized global initiative designed to trigger the rapid, population-wide adoption of a plant-based diet through social diffusion — the proven mechanism by which behaviors cascade through populations when critical mass is reached.
The initiative emerges as multiple scientific bodies confirm cascading ecosystem failures are approaching irreversibility. "We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster," states the most recent global State of the Climate assessment. James Hansen, who first alerted the United States Congress to climate change in 1988, now confirms: "We are in a planetary emergency" (GLI / VOA 2009). Writing in December 2024, Gill Einhorn, Head of 1t.org at the World Economic Forum, states: "The survival of our civilization depends on our ability to halt the climate crisis, avoid ecological collapse and build urgent resilience in our systems."
At this point, the science stops speaking in abstracts.
Dr. Gerardo Ceballos, Professor of Ecology, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; lead author on biodiversity loss and extinction risk, states: "I have spent my life studying how civilizations and ecosystems collapse, and I need to be absolutely clear with you: we are running out of time. The destruction driven by what we eat is pushing Earth's life-support systems past the point where recovery is possible. This is no longer a warning about the future — it is a decision about whether you will still have one. If we do not change collectively and immediately, collapse becomes unavoidable. #Plantist exists because this is the last window in which human action can still change the outcome."
The connection to food systems is unequivocal in peer-reviewed research. Industrial animal agriculture occupies three-quarters of global farmland, drives 91% of Amazon deforestation, and consumes 70% of freshwater supplies. The largest-ever analysis of food systems, published in Science (Poore & Nemecek, 2019), identified the shift to plant-based diets as "the single biggest way" individuals can reduce environmental impact.
"The world has been conditioned to believe solutions lie in policy negotiations or future technologies like lab-grown meat — approaches that cannot scale within the available timeframe," says Stig Harder, founder of the survival response core at #plantist and founder of the Academy of Fashion Arts and Sciences, whose charitable arm catalyzed the initiative. "Policy cycles move too slowly. Technological solutions remain years from meaningful scale. #Plantist provides the only mechanism for immediate, population-wide action that can still prevent collapse."
How Social Diffusion Works
#Plantist's strategy is grounded in diffusion science — the study of how behaviors spread through populations. Rather than attempting to persuade the entire global population simultaneously, the initiative first activates those already aligned: vegetarians, vegans, and environmentally conscious eaters. This visible adoption then cascades to the early majority — including the 89% who surveys show want urgent climate action but aren't yet aware that dietary shift is the highest-impact environmental intervention — eventually reaching population-wide adoption as the behavior becomes self-reinforcing.
"This is one of the most important grassroots initiatives of our era," says Dr. Arvind Singhal, Samuel Shirley and Edna Holt Marston Endowed Professor of Communication at The University of Texas at El Paso and a leading global expert on social diffusion.
When aligned populations adopt a visible shared identity and coordinated behavior, research shows the practice spreads through social networks, eventually reaching critical mass. At this tipping point, the cascade becomes self-sustaining as the rest of the population follows through growing social proof and stronger social pressure.
The approach addresses a structural challenge that has stalled food-system reform: policymakers often share the same consumption patterns as the general population, creating institutional resistance to systemic change. Social diffusion bypasses this bottleneck entirely by making change natural through social influence rather than mandates.
A Global Dugnad: Collective Survival Action
#Plantist operates as a dugnad — voluntary collective work for the common good when survival demands it. This concept exists across all cultures: Japan's 結 (yui), India's श्रमदान (shramdaan), Africa's ubuntu, Latin America's mutirão, and countless other traditions of communities mobilizing together in crisis.
"What distinguishes a dugnad from ordinary activism is its relationship to necessity," explains Harder. "When the village faces flood, when the harvest must be gathered before the storm, participation isn't negotiable—it's survival work. #Plantist recognizes that humanity has entered such a moment."
The dugnad framework transforms the question from "Should I change my diet?" to "Will I join the collective survival effort?" This removes the burden of individual moral calculation and taps into humanity's deepest instinct: mutual aid during existential threat.
Igniting the Cascade
"People feel helpless about climate — and they're right — only policy can stop warming. But most are not aware yet of the greater threat: ecological collapse. Now they will be. The collapse will pass a point of no return within a decade, setting in motion civilizational collapse that can no longer be stopped, and here their action is essential, not optional," says Harder. "#Plantist activates humanity's collective survival instinct by making clear what's actually at stake and providing the mechanism to prevent it."
Moral Authorities and Exponential Acceleration
The survival response core is working with moral authorities who command the trust of vast populations.
"When moral authorities with reach in the hundreds of millions visibly adopt plantist identity, they accelerate diffusion exponentially," explains Harder. "Coordination across religious, cultural, and civic leaders creates simultaneous cascades across continents, compressing change that might otherwise take generations into the years we have remaining."
Planetary Security and the Twin Existential Threats
Former Australian Minister for International Development and current Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), Melissa Parke, emphasizes that humanity now faces converging threats to its survival: nuclear escalation and accelerating ecological collapse. Speaking in her personal capacity, Parke states:
"Just as the world lives under the constant shadow of nuclear catastrophe, we now stand on the edge of a parallel existential crisis driven by the destruction of Earth's life-support systems. Nuclear weapons could end human life in an instant; ecological collapse could dismantle it irreversibly over time. #Plantist offers a practical pathway to eliminate one of these existential risks by catalyzing a global societal shift toward plant-based eating at the speed this moment demands."
Environmental Collapse as a Security Threat
Without intervention, ecological collapse crosses irreversibility within the next decade, permanently undermining global food production and the stability of human societies.
The timeline to ecological irreversibility operates on a threat horizon that conventional security planning has not yet integrated. This is not a climate scenario unfolding over decades. When ecosystem collapse crosses the 2036–2038 threshold, food production fails permanently—triggering cascading security crises within the current decade.
No military, economy, or technology can substitute for pollination, soil health, or functioning water cycles. Once these systems collapse past irreversibility, food cannot be produced at the scale civilization requires.
What makes this threat unprecedented is simultaneity. Ecological collapse degrades agricultural capacity across multiple regions at once, triggering food insecurity, mass displacement, and state fragility simultaneously, with no external stabilizing force and no recovery pathway.
Because food systems are globally coupled, no nation’s agricultural security can be isolated from global ecosystem stability. When biodiversity crosses collapse thresholds, food security weakens everywhere.
Africa as Strategic Early Adopter
Africa represents one of the most consequential regions for preventing ecological collapse. While Africans currently consume far less meat than Westerners, economic growth is driving rapid adoption of Western dietary patterns. If all Africans embrace plantist identity before this shift accelerates, the continent bypasses the resource-intensive food systems currently destabilizing the planet.
Sulaiman Abubakar Umar, Chief Catalyst for Africa at #plantist and UN-recognized climate resilience innovator from a region facing extreme crisis, sees this window of opportunity clearly. "Advocacy alone is insufficient," he says. "The only viable path forward is immediate transition to secure, climate-resilient, plant-based food systems. #Plantist provides the youth-led blueprint for achieving this across Africa."
Scientific Support
Dr. Rodolfo Dirzo, Bing Professor in Environmental Science at Stanford University, offers his full endorsement: "In these times of global environmental crisis, we — society at large — need to find science-based effective solutions. Interestingly, one major solution is within reach: a commitment to change our diet, as quickly and harmoniously as possible. #Plantist is an initiative that offers humanity exactly the kind of fast, inclusive response we need. Global meat consumption is a core driver of ecological collapse: such an industry is responsible for massive deforestation, defaunation, greenhouse gas emissions and catastrophic biodiversity decline. #Plantist channels people's values into action that scales globally. I wholeheartedly support this initiative and invite all voices to join."
The Timeline and the Stakes
Data projections on the #plantist website, based on Natural History Museum biodiversity datasets and IIASA livestock production models, reveal what cautious scientific communication has obscured: humanity has approximately one decade to prevent irreversible ecological collapse. Under current dietary trajectories, the models project cascading ecosystem failures reaching irreversibility between 2036–2037, followed by permanent decline in global food production capacity despite technological advances.
These projections are based on land-use dynamics alone. Interacting tipping points can accelerate this trajectory, creating a domino effect of cascading system collapses, with nearly half of all potential environmental collapses found to be interrelated and capable of amplifying one another. Scientists are witnessing these feedback loops accelerating: "We're heading ever faster towards the edge of a cliff," says Garry Peterson, Professor at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, echoing findings that rapid systemic change is outpacing earlier expectations.
"What makes this different from other existential crises is that prevention requires only coordinated individual action," says Nirupama Sarma, strategy and evaluation consultant with 30+ years of experience in behavior and social change communication. "The initiative builds on an existing plant-based population of tens of millions worldwide — providing the critical mass of early adopters needed for rapid social diffusion."
Dr. Ash Pachauri, behavioral scientist and health and sustainable development expert, emphasizes the interconnected benefits: "The same food system driving ecological collapse is simultaneously undermining food security, water availability, and public health globally. When we shift to plant-based systems, we address multiple crises at once — not just environmental degradation, but nutrition, pandemic risk, and water scarcity. This is preventive action at planetary scale."
A Cultural Turning Point
#Plantist is not an organization but a framework that anyone can adopt. The movement is designed to channel the massive momentum of NGOs, existing environmental movements, moral authorities, major artists, plant-based politicians, and journalists — everyone with global and local influence telling their followers this is the moment to go plantist in their own unique ways.
"We expected others to act, but we were the problem. Now we are the solution," states the initiative's core message. "This is the moment billions realize they are not spectators in the planetary crisis but participants in its solution."
The movement provides journalists with a story that crosses multiple beats: planetary security, food systems, social change, public opinion, religious leadership, youth movements, and the question of what actually works when time runs out.
People
Stig Harder — Founder of the global survival response core at #plantist. Founder of the Academy of Fashion Arts and Sciences, whose charitable arm catalyzed the initiative. Serial entrepreneur and recognized Internet pioneer who brought fashion into the digital age in 1995. Executive Judge at the Webby Awards.
Dr. Ash Pachauri — Behavioral Scientist, Health and Sustainable Development Expert based in New York. Son of Dr. Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, Nobel Peace Prize laureate as chair of the IPCC, 2007.
Dr. Arvind Singhal — Samuel Shirley and Edna Holt Marston Endowed Professor of Communication and Director of the Social Justice Initiative at The University of Texas at El Paso. Leading expert on diffusion of innovations who studied extensively with communication theorist Everett Rogers, the scholar who developed diffusion theory. Author of over 170 peer-reviewed articles and multiple books on social change communication.
Nirupama Sarma — Strategy and evaluation consultant in Bengaluru, India, with 30+ years of experience in behavior and social change communication.
Dr. Gerardo Ceballos — Professor of Ecology, National Autonomous University of Mexico. One of the world's leading experts on biodiversity loss and planetary boundaries. Lead author of multiple landmark papers on biological annihilation and irreversible ecosystem collapse published in PNAS and Science Advances.
Dr. Rodolfo Dirzo — Bing Professor in Environmental Science, Stanford University, California.
Melissa Parke — Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN — Nobel Peace Prize, 2017). Former Australian Minister for International Development. Former Member of Parliament. UN human-rights lawyer with field experience in Kosovo, Gaza, Lebanon, and New York.
Sulaiman Abubakar Umar — Chief Catalyst for Africa at #Plantist. Climate resilience innovator and youth leader based in Nigeria. Former Civil Society Youth Representative to the UN Department of Global Communications. He has contributed to UNICEF Generation Unlimited Nigeria, the UNCCD Youth Caucus, Youngo, and served as Youth Board Member for ProVeg International.
About #plantist
#Plantist is a high-impact survival intervention that applies social diffusion to eliminate the primary driver of ecological collapse: the substantial global consumption of animals.
#Plantist is intentionally structured without a central spokesperson or figurehead. It operates as a decentralized survival framework, with scientific, security, and diffusion experts contributing evidence and validation rather than leadership.
The initiative operates as a global dugnad — a concept that exists across cultures worldwide, including the Japanese 結 (yui), Indian श्रमदान (shramdaan), African ubuntu, Latin American mutirão, and several other local traditions of voluntary collective action for the common good.
Catalyzed by the charitable arm of the Academy of Fashion Arts and Sciences and coordinated by an international survival response core, #plantist is guided by independent plant-based catalysts across all continents.
This is a decentralized, data-informed initiative designed to meet the ecological crisis at its root — bringing together the world's most aligned populations to trigger the cultural cascade that prevents civilizational collapse.
Definitions
Who is a plantist? A plant-based individual who identifies as a person committed to the survival of humanity and the living world.
What is plantism? The recognition that the only way to end and prevent future civilizational collapse is to be and stay a plantist.
Who is a catalyst at #plantist? A plantist who actively implements #plantist strategy to exponentially grow the number of plantists.
Seed Asset
One destroys; one nourishes.
Black: Land used to feed the animals people eat.
Green: Land used to feed humans directly.
The white dot? That's all of us. 8 billion people.
#plantist
License: Creative Commons Zero (CC0).
Website: plantist.org
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/plantist