Statement regarding our attendance at Paris Vegan Day

After we had visited Paris Vegan Day, the French anti-fascist initiative terre d’abord critisised our attendance at the event. They stated that by visiting Paris Vegan Day we indirectly supported pro-fascist and right-wing populist structures because the organizers co-operate with people who made racist and right-wing populist comments. Furthermore, Paris Vegan Day is supported by Fondation Brigitte Bardot.

We want to thank terre d’abord for their input and would like to respond to their critique: We hereby declare that our conviction as a collective is not only anti-speciesist but also anti-fascist. We reject any kinds of racist, right-wing populist and inhumane ideologies and we especially condemn all attempts to instrumentalize animal rights issues to breed resentment against Jewish or Muslim population groups.

We didn’t know in detail about the structures of Paris Vegan Day beforehand, so our attendance should not be interpreted as a form of pro-facist support. In the past, we boycotted events when “Universelles Leben” or related groups attended and this should make clear that we don’t agree when people try to link animal rights issues to totalitarian ideas. The same applies to extreme right-wing and other kinds of inhumane ideologies.

Stalls and Shirts

Hello hello.

We just came back from our 4 day trip to Fluff Fest in Czech Republic. Thanks to everyone who stopped by and had a little chat with us. We also had an open-air screening of EDGE with about 350 people on Sunday night which was really amazing.

The weekend before we went to the Veggie Street Day in Stuttgart, Germany. Besides bands, food, and information stalls there was a fashion show with roots of compassion apparel et al. The whole event was a huge success since a lot of passers-by seemed to be really interested in vegan food and animal rights. In two weeks, on August 14th, we’ll be at the Veggie Street Day in Dortmund with a stall.

It was your decision: The “We heart the ALF” Shirt came off as the odds-on winner of the vote we started 2 weeks ago!

And finally, we have the Tofu-Monster Shirt in all sizes back in stock. The new shirt is a bit shorter and has a slightly different shade of color than the old one.

Sincerely yours and rock on
Roots

GoMaxGo? No!

Hi everyone,

today we wanna let you know why we have decided not to sell the brand new GoMaxGo-candy bars in our online shop.

The sweets are supposed to taste like Bounty, Mars, Snickers etc. and available in Germany for a few weeks now. Of course, they have aroused our interest as well. But there are two main reasons why we will not sell them:

1. The chocolate is not fair trade nor organic
2. The manufacturer in the US can not guarantee that all ingredients are 100 % non-GMO

Everyone who wants to know why we do not like the genetic engineering, please have a look right here.

We would be really glad, if GoMaxGo would take a closer look on their ingredients in the future, expecially regarding genetic engineering, fair trade labor conditions, and ecological aspects.

The ROC collective wishes you a wonderful week(end)das ROC-Kollektiv

The latest and some thoughts on vegan shoes

Patches
We finally have all patches in stock again. Especially those we haven’t had for a while, like ‘Break Free’ and ‘The silence ends’. Printed by the Fairdruckt collective from Münster.

Spring Collection
We are still working on a few minor design changes, but we’ll be releasing our spring collection on April 2nd! The Shirts will be at the printer next week 🙂

Sale
Our sale is still on, and most of the stuff is already gone, but we still have a lot of Shirts from our older collections, like Make Hunting History, The true face of capitalism or End animal testing for only 12€. These are the last ones for sure!

Shoes
Every now and then we get a request from our customers to list more vegan shoes. There are quite a few companies now that produce under fair conditions and with recycled or organic materials. So, a good question!
We’ve discussed this issue a few times in our plenary, but we’ve come to the conclusion that we don’t want to support any companies directly or indirectly that sell leather products.
Someone might argue that the purchase of vegan products would increase the demand and thus increase the range of these products. That might be true, however the sales still support leather products indirectly, and thats something we don’t want to support at all. With Vegetarian Shoes we already have a cruelty-free company that might not always have the ‘latest styles’, but we are very satisfied with the quality of their shoes.
So we’ll stick to the vegan companies, and hereby officially request all other companies to drop leather.

Let us know your thoughts on the issue, we’d be happy to hear from you.

Sale, vegan Energy and Protest against §278a in Vienna

Sale!

If you already noticed the countdown in our shop – from February 15th we’ll start our Spring Sale. Maybe its a little early, but fingers crossed that it will help with an early beginning of spring! We have a lot of t-shirts, hooded sweatshirts and jackets, books, shoes and more. Single items, stuff with minor errors or old stock for really low prices.

Energy Supplier Change

We’ve been looking for a vegan and ecological energy supplier for a while now, since our current suppier, Lichtblick also offers Ecogas, which is derived from manure from factory farms, something we don’t want to support. Most of the German eco energy suppliers already offer or are planning to offer Ecogas, so the only alternative is Greenpeace Energy. At the moment their energy mix consists of Water and Windpower, however they told us that they also might use Ecogas for energy production at some point in the future. So we’ve decided to go with Greenpeace Energy as they seem to be the best option for now.

Shop news

The Blackspot V2 is available again from Adbusters, and we just ordered them, so next week we can offer all sizes again 🙂

SMASH §278ff – Protest on Feb 27th in Vienna, Austria!

On March 2nd the lawsuit against the 10 previously detained activists will start. The protest is the kick-off for further actions and protests around the lawsuit. No matter what the outcome of the lawsuit will be, as long as the §278ff exists, the threat remains that leftists structures, groups, NGO’s etc. will be monitored and criminalized. So come to the protest because we’re all in the same boat.
When: Saturday Feb 27th, 1pm, Schottentor, Vienna, Austria

Brand-new!

We have some news for you this week:

Benefit-Button §278a
We are all $278a! The trial against the 10 animal rights activists in Austria will start in March. You can show your solidarity with our new Benefit-Button. All the profits will be given to the donation account for legal assistance. Animal rights groups can order the button for a wholsale-price in quantities from 10 pieces on to use them for their solidarity actions.You can find all the dates for their court cases and further information here.

Further there will be a Global Action Day Against Repression on March 3, 2010 because of the beginning of the lawsuit against the criminalized austrian animal rights activists to increase the public pressure on the austrian public authorities and to show solidarity with the prosecuted activists. There are going to be a lot of actions in front of austrian embassies, consulates and other institutions.

ROC-Myspace with a brand new design
Our Myspace-Page has been receiving a major update regarding design and like we already said in our blog, we will feed it with new information almost daily. Add us as a friend and let’s get started!

Twitter
Slowly but surely web2.0 has been arrived at the Roots-HQ. That’s what you have waited for a long time: You can now find us on Twitter. So, if you always wanna know what is going on in our office just follow our Tweet.

Daily Shipping
We have new shipping times for parcels: They are gonna be picked up every day now – Monday through Friday. So, that means you will receive your order even faster!

A LONG DUE UPDATE.

Twitter LogoSo, its been a while since we posted something here, but the end of 2009 has proven to be a very busy one indeed. Marc and Michi were on the road with the documentary ‘EDGE’, which now has been screened in 7 countries already. So over the time we were away, everything else was kept pretty much basic in terms of new items or projects. But there have been a couple of noteworthy changes:

First of all we have new shipping times for parcels – those are now picked up 3 times a week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That means we can ship your orders even faster 🙂

Apart from that we’ll expand our web 2.0 presence a little – you can now find us on twitter and it’s our plan to add more updates to our facebook and myspace pages.

Our conversion to a co-op is almost done, but its a little bit of a neverending story. Why did we decide to become a co-op you might ask? Since we’re a collective, we wanted that to be reflected in our legal form, so even if we were equally organised before, we are now as well on paper and legally. Thats right, no gods, no masters 😉

Over the holidays we’ll take things a little easier, but you can of course place your orders, and we’ll ship them around Dec 28th / 29th. For the new year we already have plenty of new plans and projects and products lined up so, expect to hear / read from us soon!

Happy Holidays and happy new year!
the roots of compassion collective

Three weeks in one posting…

We would like to tell you what was going on the last weekends, because we did all kinds of exciting stuff.

At the end of August we attended the Animal Liberation Congress which took place at the Castle of Lohra. Besides many interesting panel discussions, workshops, food for thought, talks and lectures we met a lot of really nice people. There are plans to release a DVD with recorded talks and writings soon. We will keep you posted.

One week later on September 6th we had a stall at the Vegan Festival in London. Unfortunately we can not give you a link for their website because of a Trojan Horse… you might just want to use a web search engine. The programme was very broad like last years and had a lot of intersting things to offer, e.g. workshops like: ‘Why should vegans and vegetarians be opposed to racism and fascism’ and ‘Veganism, Anarchism and Pacifism: Living compassionately’.

Last weekend the Freie Schule Leipzig (Free School of Leipzig) organized a charity run that Roots of Compassion supported. The kids are collecting money to attend the IDEC (International Democratic Education Conference) in Israel in April 2010. That is our (silent) starting signal for another project of Roots: We want to criticize the school system. Soon you will be able to find literature to Democratic Schools and Unschooling in our shop.

If you are interested already, check our link list here.