by Dr. Steven Best
Proceedings of the 2nd International Meeting for Environmental Ethics in Athens, 2010
(watch video of presentation HERE)
Prologue to a Problem
We are winning many battles in the fight for freedom, rights, democracy, compassionate ethics, peace, interspecies justice, and ecology.
But we are losing the war.
The war against greed, violence, plunder, profits, and domination. The war against transnational corporations, world banks, the US Empire, and Western military machines. The war against metastasizing systems of economic growth, technological development, overproduction, overconsumption, and overpopulation.
Despite recent decades of intense social and environmental struggles, we are nevertheless losing ground in the battle for democracy and ecology.
In the last two decades, neoliberalism and globalization have destroyed social democracies, widened gaps between rich and poor, dispossessed farmers, and marketized the entire world. Alongside good-old fashioned imperialism and resource extraction, people now confront genetic engineering, biopiracy, the patenting of genes, and the control of the seed supply. McDonaldization swallows up diversity as agribusiness engulfs the world’s farmers. Corporate power is growing as people power is shrinking.
Signs of ecological distress are everywhere, from shrinking forests and depleted fisheries to vanishing wilderness and rising sea levels. Throughout history, societies have devastated local environments, but only in the last two decades has humanity upset the planetary ecology to bring about global climate change. Moreover, we now live in the era of the sixth extinction crisis in the history of the planet, the last one occurring 65 million years ago in the age of the dinosaurs. Unlike the last five, this one is caused by human activity; we are the meteor crashing into the earth. Conservation biologists predict one third to one half of the world’s plant and animal species might vanish in the next few decades. By 2050, the world’s population will be nine billion, and the meat consumption in China will double; the spike in global meat consumption has prompted the United Nations to write that the only viable path for a sustainable future is a global shift toward a vegan diet.[i]
The global capitalist world system is inherently destructive to people, animals, and nature. It is unsustainable and the bills for three centuries of industrialization and market-growth are now due. This system cannot be humanized, civilized, or made green-friendly; rather, it must be transcended through revolution at all levels—economic, political, legal, cultural, technological, moral, and conceptual.
In the last three decades, there has been growing awareness that environmentalism cannot succeed without social justice and social justice cannot be realized without environmentalism. This wisdom informed the emergence of the US environmental justice movement, Earth First! alliances with timber workers, Zapatista coalition building, and the 1999 Battle of Seattle that united workers and environmentalists.
But something is still missing, the equation remains unbalanced, the strategy cannot work. The interests of one species alone are represented and millions of others go unrecognized except as resources to be preserved for human use. But in the last three decades a new social movement has emerged — animal liberation. The power and potential of the entire animal advocacy movement has yet to be understood, but it deserves equal representation in the politics of the 21st century. Despite its numerous limitations, moreover, it has revolutionary potential that must be grasped and integrated into the project of social transformation.
Progressives fighting for peace, justice, democracy, autonomy, and ecology must acknowledge the validity of and need for the animal liberation movement for two reasons. First, on a moral level, the brutalization, exploitation, and suffering of animals is so great, so massive in degree and scope, that it demands a profound moral and political response from anyone with pretence to values of compassion, justice, rights, and nonviolence. Every year humans butcher 70 billion land and marine animals for food; millions more die in experimental laboratories, fur farm, hunting preserves, and countless other killing zones.
Second, on a strategic level, the animal liberation movement is essential for the human and earth liberation movements. In numerous key ways, the domination of humans over animals underlies the domination of human over human and propels the global ecological crisis. There cannot be revolutionary changes in ethics, psychology, society, and ecology without engaging animal liberation.
It is becoming increasingly clear that human, animal, and earth liberation movements are inseparably linked, such that none can be free until all are free. This is not a new insight, but rather a lost wisdom and truth. Recall the words of Pythagoras, who 2500 years ago proclaimed: “For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.” A vital task of our time is to understand the full import of this insight.
Given their symbiotic, holistic, and interlocking relationship, it is imperative that we no longer speak of human liberation, animal liberation, or earth liberation as if they were independent struggles; rather, we need to speak of total liberation. By “total liberation” I do not mean a metaphysical utopia where all sentient beings reach a perfect state of freedom and happiness in their lives, Rather, I refer to the theoretical process of holistically understanding movements in relation to one another, to capitalism, and to other modes of oppression, and to the political process of synthetically forming alliances against common oppressors, across class, racial, gender, and national boundaries, as we link democracy to ecology and social justice to animal rights.
And while I speak of the “liberation” of the earth metaphorically, I mean it quite literally for nonhuman animals, for they are the oldest, largest, most exploited, and most neglected of all exploited groups and slave classes. Like their human counterparts, nonhuman animals are sentient, conscious, feeling, and thinking beings endowed with wills, desires, interests, and more. They have abilities and potentialities that demand satisfaction, and complex physical, psychological, and social needs that can only be fulfilled in their natural settings, apart from human interference. Nonhuman animals can and must be free from systems of human domination and exploitation — as unjustifiable in principle as they are destructive in consequence — in order to be free to live out their lives as the complex beings they have become over the course of natural evolution.
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by Dr. Steven Best
