THE ANIMAL FACTOR: Climate Justice, Speciesism, and Total Liberation in the Age of the Anthropocene

Climate justice suffers from a key deficit that stems from humanist/speciesist biases and a failure to incorporate nonhuman animals into social analyses, ethics, politics, and visions of a just transition to an ecological society. Climate mitigation strategies will fail without engaging animal rights and vegan perspectives, and the social and ecological consequences of human supremacism and nonhuman animal extermination. In the Age of the Anthropocene, human, animal, and Earth liberation movements are unthinkable apart from one another. A struggle for one is impossible without a struggle for all.

STEVE BEST: This essay provides a critical overview of climate justice writings, while examining a key deficit that stems from humanist/speciesist biases and a failure to incorporate nonhuman animals into social analyses, ethics, politics, and visions of a just transition to an ecological society. This deficit, I argue, has serious consequence for understanding the roots and driving forces of social hierarchies and the climate crisis. Climate mitigation strategies, I claim, will fail without engaging animal rights and vegan perspectives. I discuss the origins and nature of the anthropocentric and speciesist ideologies in history and the social and ecological consequences of human supremacism and nonhuman animal extermination.

I argue that Earth, animal, and human liberation movements are inseparably interlinked in a comprehensive project of “total liberation.” A guiding thread throughout is the focus on increasingly expansive concepts of rights and justice that break through the parochial boundaries of anthropocentric, speciesist, and humanist views. The emerging paradigm shifts of “animal justice” (or “multispecies” justice”) and “planetary justice,” along with anticapitalist politics, provide the kind of conceptual maps and politics resurgence movements need in our current Anthropocene epoch to remake societies in democratic and ecological forms…

Amidst the crises of the 21st century, social justice, animal justice, and environmental/planetary justice groups must come together to form the most diverse, inclusive, comprehensive, and formidable alliances yet barely imagined, let alone created. As increasingly obvious in the Age of the Anthropocene, human, animal, and Earth liberation movements are unthinkable apart from one another. A struggle for one is impossible without a struggle for all…

But let us not be naïve. Such alliances will not come easily; typically, there are fractious differences within any one political movement, let alone a broad alliance of groups with different theoretical, ethical, and political perspectives. Social justice movements are easily divided by issues of race, gender, and class, each with their own priorities, and adding animal liberation and ethical veganism to the mix adds greater challenges and complications… Differences and conflicts among social justice proponents, environmentalists, and animal liberationists require open dialogue and mutual learning, but will never be fully resolved.

Nonetheless, universal consent is not necessary, perhaps not desirable, and certainly not a process or goal for which we can patiently wait. Far more important than consensus on an intellectual level is a pragmatic approach that identifies common interests and overlapping concerns on a political level, such as discussed above regarding the array of problems caused by agribusiness, factory farms, and ever-climbing levels of meat consumption…

The challenge before us is nearly as unimaginable as the consequences of not meeting it. It is sobering to compare the magnitude of the threat posed to life; the little time left to effect decisive change; the feebleness of world response; the pervasive denial of the existential threat climate change poses to humanity; and the power of fossil fuel industries to block change and tighten its death grip on the living world. We confront not the death of the planet – which will continue to evolve into new forms – but accelerating mass extinction, ecological collapse, and the end of “civilization” as we know it. SOURCE…

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