Steven Best Quotes

Animal liberation is a movement of and by human animals for nonhuman animals. Where animals are enslaved, ethically responsible humans arguably have a duty to liberate them. Answering this call of conscience and duty, animal rights/liberation groups have sprouted throughout the world, with the ultimate objective of freeing captive animals from systems of exploitation and overcoming speciesist institutions and mindsets.

Walls solve nothing. They don’t stop desperate people, address the causes of migration, or blot out promise of a better life. They are a feeble technofix for deep-rooted social, political, and economic problems. They benefit no one but the nefarious agents, agencies, and corporations behind the migrant-industrial complex. Any serious policy approach to immigration would address the systemic causes of migration, not tinker with its effects. For the mass migration of desperate peoples are driven by global capitalism, neoliberalism, the imperialist reordering of , and the military-backed plundering of underdeveloped countries. The current global order requires harsh exploitation, drastic inequality, political violence, suffering and immiseration — all now exacerbated by runaway .

By no means is globalization to be understood as an inherently negative dynamic or consequence of human history, as if the desideratum is fragmentation, isolation, provincialism, and nationalism. Ever since Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa and dispersed itself globally across the continents, human existence has been a global dynamic and knowledge, culture, and technologies have spread in all directions, such as with the influence of Islam on the West. Certainly, from the standpoint of the natural environment and the countless animal species driven into extinction, the rapid global growth of human populations, technologies, and economies has not been a positive development. But dissemination of knowledge, culture, and people is a positive and enriching process; indeed, it is now urgent that the paradigm shift from economics and growth to ecology and sustainability take root on a global scale. A salient distinction to be made here is between globalization from above (as dictated by multinational capital) and globalization from below (as realized in self-organizing and democratic ways by people in cultural exchange and open movement).

There can be no full or even adequate understanding of the systemic problems of capitalist society, of the origins and dynamics of hierarchy, and of a future rational, autonomous, ethical, and ecological society until we address the 10,000-year legacy of speciesism and the barbaric exploitation of other animals.

Today we call this planetary monolith "global capitalism," but humans became global animals tens of thousands of years before the onset of capitalism. Humans created hierarchical and growth-addicted societies some ten thousand years ago and their ecocidal proclivities stretch back millennia more into prehistory. And just like every political empire of the past, the human empire has possibly reached its zenith and begun its downward spiral toward collapse. This empire's peak and slide into catastrophe marks a new epoch not only in human history, but also the history of the earth. Debates over whether advanced societies have entered into a new "postmodernity" pale in significance to the scientifically-based proposition that human activity has created a new epoch in geological history--the age of the Anthropocene. This epoch characterized by the dominance of human influence over earth's systems and has led to, among other colossal events, a sixth mass extinction crisis and runaway climate change.

In just 10,000 years time, a millisecond of geological time, Homo sapiens civilization, embodied by the repulsively repacious paradigm of Western speciesist capitalism and anthropocentrism has managed to push the planet to the brink of ecological collapse.

Words define reality, and the earth and animal liberation movements must resist being defined as violent fanatics and extremists. They must defend themselves rhetorically and philosophically, establishing a sharp distinction between animal and earth liberation, property destruction, protests and demonstrations on one side, and bona fide violence and terrorism on the other side. They must expose for all to see the charlatans and real terrorists in state and corporate garb who fulminate against honorable dissidents and freedom fighters from behind their Oz-like curtain.

We need to end fossil fuel energy and global in favor of new energy and food production systems. We need to radically reduce human populations and consumption to repair ecosystems and restore wildlife populations. We need new ethics, new value, new worldviews, and a completely new socio-economic system.

In the battle over animal rights, negotiations are breaking down and boundaries are being erased on both sides. Government and industry thugs unleash violence on activists, while groups such as the Animal Rights Militia, the Justice Department, the Hunt Retribution Squad, and the Revolutionary Cells openly advocate violence against animal abusers. More and more activists grow tired of adhering to a nonviolent code of ethics while violence from the enemy increases. Realizing that non-violence against animal exploiters in fact is a pro-violence stance that tolerates their blood spilling without taking adequate measures to stop it, a new breed of freedom fighters has ditched Gandhi for Machiavelli and switched principled nonviolence with the amoral (not to be confused with immoral) pragmatism that embraces animal liberation "by any means necessary."

is a brash, arrogant, brilliant, ignorant, and menacing species that in a very short period of time has colonized the entire planet and left death, destruction, and extinction everywhere it went. In an era of ecological crisis marked by species extinction, , desertification, resource shortages, and climate change, the epithet "wise man" is intolerably pretentious and false. If intelligence and wisdom entails the ability to survive, exercise foresight, and adapt to one's environment, then countless animal species are far more intelligent than human beings.

We now face the grim choice posed by revolutionaries over the last two centuries, which involved "revolution or barbarism." Our situation has deteriorated so dramatically that we must choose between revolution or ecological collapse, mass extinction, and possibly our own demise. The twenty-first century is a time of reckoning.

Whereas the unconscious operations and blind forces of the planet have provoked turbulent changes over the last 4.5 billion years of earth’s evolutionary history, now change is being directed by a conscious and volitional agent – "humanity." We cannot speak of humanity equally, to be sure, as the problem was caused by the industrialized capitalist West and the poorer nations who contributed least to will be hit the hardest. But nations such as China, India, and Brazil are major contributors, and the cumulative impact of 7.5 billion people on the planet is causing extinction and collapse everywhere. The stability of the is now gone, changes are accelerating beyond our understanding and control, and chaos waits at our door.

As the corporate machines continue to slash and burn the planet, inequalities widen and power grows, logics of profit and control spread through social institutions, human numbers and the insatiable appetites of the global consumer society swell as the biodiversity of flora and fauna steeply declines, it is easy to become not only cautious or pessimistic about the prospects for planetary peace and freedom, but fatalistic and nihilistic. In the schools and social movement discourse, we are beginning to hear from some who appear resigned to the catastrophe playing out on this planet. Others, however, remain oblivious to this incredible moment in time and the epic tragedy of resigning humanity’s fate to be a failed primate species because of its inability to harness the evolutionary advantages of a large forebrain or overcome its predilection to tribalism, xenophobia, hubris, hierarchy, violence, alienation from nature and other life forms, and uncontrolled growth.

A civil war is unfolding — one between forces hell-bent on exploiting animals and the earth for profit whatever the toll, and activists steeled to resist this omnicide tooth and nail. We are witnessing not only the long-standing corporate war against nature, but also a new social war about nature.

As with most environmentalists, the overriding concern of the Left is with fisheries, not fish; with forests, not its nonhuman inhabitants; with "resources" for human use, not animals with inherent value. Ecological concerns stem not from a "" respect for the intrinsic value of all life and the earth, but rather from the Left's oxymoronic concept of "enlightened " that reduces animals and the natural world to mere means to human ends and is incapable of advancing a new planetary ethic to inform a truly sustainable mode of life.