Unless the intensity of our defense of life matches the ferocity of the assault against it, we allow a greater violence to grow exponentially until a… - Steven Best

Throughout the last ten thousand years of history, human empires rose and fall, crumbling into pebbles and dust. Over the last two hundred thousand years, an even larger empire began its mighty and perilous ascent. From its home base in Africa, it established its presence everywhere throughout the globe, expanding endlessly in all directions, growing exponentially in numbers, colonizing land, other species, and entire peoples. Insatiable in its consumption of natural resources, addicted to growth, it left death, extinction, and destruction everywhere in its wake. This vast conglomerate was not the Persian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Ottoman, English, or American empires, but the consequence and aggregate of all particular empires and unsustainable hierarchical societies, namely, the human empire.

If physical force is needed to save an animal from attack, then that force is a legitimate form of what I call "extensional self defense." This principle mirrors US penal code statutes known as the "necessity defense," which can be invoked when a defendant believed that an illegal act was necessary to avoid great and imminent harm. One only needs to expand this concept slightly to cover actions that are increasingly desperate and necessary to protect animals from the total war against them.

Fuelled by new forms of science and technology, military expansion, and aggressive colonization of southern nations and the developing world, capitalism evolved into a truly global system. Global capital is inspired by neoliberal visions of nations as resource pools and open markets operating without restrictions. The process euphemistically termed "globalization" is driven by multinational corporations such as and ; financed by financial goliaths such as the and the (IMF), and legally protected by the World Trade Organization (WTO). It homogenizes nations into a single economic organism and trading bloc through arrangements such as the (NAFTA), the (FTAA), and the European Union (EU). Multinationals seduce, bribe, and coerce nations to open their markets and help drive down labor costs to a bare minimum, and rely heavily on corrupt dictators, loans and debt, and “hit men” and armies to enforce the rule of their “structural transformations” of societies into conduits for the flow of resources and capital. Globalization has produced trade laws that protect transnational corporations at the expense of human life, biodiversity, and the environment. It is accompanied by computerization of all facets of production and expanding automation, generating heightened , corporate downsizing, and greater levels of unemployment, inequality, insecurity, and violence.