In the battle over animal rights, negotiations are breaking down and boundaries are being erased on both sides. Government and industry thugs unleash… - Steven Best

Increasingly, calls for moderation, compromise, and the slow march through institutions can be seen as treacherous and grotesquely inadequate. With the planet in the throes of dramatic climate change, ecological destabilization, and the crisis in its history (this one having human not natural causes), "reasonableness" and "moderation" seem to be entirely unreasonable and immoderate, as "extreme" and "radical" actions appear simply as necessary and appropriate. After decades of environmental struggles in the west, we are nevertheless losing ground in the battle to preserve species, ecosystems, wilderness, and human communities. Politics as usual just won't cut it anymore

The project of human liberation and environmental sustainability will fail without giving equal importance to anti-speciesism and animal liberation. We cannot leave intact the predatory and violent mentalities that inform our exploitative relations with animals and inform our exploitation of other humans and natural world. And to make these connections, we must all fight the Right and the rise of fascism, which has appropriated ecology for its own political purposes.

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 an earth once teeming with life becomes a mass graveyard, a battered wasteland, and a toxic cesspool. Then, when it is finally too late, the unfortunates who remain will grasp what the radicals tried to convey: what the logic of growth and capitalism finally wrought, the colossal failure of human vision and will, and the complicity of pacifism with the greatest violence of all.