Attacking the new slave economy as it does, the animal liberation movement is a significant threat to global capital. Animal liberation challenges la… - Steven Best

Despite the inspirational platitude, we must realize that failure is an option. Our future is problematic at best and doomed at worst. There is no inherent purpose we are here to fulfill, no destiny at which we are assured to arrive at in glory, however tardy, tattered, bruised, and blackened we might be. There are no guiding angels to protect us from failure and no God to save us from an apocalypse. Countless millions of species have been annihilated in past , our Homo ancestors are gone forever, we are dispatching thousands of other species into oblivion, and there is nothing but the determination of aware, concerned, and committed peoples to save Homo sapiens from vanishing into nothingness as well. As Michael Boulter notes, the earth is a self-organizing system that strives toward balance, and species lose out, if necessary, to the larger dynamics of ecological imperatives. "Extinctions are an essential stimulus to the evolutionary process," and humans are not only expendable in the overall calculus, their demise would be a positive and necessary event.

The desperate and tragic migration of oppressed people throughout the world, involves not only a humanitarian crisis testing the moral resolve of developed nations, but also a calamity for wildlife and ecological systems. The most simplistic response to immigration is to seal borders, while never addressing the root causes of human movement. But barriers, fences, and walls not only thwart human traffic, they impede the natural flow of nonhuman animals and plants and directly affect their migration routes and reproduction. This threatens the survival of nonhuman communities and contributes to the growing problems of and . This in turn affects human interests in crucial ways, and the erection of barriers along borders has a systemic impact on all communities of life – humans, animals, and ecosystems.

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.