Solidarity Across Diversity

As an animal liberationist with deep environmentalist sympathies, I have been very concerned to find ways to reconcile the apparently intractable conflict between the individualism of animal liberation and the holism of some environmentalisms. The early literature relating these two movements was often exclusionary and somewhat hostile, with, for example, Tom Regan referring to Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic as"environmental fascism" ¹ and J. Baird Callicott calling the concerns of animal liberationists"incoherent,""insensitive,""life-loathing," and"anti-natural." ² On the other hand, those writers who project a more conciliatory tone, and who might be taken to have offered a reconciliation of the two perspectives, ³ have in my view only brought together with environmentalism a rather attenuated animal protectionism, one marked by a lingering ideology of nonhuman moral inferiority, ⁴ and lacking any explicit mention of the defining goals of animal liberation—the abolition of animal farming, animal vivisection, and sport hunting. In this article, I attempt to bring animal liberation and environmentalism together while doing justice to both.