Leaving Victims Behind: Animal Rights, Environmental Catastrophe, and the Limits of the Holocaust Animal Ethics, Holocaust Analogies,

In an article provocatively titled ‘An Ecological Kristallnacht’, Al Gore (1989), former Vice President of the United States of America, described the destruction of our biosphere as a ‘green’ and ‘environmental’ holocaust. The Holocaust has been used to refer to large-scale natural destruction ever since the rise of environmental activism from the 1970s onwards. In the context of questions about how we treat our environment, topics such as possible nuclear holocausts, biomedical research, animal rights, and now climate change and biodiversity loss are hotly debated.1