3: One struggle, one fight

Economy and ecocide

Both animal and earth liberation offer key footholds in the imagination, but we’re not there yet. You could say anti-speciesism and deep ecology are revolutionary, yet not necessarily in a political sense, only a moral one. Indeed, the best-known thinkers of both movements – Peter Singer and Arne Næss – sought to analyze the oppression of other animals and the earth in isolation from a critique of the state and capital, taking it for granted that the system isn’t inherently ecocidal. Both intellectual movements – themselves outcomes of the New Left – thereby found themselves looking at oppression in a way suspiciously similar to identity politics, offering practical proposals focused around personalistic evolution and legislative change. The corresponding activist movements have, of course, often utilized much more radical tactics, but even militant strategies run a certain risk: promoting animal or earth liberation in separation from an assault on social hierarchy overall.

The theory of social ecology introduced by Bookchin is extremely useful here. The point of social ecology, as the term suggests, is to provide a combined analysis of social and ecological issues. More specifically, Bookchin argued that the domination of the natural world is rooted in domination within society, especially hierarchies such as the state, capitalism, and patriarchy. The ways in which humans mistreat nonhumans are in so many ways an extension of how humans mistreat one another; hence, rampant hierarchy between ourselves can only lead to the subjugation of life in general. It’s no coincidence that those societies most heavily burdened by economic inequality are almost always the ones that treat their environment the worst. Nor should we expect a liberal response, one focused on piecemeal reforms and consumer choice, to effectively challenge the devastation. On the contrary, achieving balance within Nature is one and the same with creating a nonhierarchical society, which is exactly why most social ecologists pose social revolution as the only viable response to the growing environmental crisis. In short, this world cannot be made green: promoting sound ecology means creating new worlds altogether.

The ecological problems inherent in capitalism are among the most urgent to consider. It’s becoming increasingly impossible to ignore the ecocidal tendencies of the dominant mode of production; far from being an outcome merely of this or that version of capitalism, however, the devastation of the natural world stems from its simplest and most irrevocable features. The basic motor driving capitalist production is the need for businesses to generate profit. And profit is generated by converting natural resources into products that are sold on the market. Moreover, businesses will be successful, in the eyes of capitalist logic, to the extent they’re profitable. Which means that the success of the capitalist economy equates, roughly speaking, to the extent to which it uses up natural resources. The fact that businesses are incentivized to use these resources as efficiently as possible (less money spent on purchasing and processing them) makes little difference, given that any sound business will merely reinvest the money saved into consuming even more, thereby maximizing profit. The basic equation is thus, on the one hand, that more production means more profit, and also that more production means more ecocide.

Capitalism offers no hope of a way out. Its need for growth is absolutely insatiable. Without achieving constant economic expansion, any business tempts the possibility of recession or even bankruptcy, inviting competitors to undercut its share of the market. With the economy as a whole, too, the mere failure to maintain endless growth is defined as a crisis. To even consider a limit to the conversion of our living, breathing environment into mere stuff speaks a foreign language to a corporation.

It’s no mystery that the vast majority of the natural world has already been destroyed, as is one and the same with the smooth functioning of the capitalist machine. And what a hideous notion of “wealth” it offers: collapsed fisheries, wiped out forests, chewed up landscapes, topsoil turned to dust, fossil fuel reserves bled dry. Far from slowing down, no less, the rate of depletion is only speeding up, exactly as the mantra of constant growth requires. Since the Industrial Revolution, especially, we’ve been living well beyond our means, something that’s only risen enormously since the mid-20^th century. The economic demand for higher levels of consumption has been met with an exponentially rising global population of consumers, as well as the flooding of the market with ever more useless crap, but it can’t go on like this forever. We’re hurtling towards a crunch of one sort or another, and one of two things must go: either capitalism, or the planet.

Life and the economy exist in a fundamental state of tension with one another. To the extent that the health of one is coextensive with the devastation of the other. We’re never far from the latest report either of a catastrophic oil spill or endangered species being driven to extinction, nor another “revelation” as to the living hell of factory farms. Yet the basic contradiction of liberal discourse is to bemoan these horrors whilst refusing to question the economic conditions that necessitate them. We need to be outraged without being surprised: the cause of such abject abuse can only be a mode of production that disregards everything irrelevant to the generation of profit. Economists describe those factors unconducive to immediate growth simply as “externalities,” unintelligible to capitalist logic and utterly devoid of concern. Carbon emissions, for example, are released into the atmosphere merely as a side-effect of industrialized production; given that there’s no economic incentive to avoid this outcome, any hope of an alternative is quite futile. Even the very real threat of climate change – the imminent ruination of life as we know it – fails to offer a conceivable problem for the economy. The laws of the market literally deem it irrational to deal with such a problem, given that any corporation would be bankrupt long before the prevention of catastrophe offered the chance of a return to its shareholders. Nor can we expect capitalist governments to intervene effectively instead, precisely because their success, too, is measured first and foremost with respect to short-term economic growth.

It might seem a strange thing, therefore, that most people find themselves going along with business as usual. Yet there’s an important explanation here, and that’s “green capitalism” – the vilest of oxymorons. Green capitalism can be summarized as the idea that the market can be used to fix the deepening environmental crisis. It began gaining influence in the Global North in the ‘80s, largely in response to a combination of two factors: on the one hand, corporations realized that many consumers possessed a newfound, sincere desire to protect the environment; on the other hand, however, the majority of these consumers seemed to prefer an environmentalism compatible with the preservation of normality. In particular, green capitalism appeals to the expectation that the health of the planet be maintained alongside our resource-intensive lifestyles, cemented among the burgeoning Western middle class throughout the 20^th century. But really this indulgence is only the ultimate form of consumerism, putting a price-tag even on the sense of moral righteousness. As the planet suffocates, the solution offered by green capitalism is to consume even more, as if we’re honestly expected to believe that organic meat, hybrid cars, and energy-saving lightbulbs are going to save us. Most people simply cannot afford the luxury of appeasing their guilt whilst the environment is ravaged. And even if we somehow could, it wouldn’t make much of a difference, given that the overwhelming majority of pollution – including greenhouse gases – is emitted only by a relatively small group of corporations, not the sum of individual consumers. The green economy markets a million different things, yet each of them is only a different version of the same futile product: the hope the planet can be saved without attacking the economy.

All the talk of “sustainability” is but a distraction from questioning the unquestionable, painting over that which is fundamentally rotten. What’s really being sustained here is capitalism, not the planet. Even an allegedly renewable capitalist economy – one based, for example, on industrial solar, wind, or tidal power – would just be another means of powering a system that, at its core, is both antisocial and ecocidal. All the idea offers is a greenwashed version of what we already have: a monopoly on energy held by corporations and the state, resource-intensive consumption for privileged members of society, and the inevitable exhaustion of what little remains of the living planet. Moreover, we can hardly be sure a shift towards renewables would stop climate change, even if most governments somehow agreed to it. It’s highly doubtful whether the global economy could be fundamentally restructured in time to avert catastrophe. Nor should we assume that, compared with maintaining a reliance on fossil fuels, such immense construction efforts won’t actually release significantly more carbon emissions in the short-term, marring our efforts in the decisive years ahead of us.

There’s no limit to the hollow excuses the defenders of the existent will throw at us. But now is the time to be done with them, decisively parting ways with the certainties of this world, which nowadays offer but the certainty of extinction. For biodiversity to outlast the century, humanity must dare to call into question the economy itself. Which is often an unthinkable task, given that the economy has been the main beneficiary of the religious urge, eagerly seeking new form since the death of God – the steady withdrawal of theism as a stabilizing moral force. Yet there’s no chance for redemption here. No afterlife in which to seek salvation, nor another planet to escape to. The economy needs to be destroyed. It has to be torn down completely. Or else it will only arrive at its destination, completing its suicidal dash for the cliff edge, taking each of us with it.

Destroying the economy isn’t a matter of forgetting about meeting our everyday material needs, as if to do away with economic considerations altogether. What it does mean is realizing that the economy – the subsumption of the totality of our needs within a single, monolithic, globalized system of production – could never be squared with the perseverance of life. Leveling this structure is a process of reclaiming the conditions of existence, piece by piece, by localizing and demassifying them. It’s a call to form communes aimed at self-sufficiency, each of them striving to meet its material needs – food, energy, accommodation, and so on – wholly within the means of what they can produce for themselves. Which is a political undertaking as much as an ecological one, given that the autonomy of any community is surely inseparable from it being the source of its own potency, its own vitality. Anything short of that risks one of two things: either dependence on an external body for your most basic needs, or else the necessity of outward expansion, defined in equal parts by imperialism and ecocide.

More specifically, taking apart the economy is synonymous with dismantling the institution of private property. Communizing the means of production has often been recognized as the material basis of human autonomy, given that, as long as we lack direct access to the resources needed to survive and flourish, there’s no choice but to accept the exploitative terms of work dictated by the ruling class. What’s more rarely recognized, however, is just how relevant the critique of property is to the liberation of nonhuman life. The domination of animals and the land is facilitated primarily by their legal status as human property, something that confers our mastery over them. Animal liberation would be unthinkable without pushing back the frontiers of property relations, as was the case with resistance to other forms of slavery, including the trans-Atlantic slave trade and many traditional forms of marriage. Earth liberation, moreover, describes the completion of this historical progression, entailing the abolition of property altogether. There’s no doubt that using the land respectfully is compatible with appreciating its intrinsic value; by contrast, treating it as property – that is, owning it – necessarily declares an inferior status. In this sense, animal and earth liberation, far from being even slightly reconcilable with capitalism, begin to look inseparable from the communist project.

As far as destroying the economy goes, though, the state would never allow it. Not willingly. To refer to the state as distinct from the economy might well be an overstatement; at the very least, the needs of the economy constitute its supreme law. Even avowedly radical political parties – social democratic alternatives to austerity, for example – purport to serve the economy even better than the status quo itself. No departure from this logic is conceivable within the realm of politics. After all, the primary role of the state has always been to safeguard the needs of capital: it was at the forefront of the assimilation of the peasantry into the industrial proletariat, as well as the expansion of market relations across the globe. What you see nowadays, moreover, is the reinvention of this union for the secular age: whilst the state once tasked itself with representing the divine will, today it represents the economy, mediating between the masses and that which is sacrosanct, keeping our needs locked into the growth-imperative. There’s an enduring temptation to think that state and economy can somehow be separated (most Marxists favor this approach, still serving up whichever reheated variant of the state socialist paradox). And yet, of all the stupid ideas tried out in the long, weary history of civilization, few have claimed more lives than the anti-capitalist sympathy for statecraft. Either the state and the economy are confronted as one, or not at all.

To bring it back to social ecology with a simple summary, taking nonhuman liberation seriously means living our lives outside and against the system that engulfs us. The state and capital cannot be reformed or compromised with, because theirs is a nature that is fundamentally extra-terrestrial. Not in the sense, of course, that they originate from beyond this planet, but instead because their existence is inherently incompatible with that of the earth.

The time for timid critiques is over. This is the moment to make serious plans for desertion. At such an unforgiving moment in history, there can be no pretensions of neutrality: working for the economy can only mean complicity in our own annihilation. That leaves each of us with a vital choice, one between compliance with social hierarchy and the perseverance of life itself. Suddenly the phrase “revolution or death,” tagged on a wall during Trump’s inauguration, takes on a whole new meaning. There you have it: revolution or death.

Interconnections of oppression

The last section outlined the roots of nonhuman domination in human domination, according to the theory of social ecology. Yet to leave it at that fails to account for the converse relationship, namely, the sense in which human domination is equally predicated on nonhuman domination. The relationship between the two spheres is wholly reciprocal: neither plays a more integral role in the overall structuring of hierarchy. Which is important to clarify, or else we risk sidelining the task of nonhuman liberation, perhaps even deferring it until after the revolution. That would miss the point entirely: animal and earth liberation can’t be dealt with afterwards, precisely because their liberation is the revolution. To prioritize human liberation over nonhuman liberation ensures we’ll get neither.

This horizontal emphasis is distinctly missing for Bookchin. According to him, hierarchies between humans arose first historically, with hierarchies over nonhumans only later emerging as a consequence thereof. With somewhat comical irony, therefore, Bookchin rejected class reductionism only to replace it with an equally dangerous variant: the idea that ecological problems are a mere subsidiary of social problems, unworthy of concern in their own right. To be fair, the fact he spent so much time discussing ecology is already a clear improvement on Marx, for whom the topic was pretty much absent. Yet Bookchin still never treated nonhuman liberation as an end in itself: ecological domination was described wholly in terms of the problems it poses for humanity, whilst the domination of animals wasn’t discussed at all. This corresponded with a consistent refusal to engage honestly either with deep ecology or anti-speciesism, leaving social ecology with a subtly anthropocentric interior. Apparently our treatment of nonhumans just wasn’t considered a form of oppression in the first place.

Bookchin never even considered the possibility, for example, that speciesism might actually have been the first hierarchy (certainly the first form of prejudice) to become institutionalized in many pre-civilized communities millennia ago. Yet the predation of nonhuman animals was surely vital for everyday survival – for producing things like food and clothing – in a way that other forms of hierarchy, like those based on gender or age, simply were not. In other communities, of course, we might well suspect that hierarchies between humans crystallized first. But this is exactly the point: the development of hierarchy throughout the globe was surely quite messy, something that universally stating the primacy of human hierarchy grossly oversimplifies.

This thread warrants following: once you begin to seriously consider the historical significance of nonhuman domination, our capacity to understand the domination of humans deepens profoundly. You might even say we’re offered the missing piece of the puzzle. One of the most important cases to consider here is the advent of civilization itself, namely, the invention of mass culture based around cities and agriculture. Things weren’t always this way: of the roughly 200,000 years in which human beings have existed, the vast majority were lived out in small groups of nomadic gatherer-hunters that lacked any notions of the state, class, money, borders, prisons, laws, or police. It was only at around 10,000 BC, in Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq, that these forms of life – sometimes described as “primitive communism” – began to be superseded by the Agricultural Revolution. Agriculture initiated the widespread cultivation of crops and domestication of nonhuman animals, generating a surplus of resources that encouraged cities to develop and human populations to rise. Here we see the invention of mass production, if not the economy itself, along with the ascension of the quantitative, calculating, expansionist mode of perception over human culture, the ability to understand value only in terms of the potential for exploitation. This shift also provoked the definitive emergence of the ugliest features of our behavior, including slavery, imperialism, and genocide – often mistaken as brute outcomes of human nature. To claim that civilization gave rise to hierarchy itself might be an overstatement, given that rudimentary hierarchies seem to exist among some (although by no means all) non-civilized peoples still scattered around the globe today. What civilization did mean, however, was the intensification of hierarchy beyond all comprehension, allowing it to grow more violent, overbearing, and institutionalized than had ever been even remotely possible. It was thus with good reason that Fredy Perlman, following Thomas Hobbes, described this artificial beast as “Leviathan.”

What needs to be emphasized is just how deeply these cultural changes were rooted in the domination of nonhumans. As of yet, non-civilized peoples offer some of the few examples of genuinely sustainable, ecologically harmonious human communities; the Agricultural Revolution, by contrast, can be summarized mainly in terms of the redefinition of human needs in opposition to those of the wild. No longer was the world conceived of as an undivided whole, but instead as something to be carved up and exploited. The land was altered dramatically, driven towards satisfying the needs of one species among billions; wild animals, meanwhile, were confined, tortured, and genetically altered beyond recognition. Nature herself, once understood as the mother of us all, was betrayed and degraded, recast instead as something dirty and evil. Whilst everything Leviathan touched soon turned to dust: the once verdant, ecologically diverse landscapes of Mesopotamia, the Levant, North Africa, and Greece were transformed largely into deserts by a combination of monocropping, cattle grazing, and logging, never again to return to their former state of untamed abundance.

The interplay between nonhuman and human domination also occurred in a number of even more direct ways. Herds of livestock, as well as surpluses of stored grain, were likely the first instances both of capital and private property. The development of agriculture saw the division of labor intensify as well, with those who owned natural resources forming the original ruling class, and those who worked them – now dispossessed of the means of generating their own nourishment – forming the working class. The invention of the state simultaneously became necessary to enforce this distinction between included and excluded. Moreover, it’s surely no coincidence that the region of Sumer, Mesopotamia, saw not only the invention of widespread animal domestication, but also the earliest known instances of human slavery; presumably the former normalized practices such as confinement and forced labor, enabling them to be applied more easily to marginalized human groups, especially defeated foreigners. The expansion of Leviathan into new areas would also have been unthinkable without the surplus of food and rising populations generated by agriculture. Just as those civilizations most adept at animal domestication, particularly in service of warfare and transportation, possessed the military edge necessary to subdue these areas most effectively.

A similar story has played out throughout history, especially with respect to the practice of colonialism. Some of the most definitive examples here were significantly rooted in the domination of animals and the land. The extermination of Native American Indians in North America, for example, was largely based in an interest in expanding the international trade of leather, wool, and fur. The Mexican-American War was significantly motivated by the profitability of acquiring grazing land for cattle, as with the British colonization of Ireland over the centuries. In fact, this theme is no less noticeable today; just look at the recent attempt by Shell to subdue the Ogoni people of Nigeria, or the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline through Standing Rock – both projects of the oil industry. Something similar can be said about the creeping genocides currently occurring in West Papua and the Amazon, motivated as they are mainly by an interest in extracting natural resources. The history of colonialism, in short, has always intimately combined the subjugation of humans, animals, and the earth.

The key conceptual links between human and nonhuman domination should also be emphasized. Ecofeminists have long since noticed that patriarchy is significantly rooted in a disdain for the natural world, especially the attempt to characterize women as being irrational, and thereby somehow less human than men. The same can be said of white supremacy, given that it tends to treat non-whites (especially non-civilized peoples) as being irrational, wild, or savage, and thereby of lesser moral status. The moral exclusion of various members of the human race – women, non-whites, the disabled, and so on – has always been tightly bound up with their dehumanization.

You can trace such associations back as far as you like. In the West, anthropocentrism probably finds its most influential expression in what medieval Christian theologians, following Plato and Aristotle, termed the “Great Chain of Being.” This categorized the entirety of the universe in hierarchical terms, with each aspect of being supposedly existing for the sake of its master. The chain leads down along a scale of lesser perfection, starting with God, then going through angels, kings, lords, serfs, animals, plants, and ending with inanimate matter. This scheme was decisive in legitimizing the misery wrought by the feudal system; no less, the very foundation of the structure was human supremacy, divinely ordained in one and the same movement.

Make no mistake: anthropocentrism has played an integral part in some of the darkest moments of human history, even just in recent memory. In 1943, for example, Winston Churchill attempted to justify a famine in Bengal – wholly avoidable, yet killing millions – by blaming it on locals for “breeding like rabbits.” Prior to the Rwandan genocide, 1994, Léon Mugesera used a decisive speech to characterize the Tutsis as “cockroaches” liable for extermination. In 2015, as refugees fleeing war found themselves met with the guns and barbed wire of our proud civilization, David Cameron described as “swarms” those drowning in the Mediterranean. Just as Donald Trump, in 2018, attempted to rationalize the brutalization of migrants at the US border on the basis that “these aren’t people, they’re animals.” This kind of language – speciesist at its core – is so often lurking beneath the oppression of human groups. Although, to offer a final example, its perfection was surely attained only in the form of Nazi eugenics, certainly in terms of the rigorous formalization of such associations both in science and in law. In this case, the persecution and mass murder of Jews, Slavs, Roma, homosexuals, and the disabled was based on their classification as literal subhumans; the logic internal to the Holocaust, in other words, was majorly founded upon a speciesist base. In so many cases, committing atrocities against human groups means taking for granted the status of nonhumans as the lowest of the low. Only by first attacking the most vulnerable among us do oppressive practices gain the breathing space necessary to expand.

In sum, no axis of domination can be passed off as secondary compared to the others. Even if we’re a long way from understanding how all the parts fit together, what should be clear is that neither class, nor human relations in general, are somehow primary within the immense tangle of hierarchies we inhabit today. In essence, there’s only one victim when it comes to the horror wrought by the system: life itself. Whether it’s a question of the suicide netting surrounding iPhone factories, the futile panic of animals in the vivisection lab, or the deathly silence of a clear-cut forest, any really subversive discourse ends up putting everything into question.

A total liberation ethic

May 13, 1985, West Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Police Force launch a dawn raid on a suburban house, but clearly the occupants have no intention to leave. Over the course of the morning, about 500 cops fire over 10,000 rounds of ammunition at the house, combined with endless volleys of tear gas and even anti-tank rounds. The occupants hold out all the way into the afternoon, at which point the state makes the decision to bomb them with a military helicopter. Four pounds of plastic explosives are dropped onto the roof, which soon results in a vicious blaze, yet the police commissioner orders the fire department to keep well away. The house burns down, along with 65 others in the (predominantly black) neighborhood. Only two of the occupants survive, with eleven of them – including five children – failing to outlast the day.

Those defending the house were a group called MOVE. Formed in 1972, MOVE were defined by their combination of black liberation and armed struggle with veganism and deep ecology. The group also balanced a focus on individual campaigns, such as those against local zoos and police brutality, with a broader emphasis on building community autonomy. The statements that outlive its founder, John Africa, speak for themselves, as with his claim that “Revolution means total change, a complete dissociation from everything that is causing the problems you are revolting against,” as well as the group’s assertion that they were fighting for “a revolution to stop man’s system from imposing on life, to stop industry from poisoning the air, water, and soil and to put an end to the enslavement of all life.” Africa happened upon biocentrism, too, even before Næss had written on the topic, as is confirmed by his claim that “All living beings, things that move, are equally important, whether they are human beings, dogs, birds, fish, trees, ants, weeds, rivers, wind or rain.” In the history of social struggle in the West, MOVE were perhaps the first to commit in equal parts to the liberation of humans, animals, and the earth.

Despite being largely crushed by the state, reverberations of MOVE’s struggle have been picked up here and there, gaining pace. A comparable ethic surfaced among the Zapatista National Liberation Army, a group comprised mainly of indigenous Maya fighting for land rights. On January 1, 1994, the Zapatistas declared war on the Mexican state, on the very day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into force. They seized large areas of the state of Chiapas, including the key city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, immediately collectivizing the land. Despite eventually being forced into retreat by the Mexican army, the rebels were able to hold up in the mountains, consolidating control over many of their own rural communities. To this day, the autonomy carved out by the Zapatistas amid the Lacandon Jungle has been successfully maintained, despite numerous incursions at the hands of the state. Which remains an ecological struggle as much as anything: from the outset, the Zapatistas emphasized that their own liberation as indigenous people was one and the same with the liberation of the land.

The front opened up by the Zapatistas was arguably but one in a much larger struggle, namely, the anti-globalization movement. Peaking in intensity around the turn of the century, this worldwide struggle saw diverse participants – workers, students, indigenous peoples, radical environmentalists, animal rights activists – unite around a shared interest in opposing the expansion of global finance. The international summits of organizations such as the G8 and the World Trade Organization were the obvious targets, with some of the most spectacular flashpoints including Seattle 1999, Prague 2000, and Genoa 2001. In many cases, moreover, superficial critiques of globalization and imperialism deepened into resolute rejections of capitalism altogether, even if a frequent outcome was an inebriated expectation of some imminent world revolution. And whilst the anti-globalization movement is now largely behind us, it continues to offer a legacy focused around a grand convergence of struggles, something vital for taking things forward.

The ‘90s also saw Earth First! move towards a steadfast rejection of all oppressions, dropping the machismo and patriotism that had been present in some of the earlier days. Such a broadening in emphasis was particularly evident in the writings and activism of US member Judi Bari, who placed significant emphasis on the need for Earth First! to reach out to the working class, including timber workers. This marked the arrival at a distinctly revolutionary take on eco-defense, one informed by social ecology as much as deep ecology.

Around the same time, the ALF and ELF also began working ever more closely together, with the two movements becoming indistinguishable in many countries. The same activists would often participate in both fronts, merely swapping banners to suit the specifics of an action, whilst their aboveground networks mingled greatly. Not only that, the communiques published by various cells began making increased reference to the state and capital, confirming a focus that had shifted from targetting specific industries towards attacking the system as a whole. One communique, published during the beginning of ELF activity in the US, remains especially memorable:

Welcome to the struggle of all species to be free. We are the burning rage of this dying planet. The war of greed ravages the earth and species die out every day. ELF works to speed up the collapse of industry, to scare the rich, and to undermine the foundations of the state. We embrace social and deep ecology as a practical resistance movement. (Beltane, 1997)

Diverse though they are, these developments help explain something quite striking: at some point during the last couple of decades, various radical animal rights and environmental activists committed to exceeding single-issue campaigning in favor of a holistic, revolutionary struggle against all forms of hierarchy. As Steve Best puts it, “it is imperative that we no longer speak of human liberation, animal liberation, or earth liberation as if they were independent struggles, but rather that we talk instead of total liberation” (The Politics of Total Liberation, 2014). No instance of oppression can be understood in separation from the whole: different hierarchies interact with one another profoundly, facilitating the domination of one group – human or nonhuman – in virtue of the domination of all others. And so, too, all genuine liberation struggles must recognize that, far from having disconnected goals, each of them depends on the success of the other.

Even though specific circumstances inevitably constrain what we can do as individuals, such efforts must be situated within a shared project that greatly exceeds our isolation. That means learning how to reach out beyond the current milieu in meaningful ways; it also means improving our own practices to make it possible for outsiders to reach back. The point isn’t to subsume the struggle into a single organization, a single identity, but instead to increase the density of ties between its various fronts, nourishing the strategic alliances and networks of mutual aid necessary to leave the common enemy in ruins.

There can be no quick fixes here. No utopias, perhaps no culminations at all. Truth be told, none of us are likely to witness a totally liberated world – that is, a planet entirely free of hierarchy. Nor can we be sure, from the current standpoint, if such a thing is even possible. There’s no knowing what, if anything, is at the top of the hill; the beauty of the struggle, however, is realized in the very act of climbing. Total liberation isn’t merely a destination, as if to separate the end goal from how we live our lives in the present. No, total liberation is an immediate process. It’s the process of confronting power not as something disconnected, but instead as a totality. It’s one’s refusal to condone any notions of a final frontier – not now, not ever. If anything absolute can be known about such a struggle, it’s that it never ends. But ask not what total liberation can do for us in a hundred years: the point is to realize its full intensity already now.

It seems every generation thinks theirs will be the most remarkable, yet ours might just be the first that turns out to be right. To say this century is the most crucial our species has ever faced is actually an understatement: we’re dealing with the most significant crisis life in general has faced, even amid billions of years of evolution. We’ve entered the sixth period of global extinction, this one the first caused by a single species of animal. The rate of extinction among plants and animals is at least 1,000 times faster than before our arrival on the scene. The vast majority of wild animals have already been killed off. And that includes 90% of large fish vanishing from the oceans. From the air we breathe, to the water we drink – from the highest mountain peak, to the deepest of ocean trenches – the filth of this civilization pervades it all. To be clear, the apocalypse isn’t something foretold by a prediction: it is already here.

Death, of course, is fundamental to ecological wellbeing, because life could never be sustained without destruction and renewal. Yet the kind of death the system brings isn’t in the slightest a matter of balance, but instead simply of wiping out. Social hierarchy is fundamentally at odds with the very basics of organic development, including diversity, spontaneity, and decentralization. There’s no longer any doubt that the system will crash, and hard. The important thing left to consider is merely how best to speed up the process, minimizing the suffering yet to be wrought, maximizing the potential for life to regenerate outside this unfathomable mess.

No compromise with the system of death. Toxic waste cannot be made nutritious, nor can their idea of life be made livable. Our revolutionary task can only be the creation of our own worlds, destroying theirs in the process. This is exactly the historical moment we were born to inhabit: the apocalypse is already here, yet the extent to which it deepens is quite the open question. Anyone who listens carefully can hear the call.