Total Liberation
The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement
All oppression is linked: radical environmental and animal liberation movements in the struggle for social justice
Total Liberation elucidates the often tense and violent relationships among humans, ecosystems, and nonhuman animal species, expanding our understanding of inequality and activists’ uncompromising efforts to oppose it. Through activist interviews, fieldwork, and analyses of documents, websites, journals, and zines, David Naguib Pellow reveals how radical environmental and animal rights movements challenge inequity through a vision they call “total liberation.”
David Naguib Pellow is a first-rate scholar, and this rich, carefully-researched book demonstrates that fact. His refusal to march lock-step with any given theoretical perspective but, rather, to employ a variety of them to illuminate his data (data from diverse sources) makes this effort all the more impressive. In numerous places I found myself admiring his insights into a movement I have studied for decades.
Rik Scarce, Skidmore College
When in 2001 Earth Liberation Front activists drove metal spikes into hundreds of trees in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, they were protesting the sale of a section of the old-growth forest to a timber company. But ELF’s communiqué on the action went beyond the radical group’s customary brief. Drawing connections between the harms facing the myriad animals who make their home in the trees and the struggles for social justice among ordinary human beings resisting exclusion and marginalization, the dispatch declared, “all oppression is linked, just as we are all linked,” and decried the “patriarchal nightmare” in the form of “techno-industrial global capitalism.”
In Total Liberation, David Naguib Pellow takes up this claim and makes sense of the often tense and violent relationships among humans, ecosystems, and nonhuman animal species, expanding our understanding of inequality and activists’ uncompromising efforts to oppose it. Grounded in interviews with more than one hundred activists, on-the-spot fieldwork, and analyses of thousands of pages of documents, websites, journals, and zines, Total Liberation reveals the ways in which radical environmental and animal rights movements challenge inequity through a vision they call “total liberation.” In its encounters with such infamous activists as scott crow, Tre Arrow, Lauren Regan, Rod Coronado, and Gina Lynn, the book offers a close-up, insider’s view of one of the most important—and feared—social movements of our day. At the same time, it shows how and why the U.S. justice system plays to that fear, applying to these movements measures generally reserved for “jihadists”—with disturbing implications for civil liberties and constitutional freedom.
How do the adherents of “total liberation” fight oppression and seek justice for humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems alike? And how is this pursuit shaped by the politics of anarchism and anticapitalism? In his answers, Pellow provides crucial in-depth insight into the origins and social significance of the earth and animal liberation movements and their increasingly common and compelling critique of inequality as a threat to life and a dream of a future characterized by social and ecological justice for all.
David Naguib Pellow is a first-rate scholar, and this rich, carefully-researched book demonstrates that fact. His refusal to march lock-step with any given theoretical perspective but, rather, to employ a variety of them to illuminate his data (data from diverse sources) makes this effort all the more impressive. In numerous places I found myself admiring his insights into a movement I have studied for decades.
Rik Scarce, Skidmore College
This is a provocative book. Pellow’s notion of ‘socioecological justice’ broadens the focus of environmental justice theory and research, while his ‘total liberation frame’ captures commonalities across a wide range of diverse movements for justice. Both concepts are likely to spark debate and future scholarship.
Riley Dunlap, Oklahoma State University
A must read for scholars interested in repression, radical movements, and ethics.
Mobilization
An important work for social movement scholars, for those theorizing environmental-social connections, and for those interested in genuine democracy and the movement toward total liberation from socioecological injustices. It is a critical but hopeful work from a scholar dedicated to making such liberation more thinkable.
American Journal of Sociology
One of the most authentic accounts of the sunless side of what is widely known as ecoterrorism.
CHOICE
Total Liberation sets a standard by which future research can be judged.
Antipode
Contents
Abbreviations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: All Oppression Is Linked
1. Never Apologize for Your Rage: Radical Origins and Organizing
2. Justice for the Earth and All Its Animals
3. Anarchism and Anticapitalism: Liberation from Government and Market
4. Direct Action: Confrontation, Sabotage, and Property Destruction
5. The Green Scare: State Repression of Liberation Movements
6. Resisting the Green Scare
Conclusion: Piecing It Together
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Connect with Total Liberation on Facebook.
UMP blog: Understanding inequality—across ecosystems, species, and human populations.
The concept of total liberation stems from a determination to understand and combat all forms of inequality and oppression. It is comprised of four pillars: an ethic of justice and anti-oppression inclusive of people, nonhuman animals, and ecosystems; anarchism; anticapitalism; and an embrace of direct action tactics.
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