Life/Animal Rights

I first met animal rights philosopher Tom Regan in April of 1985 after he’d given a rousing speech in Philadelphia condemning the University of Pennsylvania’s baboon head-bashing experiments. (This was the infamous Thomas Gennarelli lab which the Animal Liberation Front exposed by breaking in and taking tapes the researchers made of themselves.) Tom was walking across the commons area and I asked him to sign a copy of his book All That Dwell Therein: Essays on Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics.

I have long wondered what the animal kingdom – mammals, reptiles, birds, fish and insects – would want to tell us humans if we and the animals had a common language?

Western sandpipers flock by the thousands during migration, one of the natural world’s great spectacles. Photo by Donald M. Jones/Minden Pictures
Hakai Magazine — This article is the first in a two-part series. The second installment, looking at the future of the western sandpiper at Roberts Bank, will be published on November 29, 2016.

Technologies exist to drastically reduce ship noise, but they’re not seeing widespread adoption. Photo by Image Source Salsa/Alamy Stock Photo

Survival International has learned that an elephant-hunting safari operation jointly owned by a French billionaire has been implicated in human rights abuses against local Baka “Pygmies” and their neighbors, including illegal evictions and torture.

WWF trustee Peter Flack with dead forest elephant © Peter Flack

We should be able to say ‘no.’ And our ‘no’ should be heard.
— Joe Pierre of the Ktunaxa Nation speaking regarding any development in Qat’muk, Ktunaxa territory

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
― John Muir

Ice, Heat, Rain, Drought
How can someone in the Inland Northwest not think about weather, the future of our valley, what the aquifer will look like in decades and the potential impacts of some scenario unfolding that is twice (or four times) more extreme/devastating than the windstorm event Spokane, Washington, experienced late last year?

Yes. I think that what is more important in Mexico is education. It’s for the children to be able to go to school. Of course, hunger is also a very big problem. But the one that really, really, really for me is very painful is education. And there’s very little money spent on education, on good teachers, on schools, on even rooms where children can go and work. And I think this is the worst problem in Mexico that has to be taken care of. And it has not been taken care of. I remember when I came to Mexico as a little girl, I loved my teacher, La Seño Velázquez.

There’s a real sense that we are past staying this mono-cultural collapse, and a book that came out 20 years ago, enlightens now more than ever, with the multiple forces of environmental, economic and societal collapses occurring under the weight of an elite and the barbarity of capitalism and extreme ecosystems and social systems exploitation.