Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement

by David Naguib Pellow

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Environment

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[M]

A very well done study of the total liberation movement in the US. Recommended for anyone who is interested in how the total liberation movement started, what it's connected to, how it was crushed in the period of the Green Scare, and more.

Read for an upcoming just wondering... video essay.

[Alexa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most interesting thing about this (and most of Pellow's work) is how readable it is. Pellow is outlining a theory and framework of anti-state, anti-capitalist, environmental anarchy. He also stresses the importance of community building in the face of oppression and repression. With these things in mind, his accessible form and writing style makes so much sense. A "hot topic" in academia (especially environmental research) currently is accessibility, criticism of the ivory tower, and "reaching outside of the academy." However, those of us in academia all too often produce jargon-heavy and ultimately unreadable scholarship for those outside of our disciplines, let alone those outside of the academy. If one is going to speak of revolution, especially involving community-building, one has to actively display that in their scholarship.

Overall, this is a workable text offering a model for the future of environmental activism and resistance.

[Franklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The thesis of this book can be summed up in one sentence: all oppression is linked. Pellow does an excellent job of exploring animal and environmental liberation activists through in depth qualitative research, and then linking his findings to broader sociological theory.

[Mills College Library]

179.3 P392t 2014