Constructing Ecoterrorism: Capitalism, Speciesism and Animal Rights

by John Sorenson

Animal rights is an important social justice movement, and the animal rights movement presents ethical and political challenges to deeply rooted structures of violence and exploitation, challenging ideologies of capitalism and speciesism. Corporate interests that form the animal industrial complex understand the animal rights movement as a threat to their profits and have mobilized to undermine it.
Informed by both critical animal studies and critical terrorism studies, John Sorenson analyzes ecoterrorism as a social construction. He examines how corporations that profit from animal exploitation fund and produce propaganda to portray the compassionate goals and nonviolent practices of animal activists as outlandish, anti-human campaigns that operate by violent means not only to destroy Western civilization but also to create actual genocide. The idea of concern for others is itself a dangerous one, and capitalism works by keeping people focused on individual interests and discouraging compassion and commitment to others.
Driven by powerful and wealthy industries founded upon the exploitation of nonhuman animals and the extraction of natural resources, the discourse of ecoterrorism is a useful mechanism to repress criticism of the institutionalized violence and cruelty of these industries as well as their destructive impact on the environment, their major contribution to global warming and ecological disaster, and their negative impacts on human health. Further, by deliberately constructing an image of activists as dangerous and violent terrorists, these corporations and their representatives in government have created a widespread climate of fear that is very useful in legitimizing calls for more policing and more repressive legislation, such as Bill C-51 in Canada.

278 pages, Paperback

Published April 2, 2016

About the author

John Sorenson is a full professor in the Sociology department at Brock University, where he gives courses on animals and society, racism, and corporate globalization. Much of his research has been on war, nationalism and refugees. His current research concerns the exploitation of animals, representation of animals and animal rights as a social justice movement.

Reviews

[Lexidreams · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved Sorenson's Critical Animal Studies Collection so I was happy to get my hands on his new book. The book focuses on how government and non-environmental (oil industries, animal agriculture) organizations have worked to construct environmental, animal rights and social justice activists as violent terrorists, despite an actual lack of violence, and the consequences for this in terms of infringement on their civil liberties and legal right to protest. He mostly focuses on Canada and the US but also discusses the UK and Australia.

Highlights include his discussion of how environmental activists and animal advocates have been more targeted as terrorists than white supremacists because eco activism is more likely to impact industry profits. He touches on how because right wing actions are more mainstream and socially acceptable, violent actions on that side of the spectrum are downplayed. He further argues that it is through the criminalization of animal advocates as terrorists that more legislation was introduced to criminalize activists in general, which is alarming. Also interesting was his description of the way in which a state can tie its identity into an industry, causing turning against those industry practices to be viewed as "treason" as it is seen as turning against the community identity. Plus, his section on Harper's targeting of environmental organizations and the Canadian government's involvement of industry associates with its security agencies was crazy. The section on ag-gag laws causes little surprise.

The book is all in all very informative and interesting but it really needed some more time in the editing room. It would've been a much better book for it. The worst of it was in an almost comical way how he would describe how there had really only ever been one violent incident caused by an animal rights activist, and then a few pages later he would say the same thing and refer to a different incident. This happened multiple times. Maybe I'm a lazy reader and he was talking about different countries, I don't know. It would be humorous to go back and list each example but it's not really worth it. Over all, he communicates his point well that animal advocacy is overwhelmingly non-violent as it holds non-violence as one of its central tenants, but acknowledging a few incidence of violence does not really hurt this point.

The very ending of the book also just needed some editing. His ending chapter focuses on global warming and environmental activism. However, his final concluding paragraphs go back to focusing on animal agriculture and animal cruelty, with little transition or section separation.

Another section that seemed kind of off to me was when he described an anti-terrorist person's statement that it would only take a handful of people with the right technology to cause mass genocide if they held the belief that it would save the planet from humans. He dismisses the statement as absurd and without evidence (indeed, he describes an example of, if I remember right, the ELF being erroneously accused of holding such views). I have to say, reading it I felt like his dismissal was a little too quick, as if he was saying of course no one could hold such views. I feel like he could have explored the ethical wrongness of that more, emphasized the value of human life etc. Obviously, such a 'possibility' is not reason to withhold rights from a group. For example, you could say women shouldn't have the right to vote because they might one day tire of dealing with garbage from men and rise up against them. Holding environmental views does not inevitably make one a mass murderer, but still it is understandable that someone with violent tendencies could exist, and it is the possibility of this existence Sorenson seems to weirdly dismiss.

More than that, while the book is focused on discussing how the eco and animal movements have been criminalized as a way of protecting industry profits and wrongly maligned as violent, I found his views on violence to be a little disconcerting. He states that the animal rights movement is committed to non-violence but then right after seems to drop a "but" which bellies his message in an unfortunate way. He emphasizes non-violence while stating that he supports some "effective" violence at least of a certain kind (seemingly property and economic damage). It leaves some inconsistency in his message when he is promoting an understanding of the movement as non-violent but then stating that if it were to be in some sense violent, it could be understandable. (Not even saying I disagree, just maybe could have been written better.)

The book really is chock-full of evidence of government and corporate corruption. But this also means a lot of names and organizations get introduced. I think he made a mistake in deciding to only intro organizations' names once and then go into acronyms. The same goes for people's names and titles being turned into last name references. I frequently had to go back a page and search through the text to find where someone/an organization was first referenced. It gets really absurdly bad in one chapter where he discusses two different people with the last name Bundy who committed similar actions. He talks about one Bundy for five pages and then names a second Bundy, introing his full name and then going back to referring to him as last name Bundy which could easily cause confusion. He then goes back to referring to the first Bundy a couple pages later. Noooo..

All in all though, it really was an informative read.

+ Goodreads for some weird reason has the author's name listed wrong on this.