From: ra-AT-alor.univ-montp3.fr (Ronald Creagh, Moderator, Research on Anarchism List)
Date: 13 Feb 1997 08:20:26 UTC   (04:20:26 AM in author's locale)
To: ra-l-AT-bred.univ-montp3.fr

Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 12:51:33 -0330 (NST)
>From: Alka Chandna <ac-AT-math.mun.ca>
Dear Andrew (and others),
I think a few clarifications are in order here. Andrew, you've painted
people who support animal rights as being misanthropic and anti-human. I
will not deny that I believe that what we do to the earth and to the
animals is extremely painful to me, and I do think that it's wrong. This
being the case, I do feel that it's my right to raise my voice in protest
against these actions (please refer to various WorldWatch reports on
environmental devastation wreaked by meat industry, various books on this
subject, books on the subject of factory farming, and personal accounts
of the same). If the collective body of animal rights proponents was
truly as misanthropic and negative as you would hold, I don't think that
there would be an animal rights movement. It's because we have faith in
the *compassionate*, justice-embracing side of the human psyche that we
spend time, energy and other resources on activist work.
Let's not mince words: I think that the collective action of 5 billion
people on this planet - as manifest in the holes in the ozone layer, the
rapidly vanishing rainforests, the extinction of so many species of
plants and animals, the biological sterilization of the oceans, the
pollution of air, water and land - sucks, big time. But I'm also very
happily aware of the dedicated efforts on the parts of so many people to
rectify this situation. While ecofeminists, social ecologists, deep
ecologists and all the others will argue the finer points of their
philosophies, I would say that most agree that one *big* problem is the
underlying ethic that permits our species to feel that it has the right
to inflict wholesale disaster on the rest of the planet. This is where,
to me, animal rights fits in. Unless we rid ourselves of the
pre-Copernican notion that *we* are the crowning glory of creation, that
everything revolves around *us*, nothing will change. It's like what
Einstein said when scientists learned how to unleash the power of the
atom: everything changed, except the way we think. Our challenge, as
anarchists, attempting to free ourselves from the societally imposed
mental chains, is to change the way we've been indoctrinated to think.
The root of environmental collapse is, fundamentally, our belief that
it's okay to pollute, rape, pillage, destroy, use everything that's
around us. To repeat myself, unless that attitude changes, nothing
changes.
Just my 2 cents.
Regards,
alka

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Moderator/Moderador/Moderateur : Ronald Creagh
Co-Moderator : John P. Clark
e-mail : rcreagh-AT-alor.univ-montp3.fr
snail mail/correo ordinario/courrier ordinaire : Ronald Creagh, Universite
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