Dr. Steve Best
Steve Best on TPC:
1. Evolve or Die: Can We Shed Our Moral Primitivism Before It’s Too Late?
Once I recovered from the shock, I exuviated into a very different person. Realizing that animals suffered far more than human beings in the quantity and quality of their pain, suffering, and death, I shifted from human rights to animal rights activism. Whereas most human beings have at least some rights, no animals have the most basic right to life and bodily integrity. When I studied the impact of meat production on world hunger and the environment, I realized that by helping the animals I would also be helping humans in the most productive way possible. In a third epiphany, I saw animal rights as the most radical, complete, and holistic form of activism…..
2. The Killing Fields of South Africa: Eco-Wars, Species Apartheid, and Total Liberation [1]
This essay supports the rights of elephants to live and thrive in suitable natural environments and opposes all justifications for culling elephants and exploiting African wildlife in general.[3] My purview is much broader than elephants, hunting, and the ivory trade, however, as I see the human-elephant “conflict” as a microcosm of the global social and ecological crisis that involves phenomena such as transnational corporate power, state totalitarianism, militarism, chronic conflict and warfare, terrorism, global warming, species extinction, air and water pollution, and resource scarcity. The approach of the South African government and people toward the “elephant problem” has global significance and is an indicator of whether or not humankind as a whole can steer itself away from immanent disaster and learn to harmonize its existence with the natural world…..
3. From “Dominion” to Domination: The Duplicity and Complicity of Matthew Scully
To whatever degree he cares about animals, Scully’s real constituency are rich, white, Republicans and — having written speeches for Bush in the aftermath of 9/11 — he had already become a shining star in the firmament of right-wing ideologues and corporate fat cats, each of whom need the best PR and BS teams they could assemble. And thanks to the fawning adulation of the likes of Karen Dawn, Scully overnight became the new darling of the animal movement. When not making the rounds of Congress or aerial warfare conventions, Scully continued to write speeches for Bush and anyone on the Right with the right fee. And, as it turned out, as so many of us were bracing ourselves for the nauseating Republican National Convention in early September 08, not wanting to hear another disingenuous word from “straight-talking” McCain but curious to hear about unknown Alaskan female governor whom he shrewdly chose to win Hillary’s armies of disaffected, we learned — at this crisis moment and critical juncture for the Far Right — that Matthew Scully stepped in to write the kind of speech the McCain team thought necessary to disguise their malignant and predatory policies in terms of populism and family values. Right-wing soldier that he is, Scully stayed up the entire night before the speech and gave the magic words to which Sara Palin only had to give life in order to sell this sordid spectacle and sham to the US public and bring us another 4 more years of Bush—or probably much, much worse…..
4. “Man the Hunter” to Homo X: Rethinking Human Nature
Champions of hunting and meat-eating fail to grasp that what was once a necessary survival mechanism and functional behavior is now – putting aside the debatable exception for any rare prehistorical cultures still left — an unnecessary, unjustifiable, addictive, health-destroying, environment-devastating, dysfunctional behavior and social practice…..
5. Dissing Cousins: The Dysfunctional Disparity between Vegetarianism and Environmentalism
In the turn to the twentieth century, however, the influence of vegetarianism in the US began to wane as the livestock industry became increasingly powerful and meat became an affordable staple for working-class families (Rifkin 1992). Amidst a culture believing that meat promotes strength and vegetarianism encourages weakness, a dramatic revival, growth, and broadening of vegetarianism began in 1971, with the publication of Francis Moore Lappe’s book, Diet for a Small Planet. In this and subsequent books (1977, 1998, 2003), Lappe described a corporate-controlled, industrialized, factory-farmed system of animal agriculture that was inefficient, wasteful, cruel, and destructive to every facet of the environment. The global livestock industry was, as well, a vehicle of Western imperialism that displaced millions of people from the land, destroyed independent farmers, exacerbated poverty and inequality, and aggravated world hunger by diverting resources into producing feed rather than food. To this destructive, unethical, unjust, and unsustainable system of agriculture, Lappe contrasted a vegetarian mode of farming that produced maximum output with minimum input; that promoted health, rights, justice, and democracy; and that was environmentally sound and sustainable…..
6. Crisis and the Crossroads of History: The Need for a Radicalized Citizenry
The global Animal Liberation Movement is an abolitionist movement that demands the end to all forms of animal exploitation, not merely reducing suffering; like its 19th century predecessor, it demands the eradication of slavery, not better treatment of the slaves. Stolen from the wild, bred and raised in captivity, held in cages and chains against their will and without their consent, animals literally are slaves, and thereby integral elements of the contemporary capitalist slave economy…..
7. Animal Rights and Moral Progress: The Struggle for Human Evolution
To call modernization processes and the current state of the world “progress” is nothing less than madness. The dominionist worldview of Western culture has been a calamitous error. The narratives, values, and identities of human supremacy cannot lead us to a better future, they can only ensure our doom. The fallacious and disastrous consequences of separating humans from nature, attempting to dominate nature and bend it to the human will, and thinking nature is an inexhaustible cornucopia of resources is evident in the ecological crisis reverberating through the world……
8. The Myth of Free Speech
With some irony, I listened to the testimony against me during the recent Senate Environment and Public works Committee meeting on ecoterrorism from Prague, land of Franz Kafka. From an Internet cafe in the Old Town sector, I heard Senators, the FBI’s Director for Counterterrorism, and a raving lunatic from a front group for animal exploitation industries demonize me as a terrorist. They tarred and feathered me as a philosophy professor who supports the illegal actions of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Some even accused me of using my position to recruit students into the criminal underground of masked liberationists…..
http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2007/12/08/the-myth-of-free-speech-2/
9. The Iron Cage of Movement Bureaucracy
Many individuals and organizations – none more aggressively than the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) — in fact have unctuously adopted the murderous voice of the corporate-state apparatus and denounced direct action as violent, terrorist, and antithetical to the values of the animal advocacy movement. The lethal virus of McCarthyism has infected our own movement. The moral purists and legalists implore direct action advocates to purge the “violent and extremist” element so that the voices of reason, compassion, and moderation can prevail. And prevail they will, we are asked to believe, with enough professionals, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and lawyers filling the hallways and chamber rooms of Congress, persuading our “elected representatives” who — of course! — serve only the interests of the people, and never the will of corporations. It is unfortunate that such naiveté still impedes social movements today, for the entire history of state repression, political corruption, and corporate hegemony belies this bullshit at every turn. In the accelerating phase of ecological crisis, it is now do or die and we do not have the luxury to wait for change to unfold in the long march through the institutions…..
http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/the-iron-cage-of-movement-bureaucracy/
10. The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: Putting Theory into Action and Animal Liberation into Higher Education
The recipe for the “success” of animal studies – immersion in abstraction, indulgent use of existing and new modes of jargon, pursuit of theory-for-theory’s sake, avoidance of social controversy (however intellectually controversial it may often be), eschewing political involvement, and keeping a very safe distance from “extremists” and “radicals” agitating for animal rights – is also the formula for its failure, upon being co-opted, tamed, and neutralized by academia. Consequently, the profound ethical, social, political, and environmental issues of animal exploitation are buried in dense theoretical webs; the lucidity and power of clear communication is oiled over with jargon and inscrutable language accessible only to experts; politically-charged issues are depoliticized; and theory is divorced from practice, resistance, and struggle. And all this unfolds amidst a new extinction crisis, the last one being 65 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs and over half of existing species,[4] and as a massive planetary social and ecological crisis begins to unfold through the reverberations of global climate change…..
11. Revisiting The Island of Dr. Moreau
But The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), is Wells’ canonical statement of a coming rupture in life processes. A multifaceted exploration, it is a powerful protest against the self-proclaimed right of science to experiment on animals and to engineer new life forms, a critique of dangerous utopian visions of “human perfection,” and a profound meditation on the psychic conflicts tearing apart humanity. Above all, it foregrounds what may happen when science recklessly tampers with genetics and disturbs intricate natural processes that have evolved over billions of years….
http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/revisiting-the-island-of-dr-moreau/
12. Minding the Animals: Ethology and the Obsolescence of Left Humanism
Despite our deep-rooted biological and social evolution, “humanity” is a social construct involving the identity and conception humans have of themselves as members of a species. In its arrogant, alienated, and domineering Western form, human identity reflects a host of problematic assumptions, biases, prejudices, and myths derived from religion, philosophy, science, and culture as a whole. The massive, tangled knot of ideologies involved in the social construction of our species identity need to be critically unraveled, so that we can develop new identities and societies and forge sane, ethical, ecological, and sustainable life ways. To an important degree, the new identities must emerge from an ethic of respect and connectedness to all sentient life – human and nonhuman – and to the Earth as a whole. Ethically progressive and inclusive, new post-humanist identities and values would also be scientifically valid, by accurately representing the true place of Homo sapiens in the social, sentient, and ecological communities in which it finds itself enmeshed…..
13. Who’s Afraid of Jerry Vlasak?
Dr. Jerry Vlasak is known for many things. He is a trauma surgeon in Los Angeles, a militant animal rights activist, a former vivisector turned renowned critic of vivisection, a scientific advisor to groups like Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) and In Defense of Animals, and a founder and Press Officer for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office. He also has a lot of “former” roles on his resume, such as former spokesperson for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and former Board Member of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Vlasak has earned the exile status of “former” for his controversial public defense of violence as a legitimate tactic for the animal rights/liberation movement to use against those who exploit animals for profit or “research.” He is also a former visitor to the UK. In summer 2004, UK Home Secretary David Blunkett, always acting in defense of the vivisection industry so important to the British economy, saw it fit to ban Vlasak, along with Pamelyn Ferdin, from again entering the UK because of his controversial exercise of free speech rights. In effect, Blunkett’s action elevated Vlasak from a mere (US) “domestic terrorist” to the more menacing status of “international terrorist….”
http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/05/03/who%e2%80%99s-afraid-of-jerry-vlasak/
14. Banned in the UK! How the Home Office “Protects the Public Good”
Free speech is a lie and myth on the same order as “democracy” itself – a vicious fiction peddled to gullible publics in the land of corporate plutocracies such as the UK and the US. The right to free speech exists only until you begin to use it and speak out against the prevailing powers, and once you do, especially if you are effective, they smash you, or kill you. Even more shocking than my own ban, in 2008 the Home Office wrote former ALF prisoner and now vegan educator, Gary Yourofsky, a Letter of Exclusion based on some of his pro-ALF writings. As Yourofsky has never been to the UK and never intended to go, this was similar to the movie Minority Report, where the cops bust for even thinking of doing something wrong, before you can do it. But it’s even worse, for Yourofsky never even thought once about going to the UK in his life! And apparently the Home Office has have done away with nicety of offering a response before they ban you.
15. Pacifism or Animals: Which Do You Love More? A Critique of Lee Hall, Friends of Animals, and the Franciombe Effect in the New Abolitionist Movement
Ironically, the relatively few animal defenders who carry out the struggle against the monstrous animal-industrial complex through militant direct action (MDA), such as property destruction and liberating caged animals, often find that animal exploiters are not their only opponents. In a perverse twist, a surprisingly large number of people whom the casual observer would assume to be allied with direct activists often align themselves with animal oppressors in their rush to show they “reach across the aisle,” “remain civil,” “work within the system,” and above all, “adhere to non-violence.” They become perfect puppets of the corporate-state complex…..
http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/pacifism-or-animals-which-do-you-love-more/
16. Averting the China Syndrome: Response to Our Critics and the Devotees of Fundamentalist Pacifism
A key intent of the essay was not to speculate on the relationship between Francione and Hall and FoA, but rather to describe what we call the “Franciombe effect” among animal rights activists and abolitionists throughout the world and in many languages. In “Pacifism or Animals: Which Do You Love More?,” we sought to highlight a problematic phenomenon that few have identified: the uncritical embrace of a dogmatic pacifist, legalist, and single-issue party line amongst abolitionists who champion and parrot Francione’s positions as if they were sacred scriptures. The Franciombe effect is evident in the slew of abolitionist forums and blogs in numerous languages, many of which are clones of one another, and all waiting for more pearls of wisdom from their revered mentor’s prolific output of books, articles, blog essays, and interviews….
17. Presence of Malice: UK Activists v. Lee Hall
UK activist, Lynn Sawyer: Hall is opposed to violence that is very clear and this is the issue her US critics are most concerned with. But what is “violence” or “force”? Hall does not enlighten us much, but she does include shouting, breaking the law, and upsetting those who wear fur or destroy forests. This is her opinion and she is entitled to it but it appears to come from an ivory tower far away from the reality of the streets and the fields. She seems to assume that the police/courts are always fair, that those who eat meat just need a few recipes to persuade them to become vegan, and that it is only animal rights militants who are ever violent. It would appear that she lives in a different realm than other activists because we always seem to encounter some mad fucker called Jethro who is 6ft 6 (tall and wide) carrying a Chainsaw and a shotgun, whose favourite uncle is Chief Constable and head of the masons, along with all his mates …who all know where we live. Yes, Lee, you persuade Jethro that his unappealing habit with badgers and sheep is wrong by giving him a recipe on vegan fruitcake; we will continue to rely on the fact that the only reason he hasn’t murdered us in our beds is because he thinks that we will invoke calamity and woe on him and his inbred clan if he tries it…..
http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/presence-of-malice-uk-activists-v-lee-hall/
18. “Is the Humane Society of the United States Part of the Meat Industry – Or What?”
A discussion with Steven Best, Associate Professor of Philosophy & Humanities, University of Texas, El Paso, co-editor of “Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals”, author of”Igniting A Revolution: Voices In Defense Of The Earth”, Senior Editor of Total Liberation for Thomas Paine’s Corner, and co-founder of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies.
19. Manifesto for Radical Abolitionism: Total Liberation By Any Means Necessary
We must link the liberation of other animals to human and Earth liberation, and build a revolutionary movement strong enough to vanquish capitalist hegemony and to remake society without the crushing loadstones of anthropocentrism, speciesism, patriarchy, racism, classism, statism, heterosexism, ableism, and every other pernicious form of hierarchical domination. Humanity may not succeed in this endeavor, but it is one that we must undertake. It is no longer the classical choice between “revolution or barbarism,” but now that of revolution or ecological collapse and mass extinction.
20. 13 Ways to Promote Alliance Politics and Total Liberation
This is the first of many drafts, and we seek your suggestions for further actions and your input on the politics of total liberation overall. We hope you will join us in the exciting, experimental process of building new communities and broader alliances by utilizing strategies such as we suggest below. Please share your experiences and ideas in our discussion forum and elsewhere. A global crisis and challenge such as humanity has never before faced is upon us. We have no time to waste. Apathy and complacency are more dangerous enemies than capitalism itself.
Intellectual Biography Statement
Beginnings
The first significant arc of my intellectual trajectory began with my work on postmodern theory and cultural studies through my writings with renowned Continental Philosophy scholar, Douglas Kellner. We started collaborating on articles in 1985 when I was a graduate student in Philosophy at the University of Chicago. My relation with Doug Kellner evolved to the point that he and I wrote a trilogy of books on postmodern theory and cultural studies – Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (1991), The Postmodern Turn (1997), and The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium (2001). These books have been translated into numerous languages, have sold tens of thousands of copies, are standard volumes for graduate courses throughout the world, and have won wide critical acclaim. Indeed, The Postmodern Turn and The Postmodern Adventure both won Social Theory/Philosophy Book of the Year awards. Rounding out this trilogy further, I published my own book, The Politics of Historical Vision: Marx, Foucault, and Habermas (1995). In this work, I analyzed the political implications of different forms of historiography and I engaged three great theorists in numerous critical dialogues that map out the insights and blindness of classical modern (Marx), reconstructed modern (Habermas), and postmodern (Foucault) positions. The book received high praise from Richard Wolin, Mark Poster, and numerous others.
Key Critical Concerns
The thrust of my work alone and with Kellner has been to:
* Map the various paradigm shifts in thought (philosophy, sociology, science, etc.), culture, and the arts
* Analyze and dialectically evaluate the various meanings of “modern” and “postmodern” in different fields, disciplines, and in history itself
* Search for both continuities and discontinuities along modern/postmodern fault lines and within postmodern shifts in theory, the arts, and science; and
* Evaluate these changes from a critical and normative standpoint that seeks to advance possibilities for radical democracy
I have never indulged in postmodern theory in a fashionable, esoteric, elitist, or opportunistic way. Instead, I have always been concerned with one of Foucault’s questions – “What is our present moment?” – and the practical and political implications of the turbulent changes in contemporary history and culture. Dewey, Habermas, Foucault, critical theory, and feminism have been vital influences throughout my theoretical trajectory that to date has culminated in 8 books and over 100 articles and reviews. I strongly affirm the value of the “public intellectual” who can illuminate key issues and controversies of the present day, communicate these in clear and compelling terms to a wide audience, and precipitate critical thinking, education, and progressive social change.
Since the mid-1990s, my work evolved from research in postmodern social theory and cultural studies to take on some core issues in science and technology studies. From the premise that science, technology, and global capitalism are the most vital forces of change in modern and postmodern societies, and that they co-evolve in profound and intimate ways, Kellner and I wrote The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium. Analyzing a wide array of related phenomena such as Thomas Pynchon’s novels, science fiction in literature and film, chaos and complexity theories in science, computerization and cyborg implosions between technology and the body, the Internet, genetic engineering and cloning, modern and postmodern wars, globalization, and environmentalism, we studied some of the key (often quite surreal) mutations in contemporary society (or, “global technocapitalism”). We charted a great “adventure” in human evolution that brings into being a wide array of complex and conflicting phenomena, noting some tendencies that augur greater democracy and other tendencies that threaten the continued survival of Homo sapiens altogether.
New Directions
My most recent work builds on these critical trajectories as it seeks to create new bridges between academic and activist communities, and among various activist causes themselves. Specifically, I have begun to address urgent issues raised by environmentalism and animal rights from the standpoints of critical theory, feminism, cultural studies, postmodern theory, deep ecology, and normative ethics. I have engaged issues such as the commonalities of oppression involved in racism, sexism, and speciesism, while mounting philosophical arguments in favor of animal rights and a new environmental ethic. In essays such as “The New Abolitionism: Capitalism, Slavery, and Animal Liberation,” I have demonstrated the strong analogies between 19th century abolitionism in the US and the “new abolitionism” of the 21st century that seeks to emancipate animals from slavery to humans and from the ideology of human supremacy.
Moreover, I have broadened long-time concerns with (cultural and political) identity politics into a new framework of human identity politics. I extend the analyses of race, class, sexual, and gender identities to consider what it means, more broadly, to forge worldviews and identities as members of Homo sapiens — as individuals within the human species whose broadest notion of self is socially constructed in relation/opposition to nonhuman animals. Using insights from Derrida, feminism, anthropology, Darwin, current cognitive ethology, and elsewhere, I have worked to break down the Berlin Wall that divides human and nonhuman animals in order to show how fallacious, motivated, and disastrous (morally, spiritually, socially, ecologically) is the ontological dualism between “humans” and “animals.” I question the rationalist fallacies informing humanist philosophies as I explore the meanings and possibilities of various forms of posthumanism. I show that even “radical humanism” is a scientifically invalid and morally prejudicial framework that needs to be overcome, and that struggles for human rights and liberation need to be articulated with struggles for animal rights and liberation.
In this vein, I co-edited, wrote the Introduction for, and contributed two essays to the first anthology and academic treatment of the Animal Liberation Front, Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (Lantern Books, 2004). Collecting original essays from both academics and activists, including feminist and Native American viewpoints, this book explores the ethical, philosophical, political, and legal controversies surrounding the use of direct action tactics on behalf of the liberation of animals, as it compares human and animal liberation movements. Terrorists or Freedom Fighters is an exciting new volume; it already is considered to be one of the most important books in the rich literature of animal rights and has prompted new discussions in academic and activist communities.
Following the same interdisciplinary and multiperspectival approach, Nocella and I put together an even richer book, Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (AK Press, 2006). I edited the volume and wrote the lengthy historical and critical Introduction on the origin and trajectory of modern Western environmental movements. In a trailblazing manner, we employ a pluralist, multiperspectival, interdisciplinary, boundary-transgressing, bridge-building approach, one that brings together sundry people and positions that ordinarily never meet. With over forty contributors, Igniting a Revolution features a wide array of critical perspectives on social and environmental issues, ranging from social ecology, deep ecology, Earth First!, ecofeminism, and primitivism to Native Americans, Black liberationists, political prisoners, and animal/Earth liberation movements. An important task of the book is to decouple environmentalism from white, male, privileged positions; to diversify it along class, gender, racial, ethnic, and other lines; and to remove it from its single-issue pedestal. This book has made an immediate impact among academic and activist communities and has won broad acclaim for the unique and important book that it is.
In the new book that I am currently completing for Rowan and Littlefield, entitled Animal Rights and Moral Progress: The Struggle for Human Evolution (2007), I argue that the next logical and necessary step in Western cultural evolution is to broaden the notion of rights to include animals and thereby to fully represent and protect their interests in law. The book shows how human beings have written the narratives of their own historical development without proper grounding of their existence in relationship with other species and the natural world. The book covers the broad scope of human biological evolution from australopithecines to Homo forms, and debunks key historical myths such as “man the hunter” and “man the carnivore.” With due attention to the complexities of writing a historical narrative, I argue that there is a progressive movement in modern Western development that can be charted through the evolution of rights, whereby rights are extended (clearly imperfectly) to an increasingly broad human community. If society learns to follow the logical implications of rights, it will move further down the path (already started in highly significant ways) of extending basic rights to animals next. I argue that the “third stage of Enlightenment” — building on the first two stages that emerged in the 18th century and then in the 1960s — involves overcoming prejudices toward human and nonhuman species, and thereby supersedes not only racism, sexism, and homophobia, but also speciesism.
Whereas ethicists such as Arthur Kaplan argue that the notion of animal rights “cheapens” human rights, I demonstrate, quite the contrary, that animal rights redeems the prevailing humanist notions of rights from an arbitrary and prejudicial limitation of their meaning and scope. Showing how the exploitation of animals negatively affects human beings in a host of ways – ranging from health and violent behavior to the global environmental crisis — I argue that a viable human future requires a radical rethinking of our relationship to animals and the earth, extending basic moral and legal rights to animals, and formulating new species identities rooted in an evolutionary and naturalist understanding of human nature(s). Among other things, I currently am exploring the rich possibilities of extending Sandra Harding’s standpoint theory toward a new evaluation of the crises in the human world and its relation to the natural world as can be uniquely revealed from the animal standpoint. While animals obviously cannot “speak” about their sufferings (which they nonetheless communicate in clear enough ways), it is only from the standpoint of animal exploitation that we can glean key facets of the pathology of human violence and illuminate important aspects of “misothery” (the hatred of and alienation from the natural world) and the social and environmental crises that so gravely threaten human existence.
Teaching and Activism
In addition to my productive research life, I am very dedicated to the mission of teaching. My student evaluations are always highly positive and my classes are popular. I teach a wide array of classes, including Modern Humanities, Introduction to Philosophy, Ethics, Logic and Critical Thinking, Social Philosophy, Science and Technology Studies, Environmental Ethics, Philosophy of History, and Philosophy of Law. Whether teaching advanced seminars on contemporary social theories or an Introduction to Philosophy class to nearly 500 students, I teach in a dynamic, energetic, non-dogmatic, dialogic manner that balances serious analysis with levity and humor. I teach socially relevant and controversial topics with the intent to awaken critical thinking processes and never to dictate the “correct conclusion.” I do not, however, rest satisfied with the relativist conclusion that all opinions of equal weight and value; rather, I urge students to scrutinize all positions critically and to provide the best possible rational support for their arguments that they can construct, understanding that their positions can always change in light of new facts, evidence, and insights.
To give an example of the kind of critical pedagogy I have done in El Paso, students in my Philosophy of Law class (Spring 2004) and I led a successful initiative at the City Council to pass a resolution declaring the PATRIOT Act to be unconstitutional. El Paso thereby became the 300th US city to win such a measure, succeeding where efforts in Austin and elsewhere failed. The research and numerous meetings with public officials paid off handsomely, and the result for my (somewhat jaded and apathetic) students was empowering and transformative.
As an “engaged intellectual,” I have been a highly visible human rights, animal rights, and environmental activist in the El Paso community and in far larger stages, both nationally and internationally. I receive numerous invitations to speak nationally and internationally on various topics and to diverse audiences in academic, activist, and community settings. I have spoken on theatre and narrative in Leon, France; on biotechnology and cloning in Essen, Germany; on abolitionism in the human and animal rights struggles in London, England; on environmentalism in Oslo, Norway and Stockholm, Sweden, and on applied ethics and terrorism in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. I have been Visiting Scholar at New Mexico State University; Keynote Speaker for an International Management conference in Manchester, England; and featured Earth Day speaker for the community of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of my work, I have addressed audiences in diverse areas such as sociology, business and management, science, nutrition, and various activist causes.
Through my work in theory and politics, through essays, books, conferences, and activism, I have broken new ground in articulating commonalities between human liberation and animal liberation issues. I have built bridges between activists and academics, and among various academics themselves, where previously there were none. As evident in the lineup of conferences I have help to organize — featuring Black Panthers, AIM activists, feminists, animal rights activists, environmentalists, and a host of others — my work is not only interdisciplinary and bridge-building in theory, but also in practice.
With colleague Tony Nocella, I have also created an online academic/activist website, the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS). ICAS is the first scholarly center dedicated to philosophical discussion on animal liberation. It strives to advance the study, research, and dialogue of the principles and practices of animal rights. TheInstitute engages in critical examinations and philosophical dialogue through an online journal, research databases, a speaker’s bureau, and conferences on animal liberation issues. Furthermore, ICAS provides resources for exploring elements of other social justice struggles as it links them to a comprehensive vision of liberation that transcends human boundaries. As part of the project of ICAS, I also have created the first academic journal for animal liberation issues, entitled Journal for Critical Animal Studies. This is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, academic journal that explores issues in animal rights/liberation issues and how they relate to other justice struggles and society as a whole. I serve as Chief Editor of the journal, presiding over the publication of five issues to date. I am Book Review editor for Democracy and Nature, and on the editorial boards of numerous academic journals. Also, I recently co-founded a new interdisciplinary academic journal on ecological politics with colleagues at Fresno State, entitled Green Theory and Practice.
Finally, embodying my commitments to making philosophy a relevant force and to exemplifying the virtues of the public intellectual, for 25 years I have been deeply involved with community groups on various issues. Most recently, since 1993 when I came to El Paso, I headed and worked with numerous animal advocacy and rescue groups, served as Vice-President of the Vegetarian Society of El Paso, and organized with the Green Party and numerous local environmental groups. Since 1992, I have hosted a local NPR affiliate radio show (broadcast globally over the Internet) that addresses urgent issues of the day as they relate to the matrix of human, animal, and environmental concerns. Widely recognized as a leading theorist and activist on animal and environmental issues, I have been featured in local, national, and international media (television, print, radio, and documentaries) countless times. I have been interviewed about various philosophical topics – from animal rights and environmental ethics to film analysis and gun control – by National Public Radio, the Alan Colmes show, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, BBC News, Channel 4 in London, and the Guardian Independent, as well as media in Brazil, Barcelona, and France. I have also been featured in academic newspapers and magazines such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Philosopher’s Magazine.
The Future
I plan to deepen and developing my work in new directions – such as to be enriched by anthropology and history — always striving to make philosophy a relevant force for progressive social change. Throughout my career as a student, academic, and community activist, I have developed an increasingly broad and comprehensive understanding of concepts such as power, democracy, rights, and freedom. I have learned to seek and draw connections among diverse phenomena, to analyze commonalities of oppression, and to grasp the interconnectedness of human, animal, and Earth interests. I have worked within, and worked against, the limitations of humanism and anthropocentrism to try to advance a broader ethic and concepts of rights, equality, and community. I hope my work is a small contribution to creating a more just and humane present, and to forging a future organized around values of democracy, equality, and peace rather than tyranny, hierarchy, and violence.
Steven Best
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Humanities
University of Texas, El Paso
