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.

What is Zen Buddhism? What is its value for Christians? How does it relate to Christian beliefs? How does Zen relate to the world--and to changing it? Total Liberation explores these and other questions about Zen and Christianity. Habito has two basic aims. First, he demonstrates the relevance of Zen to a contemporary Christian spirituality, comparing Zen insights to the often overly-cerebral qualities of Western Christianity. Second, he shows how a blending of Zen and Christian spirituality complement and sustain a social active role in the world. While an important dimension of Zen involves contemplation and personal growth, Habito points out that this basic ideal ultimately expands to embrace all of creation and not just the individual self. Similarly, the Christian spiritual relationship with God finds its expression not only in the personal and contemplative, but in action. Total Liberation defines true spirituality as engagement with, rather than disassociation from, the social dimension. It shows that Zen, no less than Christian, spirituality must lead to active involvement and struggle against social violence and oppression.

This book argues that there is an ongoing planetary crisis, in both the social and natural worlds, that is of urgent importance. This demands a new politics, a politics of total liberation, one that grasps the need to unite the disparate movements for human, animal, and earth liberation. In the book, Best outlines a way forward despite challenges.

Along with Civil Rights and Women’s liberation, Animal Rights became one of leading social moments of the twentieth century. This book critically reviews all principal contributions to the American animal rights debate by activists, campaigners, academics, and lawyers, while placing animal rights in context with other related and competing movements. Rethinking the American Animal Rights Movement examines the strategies employed within the movement to advance its goals, which ranged from public advocacy and legal reforms to civil disobedience, vigilantism, anarchism, and even "terrorism." It summarizes key theoretical and legal frameworks that inspired those strategies, as well as the ideological motivations of the movement. It highlights the irreconcilable tension between moral and legal rights verses "humane treatment of animals" as prescribed by advocates of animal welfarism. The book also looks back to the nineteenth century origins of the movement, examining its appeal to a sentimentalist conception of rights standing in marked contrast with twentieth century rights theory. After providing an extensive social history of the twentieth century movement, the book subsequently offers a diagnosis of why it stalled at the turn of millennium in its various efforts to advance the cause of nonhuman animals. This diagnosis emphasizes the often-contradictory goals and strategies adopted by the movement in its different phases and manifestations across three centuries. The book is unique in presenting students, activists, and scholars with a history and critical discussion of its accomplishments, failures, and ongoing complexities faced by the American animal rights movement.

This collection of articles contains the English contributions to the 4th Austrian Students’ Conference of Linguistics (Österreichische Studierenden-Konferenz der Linguistik, ÖSKL), which was held in November 2011 at the University of Innsbruck. With this collection, the editors want to make the insights and the knowledge presented at the 4th ÖSKL available in written format to a wider public. The contributions present in this collection are excerpts from PhD as well as diploma theses and seminar papers. The fifteen papers collected in this volume are very diverse, as are the authors themselves, who come from nine different countries, from Portugal in the West, Iran in the East and Norway in the North. The papers come from a variety of linguistic subdisciplines. Besides a strong focus on syntax, cognitive and historical linguistics, there are papers exploring pragmatics, foreign language acquisition, phonology and sociolinguistics. This volume of collected essays brings together conversations, papers, and debates from the Third Annual North American Anarchist Studies Network Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Nathan Jun and Jorell A. Meléndez aspire to go beyond a simple collection of papers and instead aim to maintain a dialogue among different academic fields with the sole task of comprehending and re-thinking anarchist studies. With over twenty-one chapters written by a diverse range of activists, organizers, musicians, artists, poets, and academics, this book transgresses the apparent simplicity of the study of anarchism with a dynamic and interdisciplinary approach that crystallizes and emulates the heterogeneous nature of the anarchist ideal. From theory and philosophy to historical analyses, methodologies, and perspectives, from different manifestations in the arts, media, and culture to religion, ethics, and spirituality, from the intersectionality of animal liberation and queer struggles to contemporary praxis and organizing, the authors explore different topics from a critical perspective that is often lacking in their respective academic fields. This book is a must-buy for critical teachers, students, and activists interested in studying anarchism and the different ways in which we can transform our reality.

Jesus Christ has taught the humanity the path of salvation and self- realization. “Peace I leave with you; I do not give to you as the world gives.” John 14 /27. The Buddha invented the path to happiness and taught us the eight fold path for samyak samadhi. Patanjali the propounder of Yogasutra advocates Ashtangayoga for emancipation – the state of ultimate peace. Everyone is entitled to achieve this emancipation or liberation even if the paths towards liberation are different. However, it can be achieved only through a spiritual journey with an earnest strive. So this book describes about the paths of liberation as discussed in Samkya and Yoga Philosophy.

Prefaced with a brief introduction to the field of animal studies, the text explores the key influential terms, topics and debates which have had a major impact on the field, and that students are most likely to encounter in their animal studies classes. Animal Studies provides a guide to key concepts in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of animal studies, laid out in A-Z format. While Human–Animal Studies and Critical Animal Studies are the main frameworks that inform the bulk of the writings in animal studies and the key concepts discussed in the volume, other approaches such as anthrozoology and cognitive ethology are also explored. The entries in the volume attend to the differences in ongoing debates among scholars and activists, showing that what is commonly called “animal studies” is far from a unified body of work. A full bibliography of sources is included at the end of the book, along with an extensive index. The book will be a valuable guide to undergraduate and postgraduate students in geography, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, and other related disciplines. Seasoned researchers will find the book helpful, when researching topics outside of their specialization. Outside of academia, it will be of interest to activists, as well as professional organizations.

Disenchanted by indirect forms of protest designed to work within existing systems of corporate and state power, animal and earth liberation activists have turned instead to direct action. In this detailed ethnographic account Jennifer Grubbs takes the reader inside the complicated, intricate world of these powerful and controversial interventions, nuancing the harrowing realities of political repression with the inspiring, clever ways that activists resist. Grubbs draws on her personal experiences within the movement to offer a thoughtful and intersectional analysis. Tracing the strategies of liberationist activists as they grapple with doing activism under extreme repression, Ecoliberation challenges ubiquitous frameworks that position protestors as either good or bad by showing how activists playfully and confrontationally enact radical social change. Nearly a decade in the making, the book looks back at the notorious period of repression called the Green Scare and draws contemporary connections to the creep of fascism under President Donald Trump. In stories that are simultaneously heartbreaking, riddled with tension and contradiction, and inspiring, Grubbs proves that whether or not the revolution is televised, it will be spectacular.

Exploring the innovative and thriving field of animal geographies, this Research Agenda analyses how humans think about, place, and engage with animals. Chapters explore how animals shape human identities and social dynamics, as well as how broader processes influence the circumstances and experiences of animals.

David Tombs offers an accessible introduction to the theological challenges raised by Latin American Liberation and a new contribution to how these challenges might be understood as a chronological sequence. Liberation theology emerged in the 1960s in Latin America and thrived until it reached a crisis in the 1990s. This work traces the distinct developments in thought through the decades, thus presenting a contextual theology. The book is divided into five main sections: the historical role of the church from Columbus’s arrival in 1492 until the Cuban revolution of 1959; the reform and renewal decade of the 1960s; the transitional decade of the 1970s; the revision and redirection of liberation theology in the 1980s; and a crisis of relevance in the 1990s. This book offers insights into liberation theology’s profound contributions for any socially engaged theology of the future and is crucial to understanding liberation theology and its legacies. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.