Vegans on Speciesism and Ableism

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank everyone that is involved in the ecoability movement and field of study that is working to make the relationship between disability, animal, and environmental liberation, advocacy, and justice. We would like to thank the contributors of the book—Clifton Sanders, Lea Lani Kinikini, S. Marek Muller, Daniel Salomon, Birkan Tas, Zoie (Zane) McNeill, Rebecca Eli Long, T.N. Rowan, and Elisa Stone. We would like to thank Peter Lang Publishing for believing in ecoability and publishing on the movement. We would like to thank everyone at Peter Lang Publishing, especially, Jackie Pavlovic, Patty Mulrane, and Dani Green from Peter Lang Publishing. We would like to thank all of those who wrote reviews for the book: Peace Studies Journal, Transformative Justice Journal, Green Theory and Praxis Journal, Richard White, Jason Del Gandio, Nathan Poirier, Jordan Halliday, Will Boisseau, Alisha Page, Johnny Lupinacci, and Ângela Lamas Rodrigues. We would like to thank Institute for Critical Animal Studies, Critical Animal Studies Academy, Critical Animal Studies Society, Ecoability Collective, Academy for Peace Education, Salt Lake Community College’s Department of Criminal Justice, Faculty Senate, JEDI4ST research center, Utah Reintegration Project, JEDI Hub, JEDI Senate, Utah Vegan Runners, Arissa Media Group, Wisdom Behind the Walls, Poetry Behind the Walls, Hangar 15 Bicycles, Galen College, Academy for Peace Education, AK Press, Syracuse Quaker Meeting, Alternatives to Violence Project, Outdoor Empowerment, Lowrider Studies Journal, Punk Studies Journal, Journal of Hip Hop Studies, International Hip Hop Studies Association, Institute for Hip Hop Activism, Lowrider Studies, and Total Liberation Campaigns.

Foreword

Clifton Sanders

Although it has only existed as a category of inquiry and discourse for a decade, the ecoability movement has produced a remarkably complex and diverse body of work to-date, including critical studies, monographs, conferences, and commentary that break new ground with each publication. Perhaps I should not be so surprised by this, inasmuch as ecoability emerged out of recognitions and relationships that are best described as intersectional. In this book, Anthony Nocella and Amber George assemble scholar-activists to probe the confluences between veganism, critical animal studies, disability, animal, environmental rights, and so on. Formulating the ecoability paradigm creates new space for an activist agenda that critically explores a new universe of connections in ways which illuminate even more complex interdependencies. This in turn further motivates collaboration, support, activism, and, ultimately, desires for justice realized via the total liberation of all species and nature-self.

As a newcomer to ecoability scholarship, I find this book personally compelling in several ways. I have been a teacher and academic administrator at Salt Lake Community College for more than 25 years, but my formal professional training and prior work experience was as a doctorate organic chemist and research scientist. My undergraduate years and summer research internships in industry occurred during the same time frame as the widespread publication of chemical assaults upon the natural world such as the Love Canal disaster and other high-profile pollution and ecosystem destruction scenarios, along with the devastating economic and human impacts of environmental racism upon marginalized and oppressed communities. Moreover, I grew up in Turners Station, Maryland, a working class African American community in southeastern Baltimore County. Turners Station is situated on Bear Creek (a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay) across the water from Sparrows Point, where steel mills, shipyards and power plants thrived from World War II until the 1970s and were notorious for frequent fish kills, toxic ponds, and heavy ←xi | xii→metal ground contamination, some of which still exist in and around my childhood community. (I note, extreme scientific caution notwithstanding, that Henrietta Lacks, whose HeLa cancer cells are celebrated worldwide by the medical community but only recently afforded her recognition, lived in Turners Station at the time of her cervical cancer diagnosis.)