Rescue Animals, or the World Will Burn

The root cause of the devastation in Maui is not what you think – and it has deep connections to animal rights.

A woman rescues a singed cat in Lahaina, Maui.

What’s up this week

• There have been dozens of write-ups about the cause of the firestorm in Maui, but almost none of the discussion has identified the root cause: a system that has ignored the interests of living beings. People have blamed the government, the power companies, and even the maintenance of local roads. What has been barely discussed, however, is how policies for decades have devastated the local ecosystems — and led to the conditions that allowed a wildfire to kill hundreds of human beings. I discuss in today’s newsletter below.

• An important legal brief was filed by Harvard Law School’s Professor Kristen Stilt this week, arguing that animals are “someone” entitled to protection under the necessity defense. This could be among the most important legal documents ever drafted, and I will have much more to say about it in the weeks and months to come. But you can read it here.

• A crucial pre-trial hearing is unfolding on Friday, September 1, with a long cast of the industry’s most villainous faces. Lawyers from the California Farm Bureau, Costco, and others will all be in court to argue that we are not entitled to evidence of animal cruelty at factory farms. At stake will be our right to present a complete defense — and the public’s right to know.

• A lot of our friends and supporters this week will be asking the Sonoma County District Attorney to #ProsecuteMe. This will be the first case in open rescue history where the defendants are prosecuted, not for our own actions, but for the actions of others. The idea behind the #ProsecuteMe campaign is, if you are going to prosecute people for merely supporting the rescue of animals, you’ll have to prosecute all of us. I hope you’ll join — and become an Open Rescue Advocate.

—

The disaster in Lahaina, Maui, which has left over a hundred people dead, has led to a chorus of finger-pointing. But almost no one has pointed to the long-term causes — the decimation of local ecosystems — that made the conditions ripe for a fire.

As disturbing images have gone viral from the firestorm, people have pointed to a number of causes. Swirling winds that caused a tree to fall on a power line — and spread the fire across the island at lightning speed. The failure of the local electric company to shut down the electricity. The delayed and inadequate alerts by the disaster warning system in Maui.

But none of these explanations actually get to the root cause: a dry and devastated ecosystem, including highly flammable invasive grasses, where much of the natural plants and animals have disappeared. Indeed, long before the wildfires, Hawaii has suffered so much devastation from human encroachment on natural systems that it’s been described as the extinction capital of the world. Ninety-five of 142 bird species (67%) that are unique to Hawaii have gone extinct since human beings first settled on the island. And in all of these cases, the pattern was the same:

Human beings acted on the land without regard to the consequences for the long-term interests of actual living beings.

And that is the real cause of the wildfires. While many have cited the invasive grasses, power companies focused more on profit than people’s lives, and a political system that is insufficiently responsive to the dangers faced by ordinary people, the actual and root cause of the wildfires — and so much other environmental or other catastrophe facing human civilization today — is a system inattentive to the needs of those who have little power.

If Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk lived in Lahaina, there would have been more than one road out of town. There would have been more investment in emergency response and an early warning system And probably, not a single person would have died.

But the people of Lahaina, and especially those who died, were relatively less well off, elderly, and above all, lacking in power. In that regard, they were like the countless animals who have been exterminated in Hawaii over the last few hundred years: not important enough to care about, within our political and economic system, until it was too late.

And until that changes, we will see more wildfires, more extinctions, and perhaps even an unprecedented ecosystem collapse. For the other animals of this earth, that is already happening. The wildfire in Maui shows how, soon, it will happen to us.

I’ve been thinking about this, and the mass suffering you see in cities like San Francisco, as my trial in Sonoma approaches. I’ve argued that this case is about much more than the chickens tortured by Costco and Whole Foods. Indeed, it’s about much more than animal rights.

At stake in this trial is the question of what we want our society to be: a place where we teach compassion, or a place where we teach callousness and cruelty?

At heart, most human beings want the former. This is why we have all cried tears for the residents of Maui, including the non-human companions who were left behind. But our systems do not care. The net result is policies that push, not just individuals or even species, but our entire planet off the proverbial cliff.

The antidote is to normalize and institutionalize dramatic action in the other direction. We need to embed the compassion that we all feel, for an individual running from a fire, into the political and legal fabric of our society.

We need to embed rescue into everything.

Imagine a Hawaii, and a nation, where we did not disregard the dozens of bird species disappearing from the Earth forever, but helped them come back to life. Imagine a world where we did not allow plantations to raze entire forests and ecosystems, forcing all the living beings to flee, but instead built shelters and rehab centers for all the suffering creatures of Hawaii — domesticated or wild. Imagine a nation where our legal and political and economic systems took the rights of all living beings seriously.

That is the sort of system where the wildfires in Lahaina never would have happened. The big money that goes into tourism and plantations and factory farming would instead have gone into things like, well, rescue.

That’s what we’re fighting for in court. I don’t know what will happen in the next few weeks. I could end up in prison. But I do know what we are building toward: a world where rescue is not a crime. It’s a way of life for our entire species.