https://youtu.be/18A0Q4vFCB0
Christopher Sebastian is a well-known speaker and journalist specializing in environmental and intersectional animal rights issues, media literacy, and American and European politics. He is currently living and working as an adjunct professor in Prague. Christopher Sebastian came to animal rights having read the diet book, Skinny Bitch, but was soon introduced to the work of Carol Adams, Breeze Harper, pattrice jones, and others, leading him to become one of the movement’s most important voices in critical vegan feminist discourse.
Christopher Sebastian’s entry into the movement through Skinny Bitch is quite indicative. The book celebrates individualism, but it also introduces basic arguments for animal rights. It would be the latter emphasis on multispecies collective solidarity that would motivate Christopher Sebastian to become vegan. Yet, since Skinny Bitch’s publication in 2005, the animal rights movement has grown even more focused on individualism and consumerism, effectively decentering compassion for other animals.
Christopher Sebastian now researches the politics of efficacy in the animal rights movement which have tended to prioritize fundraising over animal liberation. In his past consultancy work with major nonprofits, he observed a tendency to eschew evidence in order to satisfy the wants of major funders. “They are invested in keeping the world exactly as it is […],” he explains, adding that “philanthropy is actually helping to create the problem in the first place.”
Although most people go vegan and stay vegan out of compassion for animals, elite capture has ensured that the movement’s dominant message is reworked to encourage consumption. Even if this consumption is plant-based, it does not challenge extreme social inequality or environmental unsustainability, both of which inform human and nonhuman suffering. This message of consumption over liberation is supported by powerful capitalist ideologies that position individualism as a “reality” that must be catered to. Counters Christopher Sebastian:
You’re trying to force a very specific narrative, and, like you know, a very hypermasculine, very toxically masculine, very Eurocentric, very selfish and hyperindividualistic narrative onto veganism and on to activism writ large. And I think that is not just false, but it is dangerous and it is going to ultimately lead to the group’s implosion or destruction in the long run if we continue doing that, and if we don’t actually center […] grassroots, compassionate, empathetic efforts.
According to Christopher Sebastian, there are four key main obstacles in animal rights: professionalization, effective altruism, elite capture, and right wing extremism, “which are four ways of saying the same thing,” he explains.
I think that professionalization has done us a grave harm […] because people are chasing funding and people are chasing grant applications […] and overwhelmingly your activism is dictated by what funders want and not what is the material reality that we are facing.
Reality, in other words, is heavily politicized. “When you control the channels of knowledge creation and distribution, you get to control the messaging,” he emphasizes. “We have been given consumerism. We’ve been given consumer capitalism. We’ve been given hyperindividualism.” This individualism, he adds, is problematic in that it absconds large corporations and elite decisionmakers from culpability in a deeply unequal society of their own making. Reducing veganism to just an expression of individual responsibility that can be realized primarily through consumer choice, for that matter, only serves to greenwash (and humane-wash) these corporations to their benefit.
On the politics of history, knowledge, and reality-construction, he offers: “I think that documenting our history is an important part of where I would like to see us go, because if we don’t actually have this documentation, it’s very easy to lose and we’ve seen that happen over and over again in other aspects, because this is not limited simply to veganism or vegan activism.” In support of this concern, Christopher Sebastian points to the work of early 20th century vegans which clearly laid out the meaning of veganism. Today, it is regularly undercut by capitalist entities that seek to deradicalize it and reframe it as reducetarianism. “I don’t see how that’s beneficial for animals,” he worries.
Subsequently, Christopher Sebastian insists that diligence is needed as:
It only takes one generation of people to forget our collective knowledge. Bad actors actually rely on that […]. No, I don’t want anyone redefining veganism, because they’re going to make that definition worse.
Thus capitalism is a prevailing issue in the animal rights movement. Yet, as vegan feminism has identified, gender politics are also key. Christopher Sebastian summarizes: “A lot of it comes down to fear of the feminine.” “We have invisibilized the contributions of women within the movement,” he charges, and “centralized men and masculinity” in campaigning and leadership. Appealing to men is important, he concedes, but trying to appeal to toxic masculinity in the process is problematic:
I would like to see us coming up with more creative, more radical types of activism and ways of engaging with one another. I think there is a way to reclaim men and what it means to be masculine without relying on these tropes. Not only do I think that we can do it, I think that we need to do it. This is an absolute necessity.
Vegan feminism, he concludes, offers the movement a “spirit of mutual aid” and encourages us to commit to “taking care of one another” regardless of species, gender, or race. For Christopher Sebastian, there is an opportunity rising now in veganism to revisit these marginalized care-based values and resist encroaching consumerism.
This interview was recorded on January 28, 2025.