Marti Kheel


Marti Kheel was a vegan ecofeminist activist scholar credited with founding Feminists for Animal Rights in California in 1982. She authored several books in deep ecology and ecofeminism, including Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective and several widely cited articles in college courses and related scholarship, such as "The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair", "From Heroic to Holistic Ethics: The Ecofeminist Challenge", and "From Healing Herbs to Deadly Drugs: Western Medicine's War Against the Natural World". She was a long-time vegan in diet, lifestyle, and philosophical commitments, working out her understanding of its implications in every area of our human relationships with nature and its constituents, and she found a wide audience for those deep reflections. Reportedly, she had pursued a raw vegan diet later in her life. Her pioneering scholarship in ecofeminist ethics is foundational for continuing work in these fields.

Early life

Dr. Marti Kheel was one of six children born to Labor Mediator Theodore W. Kheel, and journalist and civic leader Ann Sunstein Kheel, who passed in 2003.
She was born in New York City on August 25, 1948. She is described as being "drawn to other–than–human animals." She related on her website how, around 1960, when she was twelve years old, she first protested on behalf of animals when she refused to be photographed in a family photograph without her cat, Booty–tat. She became vegetarian in 1973 through a developing awareness occasioned, by a series of troubling experiences in restaurants and grocery stores, in which she became increasingly aware of the living beings who were defined as "meat" and killed for that interpretation. Four years later, she joined the grass–roots Animal Liberation Collective while living in Montreal, and explored a wide spectrum of animal abuse issues. She became a vegan as she progressively grew more aware of the horrific treatment of nonhumans on farms and in human society's systematic oppression of nonhumans.
She co–founded Feminists for Animal Rights in California in 1982, to which she had relocated, hoping to bridge women's and animal advocacy movements. That same year, she developed a slideshow paralleling how women and other–than–human animals are viewed under hierarchical domination characteristic of 'patriarchal' society. Under the auspices of FAR, which she cofounded, the presentation has since been shown throughout the United States and abroad. Over the years, FAR grew into a national organization with regional offices throughout and beyond the United States with a message of 'shared oppression' that continues to inspire, although FAR is not currently active.

Education

Most recently she was a visiting scholar in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley.

Publications

BOOK
. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008..
Outline, Excerpts, and Reviews of :
CHAPTERS IN OTHER BOOKS
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Marti Kheel died of acute myeloid leukemia at 63 years of age on November 19, 2011, in Greenwich, CT. She was widely memorialized on the Internet, including numerous professional, topical, scholarly, and general e-mail discussion lists.