Lierre Keith

Biography

Keith attended Brookline High School in Massachusetts. She began her public involvement in the feminist movement as the founding editor of Vanessa and Iris: A Journal for Young Feminists (1983–85). During this same period, she also volunteered with a group called Women Against Violence Against Women in Cambridge, where she participated in educational events and protest campaigns. In 1984 she was a founding member of Minor Disturbance, a protest group against militarism from a feminist perspective. In 1986 she was a founding member of Feminists Against Pornography in Northampton, Massachusetts. She is a founding editor of Rain and Thunder, a radical feminist journal in Northampton.

As a radical feminist and more recently as a radical environmentalist, Keith has had many appearances, interviews, and speeches around the U.S. and Canada.

Keith was an early public advocate of the U.S. local food movement. In a 2006 Boston Globe human interest story, she said, "I like knowing that I'm supporting the local economy and not corporate America."

Her views have attracted negative attention from some vegetarians, what one journalist has called a "Vegan War." Illustrative of the heated political debate, protesters hit Keith with chili pepper-laced pies during a presentation of her book The Vegetarian Myth at the 2010 Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair.

The Vegetarian Myth

Keith's 2009 book The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability is an examination of the ecological effects of agriculture and vegetarianism. In The Vegetarian Myth, she sees agriculture as destroying entire ecosystems, such as the North American prairie. Agriculture also destroys topsoil, according to Keith.

Deep Green Resistance

Keith is associated with the Deep Green Resistance movement, and together with Aric McBay and Derrick Jensen, she co-wrote Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet, published in May 2011. The book describes itself as a "manual on how to build a resistance movement that will bring down industrial civilization and save the planet," and "evaluates strategic options for resistance, from nonviolence to guerrilla warfare, and the conditions required for those options to be successful."

After the publication of this book, the authors co-founded an organization by the same name. Aric McBay left the organization at the beginning of 2012, however, attributing his departure to the alleged cancellation of a transgender-inclusive policy by Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith. Deep Green Resistance has disputed this account, saying that the women's safe space policy was one issue among many and that the decision to restrict women's spaces was made by the women of DGR, and not by Jensen or Keith.

Works