Dr. Lisa Kemmerer
Internationally known for her work in animal ethics, Professor Emeritus Dr. Lisa Kemmerer retired in 2020 to become a full-time activist as founder and director of the knowledge generating non-profit, Tapestry. Tapestry envisions a world where all life and the earth itself are free from the exploitation of industrial capitalism—a vegan world where no living being suffers harm in the name of religion and where anymals and earth are treated with care, dignity, and respect. Always an anymal liberationist, Dr. Kemmerer also uses the arts for activism, both poetry and painting. She developed the Hospitality Challenge, which has exponentially increased vegan offerings in target eateries, as a way to leverage human interests to help anymals. Kemmerer volunteers at the local shelter and helps with animal rescue/rehabilitation, tending baby squirrels, opossums, and bunnies. Whatever else she is doing, what matters most to Dr. Kemmerer is empathy and kindness, building greater justice, and helping to bring sustainability and peace to anymals, people, and the planet.
Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur
“Once stripped of the artifice of human civilization, I am just another edible animal.”
Lisa Kemmerer in Bear Necessities: Rescue, Rehabilitation, Sanctuary, and Advocacy
“We have extended ethics outward from self to family to community to all of humanity. We are now called to extend moral consideration to other species.”
Kemmerer, In Search of Consistency
“Lisa Kemmerer is such a clear thinker on issues concerning the treatment of animals in society.”
Hope Ferdowsian (PhD, MD, MPH), Founder of Phoenix Zones Initiative
“Dr. and professor emeritus Lisa Kemmerer always works across social justice concerns, tying animal ethics with human oppression and our imperiled planet.“
Richard Schwartz (PhD), author
Professor Kemmerer
After graduation, Dr. K taught at the university level for more than 20 years, where research in anymal studies took her to South America, Europe, Africa, and across the United States several times over. Kemmerer helped to re-envision methods of preserving both wildlife and rural communities in Kenyan wildlife preserves (reflected in Animals and the Environment). She scrambled through thick, steep jungles of Peru with locals to learn more about working with rural communities to protect endangered yellow-tailed woolley monkeys (reflected in Primate People). She spent time in bear and elephant sanctuaries in Cambodia, pondering the moral boundaries of sanctuary confinement (reflected in Bear Necessities).
Speaking engagements have also taken Professor Kemmerer to India, The Netherlands, Brazil, Finland, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, England, Canada, Luxembourg (repeatedly), and to many places in the United States. When Eating Earth was translated into Italian (Mangiare la Terra), Dr. K was invited on a two-week book tour through Italy; she was also invited to publish and lecture with a climate change think-tank in Barcelona.
Dr. Kemmerer working in rural India
Earlier Years
Dr. Kemmerer’s sense of wonder in nature, smallness of self, and simplicity of lifestyle were enhanced by climbing and backpacking, month-long kayak trips, a bicycle trip from Washington to Alaska, and a number of close brushes with an early end. Traveling abroad also shaped her worldview. She worked as a forest fire fighter and nurse’s aide in a nursing home to buy a ticket to the South Pacific, where she hitchhiked around, listening to the views of hundreds of diverse locals. She also traveled parts of Asia, where her understanding of time, “necessities,” and community were altered by rural Burma and Bangladesh and in little villages on the high ridges of Nepal.
Repeatedly walking away from conventional forms of education in a quest for broader and deeper understandings, Kemmerer came to see any one way of living and thinking as just one possibility among many. Without this, Dr. K would not be who she is as an individual, scholar, philosopher, or activist.
