Editing Alice Walker (section)

=== Animal advocacy ===
Walker has expressed that [[Animal rights movement|animal advocacy]] is one of her central concerns. Her fiction has increasingly embraced [[animal ethics]] over the past four decades, as she works to include animals as both active participants in her novels and as symbols for what she has called "consciousness." Her earliest fiction represents nonhuman animals inasmuch as they are part of human life – namely as farmed animals, food sources, and absent referents for animalized [[epithet]]s directed at humans, and her fiction increasingly incorporates the animal experience.<ref>{{Cite book |last=June |first=Pamela B. |title=Solidarity with the Other Beings on the Planet: Alice Walker, Ecofeminism, and Animals in Literature |publisher=Northwestern University Press |year=2020 |edition=1st |language=English}}</ref> She has advocated for greater consciousness in human beings and their relationships with animals, stating: "Encouraging others to love nature, to respect other human beings and animals, to adore this earth, is part of my work in this world."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Outka |first=Paul |title=Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance |publisher=Palgrave Macmillan |year=2008 |location=New York |pages=115 |language=English}}</ref>