Marti Kheel (August 25, 1948 – November 19, 2011) was a vegan ecofeminist activist scholar credited with founding Feminists for Animal Rights (FAR) 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 (five daughters: Ellen Kheel Jacobs of Manhattan; Constance E. Kheel of Buskirk, N.Y.; Dr. Marti Kheel, then of El Cerrito, California; Jane Kheel Stanley of Bethesda, Maryland; and Katherine Kheel of Baltimore, Maryland; a son, Robert J. Kheel, of Manhattan) born to Labor Mediator Theodore W. Kheel (who passed in November 2010), 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 (age 25) 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 (FAR) in California in 1982, to which she had relocated, hoping to bridge women's and animal advocacy movements. That same year, she developed