Rethinking the Human-Animal Divide in the Anthropocene

Society and Animals, 2022

Paragraph

Environmental politics has become inextricably entwined with planetary deep time. This article calls for a reconceptualization of the relation between humans and nonhuman nature. It rejects the ontological singularity of the human, either as a biological species (Homo) or as a planetary super-agent (Anthropos) and argues for a perspective centred on companionship and shared vulnerability. Animal philosophy serves here to counter a growing tendency to generalize and address the human species at large, in the singular. The cultural force of the animal, it is suggested, stems from a productive tension between the abstract singular (‘the Animal’) and the unique specificity of each particular nonhuman other. In the context of Anthropocene Studies, references to Anthropos follow a similar logic. The planetary future of humans cannot be deduced from any specific geopolitical context or expressed through universalizing categories. It must be understood, against the vertiginous backdrop of g...

História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos, 2021

As globalization accelerated after 1492, often in the service of European imperial expansion, human destruction of the habitat in which animals could express their natural behaviors also increased. Within this context, the question arises: just how much are we like other animals, and if they are like us, how much do we owe them? From the 1500s to the 1800s, travelers, imperialists, the colonized, and intellectuals tried to answer this question and produced three positions: animals as mere exploitable devices; confusion about animals’ status and what we owe them, and concern about the suffering of nonhuman animals, their freedom to express their behaviors, and their very existence.

2016

This is the introductory chapter of the volume Animal Ethics in the Age of Humans; Blurring Boundaries in Human-animal Relationships, Springer, October 2016, edited by Bernice Bovenkerk and Jozef Keulartz. In this introduction we address the following topics. The first section deals with the Anthropocene - What is it? When did it start? How did it develop? The second section shows how the concept works as a major bone of contention that divides the academic community into those who consider the Anthropocene a planetary catastrophe and those who embrace the human domination over the Earth as a great achievement. The third section considers the biodiversity conservation options in the age of humans. The fourth and final section provides an overview of this volume.

Springer, 2021

This Open Access book brings together authoritative voices in animal and environmental ethics, who address the many different facets of changing human-animal relationships in the Anthropocene. As we are living in complex times, the issue of how to establish meaningful relationships with other animals under Anthropocene conditions needs to be approached from a multitude of angles. This book offers the reader insight into the different discussions that exist around the topics of how we should understand animal agency, how we could take animal agency seriously in farms, urban areas and the wild, and what technologies are appropriate and morally desirable to use regarding animals. This book is of interest to both animal studies scholars and environmental ethics scholars, as well as to practitioners working with animals, such as wildlife managers, zookeepers, and conservation biologists.

Published in Animal Studies Journal Follow this and additional works at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/asj

Ethical and Political Approaches to Nonhuman Animal Issues: Towards an Undivided Future, 2017

**Due to the publisher holding the copyright to the book, drafts of the book unfortunately cannot be circulated. This includes the introduction. Upon release of the book the freely available front matter will be made accessible online and here. Until this changes, which is beyond my authority, all I can do is direct you to the book's site and Amazon. Abstracts of the chapters will be available. Apologies, and thank you for being interested. A.** This book offers ethical and political approaches to issues that nonhuman animals face. The recent ‘political turn’ in interspecies ethics, from ethical to political approaches, has arisen due to the apparent lack of success of the nonhuman animal movement and dissatisfaction with traditional approaches. Current works largely present general positions rather than address specific issues and principally rely on mainstream approaches. This book offers alternative positions such as cosmopolitan, libertarian, and left humanist thought, as well as applying ethical and political thought to specific issues, such as experimentation, factory farming, nonhuman political agency, and intervention. Presenting work by theorists and activists, insights are offered from both ethics and politics that impact theory and practice and offer essential considerations for those engaging in interspecies ethics within the political turn era. === CONTENTS: Acknowledgements List of Contributors List of Figures Foreword (by Richard D. Ryder) 1. Introduction (Andrew Woodhall & Gabriel Garmendia da Trindade) 2. Making Light of the Ethical? The Ethics and Politics of Animal Rights (Mark Rowlands) 3. Far-persons (Gary Comstock) 4. Evolution to Liberation: Political Reflections on Morality and Nonhumans (Steve F. Sapontzis) 5. Robert Nozick on Nonhuman Animals: Rights, Value and the Meaning of Life (Josh Milburn) 6. Reinventing Left Humanism: Towards an Interspecies Emancipatory Project (Zipporah Weisberg) 7. Justice for Animals in a Globalizing World (Angie Pepper) 8. Animal Rights and the Distorting Power of Anthropocentric Prejudice (Gary Steiner) 9. Interspecies Encounters and the Political Turn: From Dialogues to Deliberation (Eva Meijer) 10. Gandhian Satyagraha and Open Animal Rescue (Tony Milligan) 11. Shame: From Defensive Fury to Epistemological Shifts and Political Change (Elisa Aaltola) 12. Are We Smart Enough to Know When to Take the Political Turn for Animals? (Kim Stallwood) 13. Interspecies Atrocities and the Politics of Memory (Guy Scotton) 14. Animal Research and the Political Theory of Animal Rights (Gardar Arnason) 15. Cross-Species Comparisons of Welfare (Tatjana Višak) 16. Population Dynamics Meets Animal Ethics: The Case for Aiding Animals in Nature (Oscar Horta) 17. Afterword (Carol J. Adams) Index

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities

Humanity defines itself through an animal other, the animal in Jacques Derrida’s definition of “absolute alterity,” cannot return the human gaze. In this paper, I explore the possibilities of accommodation and hospitality which posthuman philosophy provides in conceptualizing the position of alterity of the “animal”. Building on the writing of Jacque Derrida and Giorgio Agamben I will argue how Posthumanism can radicalize the way in which the anthropocentric worldview looks at the animal as other, questioning the positioning and relevance of speciesism and species boundary. Also, the issue of the agency has been interrogated in this research article. I have also argued for a new mode of conceptualizing the “other” / the “animal” which abolishes the hierarchical view of anthropocentric conception of nonhuman but instead views the other from the lens of companionship, borrowing from the ideas of “companionship” and “Chuthulucene” of Donna J. Haraway. The paper is an attempt to expand ...

Kultura i Edukacja

One of the main focuses of the contemporary political theory is biopolitics. It takes into consideration the life itself and the methods of its governance. Hence the ultimate goals of biopolitics are always focused on maximizing the potential of body, regulating its biological processes and normalizing both of them according to the logic of population's health. In this sense, biopolitics in normative; it creates an image of desired and undesired people being either inside or outside the biopolitical community. Biopolitics, therefore, has both collectivizing and totalizing potentials. The majority of theorists working on biopolitics focuses on the latter, framing biopolitics as a negative and exclusive concept. As such it limits the potential membership to a community only to beings who meet the desired criteria. Political scientists mainly scrutinize either the mechanisms of such a limitation (e.g., autopoietic discourses, citizenship theory, etc.), the developed biopolitical identities or power distribution and relations. Not many of them, however, consider the meaning of the word 'being'. They automatically assume or take it as granted that the 'being' means a human. According to the author of the reviewed book, Wayne Gabardi, that is a huge mistake because humans are not the only species living on the planet Earth. According to evolutionary biology, a human is just another animal but with more developed cognitive and survival abilities. In its core, however, it does not differ from the other kinds of life. Based on that initial assumption Gabardi delivered an argument that we should reframe current politics into the affirmative biopolitics; that we should reconsider our

International Library of Environmental Agriculture and Food Ethics, 2016

This book provides reflection on the increasingly blurry boundaries that characterize the human-animal relationship. In the Anthropocene humans and animals have come closer together and this asks for rethinking old divisions. Firstly, new scientific insights and technological advances lead to a blurring of the boundaries between animals and humans. Secondly, our increasing influence on nature leads to a rethinking of the old distinction between individual animal ethics and collectivist environmental ethics. Thirdly, ongoing urbanization and destruction of animal habitats leads to a blurring between the categories of wild and domesticated animals. Finally, globalization and global climate change have led to the fragmentation of natural habitats, blurring the old distinction between in situ and ex situ conservation. In this book, researchers at the cutting edge of their fields systematically examine the broad field of human-animal relations, dealing with wild, liminal, and domestic animals, with conservation, and zoos, and with technologies such as biomimicry. This book is timely in that it explores the new directions in which our thinking about the human-animal relationship are developing. While the target audience primarily consists of animal studies scholars, coming from a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, sociology, psychology, ethology, literature, and film studies, many of the topics that are discussed have relevance beyond a purely theoretical one; as such the book also aims to inspire for example biologists, conservationists, and zoo keepers to reflect on their relationship with animals.