Animals and ecology : towards a better integration

[Introduction]:Many thinking people have come to believe that there is something profoundly wrong in commodity culture’s relationship to living things. That something is expressed perhaps most obviously in the factory farms that profit from distorting and instrumentalising animal lives. In numerous books and articles I have argued that these abuses are enabled and justified by a dominant human-centred ideology of mastery over an inferior sphere of animals and nature.It is this ideology that is expressed in economies that treat commodity animals reductively as less than they are, as a mere human resource, little more than living meat or egg production units. People aiming to clarify and deepen their experience of contemporary abuse of animals and nature face an important set of choices in philosophical theory. In particular, they have to choose whether to opt for theories of animal ethics and ontology that emphasise discontinuity and set human life apart from animals and ecology, or theories that emphasise human continuity with other life forms and situate both human and animal life within an ethically and ecologically conceived universe. I represent this choice in this paper by comparing two theories that challenge –in quite different ways – the dominant ideology of mastery. Ontological Veganism is a theory that advocates universal abstention from all use of animals as the only real alternative to mastery and the leading means of defending animals against its wrongs. But, I shall argue, another theory which also supports animal defense which I shall call Ecological Animalism, more thoroughly disrupts the ideology of mastery, and is significantly better than Ontological Veganism for environmental awareness, for human liberation, and for animal activism itself

The Eye of the Crocodile

Val Plumwood was an eminent environmental philosopher and activist who was prominent in the development of radical ecophilosophy from the early 1970

Women of the mysterious forest : women, nature and philosophy : an exploration of self and gender in relation to traditional dualisms in western culture

The thesis aims to develop an account of the ecological self and its relationship to nature which takes account both of a feminist perspective and of the critique advanced by recent environmental philosophy, and to understand the role of gender and gendered nature/culture dualism in the development of a human identity alienated from nature in western culture. I argue that the fact that the dominant human identity has been masculinised has been a major aspect of the problem. A major resulting theme is concern with problems in ecofeminism and especially the question of how far an alternative identity can be based on women and the affirmation of the feminine. Chapter One sets e c ological feminism in a political context, examining its relationships to both feminist and green theory. Chapter Two reviews the major literature in the area and its critique of western culture , as well as examining problems arising from it concerning the history of patriarchal culture, the status of the »-body as nature, and tension between accounts stressing dualism and those stressing difference. Chapter Three problematises both liberal feminist (androcentric) and radical feminist (gynocentric) positions, and tries to clarify the range of options to the androcentric model of human identity, and what is defensible in the affirmation of the feminine. Chapters Four, Five and Six d e v e l o p a feminist and historical perspective on environmental philosophy, arguing that dualism — a notion clarified in Chapter Four with the help of gender theory — has shaped not only our concepts of human identity as alien to nature (Chapter Four), but also our concept of nature as mechanism (Chapter Five) . These chapters examine the histo r i c a l legacy of rationalism, while Chapter Six develops a feminist perspective on instrumentalism and on the self. This is built on in Chapter Seven, which also critiques from the p e r s pective of feminist ethics current trends in environmental ethics and deep ecology, arguing that these positions have been insuffic i e n t l y sensitive to the c o n t r i b u t i o n of r a t i onalism to the problem and its continued influence in their philosophical frameworks. Chapter Eight returns to consideration of the major theme of earlier chapters in clarifying the affirmation of the feminine and options for the reconstruction of gender, and presents an account which combines elements of both power and difference analyses

A wombat wake: in memoriam Birubi

My wombat Birubi died after a brief illness sometime around Wednesday August 18th 1999. I miss Birubi greatly and continue to catch his beloved form (or ‘ghost’) out of the corner of my eye, a half-seen image flitting around the corner of a cupboard or across the verandah. Long after his death, my eyes continued to search out his shape on the moonlit grass. He was part of my life for so long – over twelve years – that I found it hard to believe he would no longer wait for me or greet me, that he was finally gone

Babe: The Tale of the Speaking Meat - Part I

I would like somebody somewhere to endow an annual prize for a work of art which takes a group of the most oppressed subjects and makes an effective and transformative representation of their situation. The work would make its audience care about what happens to those oppressed subjects and to understand something of the audience\u27s own role in maintaining their oppression. It would foster recognition of the subjectivity and creativity of the oppressed group and consciousness of the need for redistribution of respect and of cultural and material goods. Above all, it would help to support and protect them. If these are subjects who are conventionally seen as radically excluded, for example as beyond the possibility of communication or as embodied in ways which occasion aversion or anxiety, the prize work should attempt to disrupt those violence-prone perceptions. One of my nominations for such a prize would be the film Babe