where AR head butts environmentalism
May 8th, 2003
At the moment i am embroiled in an email argument with conservationist Sheila Davis, member of the executive of the QCC and a director of Sustainable Population Australia. You may wonder what relevance this has to the topic at hand, but after my differences with Davis, i began to realise that this topic could just as well have been called ‘human rights & environmentalism – are they compatible?” as Davis seems to think they are not.
Davis holds the position that immigration and population are the key problems with the environment and that the environment should be preserved for the good of the ecology over the humanitarian gestures we might show by accepting asylum seekers.
A similar problem pervades the Animal Rights/environmentalism argument.
That is: should we forsake compassion to preserve the environment? Should we forsake the rights of individuals for the benefit of the whole?
This topic is one that is close to my heart. The struggle between being an environmentalist and having empathy for each individual life is one that pervades my thoughts, my writing, my teaching and my life!! It troubles me!
I’m only going to deal with half of the question here today – my esteemed colleagues frankie & siobhan will deal with the positives! I want to examine the question i have posited above – can we forsake the needs of individuals to benefit the whole? Why might we choose to do this?
Since the inception of the environment movement in the sixties and seventies it has been seen as a separate issue from that of animal rights. The reason for this – i think – is largely because environmental issues have been equated with human survival – ie. They are often anthropocentric in focus.
Anthropocentrism is a way of seeing the world that locates human values at it’s centre. It can sit comfortably as an ideology for environmental protection because is clearly bad for humans as a species, and as individuals, for the oceans to be bereft of fish, the land bereft of trees and the air polluted.
Anthropocentricism is at the heart of Environmental Policy in Australia today. Hence we have the rhetoric of ‘sustainability’ used to justify our use of non-human species. We are all caught up in this rhetoric, i even appeal to it myself to back up my arguments for animal protection. Yet every time i do it, i feel i am betraying myself and the non-human entities that i seek to protect.
What does sustainability mean? According to the groundbreaking Brundtland report of 1987 entitled Our Common Future, sustainable development is:
Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
The Brundtland Report was primarily concerned with global equity, redistributing resources towards poorer nations whilst encouraging their economic growth.
It is, in essence, entirely anthropocentric in focus. But this doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. Agenda 21, which arose out of the 1990 Rio Earth Summit expanded the notion of sustainability to include:
Conservation - the sustainable use and management of natural resources including wildlife, water, air, and earth deposits.
And
Preservation – which, attempts to maintain in their present condition areas of the Earth that are so far untouched by humans.
What the conservationist opposes is not the harnessing of nature for humankind’s progression, but the fact that all too often the environment comes off the worse for wear. What the preservationist opposes is humankind’s enroachment into the environment at such a rate that much wilderness is being given over to farming, industry, housing, tourism and other human developments, and that we our losing too much of what is ‘natural’, what is wild.
Like conservationists, some preservationists support the protection of nature for purely human-centred, anthropocentric, reasons. Stronger advocates of preservation however, adopt a less human-centred approach to environmental protection, placing a value on nature that does not relate to the needs and interests of human beings – this is what is commonly called Ecocentrism, Deep Ecology or Biocentrism. A strand of Ecocentrism called ‘Ethical Holism’ takes the extreme view that ecosystems and individual species should be preserved whatever the cost, regardless of their usefulness to humans, and even if their continued existence would prove harmful to us. J Baird Callicott, principal interpreter of Aldo Leopold’s ‘Land Ethic’ deems rare species as having greater rights to consideration (preservation) than populous species.
This idea is not incompatible with current environmental policy which currently allows massive culls of native and introduced animals ostensibly to preserve the non-sentient environment. The actual reason for culls is rather more complicated and selfish – economic gains for farmers and cullers being the foremost reasons and ones that simply exacerbate environmental risks for humans and nature alike: farmers clear more and more land to grown more and more cattle, ‘roo shooters jeopardise kangaroo species and pose health risks by encouraging eating wormy ‘roo meat. And that is entirely without touching on the issue of cruelty in those industries. One can find many paths to approach the same end without starting from the same premise.
The Holistic strand of Ecocentrism has copped some rather bad flack for being anti-humanist, especially when people like Earth Firster! Dave Foreman go around saying people are a virus infecting the planet. Foreman hunts animals, so he has no preference for any sentient life over another, though he would defend the rights of a giant sequoia tree to exist with his own life. Wherein his logic lies, I do not know. For he seems to rate non-sentient life above that which can feel, human or non-human. I believe Frankie will have more to say about this topic.
So you can see that at its holistic extreme, environmentalism can appear not only antipathetic to animal rights, but to human rights too. Shelia Davis puts her opposition to accepting asylum seekers thus:
It is our fear that if you prioritise social justice over ecology then you will ruin the very basis of life on the planet… To promote humanitarian principles over the sustainability of the planet will result in the total destruction of our life support systems. Human beings are taking over all other life forms and we need to halt human
population growth.
There may be a grain of truth in the effect human beings are having on the environment, but to base this entirely in the population paradigm is to ignore important economic trends that contribute to this waste of natural resources. It is also to blame the victims of government mismanagement for their predicament and thereby diffuse blame from those who have the power to change but not the will. The rich and powerful can make such choices, as can cattle farmers; the poor and oppressed cannot, wild and feral animals cannot.
This kind of justification for inhumane practises is what inspires me to act. So on the other end of the spectrum we have us Ecofeminists, who see social equity and environmental protection go hand in hand. It seems that this follows from the belief that every living thing has a right to exist and should be preserved.
That the average Australian has some understanding of the value of nature in itself is evidenced by a 1996 survey conducted by TWS that found the majority of respondents’ thought
‘Wilderness areas should be conserved for their own sake, not because people want to use them’ and ‘ we have a duty to future generations to conserve wilderness areas
For any policy to be acceptable to the greatest number of people, as it should be in a democratic society, it has to meet five criteria: it has to be economically feasible, technologically possible, environmentally sustainable and socially and morally acceptable. It doesn’t matter how many Sheila Davis’s argue for the sustainable maltreatment of refugees or kangaroos for that matter - the wrong will always remain the same. So long as cruelty remains socially and morally unacceptable, no amount of political posturing will assuage the alert public. It will never be right to lock up 500 children in detention camps indefinitely. It will never be right to deprive 9 million kangaroos of their lives no matter how justifiable the science is.
All sentient beings can suffer, and attention to their suffering is both anthropocentric and self-interested as it is ecocentric – we would want the same for ourselves, but so too we must accept that each individual animal, as each individual human being, is part of the whole – interconnected to that whole and worth preserving for that reason also. And as such, compassion for all living things is as essential to sustainability as it is to human decency.
It is not morally or socially sustainable to treat refugees cruelly, nor is it morally and socially sustainable to kill massive numbers of animals – the psychological effects on the killers is but part of the error in this. We cannot want less for others than we want for ourselves.
When we achieve a synthesis of humane and ecological we will have achieved a policy with the widest possible acceptance – for those that reject it would only do so because they have vested interests in continuing to oppress some group or another.
However the concerns of the two movements have grown closer together in recent times so that care for the natural environment and the care for the animals within it can be logically extended to concern about the treatment of captive and domesticated animals.
The central concerns of both movements overlap in a holistic conception of the need to live an ethical and compassionate life: one that includes responsibility for our own actions and the actions of others performed to meet our consumption patterns so that we minimise our individual impact on the natural world. Nowhere in our lives do we have more power to effect change than in our personal behaviour. Thus, what we eat becomes an issue.
There is ample evidence that a meat centred diet is bad for your health: heart disease and colon cancer are but two examples. Aside from its dietary implications, the consumption of meat accounts for 55% of our exposure to toxic chemicals that may be carcinogenic, mutagenic and tetrogenic (causing reproductive and inheritable dysfunction): poisons that have accumulated in the flesh of animals farmed for meat because they have been used for pest control, as well as hormone growth promotants and antibiotics for disease treatment. Many of these chemicals continue to contaminate the environment (DDT being one well known example). Farm chemicals have been identified as partly the cause of species decline and loss of biodiversity, (for example in causing the thinning of bird and reptile eggs in some species, implicated in the worldwide decline in frog numbers)
Chemical contamination is but one way that meat farming and industrialised agriculture in general is causing loss of biodiversity worldwide. Land clearing for pasture is responsible for up to 50% of tropical rainforest destruction in South American nations. Ironically, the amount of meat consumed by those same LDCs is less per person that the average western household cat. If this doesn’t make meat eating a social justice issue, then perhaps these facts will: the approximate 60 million people expected to starve to death this year could be saved if meat consumption were cut by a mere 10% ( 80% of grain and grass foods grown in the US is currently fed to stock). It has been a much quoted figure that 20 times the number of people in the world could be fed a grain based diet if all land currently supporting livestock was put to feeding people.
Lack of fresh water is a problem world-wide. Yet more than half of the water used in the US goes NOT into growing crops for human consumption, but into raising meat animals. Water use by farms is subsidised in the US and Australia. It has been estimated that a ‘pound of hamburger mince’ would cost US$35 without water subsidies. The equivalent in protein could be got from wheat for US$1.50.
Topsoil loss and desertification are also global problems exacerbated by stock-raising. 85% of topsoil loss in the US is attributable to livestock overgrazing. Yet the manure produced by livestock far exceeds that of the human population and only a fraction of it is returned to the soil for fertiliser. Cattle are attributable to a percentage of the methane released into the atmosphere which contributes to global warming.
The cost of feeding, watering, transporting livestock, chemicals, feed, processing at the slaughterhouse and packaging for the supermarket all result in an energy usage far in excess of the energy provided by the meat produced. Meat is the only food stuff that results in a negative energy ratio.
The environmental costs are what we can calculate and see. What we don’t see (because it is hidden) is the extent of the suffering occasioned by our unceasing demand for meat on the table. Billions of animals are killed each year to fulfil this taste. They are subject to suffering from birth to death in numbers that yearly exceed that of the human casualties in all the World Wars. Most animals raised for meat spend their lives confined indoors in cages or pens. Veal calves are taken at a young age form their mothers and kept in a stall too small to turn around in for six months, fed an iron-poor diet to keep their muscle meat pale to satisfy our aesthetic tastes. Pigs are chained and often beaten. A North Carolina piggery was recently prosecuted for its condoning unmitigated cruelty on the part of the keepers who regularly beat the animals with iron bars, often breaking bones. Their efforts were captured on video over a period of months by an animal rights organisation.
Closely confined in dark and badly ventilated sheds, animals suffer many illness (including respiratory ones from the constant inhaling of dust and ammonia in their unsanitary conditions). Hens grow calcium deficient deformed bones, their feet sometimes growing around the wire on the bottom of their cages because conditions are so cramped. Unable to enact natural behaviours all animals in these conditions exhibit stereotypical behaviours that in humans we would label mental disorder and in extreme cases, insanity. Hens peck each other to death (hence the barbaric practice of ‘debeaking’), pigs bite each other and themselves. Factory farms demean both animals and keepers.
When an animal has reached the end of its ‘useful’ life, or is destined for slaughter they are usually packed into trucks 2 or more storeys high and may travel hundreds of kilometers in cold, rain or heat without food or water. Needless to say, some will die in transit, or be mutilated if unfortunate enough to have a limb slip between the slats of their cage. Hens often lose legs in transit, but are probably used to sitting on the bodies of their dead sisters for days on end as they do in battery conditions. Cattle that are too weakened by this ordeal are called ‘downers’ in the US, and may be beaten for their non-cooperation, or simply left in sun or cold until they die.
At the slaughter house there can be no doubt that the animals are aware of their fate. If the din of animals crying out were not enough, many make a desperate attempt to escape the crush, often just prolonging their own deaths. The ‘captive bolt’ is not always a clean kill, and animals have been known to reach the skinning stage still conscious (as was the case with the possum abattoir scandal in Tasmania earlier this year, Lenah Game Meats). Hens are hung by their feet and killed by a rotating blade which is not 100% effective, some reaching the scalding vat (designed to aid removal of feathers) still conscious.
There was a time when domestic animals were a precious asset, killing them not done with impunity, indeed a rare event. Today we expect meat at every meal, but refuse to acknowledge the cost to the environment and to our humanity by the constant stream of deaths we are forced to perpetuate to meet this desire. The sanitation of our food, wrapped as it is in polystyrene and cling-wrap, bloodless and cold, makes it very far removed from the pollution, waste, suffering, blood and death that it occasions. That makes it very easy to ignore. Yet anyone who has experienced the company of other animals, domestic or wild, knows that there is some primeval bond that makes us realise our own animality. We can hardly ignore it with the knowledge that we have 99% of our DNA in common with chimpanzees, with even less than one percent thought responsible for our capablitites of very abstract reasoning that allows us to be moral. It makes our treatment of other animals all the more unconscionable.
Are they really just dumb animals, without interests and voiceless, there for our use and abuse like we treat the rest of nature? Or should we let our unique sense of compassion, conscience and moral rightness be their voice?
originally published in Vegan Voice magazine 2002
Categories: environment, philosophy | Tags: animal rights, vegan, vegetarian
