January 24th, 2004
The food-industry’s global advertising budget is $40bn, a figure greater than the Gross Domestic Product of 70% of the world’s nations. Yet, activists have managed to dent their omnipotence in the sphere of public information with well targeted information campaigns of their own. In Brisbane, Animal Activism Queensland has launched an attack on the Yum! Corporation (owners of Pizza Hut & KFC and other fast food chains) who, it turns out, do a lot more than just make us fat.
The success of this awareness raising is hard to gauge, however, more tangibly, McDonalds has suffered significant economic losses in the wake of a very successful and well publicised campaign waged by two Greenpeace activists. In recent years hundreds of McDonald’s have been forced to close worldwide and they reported their first ever loss last year. In 1990 London Greenpeace produced a leaflet “What’s Wrong with McDonalds” that criticised their record on animal welfare, work relations, health and the environment. McDonald’s responded with a protracted legal campaign against two of their activists that backfired seriously for McDonalds. In 1997 a judge ruled that McDonalds ‘exploit children’ with advertising, produce ‘misleading’ advertising, are ‘culpably responsible’ for cruelty to animals, are ‘antipathetic’ to unionisation and pay their workers low wages. In March 1999 the Court of Appeal made further rulings against McDonald’s in relation to heart disease and employment.
In recent years US NGO People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have worked with McDonalds and other fast food corporations to change animal production standards to benefit both animals and the humans eating them. In September 2000, PETA suspended its campaign against McDonald’s after the company agreed to conduct slaughterhouse audits of all its pig, chicken, and cow suppliers, stop purchasing from suppliers that fail audits, increase the living space for laying hens, stop starving chickens in order to force them to produce more eggs, and implement humane catching standards for chickens. In June 2001, PETA halted its campaign against Burger King (franchised as Hungry Jacks in Australia) when the company announced that it would do all this and more. In September 2001, Wendy’s agreed to make these changes after two months of unrelenting pressure, including arrests at Wendy’s restaurants around the country. And now McDonald’s are funding research into the effects of antibiotics given to farmed animals.
The repercussions of PETA’s work will have tangible human benefits too: the World Health Organisation and other health groups have long decried the use of antibiotics in food for their link to the development of antibiotic resistant diseases that can and do pass the species barrier. Such use is practically indispensable in the intensive situation in which chickens and pigs in particular are raised. The January outbreak of fatal flu strains in Vietnam can be directly linked to intensively raised chickens. Thousand of hens and pigs have died of influenza in Vietnam, and millions of hens have been killed in damage control. In 1997 an outbreak of avian influenza virus in Hong Kong infected 18 people and six died. About 35 new infectious diseases including AIDS, SARS and Jacob-Cruzfeld (Mad Cow in cattle) have been identified since the 1970s and the primary source for new human infections has been animal-borne viruses. Factory farms provide incubator conditions for viral and bacterial mutation in animals: close quarters, poor ventilation, large quantities of faecal matter, stressed immuno-systems, sick and dead animal bodies and the use of antibiotics in large doses all increase the risk.
A decrease in antibiotic use may well change the system of caging animals – larger pens where animals are able to exercise with better ventilation will create healthier animals and provide a better workplace. Cruelty in the slaughterhouse is largely the result of management pressure on workers to increase production speed. Improperly stunned and struggling animals combined with excessive line speeds result in increased worker injuries. Speedy production is also linked to increased incidence of food poisoning because time does not permit proper inspection of carcasses. In addition, the perpetration of cruelty has wider social repercussions. Studies show that people in killing industries are also brutalised emotionally by that work and sometimes continue that abuse in the family home.
Ingrid Newkirk, CEO of PETA says “It was pretty easy to settle on McDonald’s because they’re the giant of the fast food industry and their name is instantly recognizable all over the world and the number of animals that they use to go into those burgers and those Egg McMuffins is just extraordinary. So we knew if we could get McDonald’s to changewhich is no easy taskthe other fast food restaurants might fall like skittles.”
And that is exactly the reason why activists all over the world are now after Kentucky Fried Chicken. But this time PETA are turning the tables on KFC and litigating first. In July 2003 PETA filed against KFC for what they allege were fraudulent claims made on their website. In May 2001, the Yum corporation of which KFC is a subsidiary, assured PETA it would “raise the bar” on animal welfare. However, it has yet to do so.
KFC use as many as 700 million broiler hens annually. High turnover and a need to minimise costs to maximise profits means that the factory farms in which meat chickens are raised subscribe to only the minimum standards for animal welfare. From the hatchery until slaughter, they are subjected to a succession of cruelties. The chickens undergo mutilation, crowding, injuries, diseases, de-beaking, forced molting, antibiotics, ammonia burns and heat stress. An investigation in Stolle, Germany found that:
This time, investigators found 38,000 chickens in a crowded barn, forced to spend their entire lives in their own excrement and waste. To counteract the filth and diseases that run rampant in such conditions, chickens at Stolle are pumped full of antibiotics and other drugsBaytril, Ampicillin, and Neomycin are used in doses as large as 583 milligrams per liter of drinking water. These drugs, combined with genetic manipulation through generations of forced breeding, cause the birds to grow so obese so quickly that many become crippled. At the time of the investigation, the chickens at Stolle were only 19 days old, but they were already too heavy for their bones. Many birds suffer when their legs collapse beneath them, shattering because of their massive breast weight. Thousands live their entire lives with these painful injuries. …Despite the drugs, Stolle’s own records show that as many as 316 birds have died in a single day as a result of their horrible living conditions.
“KFC suppliers and slaughterers put chickens through hell on Earth,” says PETA Director of Vegan Outreach Bruce Friedrich. “If KFC executives treated cats or dogs the way they treat chickens, pigs, cows, and other animals, they could go to prison on felony cruelty-to-animals charges.”
Workers groups in the USA are also confronting Yum! over it’s work conditions. Workers in the fast food industry are paid low wages, they tend to work for extremely long hours with little breaks. KFC mostly employ young people between the ages of 16 and 25 in what is commonly called “McJobs”: low paid with no prospects. The pressure to work fast often results in accidents (particularly burns). Unionism is near impossible due to the high staff turnover.
Human welfare is given short shrift by the Yum! corporation also. In May 2003 KFC capitulated, or so it seemed, to many of PETA’s demands regarding humane conditions in suppliers farms. However, they did not do the same for the workers on those farms, who are said in some cases to work under slave-labour conditions. Protestors in the US claim that suppliers to Yum!’s Taco Bell chain employ workers on their Mexican tomato farms under slave-labour conditions.
In 1998 KFC workers in Indonesia went on strike. Workers in Surabaya were at that time demanding an increase in wages from 30 cents a day to 60 cents a day. KFC rejected the demands and threatened to dismiss those who joined the strike without compensation. In the US KFC workers are not encouraged to unionise. In 2002 the International Workers Union tried to infiltrate a number of KFC franchises in the US to help unionise the workplace. In the one place they were successful, management responded by sacking all staff. They subsequently went broke as customers boycotted the store. In Australia in 2001 KFC went to the Federal Court in opposition to unfair dismissal laws, claiming they were ‘stifling’ employment. A full bench of the court found no provable link between unfair dismissal laws and employment. In 2002, in an overtly political move, KFC decided to ban Catholics from employment in their Antrim, Ireland franchise due to loyalist conflicts. In 2002 Ealing KFC in the UK was found guilty of workplace health and safety breaches when they failed to protect workers of Sri Lankan heritage who were the subject of attacks by gangs of racists when they had to work late shifts to 2am.
Yum! has little interest in protecting the health of their customers either. In June 2003 Yum! Corporation and other fast food giants united in demanding protection from the US congress from claims that their products, targeted at young people, could be subject to prosecution under new obesity laws. The February 2003 edition of New Scientist reported that fast foods can cause brain chemical changes that appear like those associated with addiction. UK, US and Australian rates of childhood obesity are at one in four, leading the UK Food Commission to call for controls on fast food advertising to children. In NSW Premier Bob Carr recently called for a ban on junk food in school cafeterias. It seems that at least McDonalds have learnt from the McLibel experience and are already changing their corporate habits regarding the healthiness of their foods.
The health effects of the factory farming practices that KFC relies upon for it’s meat and eggs goes beyond the consumer of their products. The January 2004 an epidemic of bird flu has to date killed twenty-one people, infected a further over twenty and caused the deaths of at least 24 millions hens and ducks, spreading through ten Asian nations including China. KFC has been forced to close many of its Asian outlets as people refuse to eat chicken there. The World Health Organization, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Organization for Animal Health consider the outbreak a serious threat to human health that requires international action. This and other worldwide epidemics like Sars have been linked to farming practices. The confined nature of factory farms, combined with antibiotic dependence and stress inevitably produces a breeding round for viral and bacterial mutations, creating very unhealthy conditions for workers, animals and the wider public, increasing the risk of public epidemics. New influenza strains have killed as many as 4.5 million people since the 1950s. Is it any coincidence that factory animal farming only began on a large scale at that time?
The health effects of factory farms don’t stop at the farm gate. Besides being the biggest users of water in industrialised nations, factory farms also produce water, land and air pollution through effluent. Factory farms in the US produce 20 times the effluent of the human population! In the case of factory farms, this effluent is laced with hormones and antibiotics. Eighty percent pf the world crop in soybeans is grown for the purpose of feeding to factory farmed animals. The US Environmental Protection Agency says that factory farm waste has polluted over 56, 000 kilometres of rivers in 22 states and contaminated groundwater in 17 states. Increased nitrate in water caused by factory farm effluent ponds has been linked to human birth defects in South Australia and spontaneous abortions in animals in the US. Antibiotic contamination of water sources in Europe have also been linked to decreasing sperm counts in men over the last few decades.
The McLibel case stands out as example of what people can do to change recalcitrant multinationals who shamelessly exploit others for profit. McDonalds has responded by changing some of their corporate behaviours to reflect the criticisms of activists. However, the work of activists often only results in minimal institutional change often driven by the effect of campaigns on profits. Epidemics like bird flu bring to light the reality of what animal activists are saying about the practices of industrialised farming and the responsibility fast food corporations have in effecting change in this sector.
The sum result of these types of campaigns for animal liberation is in step with broader progressive social movements for human liberation, in that they are attacking or reforming the functioning of capitalist organisations for the ideal of reducing suffering and improving the quality of life for all living beings.
While organisations like PETA have middle-class, conservative practises, their campaigns do have a useful aspect in the fight against earth-destroying, life-denying practices of big corporations. Affecting change means reaching people where they are at. For animal rights activists this means linking into egalitarian, democratic, humanist and ecological movements. For social and political change activists this means recognising personal practises of exploitation and domination over other species. Social change does not happen instantaneous, but is the result of changing attitudes as much as changing behaviours. Recognising this interconnectedness of the ethic underlying all social justice movements can only strengthen our successes.
submitted to “Solidarity” magazine, Wednesday, 28 January 2004
Links:
Animal Activism Queensland: www.animalactivism.org
McSpotlight www.mcspotlight.org
The Meatrix www.themeatrix.com
References:
Animal Welfare Institute Quarterly 2000, “Cutting the Gordian Knot” No. 24 Vol. 9
http://www.awionline.org/pubs/Quarterly/f00gordian.htm
An Phoblacht, 2002 “No Catholics need apply at Antrim KFC” in An Phoblacht/Republican News, Sept 12 at http://republican-news.org/archive/2002/September12/12antr.html
Asia Pacific People’s Assembly, 1998, “Indonesian KFC workers on strike” in The Rag, No.2 at http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/8340/rag2.htm
PETA 2003 letter to YUM Chair, Pete Bassi at http://www.kfccruelty.com/12-8-03lettertobassi.html
PETA 2004 http://www.kfccruelty.com/index.html
Poultry Solutions News 2003, May 1 at http://www.poultrysolutions.com/pserv/DetailedNews?news_id=269
Sanchez, J 2003, “Meat markets: PETA praises McDonald’s” in Reason Magazine
October 1, No. 5, Vol. 35; Pg. 15;
http://lists.envirolink.org/pipermail/ar-news/Week-of-Mon-20030929/007400.html
The Food Commission, 2003 “Health groups warn: World’s children at risk from junk food marketing”, July 29, at http://www.foodcomm.org.uk/press_junk_marketing_03.htm
Openrescue.org 2003 “Broiler Chicken Rescue Exposes KFC Cruelty” Victoria http://www.openrescue.org/rescues/20030128/2003_01_28.html
KFC’s staff suffered racist attacks
http://www.ehn-online.com/cgi-bin/news/news1/EpFppplyZkXqGSwbrz.html
Stuart Spear Thursday, August 22 2002
“Bird flu claims 13” in Vietnam January 15, 2004
http://www.optusnet.com.au/news/story/abc/20040115/17/international/1026111.inp
“Animals Play Key Role in Flu Pandemics” David Fogarty Jan 16, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/23469/story.htm
A Killing Floor Chronicle
Published on Monday, December 8, 2003 by the Los Angeles Times
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1208-07.htm
Inside the mind of a killer http://www.cyberactivist.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_cyberactivist_archive.html
Schlosser, E 2001 Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Houghton Mifflin Co
Deadly Bird Flu Leaps Into China; Kills Thai Boy Tue 27 January, 2004 http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=healthNews&storyID=4221082§ion=news
Humane Farming Association Factory Farming: The True Costs
http://www.hfa.org/factory/index.html
Sierra Club 2003 “Keep Animal Waste Out of Our Waters. Stop Factory Farm Pollution” http://www.sierraclub.org/factoryfarms/
Grace Factory Farm Project “Water: Reports”
http://www.factoryfarm.org/topics/water/reports/
Categories: environment |
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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 | No Comments
May 9th, 2002
Before I embark on my attempt at explaining what ecofeminism is, I’d like you to forget everything Forge has taught you so far! If I remember correctly, Forge talks about ethical theories in terms of individual rights – who is morally considerable, and who is not, ‘guys like us’ etc. And from this he postulates a series of sets of rules: Kantian deontology, utilitarian greatest happiness principle etc. – all based on the ‘reasoning adult’ model. Nothing wrong with that, as a theory, but it doesn’t work in practice. Not all people are rational – say infants and the mentally incompetent, even you and I are not always rational. And no one can be that consistent as to always adhere to rules. To do so requires one to “do right tho’ the heavens may fall” to paraphrase Kant.
So if there is one defining characteristic that unites Ecofeminist thought, it is the idea that rules must always be broken, that every decision is a unique one and contingent on the situation in question, and that we do not solely use reason to make our decisions.
Psychologist Carol Gilligan sees the gendered differences in our lives to have given women a unique way of seeing the world, a “different consciousness” that increases their respect for nature. (Gilligan was a student of Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychologist who wrote ‘Kohlberg’s hierarchy of moral development’) Gilligan noted that women consistently failed to reach that more abstract levels of reasoned morality in Kohlberg’s schema (mainly because Kohlberg used an all male sample!) In her own studies she found that women were more likely to break rules where personal relationships were involved, and more likely to take the compassionate decision over the ‘right decision’ (in the Kantian sense) Gilligan suggests that it is often a psychological disposition of men (perhaps as a result of traditional gender roles) to subordinate relationships to universal principles or rules and thus relationships are devalued or objectified (Gilligan 1987:19) The effect of objectification is intellectual separation of subjectivity and objectivity, personal and public, feeling and ‘fact’: dualism! As such it is may be easier for many men to suppress their feelings of wrong doing towards women or the environment to a higher so called moral principle that advocates the primacy of individual actions (including those done for profit) over relational and community spirited ones. Yet both caring, and objective rational calculation are socialised into us and may be undone.
The fact is very few people have to choose between saving a child from drowning, or a dog. Our lives, and in particular our ecological lives, are rather more complex, rather more mundane. They are based on day to day decisions, cumulative in their effect and intimately connected with our relationships with each other and the non-human world. Forge is right, however, when he points out that we don’t just use reason to make our choices, we also use our values. For ecofeminists these values are ecologically sane ones, but they are also relational, and personal. There is simply no way any ecological theory will gain wide acceptance if it ignores the importance of human relationships (hence the failure of holistic deep ecology to catch on with anyone but the most fanatical). Our relationships between each other and between ourselves and the environment we live in MUST be integral parts of an overall ecological consciousness.
What is ecofeminism? Not an easy Q to answer. Ecofeminism is diverse, and it’s diversity is one of its virtues. Rather than try to pin it down to a definite set of rules, which in any case is contrary to what most ecofeminists are seeking to do, I would like to pose a series of Qs that we might ponder. I know they are going to sound a bit left-field, but they are, i think, intuitive ones when one thinks about a gendered approach to conceiving of the environment.
Slide 2 Are women closer to nature than men? Is the Earth our Mother? Is the degradation of the environment linked to the oppression of women? Must environmentalists be feminists? I’d like you to think about these questions during my talk and maybe we can try to answer then at the end if we have time.
Slide 3 Francoise d’Eubonne: an anarcho-feminist What can an Ecofeminist Society be? 1974 coined the term ‘ecofeminisme’ to encapsulate women’s potential to environmental revolution analysis of ecological problems based on: 1. patriarchy 2. capitalism 3. Domination i will deal with each of these three claims and see if you think they have any theoretical credence.
Slide 4
1. patriarchy feminists identify ‘androcentrism’ as the root of women’s oppression, ecofeminists see ‘androcentric anthropocentricism’ as the root of ecological and social inequity androcentrism: male-centredness, not biological but socially constructed anthropocentrism: human-centredness Karen Warren identifies eight important womyn-nature connections. The first is a historical link, whereby patterns of domination have stemmed from the end of the matriarchal period in Europe marked by invasion from the east. Ancient Greek culture is also held as historically responsible in establishing the dualist and rationalist traditions that continue today. These historical links have been continually reinforced throughout history, but most notably by the establishment of a mechanised view of nature as promoted by Descartes in the 16th century. Symbolic connections found in religion, art and language are another sphere of womyn-nature connections. These social structures perpetrate many symbolic devaluation of the feminine, including the identification of the body as impossibly non-spiritual, or the only source of value for women (especially in art). Language reinforces the link between women and nature by using the same exploitative phrases to describe both: “nature is raped, her secrets are penetrated”.
slide5 capitalism: the name given to a structural understanding of the world an how it works based on capital; ownership of it affording privilege over other values. (note that now and in the past women have been prohibited from owning property/capital, or making decisions about how it is distributed through voting) ecofeminists identify capitalism as a dual oppressor: capitalism needs cheap labour to succeed and women are more often the lowest paid or do most of the unpaid work (child-rearing, food production) in all societies The third womyn-nature connection used by ecofeminists includes finding empirical evidence for their claims. Health risks to women, first world development policies, animal exploitation in factory farms and the practice of meat-eating, pornography and rape, are some of the diverse range of cultural phenomena identified as evidence of patriarchal domination and are largely products of capitalist exploitation that makes anything fair game for profit. Some more radical theorists see womyns identification with nature as complying with that which oppresses, yet some womyn have chosen the spiritual dimension of identification with nature with its recognition of the value of indigenous beliefs that have often been decimated in the dominator/capitalist culture.
slide 6 Domination: exerting rule leads to dualism: dominator/dominated; powerful/oppressed; force/submission; good/bad; male/female; - things are not this simplistic Domination leads to attitudes not amenable to environmental or social justice: aggression, deceit, lack of cooperation, resentment of those in power, a class structure Domination leads to psychological states not amenable to human fulfilment: fear, resentment & resignation in the oppressed group; omnipotence and self-righteousness in the dominating group Val Plumwood points to the value dualisms and hierarchies within our language and thought which pair values such as ‘man/womyn’, ‘reason/emotion’, ‘mind/body’, ‘culture/nature’ where the first are identified as the norm or superior, the second as aberrations or otherness. Accordingly women in giving birth and mothering are equated with nature and the body, men extract themselves from nature by engaging in “rational” projects. Ynestra King points out that this is erroneous: “the process of nurturing an unsocialised, undifferentiated human infant into an adult person is the bridge between nature and culture”4
Slide 7 How does this effect the environment * an attitude of domination, of instrumentalism, that backgrounds capitalism has led to profligate abuse of the non-human world. Until profit ceases to be the measure of good, waste will continue to occur * only through ceasing human inequity (ending domination, patriarchy & capitalism) can we achieve environmental equity - equity for humans and non-humans alike. People will always misuse nature when they can make a profit or when they are wanting for their vital needs * effects not only the environment, but the practice and success of environmentalism: women outnumber men 3:1 in environment & social justice groups
slide 8 diversity in ecofemism liberal feminism - critique only of unequal opportunity for women, ‘bourgeois’ feminism marxist feminism - critique of capitalism, as source of women’s oppression radical feminism - critique of socialisation/patriarchy as source of women’s oppression socialist feminism - critique of capitalism, patriarchy anarcho-feminism - variant on s/f & r/f, that sees androcentric domination as source of problem
slide 9 & 10 comparisons of feminist attitudes to the environment
slide 11 common threads in feminist critique of environmentalism shiva slide 12 deep ecology: similarities and differences I would suggest that because ecocentrism attempts to so radicalise the realm of the morally considerable, seemingly to the detriment of especially human individuals, it will never be widely embraced. An environmental ethic that can embrace commonly felt and vital human impulses to care, to share and respect the environment based on feelings of kinship with other humans and a recognition of our kinship with nonhuman life is better placed to win popular acceptance than a value theory that defines in abstract terms our moral duties and expects us to do ‘justice though the heavens may fall’ . The tools for such a moral revolution are already within every one of us.
Slide 13 and differences Marti Kheel sees an affinity with deep ecology, where “the emphasis of both philosophies is not on an abstract or ‘rational’ calculation of value but rather on the development of a new consciousness for all of life, they call for an inward transformation in order to attain outward change”3 This is the stream of ecocentrism which has gotten the most criticism is that relying on what Robyn Eckersley calls ‘autopoietic value theory’. Autopoietism posits that because organisms or entities are self-renewing, they have intrinsic value and hence are morally considerable and should be allowed to fulfil their life-potential. This substantially widens the scope of who or what is morally considerable to the point many consider ridiculous – that, and that sometimes “killing of a wildflower…is just as much a wrong…as the killing of a human…in some situations it is a greater wrong” (Taylor in Nash 1989:155) However, Taylor does differentiate between wanton destruction and self-defence. Indeed, the radical exclamations of ecocentric holists do nothing to promote the widespread acceptability of their ethic when they make statements about “siding with the bears” (John Muir in Nash), that injuries resulting from trees spikes “served them (the loggers) right for killing trees” (Gilliam in Manes 19:458). Biospheric holism takes no account of the rights of individuals except insofar as they are endangered. J Baird Callicott makes it absolutely clear in his earlier writings that he himself considers abstract entities like ‘species’ to have a “prima facie claim to preferential consideration” because diversity contributes to ‘stability’ (Callicott 1980: 325). He goes as far as to suggest that individuals in a biotic community are like the cells in a body – they have no importance except as parts of a functioning whole. The practical use of this analogy is questionable. The interests of a human or other organismic body can be defined in terms of interests. Individuals have goals, to reproduce themselves and to survive until this is accomplished, that ecosystems clearly do not. The political connections between womyn and nature are far ranging: from health, to the treatment of animals, to the peace and anti-nuclear movements. Womyn are clearly an important voice in these movements and, in my experience, are often there in greater numbers than men. The seventh womyn-nature connection dealt with by ecofeminst analysis is an ethical one. Theorists point out that environmental ethics as formulated in the mainstream are “problematically anthropocentric or hopelessly andocentric”. Ecofeminists suggest alternatives ethical theories, including an ‘ethic of care’ stemming from the notion of care we learn to give and receive as part of the parent-child relationship, reciprocity, kinship, animal rights, and social ecology perspectives.
Slide 15 The final womyn-nature connection is a theoretical one. This is where I started so makes a fitting conclusion to my explication of ecofeminism. Ecofeminist theory is seen as a valid alternative to the consequentialist / deontological dichotomy: an ethic not based either on weighing outcomes to achieve the “greatest happiness”, or setting inflexible rules. They make no claims to be the only alternative, but have some common threads with deep ecology, social ecology and Leopoldian land ethics. The significance of ecofeminism, i think, lies within and without environmental ethics. Like much feminist critique before it, ecofeminism points to a new way of formulating mainstream thought. Importantly: “Can mainstream philosophy generate an environmental ethic that is not male-biased?” Many Ecofeminist theorists suggest that it cannot because it is deeply entrenched in the dominator model of patriarchal culture. If it cannot, then it remains the task of alternatives like ecofeminism to dissect the fundamental premises of mainstream philosophical analysis and theory, and to show how it might be different.
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November 11th, 2001
UN Declaration of Human Rights
Article 29 (1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of their personality is possible (2) In the exercise of their rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare of a democratic [and ecological] society (my brackets)
It is a forgone conclusion to this essay that there is dire need for an environmental ethic. The extent to which we human beings are capable of changing the earth is only just being realised. We are daily assailed by increasing evidence that global warming, deforestation, salinity, pollution and species loss are widespread. The scale at which these events are occurring is unlike what has ever occurred in the past as a result of natural processes. We cannot deny that these changes are anthropogenic. Because we have this capacity to make the world unliveable for ourselves and other beings, it is imperative that we change the way we use the Earth and the nonhuman beings that inhabit it. To do this we need also to conceive of the earth as more than just a resource for human beings, we need to change the way we think about the planet.
When I began to research for this paper I soon found myself drowning in a sea of complex political and philosophical theory. The more I read, the more confused I became! I felt a bit like I had fallen down Val Plumwood’s ‘Well of Discourse’, endlessly arguing to and fro and around theory, all the while sideways glancing “in dismay into the fearful and bottomless Abyss of Relativism”.
I attempted numerous strategies to try to find some commonality, some thread to lead me through the minefield of theory: I compiled lists, tables, mindmaps, even resorted to comparing indexes in a desperate hope of happening across some one sentence that might pull it all together. It was at that point, surrounded by reams of paper wasted to the end of such knowledge, that I had a kind of personal epiphany. If the theories I read were incoherent in the context of my own life, how could I expect that they would inspire others to change theirs? No matter how watertight the arguments, mere reason will not move anyone to action without feeling. The kind of feeling you might get from looking at that graph.
I have had occasion in the past to dwell on the philosophical framework of my life and realised that theory plays little part in our initial impetus to take up a cause, to devote ourselves to social change. It begins with a psychological state, of doubt and dissatisfaction that leads to a desire to change things. Theory often comes afterwards, and perhaps it is the role of academics and philosophers to articulate the premises of social change movements, but they do not start them.
There is no doubt that a lot of environmental activists are angry and despondent when they think about the current ecological crisis. These feelings come of frustration that our society does not regard nature with much esteem, and felt powerlessness in the face of a so-called democracy that seems much less fair than it could be. From whence does this sense of fairness stem? Why be fair? Why care about others, human or nonhuman, being treated fairly?
I guess some of the answers may be found in biology. Indeed socio-biologists seek to explain all human cultural phenomena in terms of survival of the species – and indeed a concern for the welfare of future generations of human beings fits this mould. This is a kind of “extended self-interest’’, entirely human-centred (or anthropocentric) in conception, that some self-styled ‘pragmatic’ environmental ethicists suggest is all we need to ensure ecological preservation. We know that if we continue our excessive resource abuse of the environment we will jeopardise the survival of future human beings. Not only will they suffer material deprivation, but also be psychologically diminished as we leave them a less biodiverse and less beautiful world than the one we were born into. Yet when we despoil wilderness, alter the global climate, manipulate and engineer nature to suit our purposes, we are doing more than merely decreasing our own chances of survival. As conscious, reasoning beings are we not capable of recognising the natural world as more than a resource for ourselves?
It was Scottish philosopher David Hume who observed that ethics begins with “esteem, respect, regard, kinship, affection and sympathy” (in Callicott 1989:198) In advocating social change in favour of environmental protection we are taking a moral position that requires respect for the biotic community as well as the human one. So I returned to the central premises of Deep Ecologists, Ecofeminists, and Ecoanarchists, as the foundation for my environmental ethic. These three theories all provide some aspect of the analysis of what is wrong with the system that has led to ecological destruction and the social injustice that accompanies it. With these theories in mind I will try to articulate what I think is a viable strategy for social change that will benefit the environment and promote social justice.
Roger Gottleib in The Ecological Community suggests that “the realisation that our manner of life leads so easily to the elimination of other species and a kind of slow suicide (for our species) should make us deeply suspicious of the beliefs our culture has held”. For this reason I consider the social change fundamental to achieving environmental outcomes to be primarily an ideological one.
But it is not enough to stop there. For as Edward Abbey says in the infamous novel that inspired the Earth First! movement, The Monkeywrench Gang, “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul” or as I am fond of saying ‘philosophy is no substitute for action’! For it is only through positive action that we may mitigate the ecological crisis which is also a crisis of what it means to be human.
Deep Ecology – what it is, what it is not
I feel obliged to dispel some of the misconceptions that have been circulated by opponents of deep ecology, or more succinctly ecocentrism. The primary tenet of ecocentrism is that the human species are an integral part of nature, not somehow above or better than nonhuman life, and that this has moral implications regarding our behaviour. This ‘biospherical egalitarianism’ then requires that all other entities that fit the criteria of moral considerability be included in deliberations over our use of the environment.
Perhaps the earliest conservationist to warrant the ecocentrist label is Aldo Leopold, famous for having written of his ‘Land Ethic’ in 1949. For Leopold the “integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community” was paramount. His approach, rating biotic integrity above individuals has had a pervasive influence on environmental policy in that quite often individuals and sometimes whole species are eradicated in the interests of preserving conservation values of other species or a protected area as a whole. However, such eradications are usually done for anthropocentric reasons.
Leopold’s approach is what is called ‘ethical holism’, in that it rates the community’s benefit over that of the individual. In my opinion this is not necessary nor moral, and it has led to charges of misanthropy against ecocentrists in general. As Ecofeminist Marti Kheel says, “what the wholists seem to forget…is that the whole consists of individual beings - beings with emotions, feelings and inclinations - and these too are part of the whole.” (1985:22)
This is the stream of ecocentrism which has gotten the most criticism is that relying on what Robyn Eckersley calls ‘autopoietic value theory’. Autopoietism posits that because organisms or entities are self-renewing, they have intrinsic value and hence are morally considerable and should be allowed to fulfil their life-potential. This substantially widens the scope of who or what is morally considerable to the point many consider ridiculous – that, and that sometimes “killing of a wildflower…is just as much a wrong…as the killing of a human…in some situations it is a greater wrong” (Taylor in Nash 1989:155) However, Taylor does differentiate between wanton destruction and self-defence. Indeed, the radical exclamations of ecocentric wholists do nothing to promote the widespread acceptability of their ethic when they make statements about “siding with the bears” (John Muir in Nash), that injuries resulting from trees spikes “served them (the loggers) right for killing trees” (Gilliam in Manes 19:458). Biospheric holism takes no account of the rights of individuals except insofar as they are endangered. J Baird Callicott makes it absolutely clear in his earlier writings that he himself considers abstract entities like ‘species’ to have a “prima facie claim to preferential consideration” because diversity contributes to ‘stability’ (Callicott 1980: 325). He goes as far as to suggest that individuals in a biotic community are like the cells in a body – they have no importance except as parts of a functioning whole. The practical use of this analogy is questionable. The interests of a human or other organismic body can be defined in terms of interests. Individuals have goals, to reproduce themselves and to survive until this is accomplished, that ecosystems clearly do not.
Other ecocentrists consider a fundamental metaphysical shift in the way we perceive ourselves as humans and as individual ‘selves’ is supported by new findings in the physical sciences that suggest that matter is more space than solid, and as such there is no clear line between our self and the environment we find ourselves in. In a parallel with what ecoanarchists say about individualism being impossible and parasitic on community, so to our physical entity is seen to be more part of the physical community than was previously thought (see Table I).
It is this latter notion of the insuperability of individuals and wholes that I take to be a useful one in formulating a socio-environmental ethic.
Table I
CORE TENETS OF THE THEORIES
|
|
|
CONCEPT OF SELF |
HUMAN PLACE IN THE WORLD |
ORIGIN OF ECOLOGICAL CRISIS |
|
Ecocentrism |
extended self |
No discrete entities, self-realisation and flourishing of nature interrelated |
Hierarchy of humans over nature (anthropocentrism) |
|
Ecofeminism |
extended family |
No autonomy: self -realisation through caring relationships with others (which can include nature) |
Hierarchy of men over women. Male values over so called feminine ones (dualism) |
|
Ecoanarchism |
extended self |
Autonomy/community dynamic: Self realisation through social relationships |
Hierarchy of human over human, duplicated in human domination over nature |
Murray Bookchins main criticism of deep ecology in particular is that is relies too much on ‘intuition’ or ‘mysticism’ and is anti-rational. I contend, along with most Ecofeminist thinkers, that considering intuition as a valid source of knowledge is not the same as rejecting rationality, rather it is supplement to it. All so called factual and scientific claims about the world are ultimately based on concepts that are taken as given – concepts broadly identified by Kant as being apriori and only known through intuition: time, space, causality, infinity, even the process of logic is unprovable and must simply be accepted. By this Kant defines the limits of human reason.
Instead of appealing only to abstract universal or scientifically verifiable principles and by implication rejecting intuition, ecocentrists accept that when we think of environmental problems we FEEL something is wrong. These feelings are the starting point for change:
The emphasis of both philosophies [Ecocentrism and Ecofeminism] is not on abstract or ‘rational’ calculation of value but rather on the development of a new consciousness for all of life…they call for an inward transformation in order to attain outward change..(Kheel 1990:128) [my brackets]
Ecocentrist philosopher John Rodman attempts to describe not only his emotional and moral outrage at environmental destruction, but also the intuition all life has value and the myriad forms of oppression are interconnected in this quote:
I confess that I need only stand in the midst of a clear-cut forest, a strip-mined hillside, a defoliated jungle, or a dammed canyon to feel uneasy with the assumption that could yield the conclusion that no human action can make a difference to the welfare of anything but sentient animals … I strongly suspect that the same basic principles are manifested in quite different forms…in damming a wild river and repressing an animal instinct, in clear cutting a forest and bombing a city, in Dachau and a university research laboratory, in censoring an idea, liquidating a religion or racial group, and exterminating a species of flora or fauna… (John Rodman 1988: 192)
Ecocentrists accept not only the evidence of ecological science that everything is interconnected at an ecological level, but extrapolate psychological and socio-cultural interconnections. As such, band-aid or end-of-pipe solutions to social or ecological problems are not enough.
Ecocentrism Redefined
It is the main concern of Ecocentrists, to change the way people perceive nonhuman nature and their place in the world. We consider nonhuman life to have value of and for itself – intrinsic value – and though, in my opinion, value may only be attributed by human beings who, as far as we know, are the only animals capable of reasoning, it does not exclude our appreciating the environment and everything in it as being valuable in ways other than ones that directly relate to the needs of human beings. Queensland’s own Nature Conservation Act (1992) mentions intrinsic value as one of the motivations for the act. In study done by the TWS in 1996, oft quoted by me, only 12% of respondents thought economic growth was more important than wilderness preservation. The study found that “there was strong and widespread agreement…(that) ‘wilderness areas should be preserved for their own sake, not because people want to use them’” (1999: 2)
Arne Naess redefined ecocentrism in his formulation of the Deep Ecology ethic in 1973. Naess allows scope for the rights of individuals in the “vital needs” clause: recognising that all life forms require the use of others for their survival, but that this should be minimal. Naess’ ethic has an important facet regarding personal growth and integrity which is often overlooked or outright rejected as mystical nonsense in interpretations. An important part of Naess philosophy is the idea of ’self-realisation’. Naess bases this in the traditions of “non-violence, non-injury and reverence for life” in Buddhism and other eastern religious traditions. In this sense, it goes beyond being a value-theory, and instead suggests that respect for nature is as much a psychological attitude, an ecological consciousness. Warwick Fox furthers this notion of self-realisation in his ‘transpersonal ecology’. Murray Bookchin, despite being a most vehement critic of Deep Ecology himself advocates consciousness change as a means to achieving ecological sustainability. In the same way that Fox suggests a reconfiguring of the meaning of self to include the biotic community (and even the cosmos), Bookchin advocates a reconfiguring of what it means to be an individual in the context of the wider community good, and Ecofeminists in the interpersonal.
Both Naess and Fox and some Ecofeminist thinkers ground their of Abraham Maslow’s model of personal growth and fulfilment, and Lawrence Kolhberg’s model of moral development. Maslow predicates the higher levels of self-realisation and ability to identify with the whole on self esteem and safety. So too Kohlberg’s stages 5, 6 and 7 which recognise the importance of community, the sacredness of life and ultimately identification with the cosmos is predicated on the same things. The ‘cosmic unity’ that Kohlberg and Fox talk about is in part a recognition of our place in evolution.
Both systems, though not without their flaws, rely on a conception of human virtue that can only be supported by material and psychological safety. And from this I turn to the importance of good interpersonal relationships and social justice as integral to sustainability. A reassessment of our relationship with nature, our concepts of self and what it means to live a good life are all keys to the ecocentric approach to environmental justice.
A Useful Ecofeminist Critique
I have mentioned some of the criticisms Ecofeminists have with Ecocentrism. Yet on many things they do agree. Feminists identify ‘androcentrism’ as the root of social inequity and Ecofeminists ‘androcentric anthropocentrism’ as the root of ecological inequity.
In a capitalist society individuals become rich only at the expense of others, and those others are predominantly women, though as we shall see with Ecoanarchism, the whole human community may suffer also. Women do most of the unpaid work in the world, including growing most of the food. When food production becomes industrialised men take over, but in the scheme of things, day-to-day subsistence food production is primarily done by women.
The individualist liberalism that is basic to a free market system is parasitic on women’s work. Cleaning, meal preparation, child rearing and care are predominantly done by women. This unpaid work provides the social support necessary for paid workers to devote themselves more fully to their ‘careers’. In a system where the economic is the highest value, only paid work is considered ‘real’ work. Everywhere men own most of the property and in some cultures also their wives and children. As such, women are often only valued in their ability to provide heirs and workers, the real work they do to sustain the family unit is undervalued. Some Ecofeminists identify this ‘sustaining’ role as a vital one to sustaining the earth: and this is perhaps borne out to some extent by the predominance of women in volunteer helping organisations, in particular green groups and animal rights groups.
Analysing the position of women in relation to nature Vandana Shiva links the use and abuse of nature with the violation and marginalisation of women, especially in the ‘majority’ world. Both stem from the primacy of economic development, a process she argues is more aptly ‘maledevelopment’. Social institutions like science, technology, politics, and the economy itself, are inherently exploitative: thus every area of mainstream human activity marginalizes and burdens both women and nature. There is only one strategy, Vandana Shiva suggests, to survival and liberation for nature, women and men: the ecological path of ‘harmony, sustainability and diversity’.
Shiva claims that women, in India in particular, have been both saviours and victims of maldevelopment. Many women find solidarity in identifying with the oppression and destruction of nature. Indeed, it is vital for them to do so, when it is of great importance to them to ensure the survival of their families. The personal impetus to protect nature felt by many women overlaps with the self-realisation aspect of Ecocentrist theory.
A study of women’s roles and influence on society in the Indian region of Uttar Pradesh in India found that,
Woman’s role in the conservative society in Garhwal, is determined more by men, tradition and livelihood patterns. As in the other patriarchal societies, these influences have restricted her role - largely to home, hearth, child rearing and those farming activities which have a basis in gender rather then equity;
Her contribution to family is enormous and is recognised well - both within home and outside. Her contribution to community development is the deep ethical grounding which she bestows on her children; Beyond this has been the realm of men, until recently; Last, few decades have seen the formation of many formal women’s savings and self help groups, crèches run by women in the villages and women undertaking a variety of welfare or development activities in their communities. (Srivastava 1997)
Another facet of anti-environmental ideology is suggested by a gendered approach to morality. Psychologist Carol Gilligan suggests that it is often a psychological disposition of men (perhaps as a result of traditional gender roles) to subordinate relationships to universal principles or rules and thus relationships are devalued or objectified (Gilligan 1987:19) The effect of objectification is intellectual separation of subjectivity and objectivity, personal and public, feeling and ‘fact’: dualism! As such it is may be easier for many men to suppress their feelings of wrong doing towards women or the environment to a higher so called moral principle that advocates the primacy of individual actions (including those done for profit) over relational and community spirited ones. Yet both caring, and objective rational calculation are socialised into us and may be undone. In this the project of personal change advocated by Ecocentrists intersects with that of many Ecofeminists.
The Anarchist dilemma
Anarchism identifies oppression with hierarchy. Where one individual or institution has power over people, those people are liable to feel resentful, be uncooperative, or fearful. Ecoanarchists are convinced that by simply removing the hierachies that constitute the public sphere, individuals will be empowered enough to take life-affirming control of the way the world is used. Anarchism reifies a dialectic between the individual and the community in a way that affirms the value of both. An anarchist society, like that posited by Bookchin and his ilk supposes that individuals, given the freedom to make well-informed and valid decision that affect their lives will choose those options that are also communally beneficial. The obvious flaw in this schema is that there is no reason why they should choose communally beneficial options over self-serving ones, much less ecologically sound ones. That the latter is so is evidenced by the only long-running anarchist experiment in the Mondragon co-operatives in Spain.
This is a criticism ecofeminsts make of ecoanarchism – in that it denies the difference and importance of personal ties in influencing our decisions. It is also a critique Ecocentrist make of social ecology in that something more than an economic or human-centred valuing of the environment (for in an anarchist community the environment would surely continue to be valued economically as a resource) As such something approaching an ecological consciousness that combines a scientific and biological knowledge with a spiritual or personal appreciation of the nonhuman world is essential to an ecologically sustainable community.
Connections
I contend that despite the fact that Ecocentrism, Ecofeminism and Ecoanarchism define their premises as quite differently, they have important similarities also.
All three base their world view on a conception of what it means to be a human being that extends beyond of a narrowly defined autonomous self. Indeed, the idea that we can be autonomous is considered a myth, and all three recognise the autonomous liberalist idea of self to be supported by unacknowledged others: the biosphere, the work of women and the support structures of the volunteer or gift economy as constituted in the social network of community. All three see the realisation of the good of the individual as essential to and dependant on community. All three identify hierarchies of some kind to be the cause of social and ecological oppression (see table I)
The fact that social movements are recognising the unity of their oppressions is the driving force behind the anti corporate-globalisation movement such as that exhibited at the huge protests at Seattle, Washington, Melbourne, Prague, Quebec and the recent world-wide M1 protests. Such unity serves an important purpose in bringing together disparate groups, enhancing their understanding of one another and giving them more ideological force by recognising their similarities. This has been misunderstood or misconstrued by the mass media as being too disjointed to be effective and indeed even naïve.
This is the politics of difference Ecofeminists talk about, in action. Indeed, in accepting that others can be different and not wrong allows for a truly inclusive and participatory public sphere to develop. As we accept there are a plurality of ways to deal with environmental and social issues, in a local context, we must also realise that the only way to do this is through providing optimal conditions: of “mutual respect, openness, (and) scrutiny of (our) relationships with one another” which Dryzek postulates is the only way to create ‘truly public opinion, and crucially, the conditions for confrontation with state power.”
These conditions are, of course, already a characteristic of many social change groups.
Strategies for Change
Paul Taylor, an Ecocentrist, defines his ‘Respect for Nature’ ethic as tripartite,
consisting of :
1. A belief system - that all nature is interconnected and interdependent; all parts are necessary to the whole; that all parts are inherently worthwhile 2. An ultimate moral attitude - respect for the autonomy of oneself and other persons as loci of inherent worth, hence respect for nature
And
3. A set of rules defining our duties - non-violence, a commitment to minimal harm etc
As it is my opinion that the political project of environmentalism is essentially driven by a moral schema such as this, I would suggest that to Taylor’s 3 points we add a fourth
4. A strategy for realising those values
Ecocentrist and Ecofeminist thinkers have only suggested what form a grreen society should take. They have only provided a few guidelines as to how things need to change. But it is my conviction that the evidence for such change is manifest in many non governmental agencies, and even in some of the more progressive strategies of government itself.
Insofar as Ecoanarchism, Ecocentrism and Ecofeminism identify hierarchies of some kind as the root of oppression, a politics of change for the better would have to exhibit the dissolution of hierarchy. This is fundamental to a system that aims to be fair: As all are born ‘free and equal’ so shall they be treated.
Jim Dodge’s article on Bioregionalism describes the practice of social change as being equal parts resistance and renewal. There is considerable overlap in what constitutes resistance or renewal, for example involvement in alternative food co-ops serves both purposes (see Table II)
Table II
Strategies for Change
PRACTICE
|
|
RESISTANCE: |
activism |
RENEWAL: |
articulating alternatives |
|
|
COLLECTIVE |
PERSONAL |
COLLECTIVE |
PERSONAL |
|
Involvement in local politics, com consultations etc |
Changing personal consumption habits: boycotts etc |
Formulation of theories for structural change |
Consciousness change through education, self development |
|
Using all available means in democratic process (as we know it) |
Trend towards self-sufficiency where possible |
create and get involved in local co-operatives, NGOs: alternative economy |
Nurture self and others through participating in various struggles and seeking to understand |
|
Advocate non-hierarchical decision making |
Intellectual vigilance against sexism, racism, etc |
alternative media to provide a voice for the voiceless |
importance of learning the skills of questioning early in life |
|
involvement in protest movements: saying “NO to violations of widely held human values” |
|
living and building cities that encourage community rather than alienation |
|
|
non-violent direct action and civil disobedience |
|
changing public policy to facilitate community action |
|
This table is by by no means exhausts the possibilities.
In trying to formulate strategies for change, I have largely stayed away from mainstream democratic processes. It is contrary to non-hierarchical decision making for proponents to get involved in politics through elections when democracy as practised in Western societies is a travesty of the ideal. Janet Biehl, a social ecologist, describes western democracy thus:
To label this system politics is a gross misnomer. It should more properly be called statecraft. Professionalised, manipulative, and immoral, these systems of elites and masses impersonate democracy…Far from empowering people as citizens, statecraft presupposes the abdication of citizen power… (Biehl 1997:1)
The abdication of power to another is tantamount to permitting them to dominate over you, and the extreme extension of this is violence. Participation as a politician in such a system is to accept compromise. Certainly, so long as economic values outrun any other, ecology will continue to be compromised.
“Why think that non-official people could not arrange life for themselves…?” (Tolstoy)
Insofar as I advocate self-determination of social and political organisation, I think it would be contrary to prescribe any one way to go about it. However, there are any examples of self-determined communities who, acknowledged or not, operate under what might be called anarchist principles of non-hierarchical decision making, provide opportunities for women’s equal participation and nurture both each other and the environment.
The fact that people can arrange their own lives is in evidence everywhere: from P&C meetings to, green groups, to intentional communities, to struggles for self-government. People everywhere resent being told how to live by governments that are distant both physically and ideologically from their day to day lives.
There a myriad examples of people ‘arraigning their own lives’ that I might refer to. Uttarakhand, in the north of India, is well known for its various active social movements. It is the birthplace of the Chipko movement of non-violent resistance, possibly the Third World’s best known and studied environmental struggle (‘chipko’ literally means embrace – hence tree-huggers) The Chipko Movement was the result of hundreds of locally autonomous groups. The main participants and organisers have been village women, acting to save their livelihood and their communities.
Uttarakhandi activists have also sought to combat the precipitous declines in the economic, social, and ecological integrity of the Himalayas with a host of campaigns that have met with varying levels of success.
Uttarakhand is a very poor and environmentally damaged region, yet the people have organised to solve their own problems where the government has either ignored them or been actively hostile. Protests for self government in 1994 resulted in the murder of unarmed men and women by police.
They are many volunteer organisations applying themselves to local social and environmental problems including groups focusing on : appropriate technology, biodiversity, forests, corruption, cultural survival, alcoholism, pollution and urban sprawl, water ,wildlife and women’s issues. A campaign against the Tehri Dam ‘maldevelopment’ has been ongoing since it’s construction began 30 years ago. One commentator notes that despite the official propaganda about the benefits of ‘progress’,
It is important to ask, benefits for whom? Who should control and benefit from the resources of a region? Opposition to the dam over its severe environmental impact, economic merit, and adequate compensation, have largely been glossed over in the national press, although in groundbreaking studies in scientific and environmental journals, the Tehri Dam has not fared as well. RR (4.7.00)
Local knowledge (and common sense!) realises that a massive dam in an earthquake zone is not a good policy, indeed cracks have already appeared. The electricity provided by the dam will not benefit the local community who have no money to purchase electricity. In addition the dam is perceived as a religious violation of the sacred Ganges River.
Like democracies everywhere, the experiences of the Uttarakhandi people are indicative of the inadequacy of a distant, centralised government working within an economic paradigm. The village of Dulmooth, is one example where the elected officials exercise a right to mark timber trees for felling by villagers in the forest department’s reserved forest where villagers should have rights to use the forest also.
The forest is shared by at least three villages, and had become a brown patch till it came under the management of the locals about 20 years ago. Now, broad-leaved species give enough fodder and fuelwood for the villagers, and women spend a fraction of the time they spent earlier in collecting firewood. Women have also taken over the functions of the government officials — controlling grazing, felling, lopping, guarding the forest, catching violators and confiscating their axes, prosecuting and imposing fines on them and settling disputes over the forest produce.
Elected officials are anyways bound by various legal provisions that hinder, rather than facilitate, autonomous decision-making. The women are, therefore, not keen to make theirs an elected body and apply for registration. “We manage quite well without the help of forest laws or district authorities,”
The lack of co-operation from government, forces local communities to fend for themselves, and like the Mondragon experience, this can often be very successful.
Part of the success of community action in Uttakarhand lies in fact that these people work where they live and are intimately familiar both with each other and their natural environment. As such, the very structure of their living environment is contributory to community.
In most Western societies the ‘cult of individualism’ has led to isolated living and working spaces. Although this is changing to some extent in the housing industry with trends towards semi detached town houses, the poor in many Western cities are still living in the huge, ‘depersonalised’ apartment towers (Saunders 1999: 28).
Part of the reconnection with nature and community in these places has been the establishment of community parks and gardens created and maintained by citizens, not councils. Since 1989, urban permaculture gardens in Havana, Cuba have liberated the poor from food shortages brought on by international sanctions, (now city gardens are providing half of Cuba’s food supply!) and attracted community activists from all over the world to participate in a two-directional learning experience.
Not only are community gardeners providing for themselves, but sharing the product of their labours and promoting sustainable practice. Citizens have encouraged council to support them with information, seeds and free land titles on which to farm. Chemical fertilisers and pesticides have been banned. In addition, public health has improved with the availability of fresh produce, and I daresay so has mental health with the empowerment of oppressed individuals in a common and highly successful struggle. The gardens provide remedial work for young offenders who often enjoy it so much, according to one teacher, “they don’t want to leave”.
She sums up the success of public gardens:
We organised a brigade of family and friends and created it for ourselves. We needed only our hands. And we have a wonderful relationship with the people around us; we all work together and make our city a good place. We provide good, cheap food for people, and free food and care to those who need it. (Saunders 1999: 29)
World-wide many people have organised themselves into ‘intentional communities’ , buying land solely for the purpose of living democratically and sustainably.
There are hundreds of intentional communities Australia, with most of them located in NNSW and NQLD. These communities are actively attempting to improve their relationship with the bush whilst living in it. Max Lindegger, one of the founders of Crystal Waters Community in SE QLD, has helped develop a tool by which to measure community sustainability. Most importantly they include a spiritual dimension on an equal basis with ecological and social sustainability.
Ecological aspects include living in harmony with the natural environment, respecting the nonhuman world and ensuring its integrity by diminishing one’s own harmful practices and the harm of the community as a whole. A good public knowledge of ones bioregion is also a measure of the communities ability to monitor the effect their practices are having on the natural environment. It is expected that a truly sustainable community would regenerate the natural environment rather than destroy it. Thus food is organically grown, and the less products need to be made and bought outside the community the better. Reusing and improvising are seen to be both ecologically and spiritually sound (in that it takes imagination to improvise!). Creativity and cultural vitality are part of the spiritual leg, and seen as a measure of community unity, encouraging personal esteem and growth through belonging. The third leg is the social, whereby the degree to which people co-operate, share and feel safe to express themselves is a good indication of social health. Crystal Waters itself has an educational program where people form all over Australia and the world have visited to learn permaculture and the world view that accompanies it.
At Black Horse Creek community, near Kyogle in NNSW, a community building facilitates regular social events and monthly meetings are held to decide maintenance issues. Informally groups meet garden, draw, horse ride, and otherwise share skills. Each resident has a 10 hectare ‘share’ in the property on which they live and build homes largely of recycled products and have permaculture gardens, but 750 of the 1,000 hectare property is common and designated wildlife reserve. It is being actively regenerated from the former cattle property with as many as 2000 trees being planted last year under a grant from the state government. Although many of the 50 people living on the community are unemployed in the economic sense, they certainly are not in any other. Arguably the ecological impact of residents living in such communities is much less than those living and working in cities.
In Brisbane many NGOs and citizens groups have organised to provide some of the basics for life and community in public gardens like the City Farm at Windsor, Morningside, West End and many other suburbs. Organic food co-ops and buying groups have been organised in many suburbs and universities. People are becoming more environmentally aware in increasing participation in the 200 or so land care and reforestation groups in South–east Queensland, such a s ‘Creek Freaks’, RAGE, and SCRUB to name but a few.
Dryzek emphasises the importance of a truly autonomous public sphere as a precondition for an ecologically rational reconstruction of society. There are two main barriers to conditions, that would allow increased public awareness and involvement in local issues. They are educational institutions and the mass media. ‘Cross-fertilisation’ of ideas in academia is vital to changing both government educational policies and hence the world view of individuals and institutions. We live under a system that firstly, suppresses or ridicules difference; and secondly actively promotes egoistic individualism at the expense of common interests.
Suppression of difference in both educational institutions and the media can be linked to some extent with powerful economic interests involved, which can be said to “undermine any pretensions to democratic legitimacy” (Dryzek: 32). Universities are more and more reliant on corporate sponsorship in order to fund programs. As such they are obliged to produce both research and graduates that will fuel the economic machine. Personal growth is no longer a motivation for education, when increased competition in all things is encouraged. This state of affairs is both contrary to the encouragement of respect and esteem for difference necessary for co-operation and the development of community. We often take this intense competitiveness into the workplace and our private lives become increasingly alienated from others. We cannot admit intimacy, share or co-operate with others easily when we perceive they may be a threat to our getting ahead. It is easy to believe that, on the surface, democracy is alive and well when there are no violent oppositions to what we think is best for us. So long as one stays within the confines of the Australian Dream, one may never be exposed to the kind of opposition that makes for revolutions like that ongoing in Uttarakhand, and those people that do protest will always been perceived as misguided at best, idiots at worst. Privilege is invisible to those that have it.
Here we are espousing community and environmental justice for humans and non-humans and right above us, in the is same building ,other students are learning about the ‘economic man’ and the ‘invisible hand’ and those values will become, for a great number of them, internalised as part of their own beliefs. It is this perception that convinces me of the dire need for philosophy in schools, and in the public sphere. One of the vital skills each person needs to resist an oppressive system is the ability not only to question policies that damage their own lives, but to understand the bigger picture and empathise with others unlike them. The ability to question reality as science and the educational system present it to us is absolutely vital to social change. With understanding comes empathy and with empathy comes caring.
As things change at a grass roots level under the impetus of people acting where they are ‘at’, (as Jim Dodge might say) there is also need to change the political structure that is preventing people from arraigning their own lives. Real possibilities for change exist, according to Dryzek, in those places in the ‘political economy’ where there is significant opposition and contradiction. The world-wide anti-corporate globalisation movement is a response to such conditions: corporate globalisation is widely opposed because it is held responsible for preventing people acting for themselves in a truly public sphere and because it does not distribute the benefits of economic growth evenly, despite claims to the contrary by its advocates.
The very negativity with which institutions react to dissent (I think of the unnecessarily large police presence at the recent M1 protests for instance) and the way mass media portray any threat to the ideology of the free market is indication that they consider it a serious threat.
Though protest may be defined by many commentators as the last resort of the powerless, it has two valuable products: it unites peoples with similar objections in solidarity and it allows the movements to use the mass media to some extent to get there message across. When video footage shows a police officer battening a protestor, then proclaims it was ‘protestor violence’, and news reports do this repeatedly, it is hard for any sensible person to accept that an anti-corporate protest of 700 people where 45 people get arrested has no legitimacy. Where protesters are objecting to the behaviour of the corporations that own the media that is portraying them as violent, it is only a matter of time before people begin to suspect.
In addition all protest movements are increasingly using and creating their own media tools to get their message across. Street theatre, zines, posters and leaflets have always been the tools of underground movements. In Africa and other places where literacy might be low, music continues to be a tool of protest.
Community radio stations, self-organised public meetings, student organisations, environmental and social justice groups are organising in towns all over the globe to take up the tasks governments cannot or will not do. And they are not only doing it locally. The internet has provided a unique opportunity for grass roots organisations world-wide to network and share skills and information. Global Grassroots Resistance Directory are one such network which connects thousands of organisations in 30 countries. Indymedia.org is a global organisation that allow anyone anywhere to contribute to their debunking of the news as the mass media portray it. Anyone with a computer can contribute articles or pictures and comment on others. Although the vast majority of the world’s people do not have access to advanced technology, (indeed many people do not even have access to safe drinking water!), the existence of global resistance allows the affluent first world to wake up from its complacency and help others.
What crisis? – institutionalised denial
Exposure to the kind of information that protestors are trying to expose can be the catalyst to change a persons world view. It is a political act to suppress such information, or devalue it in the public sphere and that is exactly what happened to Donella Meadows etal, with the ‘Limits to Growth’ simulations, (and which has been attempted with less success in the global warming issue). It wasn’t long before their scientific credibility was shredded by the establishment and the scientific expertise that depends upon and supports ideologically to a large extent, the economic ideology which is the value base from which our society operates.
I contend that these things happen because governments KNOW the subversive effects such knowledge can have if it is given credence in the scientific and public sphere. Chris Brazier in 1999 wrote an article called “The Radical Twentieth Century” in which he outlines the way that “Truth, Justice and the American Way” (as defined by the US govt) has usurped the meaning behind every freedom struggle every positive movement and every so called negative or ‘terrorist’ act and renamed them to suit the American economic rationalist paradigm. Time magazine has relabelled history to suit the American constitutional principles while largely ignoring world-wide trends towards self-management of communities, increasing awareness of social injustices perpetrated by the economic system, and anger and despair at ecological disasters, accompanied by much unpublicised rejection of the primacy of economics and false democracy. Time magazine waxes lyrical saying: “Democracy can exist without capitalism, and capitalism without democracy, but probably not for very long. Political and economic freedom tend to go together…” (1999:8)
This is a half-truth often espoused by advocates of the free market. Pure capitalism, like pure liberalism or pure autonomy for the individual, is NOT compatible with democracy. For the supremacy of one value or one individuals’ wants over others is contrary to the good of the whole community: indeed they may even be mutually exclusive (Stewart 2000:3). As commentator Michael Sandel suggests, the notion of autonomy as espoused by liberalism is “parasitic on a notion of community”. In order for a free an autonomous individual to exist, there needs to be a community that supports open debate of ideas, which provides the psychological basis for free thought (ie. Is not oppressive). Insofar as the media, governments and corporations control social debate, we do not live in a free society. Until people questioning the status quo can speak and be heard without misrepresentation, neither free speech nor democracy can be said to truly exist.
In summary:
People are already actively arraigning their own lives without the help of politicians and outside mainstream economics in ways that respect each other and the planet also.
The broadest meaning of sustainability is applicable in this grass-roots context, for collective practises that respect the differences of individuals certainly are socially sustainable.
Where they also promote ecological care they are environmentally sustainable. The fundamental difference between sustainability in a grass roots context as opposed to what corporations generally mean when they talk about sustainability, is that the former is not premised on economic growth.
We can’t expect that the political will to change the world to protect the environment will materialise any time soon. Recent politics in the US is a pretty good indication of just how little the environment means to those so easily swayed by economics and the power it affords them and their pals. And we sure as hell can’t expect Captain Planet to save us!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Brazier, C 1999 “The Radical Twentieth Century” in New Internationalist, No. 309, Jan/Feb pp7-9
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