November 17th, 2000
Women must see that there can be no liberation for them and no solution to the ecological crisis within a society whose fundamental model of relationships is one of domination - Rosemary Radford Reuther
It is no coincidence that social justice movements like animal rights and human rights should find many parallels to reaffirm their claims of validity. There is also a case for a unique relationship between feminist and ecological values: not only do the goals of the environmental movement have much in common with the feminist struggle to free womyn from the domination of a patriarchal system that also subjugates nature, but that the domination of nature is akin to the domination of persons. Linking these two struggles can be mutually reinforcing.
Ecofeminism is difficult to define because it is so diverse. However, ecofeminist thought does have a common thread: that there are important correlations between the domination of women and the domination of nature and the implications are “crucial to feminism, environmentalism and environmental philosophy”1.
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.
The second womyn-nature connection identified by ecofeminists is conceptual. 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.2 Accordingly women in giving birth and mothering are equated with nature and the body, men extract themselves from nature by engaging in “rational” projects. Feminists maintain that though birth might be a natural occurrence, the circumstances in which it occurs is social, as too is child-rearing. Ynestra King: “the process of nurturing an unsocialised, undifferentiated human infant into an adult person is the bridge between nature and culture”4. Some theorists have seen 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.
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. 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 culture.
Symbolic connections found in religion, art and language are the fourth 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”.
Epistemology is charged with being male-biased and the source of the fifth womyn-nature connection analysed by ecofeminists. Philosophy has been implicated in maintaining the separation between humans and nature, and in perpetuating the view that nature is purely instrumental. Ecofeminist analysis will require us to re-examine many philosophical notions that we take for granted. Reason, rationality, knowledge, objectivity, ethics and what constitutes the moral self will need a radical rethink. Marti Kheel sees an affinity with deep ecology here, 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
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.
The final womyn-nature connection is a theoretical one. 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 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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October 30th, 2000
Unless you have been living in a closet for the last 20 years, it can hardly have escaped your notice that many people perceive the world to be in environmental crisis. In Australia alone we have vast tracts of farmland rendered useless and dead through salinisation; we have agricultural runoff, trawling and climate change destroying the Great Barrier Reef; we have less than 5% of old growth forests remaining. We have a kangaroo cull quota of over five million while introduced hoofed animals that outnumber the human population 10 to one are pulverising our marginal ecosystems beyond repair. In Queensland we have the highest rate of land clearing in the western world, the fifth highest in the world if we were a country. Globally, climate change has resulted in the hottest 14 years on record since 1980; yet we continue to use fossil fuels (indeed our use of them increases yearly) despite the knowledge that the carbon rich pollution that results is a major contributor to this climate change.
Globally, biodiversity is decreasing at an alarming rate:
70% of the world’s fish species are either fully or over-exploited. One third of all fish species are threatened with extinction.
14% of the world’s 242,000 plant species are threatened with extinction.
11% of the world’s 9,600 species of birds are threatened with extinction
11% of the world’s 4,400 mammal species are threatened with extinction
This decline in species can inevitably be traced to over exploitation or negligent use of habitat by human beings.
In the face of these sobering facts, it is difficult to see what difference philosophy can make. However, ethical theories can help make clear our concerns by attempting to show that what we feel is right or good is also logically valid. That our feelings of moral outrage are justified.
A study carried out by the Wilderness Society in 1996 found that most Australians do value wilderness, only 12% thought economic growth was of greater importance. The study found that:
there was strong and widespread agreement…(that) ‘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 (1999:2)There are obviously deep contradictions in our society when most people value nature, yet are acting within a system that is detrimental to it.
Roderick Nash elucidates the two views that promote human obligations to preserve nature:
first, some people believe that it is right to protect and wrong to abuse nature…from the standpoint of human interest…But the more radical meaning…is that nature has intrinsic value and consequently possesses at least the right to exist. (1989:9)The first view is what has been called anthropocentrism, or human-centred ethics; the latter covers biocentrism and deep ecology. Nash sees this more radical way of viewing nature as part of the evolution of ethics. He observes that “environmental ethics is revolutionary; it is arguably the most dramatic expansion of morality in the course of human thought” (1989:7) He also observes that the idea, to most people, is still ‘incredible’. However, so too was the idea of freeing slaves, women’s equal rights and the rights of indigenous peoples. Every milestone in the evolution of ethics, in the words of John Stuart Mill, has been met with ‘ridicule, discussion, (and finally) adoption’ (in Nash 1989:8) Paul Taylor also sees the acceptance of ‘life-centred’ rather than ‘human centred’ ethics as having the potential for a “profound reordering of our moral universe” (1998:72)
Before I go on to discuss the more radical premises of environmental ethics, I would like to say a little about the enterprise of ethics in general. The main purpose of ethics, as I see it, is to make clear to us the reasons for what we do. When it comes to other human beings, this is a relatively easy task. We assume that other people are very like ourselves - we accept that they feel pain and pleasure and have the same basic needs as we do. We are able to put ourselves in the place of another because we know what it feels like to be a human being. It is on this premise that we rest our obligation to treat others well, hence we have the ‘golden rule’ that we should ‘do unto others as we would have them do to us’. Thus we value human life. We can call this value an intrinsic one because it is not merit-based, it rests on no personal quality or talent, just the virtue of being human. So even human beings that are medically brain dead are still accorded some moral consideration even if that consideration involves turning off their life support to preserve their dignity as persons.
Peter Singer has shown us that it is not difficult to extend the realm of moral consideration to other sentient, or feeling, beings because we can empathise with them. We can imagine what it feels like to be a rabbit whose eyes are being washed with a caustic substance, what it feels like to be a monkey deprived of its young and incarcerated in a small cage for the duration of its life. Singer accords value to the lives of animals because:
- there is something it feels like to be an animal with which we can empathise
- we can extrapolate from this that the animal has an interest in the preservation of its life through the avoidance of suffering and the seeking of pleasure.
This last point is what rights thrusts have called a point-of-view that amounts to a purpose or and end to their lives.
However, Singer voices some doubt about the usefulness of speaking of life having ‘intrinsic value’. In his essay All Animals Are Equal 1974, he suggests that intrinsic value “takes the problem back one step, because any satisfactory defence of the claim…would need to refer to some relevant capacities or characteristics that all and only humans possess.” Given that there is no such characteristic, to use intrinsic value to substantiate a claim necessitates including all of life, including non-sentient life, which Singer is loath to do. However, nineteen years later, in the 1993 edition of Practical Ethics, Singer does accord animals intrinsic value, but sees any further extension of the concept as ‘problematic’. Hence Singer’s view of environmental ethics is restricted to the instrumental: preserving the environment protects the interests of sentient beings.
Singer draws the line of moral consideration at animals, while plants, trees, rocks, rivers and mountains remain only as useful to sentient life. There is room in this theory to accommodate caring for the environment, despite the fact that we cannot know what it is like to be a tree or a river. Singer encourages assessment of our idea of luxury, and a measure of pleasure based not on consumption, but on developing human relationships.
Others seek to justify our obligation to preserve the environment beyond the needs of sentient life. When deep ecology speaks of nature having ‘intrinsic value’ they seek to find value in nature that is not attached to the needs of life forms. Paul Taylor claims that judgements based on merit are a human cultural phenomenon, a form given to nature based on our value system. Inherent worth or intrinsic value judgements, on the other hand, have no grounding in culture. If a thing has inherent worth, it simply does, you believe it or you don’t, but no evidence can be brought forward to defend the claim. The ‘good’ or ‘end’ of an organism life exists independently of our valuing it.
it is the good (well-being, welfare) of individual organisms considered as entities having inherent worth, that determines our moral relations with the Earth’s wild communities of life. (Taylor 1998:73)Taylor’s life-centred ethics seeks to expand the realm of moral consideration to include all life, using the notion of the inherent worth of life as it’s justification. Being alive, he says, involves having a ‘good of one’s own’. That good is the “full development of (one’s) biological powers”, through the realisation of the life cycle. There is no need for a life form to have awareness of this end for it to exist.
I take it that trees, for example, have no knowledge or desires of feelings. Yet it is undoubtedly the case that trees can be harmed or benefited by our actions… we can help or hinder them in the realization of their goodTaylor’s theory overlaps with deep ecology when he speaks of the interconnectedness of life being vital to the realization of individual good. Holmes Rolston III accords individual life value because of this interconnectedness. For Rolston, individuals have ends-in-themselves which cause them to value their own lives intrinsically, but individuals also serve the system that supports them. The ecosystem and the biosphere as a whole is credited with a higher respect because not only is it instrumental to the lives of individuals, it is the source of new species, or kinds. Individuals and species increase their kind, but the biosphere increases kinds. The biosphere is a creative force. Inanimate life and non-life are all valued intrinsically in this theory. It is ’short sighted’, he says,
to say that the only value in the system is the production of life…the astronomical and geological processes are precursors to life, but that does not reduce them to mere instrumental value. Nature is not inert and passive until acted upon…by life and mind. Neither sentience nor consciousness are necessary for inventive processes to occur (1988:198)It is the creative potential, or ‘inventive processes’ of the biosphere that Rolston identifies as the “root of all value” (1988:198)
It is difficult to comprehend how something so apparently inert and insensitive to what happens to it, like dirt for instance, could have intrinsic value. Dirt doesn’t have interests in the Singerian sense: it can’t suffer. Dirt doesn’t have a goal, an end that wants realising that would give it value in Taylor’s theory. It appears to be the mere by-product of natural processes a resource for life.
Dirt can be accorded value in Taylor’s system if one accepts that “commitment to certain normative principles” (to a moral code) need not involve validation by empirical truth or facts. Taylor gives up claims to comprehensive reason for confirming beliefs. This is not without precedent because, as CS Pierce points out, human beings often use a combination of experience and reason to fix their beliefs. Additionally, comprehensive reason has been used to justify some heinous crimes and makes egoism seem entirely plausible. But egoism does not offer protection for animals or nature, or even for other human beings except as they are resources for the pleasure of the egoist.
Respect for Nature, then, is an attitude informed by beliefs, based on experience and intuition. This is the tack that some ecofeminist philosophers take when they identify feelings, compassion and caring as the source of morality. Indeed, when one thinks about the right or wrongness of despoiling wilderness, it is a feeling that something good will be lost by doing so that first arises. John Rodman describes this sensation when he says:
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…An appreciation and respect for nature arises, for Rodman, as a sensibility developed through experiencing the facts of nature and reflecting on the feelings that arise form those experiences.
Rodman is in good company when he refers to the feelings of awe inspired by nature. Paul Davies, astrophysicist and physics populariser sees microphysics, astronomy and chemistry as “fine tuned to such a stunning degree (that) a hidden principle seems to be at work, organising the cosmos in a coherent way.” Mike Corwin, another astrophysicist wonders:
our very existence appears to be the merest happenstance. Any significant change in the initial conditions would have ruled out the possibility…(in Rolston 1988:193)Getting back to valuing the dirt, Edward O Wilson, biologist, describes the awe which he associates with the valuing of nature:
think of scooping us a handful of soil and leaf litter…this unprepossessing lump contains more order and richness of structure, and particularly of history, than the entire surface of all the other (lifeless) planets. It is a miniature wilderness…Every species living there is a product of millions of years of history, having evolved under the harshest of conditions of competition and survival. Each organism is the repository of an immense amount of genetic information… Each of the species has a distinct life cycle fitted to a portion of the micro-environment… The individuality of each is programmed by an exact sequence of nucleotides…these species have evolved as independent elements for thousands of generations…This is the creative process that Rolston describes. The path from accepting that this is wondrous to formulating a moral code that defines how we ought to behave towards the dirt (or non-living nature in general) appears to amount to wanting to care, and feeling that caring is the right thing to do. I don’t know if this amounts to according non-living nature intrinsic value, but it certainly defines the setting for a code of conduct towards nature. The idea of intrinsic value in non-living nature remains problematic.
However, if one is prepared to accept that nature and the universe itself may be intrinsically valuable, it could indeed result in the “profound reordering of our moral universe” that Taylor hopes for. Practically, one would expect to see radical changes in our use of the planet. Perhaps the influence of this ‘deep’ appreciation of the creativity and wonder of nature has already been felt in the values that underlie the Endangered Species Act, The Wilderness Act and The World Heritage Convention.
The intrinsic value of nature is a given to the more radical environmental protectionists like the Earth First! group whose spokesperson Dave Foreman professes:
every living thing in the system has intrinsic worth and a nature-given right to be here…we must constantly extend the community to include all the other beings - four-legged, winged, six-legged, rooted, flowing etc…they are their own justification for being, they have inherent value, value completely apart from whatever worth they have for…humans (in Nash 1989:92)Earth First!, with their slogan “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth” and their campaigns of monkeywrenching (tree spiking, destroying roads, decommissioning earth-moving equipment, defacing billboards etc) believe themselves to be performing “the most moral of all actions: protecting life, defending the earth” (Foreman in Nash 193) They defend their actions as morally justified, but more importantly as morally required, as duty. There is no doubt to Earth Firsters! That the realm of moral consideration extends beyond sentient beings.
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October 20th, 2000
Turn off the tv and think for a moment.
Despite the fact that most of the species that have ever existed are now extinct, never before in the history of the earth have extinctions occurred at such a breathtaking rate: we are causing it. Every year more than 20,000 species, evolutionary history, disappears forever down the plug-hole with our toxic waste (except that the toxic waste comes back to haunt us, but no Dodo ever has…) 20,000 species but countless individuals.
The species that, by small mercy we find useful, survive in a living hell, either subjugated to our will at every turn, and/or in such an unnaturally manipulated form that they are no longer able to fend for themselves or indeed live a decent, pain-free life. The domestic animals and pets that we have bred to suit our purposes may owe their existence to our interfering use of them, but what kind of existence is it? Deformed by breeding, commercial poultry for instance are subject to bone disease (amongst myriad other breeding-related deformities) which result in many of them suffering extreme pain as they grow at a ridiculously accelerated rates to become our next chicken-burger. We become the living graves of others, subjugating their most basic interests, that of life, to our most trivial tastes.
We keep nature captive everywhere. We cage and beat animals for food, sport and fun. We put fences around forests and call them national parks while over the fence we raze that same forest to the ground so that we can torture more cattle to feed our spurious taste for the flesh of other beings. We ‘cull’ our native animals so that we can replace them with introduced ones. The hypocrisy of the fact that National Parks and Wildlife are responsible (either directly or in the issuing of permits) for killing the most wildlife is truly mind-boggling.
The biodiversity of nature after earth’s previous extincitions was largely preserved by species enduring in small numbers in ‘refugia’, usually enclaves of tropical rain forest that survived the heating or cooling of the planet. Yet rainforests are disappearing more rapidly than any other bio-region, ensuring that after humans have finished with, the Earth will remain a biological desert for eons to come. Does this sound the death knell for nature?
So this is civilisation, this is what the free-market with its insatiable growth fixation, has driven us to become. We are aliens in Gaia, we are no longer part of the ecosystem, we think ourselves lords over it. We have become alienated from it, cocooned in our electronically enhanced concrete prisons, where we endure life so that we may occasionally be entertained and distracted from how truly soul-destroying it is. The result is that we are often unaware or uncaring about how we have, as a species, fucked up the natural world. We don’t see ourselves as part of it anymore, we are mere parasites living off it.
The earth was once gloriously diverse with nature. Yet every place that we have infested we have left our destructive footprint. Easter Island is probably a case in miniature of what most environmentalists see is happening to the world writ large.
Easter Island was first encountered by human beings during the fifth century when a boat, probably blown off course in a storm deposited its human cargo. The island is remote and hosted a limited but endemic range of species: 30 types of plants, no mammals and few insects, lizards or fish. The climate was not suited to the traditional diet of the new arrivals, tropical fruits and vegetables, so they subsisted on mainly sweet potato and chickens. As a consequence, they were permitted the luxury of leisure time because neither of these food stuffs required much work to provide.
The clan structure was the basic social unit, around which ceremonial activities worked. It is thought that these ceremonial activities became the driving reason for all other activity on the island, inducing a sort of intense nationalism that warranted wars in the end. It was the competition between these clans that is credited with the collapse of the islands environment and subsequently its human inhabitants.
All that remains on the island today are the infamous Easter Island ‘heads’ which became the symbols of power and hence prompted the destruction of all other values (including ecological ones) to that power. The statues were carved from a quarry, the production of which must have taken up a great deal of time and provided ‘useful’ work to the population. The island was heavily treed and these trees were used as rollers to transport the statues from the quarry. As the population rose (to an estimated max of 7,000 in 1550), clans would have proliferated, and prompted the escalation of statue production. Yet when the Europeans first landed on Easter Island in the 18th century, they discovered a number of unfinished statues in the quarry, and the island was treeless except for a few inaccessible specimens in the crater of an extinct volcano. It appears that culture went mad, ultimately destroying itself as it stripped nature bear to feed its irrational desire for growth and competition.
Captain Paul Watson, in The Politics of Extinction, compared the ecological destruction of the earth to the hull of a ship, each species a rivet:
If I were to go into my engine room and find my engineers busily popping rivets from the hull, I would be upset and naturally ask them what they were doing. If they told me that they discovered that they could make a dollar each from the rivets, I could do one of three things. I could ignore them. I could ask them to cut me in for a share of the profits, or I could kick their asses out of the engine room and off my ship. If I was a responsible captain, I would do the latter. If I did not, I would soon find the ocean pouring through the holes left by the stolen rivets and very shortly after, my ship, my crew and myself would disappear beneath the waves.The last option is the only sane one. Capitalists still maintain that a cut of the profits is more important while paying lip service to ‘green’ ideals, governments often wish it would all go away. Yet while things change slowly in public policy, destruction continues unabated in most respects. Sixty-eight percent of people opposed Jabiluka uranium mine, yet it went ahead. Despite an exhaustive public consultation process that demonstrated widespread opposition to it, genetically engineered crops are now being grown in Australia. The majority of people want nature preserved, yet the Vegetation Management Act at remains unproclaimed and unenforced while Queensland forests fall at the highest rate in the Western world. We say we respect life, but it remains only partial so long as it excludes the rights of animals and nature to be protected against our selfish whims. Is looking on in horror all we can do? Do we remain Earth parasites? Or do we kick the butts of the world’s oppressors by uniting our personal commitments with our public actions, and become truly integrated within ourselves and with the natural world on which we all depend. Of course we kick those damned butts, because if we don’t we all go down with the sinking ship.
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October 8th, 2000
There will come a time when the world will look back on vivisection in the name of science as they do now to burning at the stake in the name of religion.
Dr Henry Bigelow, Professor of Surgery, Medical School, Harvard UniversityWhen dealing with the moral issue as to whether it is wrong or not to use animals for experimentation, we often find that the issue is clouded by the supposed costs and benefits of such experiments. We must decide firstly, if animals are worthy of consideration, and if they are, whether their suffering is justified in terms of human interests, and finally if human interests are really being met by such experiments.
For the purposes of this article, I will use the words ‘experimentation’ and ‘vivisection’ as interchangeable, since vivisection means the “cutting of life”, and experimentation with dead animals does not raise the same issues of suffering.
Are animals worthy of moral consideration?
Peter Singer, in All Animals are Equal 1974, argues for the extension of moral consideration to animals. Singer states that the basic principle of equality of consideration that we already apply to human beings, regardless of their abilities, can validly be extended to other sentient beings. Singer sees the liberation of animals as being consequent of other liberation movements, such as the women’s movement and the civil rights movement. The change required rests on a profound rethink of contemporary values.
Prejudiced attitudes, Singer notes, are often based on defining what is ‘different’ about the subject being excluded from moral consideration. The intellectual superiority of humans, in our capacity to use language, to reason, and to form intentions for the future based on knowledge have been use to differentiate us from other animals. Yet even some human beings, infants and the elderly, do not meet this criterion. Indeed, the intellectual capacities inherent in a cow may well exceed that of a new-born human, yet we would never think of using infants for food or medical experiments.
If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-human? Singer1979:36Even if we were justified in claiming our superiority to animals in every respect, would that give us the right to use other species as we will? Tom Regan thinks not. If anything, our superiority as the possessors of language, consciousness or souls should rather increase our duty towards them.
Suppose it is true that all the other species utilise species “below” them…from this fact it does not follow that we humans ought to utilise the species below us, or that we do nothing wrong if we do so. Neither values not moral principles follow logically from facts…Regan 1989:p25Singer suggests that when we are making judgements about what is right or wrong in our treatment of others, human or animal, it is the consequences of our actions for the interests of that individual that we should take into account. Animals have a lot in common with human beings, physiologically, so we can make assumptions about their good or suffering extrapolated from what we know about ourselves, as well as on behavioural evidence. Singer makes it clear that this does not mean that every group granted moral consideration should be treated equally - it is questionable that a amoeba has consciousness, when compared to a human its awareness would be minimal, and there is no doubt that humans suffer simply by being aware of the possibilities the future might hold. Yet non-awareness does not give us carte blanche to use animals as we like. As basic as their responses might be, they are capable of feeling pain, and clearly pain is not in the interests of a good life. “The question”, says Jeremy Bentham, “is not Can they Reason? nor Can they talk,? but, Can they suffer?” The ability to suffer is “prerequisite for having interests…if a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take the suffering into consideration”(Singer 1979:31) This is what he calls the “principle of consideration of interests”.
That we continue to disregard the interests of animals, Singer claims, is simply prejudice: “speciesism”. That we continue to eat, kill and maim animals is evidence that we are willing, through pure self-interest, to put our most trivial tastes above the most fundamental interests of another being, that of continuing to live.
Singer makes it clear that we cannot continue to embrace any notion of equality with consistency if we are not willing extend equality to animals. In my opinion, this is the strongest part of his argument. In order to accept it, one has to accept a gradation of awareness amongst living things that will put some humans on par with some animals, we can only be logically consistent if we accept animals into the realm of consideration (or else reject the notion of equality for humans also).
Regan, on the other hand, suggests that because animals can be said to have a purpose, or end to their lives then they should be accorded at least the right to exist. He sees Singers utilitarian approach as possible justification for practices like vivisection because if it could be proved to be of more benefit to a greater number than it causes harm, it would be morally okay. Either way, both theorists believe that animals should be included in the realm of moral consideration.
Is animal suffering justified in terms of human interests?
If one accepts Singer’s and Regan’s argument that animals are morally considerable, then the question remains: is animal suffering justifiable in terms of human interests? In order to accept that it is, one must accept that there exists a kind of moral hierarchy. Many people do believe, for various reasons, that humans are the apex of evolution and that it is our right to use other creatures below us. This is part of the value system underlying the scientific use of animals to solve human problems. However we might want to deny that animals are like ourselves, and so set ourselves above them we are caught in a paradox: If results based on animal experimentation are to be considered valid for humans, we have to claim that animals are like humans. Yet if animals are like humans, how can their suffering be ignored?
It is certainly in the interests of humans to discover the causes and cures for the various diseases that increase human suffering and death world-wide. If it could be shown that human suffering has been decreased by the use of animals in experiments, then by this world-view, animal experimentation would be justified. If it could be shown that the same vital interests of humans could be met without the use of animal experiments, would the denying of the vital interests of animals to achieve that same ends then be immoral?
Regan says that there is no direct connection between facts and value. If that is the case, then the rightness or otherwise of the use animals should remain unchanged despite changes in technology. When Thomas Koch used guinea pigs to prove his hypothesis about the source of tuberculosis, it may have been possible by other means such as epidemiological studies and improvements in microscopy. Yet the practicality of his method may not have been informed so much by what was the best method, or the right method, but by the prevailing scientific culture that accepted vivisection as valid for historical reasons.
Descartes made the claim, in the seventeenth century, that animals do not feel pain, and are mere automaton because they cannot speak and “the reason why animals do not speak as we do is not that they lack organs but that they have no thoughts”(in Masson 1994:33). Vivisectors contemporary to Descartes were known to make fun of those who pitied creatures as if they felt pain. Cartesianism remains alive an well in the scientific lab today, where the steps towards being a true scientist involve denying feelings of compassion for other species staring with dissection to teach anatomy in schools.
The actions of experimenters are not simply the function of best scientific method, but can also be informed by desires such as being accepted by their peers, self-glorification and economic gain. Dr E.J.H. Moore, Vice-President of Doctors of Britain Against Animal Experiments, says “The pressure on young doctors to publish and the availability of laboratory animals have made professional advancement the main reason for doing animal experiments.” Such pressures led one doctor to describe the lab rat as, “an organism which when injected produces a paper.”
In making a judgement about the moral validity of experimental use of animal it is useful to differentiate the purposes of experimentation. Bernard Rollin identifies five types of experiments involving animals:
- The first is ‘basic biological research’ where facts about the physiological and chemical functioning of the body are studied without any thought to practical application. This form of experimentation most approaches ‘pure science’. Although this form of experimentation is often increasing the amount of knowledge available to human beings, it is not meeting vital needs and indeed may not ever lead to the alleviation of any human suffering.
- The second is biomedical research, whereby testing hypotheses about disease are seen as having practical application in the future for the treatment of the said disease. This category also includes the testing of technology for treating disease, including radiation, chemical and gene therapy, and has the most direct bearing on human interests.
- The third category identified by Rollin is that designed to find drugs for therapeutic purposes. It is more ‘exploratory’ than the former two which are based on hypothesis testing. Although this category ostensibly serves to protect vital human interests, its ‘hit or miss’ nature means that a lot of experimentation that involves animal suffering leads to no human benefit and thus those animal lives are wasted.
- Consumer goods, including cosmetics, herbicides and pesticides, and food additives are tested for toxicity, teratogenicity, and mutagenicity using animals. This is often done as a kind of insurance policy to protect the company against law suits. It is usually not required by law. This category is the most obvious superfluous destruction of animal life. It is certainly not a vital human interest to have a new brand of toothpaste, though it might have a great economic incentive.
- Animals are also used as teaching tools in universities and schools, and elsewhere for demonstration purposes. Although one cannot expect to learn everything about an animal without observing it, this need not involve killing. This is one of the greatest growth areas in alternatives, including the use of computer models, plasticised specimens, or veterinary practice in real situations. There now exist overseas veterinary colleges that do not require the unnecessary maiming and killing of healthy animals to teach.
Where pure science involves the use of animals to discover things about genetics, cell functioning etc, this information is not necessarily even applicable where it relates only to the animal on which the research is being conducted. Many doctors and researchers now question research done on animals being valid even for these purposes because of the artificial nature of experimentation. Caged and restrained animals are subject to stress which is known to effect their behaviour and may well effect biochemical changes that render research invalid.
Even more doubt arises when this information is extrapolated to human beings. Even amongst the closely related (and frequently used ‘animal models’) rats and mice, there is only a 70% correlation in the effect of toxins. The similarity between humans and other primates has been used to justified their use in experiments, yet this very same similarity recently (1999) led the New Zealand parliament to make illegal their use in research laboratories.
Professor Pietro Croce, MD, speaker at the 1995 review of the Animal Research Act:
An experimental model of the human being does not exist. Every species, all the varieties of animals and even individuals of the same species are different from each other. No experimentation carried out on one species can be extrapolated to any other, including man. To suppose that such extrapolation could be legitimate is the main reason for the failure and sometimes for the catastrophes which are inflicted upon us by modern medicine, especially in the area of drugs.There are many “alternative” methods; about 450 have been counted. However, their number is theoretically unlimited as every research endeavour presupposes devising a method specific to that research, able to guarantee a credible result, in harmony with scientific logic, repeatable ad libitum and capable of satisfying the “criterion of falsification” - all qualities missing from the vivisectionist method.
A great deal of consumer product testing does not even pretend to meet vital human needs, but serves rather as an insurance policy against laws suits. The two most commonly used tests, The Draize eye-irritancy test and the LD50 (Lethal Dose 50 percent) cause prolonged pain. The former involves the application of irritant substances to the eyes of rabbits who are often blinded, the harmfulness of the product is then assessed rather subjectively by examination. The LD50 involves the force feeding of substances to rats, mice or guinea pigs until half the population dies. This may take from days to months, the intervening period marked by convulsions, vomiting, diahorrea and many other forms of physical effect, not to mention the mental anguish accompanying this suffering. Clearly the development of a new consumer products is a trivial desire when compared to the vital interests of an animal not to suffer. Britain, in 1998, became the first country in the world to ban cosmetic testing.
The military frequently use animals as victims to measure the efficacy of their ‘products’, weapons. Donald J. Barnes worked for the US airforce doing nuclear research for sixteen years. He would irradiate the brains of rhesus monkeys and then compel them to perform tasks as they gradually died over a number of days or weeks. “I saw a lot of pain, I saw a lot of suffering…It’s a horrible thing to watch an animal die form radiation poisoning, to just waste away with bloody diahorrea and vomiting. It’s gruesome.” It wasn’t until he was asked to perform an experiment for funding reasons that he began to question his role. “I didn’t want to be seen as a poor scientist. I didn’t want to be castigated by my peers.” He was fired as as a consequence began to question the justification for his research: “I asked myself how I had helped humans by vivisecting monkeys, and I realised I couldn’t answer that question.”
Barnes came to the conclusion that a great many other researchers and Doctors have come to: “that all research using non-human animals…(was of no benefit to humans and) must be stopped immediately”
In the case of toxicology testing of industrial and commercial chemicals, it has been claimed by some that
This represents not only a useless sacrifice of animals, but it’s an alibi that enables the chemical industry to sell products which are classified as harmless or almost harmless, but are in reality very harmful in the long run, even if taken in small doses. Many pesticides classified as belonging to the fourth category, meaning they can be sold and used freely, have turned out to be carcinogenic or mutagenic or capable of harming the fetus. Also in this case, animal tests are not only ambiguous, but they serve to put on the market products of which any carcinogenic effect will be ascertained only when used by human beings - the real guinea-pigs of the multinationals. And yet there are laboratory tests that can be used, which are cheaper and quicker than animal tests; in vitro tests on cell cultures, which have been proving their worth for years already. But the interests of the chemical industries which foist on us new products in all fields may not be questioned.Prof. Gianni Tamino, 1987, biologist at Padua University, Italian Congressman quoted in Ruesch 1989
Are human interests really being met by the use of animal models?
While some claim that animal research is a flawed methodology and of no benefit to human beings, others go further to claim that animal research may actually harm human interests. They make this claim because vivisection draws a lot of funding that might be beneficially used in other research or in preventative measures, such as clinical human studies, in-vitro research, autopsy studies of disease, computer modelling, epidemiology, human tissue analysis and research, research of how to stay healthy so as to prevent disease, and educating the public so that may change their behaviour to reduce risk.
Why am I against vivisection? The most important reason is because it’s bad science, producing a lot of misleading and confusing data which pose hazards to human health. It’s also a waste of taxpayer’s dollars to take healthy animals and artificially and violently induce diseases in them that they normally wouldn’t get, or which occur in different form, when we already have the sick people who can be studied while they’re being treated.Dr. Roy Kupsinel, M.D. 1988, medical magazine editor, USA.
They also claim that the continued use of vivisection delays the progress of science:
Flemming saw penicillin kill bacteria in petri dishes and tested it on rabbits. It did not work. Rabbits excrete penicillin very rapidly in their urine. Flemming discarded the drug thinking it to be useless as a systemic medication. Years later he had a very sick patient and since he had nothing else to try, gave the penicillin. It is fortunate Flemming’s initial tests were not on guinea pigs or hamsters, it kills them. Howard Florey, the Nobel Prize winner credited with co-discovering and manufacturing penicillin, has stated: “How fortunate we didn’t have these animal tests in the 1940’s, for penicillin would probably never been granted a license, and possibly the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realized” (Guardians newsletter, spring 1999)The most important claim against vivisection for medical purposes is that it has often resulted in death or injury to humans because animal models prove nothing about how substances may affect human beings. The most famous is that of thalidomide (a morning sickness medication released in the mid sixties), which despite the requisite animal testing prior to release, proved to cause extensive birth abnormalities in humans that it did not in the test animals.
Summary
The main objections to vivisection are:
- animals can suffer and it is wrong to cause suffering as vivisection often does
- animals are ends-in-themselves therefore we should not use them as means
- the use of animal models to prove things about humans is invalid methodology seeing that there are too many differences between species, even those that are closely related
- the use of animal models may be injurious to human beings health
- the use of animal models sets back the progress of science
- the use of animals is inherently bad for it demeans humans, and increases the likelihood that they will be bad to other humans
I have dwelt on the objections to vivisection because, for the most part, it is accepted as morally justifiable in mainstream scientific community. Medical science asserts that the sacrifice of animals in the name of research is a necessary evil to serve the greater good of human interests. Researchers using vivisection claim that without the benefit of animal testing, many people would have died. Some of these benefits, as listed by the group Americans for Medical Progress, include: antibiotics, vaccines, gene therapy, insulin to control diabetes; anti-coagulants, anesthesia, and neuromuscular blocking agents, chemotherapy for cancer patients, pacemaker implants to treat cardiac patients, discovery of the HIV virus and development of drugs, organ transplantation techniques, medication to control hign blood pressure,”…Surgery of any type would be a painful, rare procedure without the development of modern anesthesia allowing artificially induced unconsciousness or local or general insensitivity to pain…millions of dogs, cats, and other pets and farm animals would have died from anthrax, distemper, canine parvovirus, feline leukemia, rabies and more than 200 other diseases now preventable thanks to animal research.”
Although many of these claims can be countered by the alternatives argument, there is still the problem that the use of alternatives may have cause delays that would have resulted in more human suffering. However, it can be counter-claimed that reliance on animal use has slowed the development of more humane methods of research. It is a catch-22 situation.
Conclusion: Are animal experiments ever justified?
If this judgement were to be made based entirely on facts, then neither side of the argument would have compelling proof. Animal experiments do appear to have been the only means at the time of achieving some of the medical advances that many people lives rest on today. Besides the moral objection to the use of animals, anti-vivisectionists would claim that every one of these medical aids could have been achieved by alternative means.
The continuation of vivisection as a valid source of scientific information relies, in my estimation, on an entirely anthropocentric and instrumental view of life. Yet even within the human framework, some justification may be given to the ceasing of animal use in experiments because of the adverse effects it has on our humanity:
George Bernard Shaw speaks to this argument well:
You do not settle whether an experiment is justified or not by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments, but between barbarous and civilised behaviour. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.Many theorists, and animal advocates like Singer and Regan, seek to expand the realm of moral consideration to include other animals and even all of life. On the former point of view it is clearly wrong to use animals when they can suffer and are end-in-themselves that should be accorded the right to exist. On the latter, perhaps even the organisms that cause the diseases should be accorded rights. It is essentially this conflict of interests that defines the moral dilemma of vivisection. Yet it remains obvious to any feeling person that the exploitation of animals for human benefit is not morally justifiable, and where life and suffering are involved, it is morality, not practicality, that should win the argument. What are we if we are not moral animals?
Bibliography
Singer, P Practical Ethics Cambridge University Press, UK: 1987
Singer, P “All Animals Are Equal” in Zimmerman, M (ed) Environmental Ethics: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, Prentice-Hall 1998
Rollin, BE Animal Rights and Human Morality, Prometheus Books: NY 1992
Regan, T “Animals are not our Tasters, We are not their Kings” in The Animals Voice Vol2, No3 June 1989
Healey, K Animal Welfare, in the Issues in Society series: Vol 109, Spinney Press, Balmain 1999
New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/nsplus/insight/animal/features.html
Australian Association for Humane Research http://www.aahr.asn.au/cruelty-free/ visited April 17, 2000
Medical Research Modernization Committee http://www.mrmcmed.org/ visited April 17, 2000
Guardian Newsletter, Issue 18, Vol 15 Spring 1999
Croce, P (MD)Vivisection or Science: A Choice to Make CIVIS, Hans Ruesch Foundation: NY 1991 at Campaign Against Fraudulent Medical Research http://www.pnc.com.au/~cafmr/online/research/index.html visited April 17, 2000
Ruesch, H 1000 Doctors (& many more) Against Vivisection, CIVIS, 1989. CIVIS, Hans Ruesch Foundation: NY 1991 at Campaign Against Fraudulent Medical Research http://www.pnc.com.au/~cafmr/online/research/index.html visited April 17, 2000
Moretti, L “Change of Heart - Donald Barnes” in The Animals Voice Vol2, No3 June 1989
Masson, J and McCarthy, S When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, Vintage, UK: 1994
Categories: environment, philosophy |
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September 8th, 2000
Land clearing, including the felling of forest for timber, for urban growth, and especially for agriculture, has important implications for the sustainability of ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole. Clearing kills animals and destroys their habitat, is the main cause of salinity which threatens to render water undrinkable, degrade human structures and limit agricultural productivity. Land clearing also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and runoff from exposed soil threatens our waterways and in Queensland, the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest World Heritage Area.
The significance of land clearing is not limited to ecological, political or economic questions, for when we allow others to destroy trees they are doing more than simply disposing of their private property, they are destroying something that should be the heritage of all beings on this planet. The implications transcend time and location. As such, the question of whether we should protect our trees goes beyond human needs and is, like all environmental issues, a moral question also.
Only a small proportion of Australia’s land mass is protected by National Park status (5.9%) The remainder is either state forest, aboriginal reserve, leasehold or freehold land, over 500 million hectares (approximately 75%) of which is used for agriculture. This is the highest proportion of land used for agriculture in any country in the world. Only a tiny fraction (4.6%) of this is under crops the remainder of agricultural land is used for livestock grazing. This land, not protected as national park or reserve, is still the home for abundant forms of life. As such, the imperative to preserve life should override other coniderations - not just the individuals that exist there, but ecological biodiversity for this continent and the world.
The State of the Forests Report 1998 (NRC) estimated Australia’s forested land at 20% of the continent in 1788, we have lost 36% of that vegetation to the present (ABS 2000). Queensland has the greatest area of tree cover in Australia. Yet only a tiny part of our forest is protected as National Park. While laws protect the flora and fauna in these limited areas, they are not the only areas in our state which are worthy of that protection, and all forms of vegetation are essential to the maintenance of local climate and habitat. The State Land cover and Trees Study indicated that approximately 400,000 hectares of native bushland a year was cleared in Queensland between 1997 and 1999, up 20% from the 1995-97 period. This gives Queensland the highest rate of clearing in the western world and is where almost 90% of land cleared in Australia. Although law has been enacted to protect leasehold land, this law has not been proclaimed and is not being enforced due to the intractability of state and federal governments over the issue of funding.
Economists will tell you that it has been necessary to destroy this forest because the market demands wood, land and food. I will attempt to show that not only is the economic argument for logging, clearing and food production erroneous, but also morally questionable. It is my intention to follow each strand in this web of moral responsibility leading from individuals to the whole system of modern capitalism.
The State of the Forests Report found that although the volume of wood consumed and exported Australia wide has increased, there has been no “commensurate increase in financial gain…” They are willing to concede that, given the lack of economic incentive:
The question of whether or not Australia’s overall use of its forests for wood products is ecologically sustainable is contentious, and at this point the answers remain uncertain.In other words, the State of the Forests Report admits that there is less economic incentive to continue logging for wood, and that indeed it may be unsustainable to continue.
Logging of old growth forest always attracts attention from conservationists and has been the reason for many blockades. What timber-getters see as an economic resource, environmentalists see as a natural heritage, for in the preservation of old growth forests, we are preserving evolutionary history which cannot be repaired or replicated and which we have no right to destroy. This is at the heart of many environmental disputes and revolves around two world views which are often set up as being in opposition: anthropocentrism and biocentrism.
Roderick Nash, in The Rights of Nature 1989, elucidates two main views of human obligations to non-human life:
First, some people believe that it is right to protect and wrong to abuse nature…from the standpoint of human interest…But the more radical meaning…is that nature has intrinsic value and consequently possesses at least the right to exist. (Nash 989:9)The first, often termed anthropocentrism, or human-centred ethics; the latter is referred to variously as ecocentrism, biocentrism or deep ecology. Nash sees the latter as a more radical way of viewing nature as part of the evolution of ethics. He observes that “environmental ethics is revolutionary; it is arguably the most dramatic expansion of morality in the course of human thought” (Nash1989:7) He also observes that the idea, to most people, is still ‘incredible’. However, so too was the idea of freeing slaves, women’s equal rights and the rights of indigenous peoples. Every milestone in the evolution of ethics, in the words of John Stuart Mill, has been met with ‘ridicule, discussion, (and finally) adoption’ (Nash 1989:8) Paul Taylor also sees the acceptance of ‘life-centred’ rather than ‘human centred’ ethics as having the potential for a “profound reordering of our moral universe” (Taylor 1998:72)
Aldo Leopold’s inceptive work The Land Ethic 1949 outlines what he believes is a natural progression in ethics to recognise the land as part of the community: “all ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts” (Leopold 1999:88) This notion of the interdependence of individuals in the dynamic functioning of the ecosystem has been borne out by ecological science which has been the impetus for a new ethic for the environment that seeks to justify our obligation to preserve the environment beyond the needs of humans.
When deep ecologists speak of nature having ‘intrinsic worth’ they seek to find value in nature that is not attached to the needs of life forms. Inherent worth or intrinsic value judgements, are supposed to have no grounding in culture or fact. As such, the rights accrued to nature based on it’s intrinsic value are said to be inalienable. The ‘good’ or ‘end’ of an organisms life exists independently of our valuing it.
it is the good (well-being, welfare) of individual organisms considered as entities having inherent worth, that determines our moral relations with the Earth’s wild communities of life. (Taylor 1998:73)Taylor’s life-centred ethics seeks to expand the realm of moral consideration to include all life, using the notion of the inherent worth of life as their justification. Being alive, he says, involves having a ‘good of one’s own’. That good is the “full development of (one’s) biological powers”, through the realisation of the life-cycle. There is no need for a life form to have awareness of this end for it to exist.
I take it that trees, for example, have no knowledge or desires of feelings. Yet it is undoubtedly the case that trees can be harmed or benefited by our actions… we can help or hinder them in the realisation of their good (Taylor 19The idea that trees and nature in general could have value outside of our use for it is already accepted by many people, especially in the green movement. The importance of wilderness to the Australian population was not more apparent than in the demand to prevent the construction of a dam on the Franklin River in Tasmania in the late eighties.
A study carried out by the Wilderness Society in 1996 found that most Australians value wilderness, only 12% thought economic growth was of greater importance. The study found that:
there was strong and widespread agreement…(that) ‘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 (McGuiness1999:2)This result speaks of a conception, perhaps not conscious to many people, that the exist of wild life is something of greater value than can be measured by the economic system.
The interests of the forestry industry are often brought in to defend our use of forests, but these interests are being overstated, for despite the fact that they are responsible for killing the largest and oldest trees, it is clearing for cattle grazing that is the predominant cause of vegetation loss in Australia. The implications of this encompass the individual, government, corporations and the global market and are complex interrelations of cultural phenomenon and economics. However, rarely is the moral question raised. As agriculture is the main reason for clearing land of vegetation, I shall examine it in some depth.
The focus of the recent Vegetation Management Act 1999 (Qld) has been to control what individual farmers do on their privately owned property. Legislation already exists to protect leasehold property. Not surprisingly farmers did not respond well to the idea, with one grazier warning:
If that legislation goes through, what will happen is, I’ll tell you now, you will lose us as people, and the other thing that really worries me is that you’ll lose every tree, because we, all of a sudden, will be turned into bloody criminals, and I don’t care, I have to survive. (Earthbeat 2000)The Queensland Farmers Federation (QFF) argues that they must be compensated if the government, as the representative of community concerns, wants to prevent them from doing what they wish with their own property (Position Paper 1999) They argue that they will be economically disadvantaged if they are prevented from clearing their property for pasture, because it will prevent them from increasing their productivity and decrease the dollar value of their land. But do the farmers have absolute rights over their property? And even if it were so, is it morally permissible?
In the case of land clearing, the anthropocentrist / biocentrist opposition has been sharply outlined, pitting greenies against farmers in a bitter fight. Yet there is a case, within the farmers own professed pride for and knowledge of the country, to bring the two sides closer together. Leopold sees the landowner as bound by obligations to the land that go beyond traditional property rights which have been “strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations” (1999:88) Leopold examines what the so-called ‘love’ that farmers profess for the land is, and finds it wanting:
…do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land…Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter down river. Certainly not the waters which we assume have not function except to turn turbines, float barges and carry sewage. Certainly not the animals of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species…(1999:88)The QFF question the right of governments to tell “landholders who thought they held title to the trees on their land.” how they may dispose of their property (QFF Position Paper 1999). However no such right to absolute ownership exists in either morally or in law. In Berry’s sense, the natural world does not belong to us as individuals, but is inherited from the past and borrowed from the future. This is a view common to indigenous people’s also, who may view the land as theirs in the sense that it is like a part of the body and the body of their ancestors, which one would protect and not harm: “we say, everything is our body… Our shadows follow you around, my people…shadows of your ancestors” (Daisy Utemorrah) Biocentric thought reflects this in the notion of interconnectedness, in that the whole and the parts are equally valuable and cannot exist independently. Even in a purely anthropocentric world-view common sense dictates that the long term preservation of nature for non-use values (recreation, biodiversity) and agricultural ones, means that total rights to private ownership are untenable. Additionally, the government regularly instructs us about how we may build our dwellings and what we may do in them, and the state still retains the rights to mine minerals under the surface of ‘freehold’ land, so no such total legal rights exist either. Indeed, we do not have total legal rights to do with our own bodies what we like, for laws prohibit what substances we can put into them, and with whom can share them.
In the short term, farmers want to increase the productivity of their farms in order to meet financial commitments and remain viable, and to preserve a lifestyle they value. They should have every right to a life free of suffering from the impediments of debt and the ability to feed, clothe and shelter themselves, and an increase in pasture may increase their ability to stock more cattle in the short term and hence make more money. But they are still at the mercy of the vagaries of the market, and an increase in stock may not result in an increase in economic gain because recent trends show a decrease over all in meat consumption and export. (ABS 2000) So even claims to short term economic gain are not necessarily justified.
The QFF say that “primary producers need long-term certainty as a basis for investing in their land.” Yet their current clearing practices will not achieve this goal because there are even more serious implications in the long term. Salinity is a problem in many other states, it takes a long period of time to manifest, sometimes as long as 100 years, and is often irreparable. It renders the soil unable to support native vegetation or agriculture and transcends boundaries of property, potentially and unavoidably affecting areas that are now protected like national parks. The primary cause of salinisation is vegetation loss. The disastrous possibility of irreversible damage being done to agricultural land and waterways in Queensland was not realised until recent scientific surveys were carried out by the CSIRO in Queensland:
Scientists and experts were so stunned by the potential political impact of their findings on dryland salinity, they went back and re-checked the numbers to make sure they were correct. They were. (Barclay 1999)Salinisation is not an idle threat, it will happen if deforestation continues unabated. This should be of serious concern to both farmers and government for it will have serious economic implications in the least.
Wendell Berry, farmer and ecophilosopher, outlines what he perceives to be the moral obligations of farmers to good ‘stewardship’ of the land based on the Christian notion of gratefulness to God and duty to charitable behaviour towards one’s neighbours. Despite their basis in Christianity, these are socially useful notions, for good behaviour towards one another is the basis for a properly functioning civilised society.
Berry sees the land as a ‘gift’ given by God and “borrowed from the unborn” for our use and responsibility to the land transcends temporal and spatial boundaries:
the land…is an ‘inheritance’; the community is understood to exist not just in space, but also in time. One lives in the neighbourhood , not just of those who live ‘next door’ but of the dead who have bequeathed the land to the living, and the unborn to whom the living will in turn bequeath it… (Berry 1993:491)This sits well with the notion of ‘intergenerational equity’ that arises in issues of responsibility for the cost of land rehabilitation. Land owners claim that governments should help them to repair the damage because they see the actions of past generations of governments and farmers as the cause. Land degradation attributable to agriculture and pastoralism is often a slow process and present actions are just as responsible for future damage as past ones are for the farmers’ present woes.
Berry then extends his understanding of Christian charity to include not only immediate obligations to human beings alive now and in the future in the anthropocentric sense, but to animals and the land. He justifies this by appealing to the idea of interconnectedness, that charity for one species must equal charity for all because charity, “once begun…cannot stop until it includes all Creation, for all creatures are parts of the whole upon which each is dependent” This idea of the extensiveness of charity creates a practical obligation to action for:
How can you love your neighbour if you don’t know how to keep your filth out of his (sic) water supply and your poison out of his air? How can you be a neighbour without applying principle - without bringing virtue to practical issues?Additionally, one must examine the assumptions upon which meat farming itself rests. If farmers do not, legally, have the right to dispose of their living or non-living ‘property’ as they see fit, this constitutes a moral duty not to destroy something that cannot be owned, or conversely is owned by everyone - the trees and vegetation - as part of world heritage. A prohibition on tree clearing is a duty to others, human and non-human, a duty to preserve what has value outside of economics. If we do not have the rights to clear on moral grounds because the trees are not ours to own, a case can easily be made to extend this prohibition to the property rights they attach to the sentient beings they exploit for money.
Clearing for grazing pasture is the primary cause of tree loss, in addition to problems of overstocking and erosion caused by the impaction of hard-hoofed animals on the delicate soil structure of marginal arid lands. These effects are well know, but despite this farmers continue to clear while the financial return from meat-growing drops, yet the demand for meat products is rising yearly. In 1999 Australia produced over 3 million tonnes of meat, with approximately 26 million cattle nation-wide, 10.4 million of them in Queensland. (ABS 2000) The total livestock to humans ratio is approximately 8:1.
Western culture has promulgated an ideal of affluence that is not sustainable on many levels, but the one of increased meat consumption is well established in Australia, and is becoming widely accepted in less developed countries as a sign of success, yet leading to ‘diseases of affluence’ like coronary disease. Additionally, the mainstream media and powerful economic interests like the NFF and the Meat Marketing Board, continue to push the line that meat is essential for human health. Australians ate an average of 104.9kg of meat in 1997, compared to the world average 36.1 in the same year. (ABS 200 and World Watch Institute 1998) However, cardiovascular disease is still the main cause of deaths in this country (41%) and is strongly associated with dietary habits. This has moral implications because it “results in a considerable burden, in terms of illness, disability and economic costs” (ABS 2000) on the rest of society, which in Berry’s view is uncharitable in the least: “How can you love your neighbour…if you cannot look after yourself and become a burden?” (Berry 1993:492) It also calls into question the ideal of respect for life that many of us would be happy to apply to human beings, but neglect to extend to animals.
So consumers, by their continued reliance on meat products as the mainstay of their diets, are providing the additional impetus for unsustainable and immoral agricultural practices.
The Queensland state government introduced the Vegetation Management Act in late 1999. Despite its’ good intentions, it has had deleterious effects in that ‘panic’ clearing has ensued and the Act is not being enforced due to political quibbling over funding. Both the federal and state governments have become entrenched in their no compromise positions, while the destruction of Queensland vegetation continues unabated. The difference, over who should pay the $100 million compensation to the states’ farmers, is petty and immoral in view of the bigger picture.
Additionally the state government intends to spend $185 million dollars on revamping a football stadium and other public works with more political popularity. This hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed by Queensland environmentalists who see the outcome as immoral, unnecessary and indirect contradiction of the commitment to the environment of both governments. Drew Hutton, of the Queensland Greens
was also bitterly critical of the Federal Government accusing Environment Minister, Senator Robert Hill, of hypocrisy in refusing to offer Commonwealth money to a project that is with all his government’s stated goals on reducing greenhouse gases, maintaining bio-diversity and rehabilitating the Murray-Darling Basin. “Peter Beattie can spend hundreds of millions on dollars on an anti-environmental project like the Inner City Bypass but cannot find money to compensate farmers so that the massive land clearing in Queensland can be reduced”, Mr Hutton said. (QG media release 2000)
Conservation pressure groups including the Queensland Conservation Council (an umbrella group for 50 “grass-roots” local groups) have been urging the state government to implement land-clearing restrictions on private land. The Community Biodiversity Network identify the potent effect present and past clearing will have on biodiversity:
Land clearing is having a devastating effect on millions of birds, reptiles and other animals, who are killed immediately or die from starvation or injury soon after their habitats are destroyed. The fragmentation of native vegetation into patches of remnant bush also makes survival unviable for many species…. Over time these unviable species (sometimes called the ‘living dead’) gradually die out in the cleared area. This long time lag (or extinction debt) means it takes decades or even centuries before the full impacts of current clearing becomes apparent. (CBN: 11 July 2000)Governments have a clear moral obligation to do more than just window-dressing with policy. In neglecting to deal with state clearing, individual landholders and governments are also neglecting their obligations to the rest of the world.
Australia as a nation has duties to the rest of the world. We have treaty obligations to protect areas listed under the World Heritage Convention, and the legal power under s51 of the constitution to do so. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority recognised that fertiliser and sediment runoff attributable to bad land management upstream, can bury coral, reduce light to sea grass and plankton, increase nutrient levels and hence kill marine life. They identify improving land use practices, including reducing cattle stocks, reducing clearing rates, and reducing fertiliser usage as the most important factors in protecting the present and future heritage value of the reef.
In addition, clearing by contributing to the greenhouse problem, is contributing to increased levels of what is euphemistically called ‘coral-bleaching’ ( coral death). The changes in weather patterns associated with global warming will have a global impact including rising sea-levels, changes in rainfall patterns, increased incidence of tropical diseases, and the movement of homeless ‘environmental refugees’.
This issue, like many environmental issues, cannot be simplified into one of cost. Deeply felt human values are part of this decision making process, so deeply felt that they often put interest groups at loggerheads. The values of a diverse range of interest groups make it difficult to resolve this issue either in a political or a moral sense. Yet there are obviously deep contradictions in our society when most people value nature and can see the long term interest of preserving it, yet are acting within a system that is detrimental to it. The ideological background to exploitative land use lies in the anthropocentric idea that human beings and their interests are the only things worthy of moral concern and all else is a resource for humans, and the supremacy of private property as ensconced in law and accepted as a right under law. This ideology is a serious impediment to the protection of the environment.
Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia Now - A Statistical Profile “Environment: Sustainable management of Australia’s land, forest and woodland resources” visited Sept 2000, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats
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Earthbeat 2000 Queensland Landclearing Debate aired on Radio National 19/2/2000 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/earth/stories/s102647.htm
Information Please Environmental Almanac 1994
Lecci, K 2000 Queensland Land clearing- governments sit still while the bush keeps coming down 23 June 2000 at Community Biodiversity Network, http://www.cbn.org.au
Leopold, A 1949 The Land Ethic, in Zimmerman, M (ed) Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights ot Radical Ecology, 2nd ed., Prentice Hall 1998
McGuiness, J March 1999 “Updating Wilderness in Australia”, The Wilderness Society Newsletter, TWS
National Reserve System Protected Areas “Queensland” visited Sept. 2000 at http://www.environment.gov.au/bg/nrs/protarea/pa99/index.html
Queensland Greens Media Release Beattie’s Right: He Will Need To ‘Spin’ On Environment Wednesday 12 July, 2000
State of the Environment Report Australia 1996 “Backgrounder: Land Resources” at http://www.dest.gov.au/soe/soe96/bg27jun_land.html visited October 1st, 2000
Taylor, P “The Ethics of Respect for Nature” in in Zimmerman (ed) Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights ot Radical Ecology, 2nd ed., Prentice Hall 1998
Utemorrah, D 1989 “The Cry of our Ancestors” in North of the 26th, Weller (ed) Reeve Books
Zethoven, I December, 1999 Campaign Watch: Land Clearing, at http://www.qccqld.org.au/
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