Special Issue on the EcoGotchic has just been released

Special Issue Gothic Studies 16/1, "The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century", has just been released, and will probably be of great interest to many of you.

The special issue addresses introduces a new field of inquiry, the EcoGothic, which includes, among others, two essays on carnivorism and speciesism in Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  The issue is available in preview on the Manchester University Press website and by subscription through many university libraries. A brief description of the issue follows below.

This special issue of Gothic Studies brings together Gothic works--British, Irish and Italian--to consider their engagement with species- and environement-related issues through the theoretical lens of an emerging field of critical inquiry–the EcoGothic. An EcoGothic approach takes a nonanthropocentric position to reconsider the role that species, nonhumans and the environment play in the construction of monstrosity and fear, examining the construction of the Gothic body–unhuman, nonhuman, transhuman, posthuman, or hybrid–through a more inclusive, antispeciest lens.

Contents

The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century  David Del Principe

Abominable Transformations: Becoming-Fungus in Arthur Machen’s

The Hill of Dreams  Anthony Camara

(M)eating Dracula: Food and Death in Stoker’s Novel  David Del Principe

The Bog Gothic: Bram Stoker’s ‘Carpet of Death’ and Ireland’s Horrible Beauty Derek Gladwin

Italian Rural Gothic: The Powers of Were-Goats in Tommaso Landolfi’s La pietra lunare [The Moonstone]  Keala Jewell

Meat, Cannibalism and Humanity in Paul du Chaillu’s Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, or, What Does a Gorilla Hunter Eat for Breakfast?  John Miller

‘L’orrida magnificenza del luogo.’ Gothic Aesthetics in Antonio Fogazzaro’s Malombra  Maria Parrino

 An Already Alienated Animality: Frankenstein as a Gothic Narrative of Carnivorism  Jackson Petsche

 Between Darwin and San Francesco: Zoographic Ambivalences in Mantegazza, Ouida, and Vernon Lee  Nicoletta Pireddu

(Thank you to David Del Principe for both putting this together, and letting me know this existed). 

Call for Papers for an Edited Volume on Non-native Species

Call for Papers for an Edited Volume on Non-native Species

Within a growing literature of animal studies and animal ethics, scholars have critically examined factory farms, zoos, companion animals, and laboratory testing.  What remains underexplored are the logics of extermination deployed against feral or non-native species.  The existing vocabulary utilized to describe non-native species often represents these animals as pests that wreak havoc on the eco-system, promiscuously over-populate, and spread disease. This rhetorical framing justifies a militarized relationship to these species.  Furthermore, the debate over non-native species divides common ground between animal activists and environmentalists.  If the world is moving very slowly towards less cruelty in the treatment of animals and a modest increase in awareness about the basic dignity that should be afforded to all creatures, there is a vast slippage in the case of feral and non-native species that merits attention.

We are looking for essays that critically explore the affiliation between humans, non-native species, and the environment.  These essays will be part of a submission for an edited volume to be published by an academic press.  We are excited to invite scholars from a variety of disciplines and epistemic positions, including thinkers from multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds.  300-500 word abstracts should be emailed to criticalspecies@gmail.com.  Interviews and reprints from journals will be considered.

Topics might include:

• Bridging the gap between environmental ethics and animal ethics
• Rhetorical examination of the tropes of nativity, exoticness, and/or invasion
• Media and mediated accounts of invasive species
• Ecofeminist approaches to overpopulation, fertility, and promiscuity
• Queer critiques of reproductive futurism
• New materialist and speculative realist interventions in non-native species
• Colonialism and critical geographies
• Economic imperatives and wild/pristine spaces
• Defining ecosystem harm and the terminology of equilibrium, balance, and harmony
• Questions of cohabitation and competition with endangered species
• Introducing, re-introducing, and restoration ecology
• Invasivores
• The biopolitics of wildlife management and/or hunting


The deadline for submission of abstracts is June 6, 2014.  Please address correspondence to Dr. James Stanescu and Dr. Kevin Cummings.

Dr. Kevin Cummings is associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication Studies and Theatre at Mercer University.  He publishes in the areas of rhetoric and media theory.

Dr. James Stanescu was the winner of the 2012 international critical animal studies dissertation of the year for The Abattoir of Humanity: Philosophy in the Age of the Factory Farm.  He publishes in the areas of continental philosophy and critical animal studies and is the author of the blog Critical Animal.

Meditations on Second Philosophies: Comments on Anthony Paul Smith's A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature

What’s in a prefix? The non- of non-philosophy, as Anthony frequently reminds us, is the same as the non- of non-Euclidean geometry or the non- of non-standard physics. Indeed, Laruelle, it seems, has taken to referring to this as non-standard philosophy rather than simply non-philosophy. The non- is not, therefore, an anti- or an un-, it does not signify either an oppositional discourse, or a mark of being outside and other. In the same way that non-Euclidean geometry is still geometry, or that people working on non-standard physics still see themselves as physicists. What does the non- of non-Euclidean geometry and non-standard physics have in common? Well, both are moves that question the defining axioms of their respective fields. In both cases they argue that the axioms that geometry and physics use to describe the world are not always sufficient for the task. Furthermore, these non-s are not primarily critical projects. They simply indicate a field in which there exist several positive projects (such as hyperbolic geometry, or string theory and M-theory). The non-, then, is fundamentally a marker of an immanent relation. It does not come from outside as a master discourse to finally tell philosophy what it is, but rather comes from within philosophy (or physics, or geometry) in order to re-examine its fundamental axioms in order for its intellectual projects to continue. Or at least I think so. This is probably a good as time as any to point out that I don’t know anything about Laruelle (and I know roughly the same amount about theology), but here I am anyway. But, if non-standard philosophy wishes to change or adapt axioms or principles of philosophy, what axioms and principles are under consideration?


Read the rest over at AUFS. 

On nonnative species (aka "invasive" species)

I am currently trying to finish an article on nonnative species. What follows is a small blog post about some of the issues around nonnative species. However, I have been provoked to write this article/post by conversations with (and resources shared), by Kevin C, Vasile S, and Matthew R (I didn't get their permission, so I am not including last names right now).

"Human beings shorten all food chains in the web, eliminate most intermediaries and focus all biomass flows on themselves. Whenever an outside species tries to insert itself into one of these chains, to start the process of complexification again, it is ruthlessly expunged as a 'weed' (a term that includes 'animal weeds' such as rats and mice)." --Manuel Delanda, A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, p.108. Emphasis in the original.

(1) Issues surrounding nonnative species (both plants and animals), is one of the perennial questions in environmental ethics, environmental studies, resource and animal management, and a variety of other fields concerned with the environment. I will also be the first to admit that the issue is complex. However, despite the complexity, it is also an issue that is often spoken of in the most apocalyptic tones and terminology. We can get this in the more common term of invasive species.  Tim Low has argued, "As any invasion biologist will tell you it’s a threat more ominous than the greenhouse effect, indus- trial pollution or ozone depletion" (Feral Futures, p. 295. Cited in Nigel Clark's "The Demon-Seed"). And as Chew and Carroll have pointed out in their op-ed in The Scientist, "invasion biology, like epidemiology, is a discipline explicitly devoted to destroying that which it studies.  This necessarily constrains its research program and colors its communications, both internal and external, in very particular ways." In other words, the hyperbolic communication around nonnative species allows us only hyperbolic reactions. We can have a relationship to nonnative species that is only permanent war or total eradication.

(2) A lot needs to be unpacked when we talk about nonnative species being a problem. What makes a nonnative species a problem? A lot of lip service gets paid to ecological balance, but that isn't really a thing (ecology not having much to do with balance, hippies be damned). Sometimes by problems we mean problems for humans -- that certain species eat our gardens, run onto our roads, or attack our pets. These are issues, but are they really issues of nonnative species? So, when we say that an animal species is negatively impacting the ecosystem, what does that mean? Are we complaining about, for example, a decrease in species richness?  Mark Sagoff does a good job on the complexity of talking about harm when we talk about nonnative species, especially with the question begging that certain definitions of harm are used.

(3) This is why the issue of nonnative speices is often overstated. For the most part what we see is the occasional issue of nonnative species being used to justify a vaster belief in the problem of nonnative species. It is a little like pointing to the European colonization of the Americas as reasons to oppose immigration. There are certainly studies exploring the broader question species richness and nonnative species. Which isn't to say this is a settled question in the environmental science literature, but at the same time these are not cranks, there are real debates around species richness and nonnative species.

(4) Also, just as we know that immigration does not usually hurt jobs and resources, it usually helps it (again, not universally), we are just now beginning to explore the ways that nonnative species can be used for conservation techniques, something that has been routinely ignored in most studies of nonnative species. For more on this, see this debate: "The Potential Conservation Value of Non-Native Species," "Revisiting, etc", and "Toward a More Balanced View of Non-Native Species."

(5) Why do we tend to focus on the destructive aspects of certain nonnative species, rather than the overall issue around nonnative species? It is here that I find Banu Subramaniam's work particularly on point: there really is something about the language and desire around nonnative species that is rooted in a broader xenophobia.  This isn't anti-realism, but the sort of basic situated knowledge questions that an early Donna Haraway raises. There are really good reasons to look at the ways that this stuff gets framed in order to understand research programs and policies, particularly to understand which ones get attention, funding, and support. On that last point in particular, see Helmreich's "How Scientists Think; About 'Natives,' for Example."

(6) If everything of 1-5 is correct, then I think we can agree with Paul Robbins that "It is not
species, but sociobiological networks that are invasive."  That is to say that nonnative species are not only questions of ethics, but also politics and policy. You know, constructivist political ecology. Not that ethics will not be a part of those issues, but we could in the short term engage in management systems that are not principally non-lethal, and in the long term target sociobiological networks as opposed to individual species. But, of course, that is not where we are in terms of political will. There is no real desire to discover, spend money on, and implement these sorts of management systems.

One of the reasons that we do not spend time on developing non-lethal management techniques, and one of the reasons we spend a lot of time publicizing the problems of nonnative species, is that people like hunting, they like killing, and they like eating meat. While Chamayou's work is horribly anthropocentric, I think his arguments about a cynegetic power (hunting power), is right on. Likewise, if you look into MacKenzie's The Nature of Empire, you see the strong connection that hunting has to conservation. Conservation has been stapled to hunting for a long time. And what we need now is not conservation. We need ecological or ecofeminist constructivism, not more natural conservationism. One that can honor and respond to what Lori Gruen has called the wild dignity of nonnative species.

Guest Post: Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics in the Age of Bio-Mechanical Reproduction

"Guest Post: Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics in the Age of Bio-Mechanical Reproduction"
Vasile Stanescu
[What follows is a guest post by Vasile Stanescu. It began as an extended comment on my most recent blog post. I, however, gave the post its title, so any issues you have with that are on me. If you are interested in writing a guest post for my blog, please feel free to email me at james.stanescu@gmail.com]

I think there is another link between these two long quotations. I think the polar bears do not “matter” because of calculative logics that only values species. While killing individual polar bears both wholly matters in its own right and does hurt the species as whole, the idea is that it only kills individual animals. However, animals in our culture have no “individuality;” animals are believed to be interchangeable, so a polar bear's “loss” is only perceived if there are no more polar bears at all.  There is a similar logic at play with the current project to try and clone extinct animals from preserved DNA (no, not from amber). The danger of such a project is that there would seem to be no need (for many) to worry about animals’ loss or death or suffering as long as an infinite number of new animals could be “recreated” in the future. Indeed, there probably wouldn’t even be the “need” to recreate them in any literal sense (for many) as long as the potential of reaction existed –the simple idea of the possible animals or the DNA bank would stave off some peoples fears of species extinction and biodiversity loss based on the same idea that animals are infinitely reproducible. (We should write an article on the idea of animals’ rights in the age of mechanical reproduction). Here is an ABC article on the practice: "Scientist Preserve Endangered Species' DNA"; and here is  a link to a nonprofit working on the topic:  The Frozen Ark. The main idea I want to highlight from these practices is the much-repeated phrase that the point of preserving these animals DNA is as a “treasure-trove of knowledge.” What comes to matter via these discourses are not the animals themselves, but only the “knowledge” they represent which, since the animals can be transformed into knowledge, need not be grieved (much less saved) since they (it?) can be “preserved” forever.

So too, I think a similar calculus is at play in the new found fears for the global poor. It is worth remembering that the ethnographic fairs, zoos, sideshows, and circus of the 16-21 century have all paired the “exotic” animal with the “exotic” culture. Again, what seems to be at play is not a fear or concern of actual or individual people but a loss of “cultural” or  “linguistic” diversity. And, much like “DNA banks” we witness the rise of “linguistic banks” to preserve languages before they are “lost forever.” For example, here’s an article on “Preserving Language Diversity: Computers can be a tool for making the survival of languages possible.” Again, a technological fix (to re-appropriate Homer Simpson’s claim about beer : Technology apparently has become “both the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”). But what is even more important is the way in which linguistic and cultural diversity is justified:

Languages seem to be disappearing faster than ever before. I estimate that there are about 15 percent fewer languages now than in 1500 A.D. This is alarming in itself, but, just as important, the consequent reduction of cultural diversity may threaten humanity's survival. Our adaptive success as a species - with over 5 billion people in such diverse environments as jungles, deserts, and the Arctic - is due to "culture," implying the communication of ideas through language. Linguistic diversity relates to adaptational ideas about property, health care, food, children, power, and disputes. The loss of language diversity diminishes our ability to adapt because it decreases the pool of knowledge from which to draw. 

The point is the calculative logic is, itself, a type of computeresque way of understanding the world. Somehow these moments of empathy or caring are elided in which the suffering of the world (be it animal or citizens of the global south) becomes repacked as only enlightened self-interest. The Endangered Languages Project, funded, in part, by Google, makes this linkages between animals and languages (and the easy techno fixes that are being proffered) even more clear, claiming:

Languages are entities that are alive and in constant flux, and their extinction is not new; however, the pace at which languages are disappearing today has no precedent and is alarming. Over 40 percent of the world’s approximate 7,000 languages are at risk of disappearing. But today we have tools and technology at our fingertips that could become a game changer.
The Endangered Languages Project puts technology at the service of the organizations and individuals working to confront the language endangerment by documenting, preserving and teaching them. Through this website, users can not only access the most up to date and comprehensive information on Endangered Languages as well as samples being provided by partners, but also play an active role in putting their languages online by submitting information or samples in the form of text, audio or video files. In addition, users will be able to share best practices and case studies through a knowledge sharing section and through joining relevant Google Groups.

I know that “Thing theory” has long been an interest of ours, but I cannot help but wonder—what are the political stakes behind defining languages themselves as an endangered living entity nearing extinction? I see in this move the erasure of the speakers of these languages who cannot but matter less as long as the “languages” themselves are “protected.” Furthermore, however, it seems to me that static perseveration via an audio of video upload (more true in the second example than the first) only “preservers” a language if it in fact ceases, itself, to be a living entity at all. Again, much like the DNA banks, the idea seems to be that static preservation of languages will, in some way or some manner, allow for their “recreation” in the future—although who would respeak these languages in the future (if anyone) is never addressed. In other words what we are offered is not the languages' protection but instead only a techno-mausoleum to their loss. More importantly, like the DNA banks to the “vanishing” animals, there seems to be a way in which the disappearing of the people (both individually and as groups) seems to no longer “count” since the formula that people=culture=language=information means that people can be “stored.” As though a person's language was her “cultural DNA,” as it were. The losses are rendered ungrievable because they can be endlessly preserved and recreated. Again, just in case anyone thinks I am making a stretch between this idea of species loss and linguistic and cultural loss here is an excerpt from the Endangered Languages Project on “Endangered languages: Why so important”:

The disappearance of an individual language constitutes a monumental loss of scientific information and cultural knowledge, comparable in gravity to the loss of a species - for example the Bengal tiger or the white whale. However, the disappearance of whole families of languages is a tragedy comparable in magnitude to the loss of whole branches of the animal kingdom (classes, orders, families), such as the loss of all felines or all cetaceans. Just as it would be difficult to understand the animal kingdom with major branches missing, it is impossible to understand the history and classification of human languages with the loss of entire language families.

The point of this, for me, is the calculus by which either “culture” or “species” becomes valued. Animals, themselves, as themselves, matter not at all. Even the loss of the entire species, as a group of animals who have all now died, matters not at all. What is calculated to count, to matter, is only the “monumental loss of scientific information.” So too, I wish to argue, the people of the global south are not, in and of themselves, deemed to count. While, as you know, I am a huge critic of Achille Mbembe (from his unnecessary coining of the neologism “necropolitics” to his incorrect understanding of Foucault) in this one area I have to completely agree with him that “death” in the post-colony are simply uncounted by "us," are simply viewed as a “letting die” of all involved. In both cases, for animals and the world’s poor, all that seems to “count” is the “monumental” scientific information. However if both animals and the poor are rendered as purely informational, as only counting in terms of the knowledge they can express, the very forces which are now fueling their shared destruction (Western capitalist global technological development and control) can, ironically, be viewed as the vehicle for their salvation by transforming both human and animals into pure information which can be “protected,” “preserved,”  and mechanically reproduced forever.

Abstraction, Calculative Thinking, Global Warming, and Environmental Ethics; or the Polar Vortex of Thinking!

This polar vortex seems to be a good cause for our annual winter jokes from Republicans that global warming is somehow a lie. This time from Ted Cruz, but he is hardly the first. At the link, Weigel argues that the issue is a fundamental confusion between weather and climate. Weather being the immediate phenomenological event, climate being an abstraction. In order to understand something like rapid climate change or global warming, and the ability to understand its causes, and the ways we may stop or divert its destruction, requires serious calculative thinking. It requires care for our abstractions.

Abstraction here should be hear in the register of Whitehead. It is a idea (like Nishida Kitaro's transcendence, Althusser's problématique, Foucault's historical a priori, and Deleuze and Guattari's concept) to talk about the way that knowledge's knowing comes to be known (that is an ugly 90s-style phrase, but I think you get the idea). To quote Massumi quoting Deleuze, "the opposite of the concrete is not the abstract, it is the discrete."   As Massumi adds, “[t]he discrete: the slothful just-being-there of an inactive chunk of matter.” (Semblance and Event, 27).  Abstraction does not take us out of the situation, rather abstraction gives us prehensions of the situation. Let us take the abstraction of global warming.

Global warming is a lure for thinking about issues of consumption and production, of energy and waste, of diet, transportation, and development. We can understand how, as ethicists, we need this abstraction of global warming in order to ask and answer certain questions. And, we can also see here how the discrete is the opposite of the concrete, rather than the abstract. For example, Ted Cruz's 'joke' that Al Gore told me this wouldn't happen.  Such a move refuses the very actual, very concrete reality of global warming by discreting the moment of snow and cold in D.C. from the broader reality and the broader context of global warming. We can give many other examples. How colorblind policies discrete the reality of racism, or how 'tone' criticisms are used to discrete the lived experiences under the abstract and concrete realities of white supremacy and heterosexist patriarchy. To bring us to animals, when we are able to cherish the family pet and treat her as if she was a family member, and then to go and eat the parts of bodies of other animals, is certainly a manifestation of the discrete. That is to say, the ability to de-contextualize our pets from animals in general is a moment of discretion, and not abstraction.

My point here is that our response to global warming cannot simply be through appeals to phenomenological immediacy. Moreover, we will not be saved by virtue, infinite responsibility for the infinite other, or voluntarism. What we need is better abstractions, more calculative thinking, more en-framing, and stronger institutional responses. As David Wood has shown, when it comes to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Katrina, global warming, and a variety of other events, it has been the conservative response to embrace the impossibility of calculative thought.  Perhaps our project going further is to, as Isabelle Stengers has argued, to calculate again. This is not the calculative thought of the capitalist cost-benefit system, but a different calculation. It is, to steal a phrase from Jane Bennett, about mutually enabling instrumentalizations.  Long quotation from Stengers ahead, so bear with me:

The cosmopolitical Parliament is not primarily a place where instantaneous decisions are made, but a delocalized place. It exists every time a "we" is constructed that does not identify with the identity of a solution but hesitates before a problem. I associate this "we" with the only slogan Leibniz ever proposed: Calculemus. Let us calculate. It's an odd expression, constructed to conceptualize the possibility of peace during a time of war. But Leibniz was a mathematician, not an accountant or statistician. For him, calculation was not a mere balance sheet contrasting homogeneous quantities, calculations of interest or benefits that were presented as being commensurable. For a mathematician, the accuracy of a calculation and the validity of its result are relatively simple questions, "trivial" in the language of mathematics. What is important, and which is not in the least trivial, is the position of the problem that will, possibly, allow it to be calculated, the precise creation of relationships and constraints, the distinction between the various ingredients, the exploration of the roles they are liable to play, the determinations or indeterminations they engender or bring about. There is no commensurability without the invention of a measurement, and the challenge of Leibniz's calculemus is, precisely, the creation of a "we" that excludes all external measures, all prior agreements separating those who are entitled to "enter" into the calculation and those subject to its result. [...]
Calculemus, therefore, does not mean "let us measure," "let us add," "let us compare," but, first and foremost, let us create the "we" associated with the nature and terms of the operation to be risked. It is not a question of acting in the name of truth and justice, but of creating commensurability. It is a question of knowing that the "truth" of the created common measure will always be relative to what such creation will have been capable of, knowing also that a radical heterogeneity preexists such creation, the absence of any preexisting shared measure among the ingredients to be articulated. (Cosmopolitics II, pp. 399-401). 

One can begin to understand that the way of an abstraction of global warming, and our calculating, can produce a different we. Malcolm Bull has argued that global warming has the power to extend our moral imagination (another long quotation coming on):

What this reveals is the extent to which climate change is now constructed not as a scientific problem that generates unexpected moral dilemmas, but as an ethical problem that necessarily requires moral solutions. The sceptics are understandably wary of this, and, as Björn Lomborg has argued, we are not generally as moral as climate change ethics assumes, for if we were we might not make climate change our top priority. If we were concerned about polar bears we would start by not shooting them, rather than worrying about how much ice they had left to stand on, and if we were really worried about the global poor, we could help them now rather than helping their descendants at the end of the century, who will probably be a lot better off anyway.
These are in many respects valid arguments, but they miss the point that were it not for climate change, we would be giving even less thought to polar bears, or to the global poor, and would see little connection between our actions and their fate. As Peter Unger’s Living High and Letting Die showed, our customary moral intuitions barely extend to poor foreigners, let alone to their descendants, or to Arctic fauna. It is thanks to climate change that an entire body of political thought has emerged which positions our everyday actions in direct relation to their most distant consequences.
[...]
Contrary to Gardiner’s concerns about moral corruption, climate change does not tempt us to be less moral than we might otherwise be; it invites us to be more moral than we could ever have imagined. [...] Climate ethics is not morality applied but morality discovered, a new chapter in the moral education of mankind. It may tell us things we do not wish to know (about democracy, perhaps), but the future development of humanity may depend on what, if anything, it can teach us.

The calculative thinking and en-framing of responding to global warming, and the abstractions that will be necessary for such a response, is not one that will leave the world as it is.

Reproduction and Veganism in the Age of the Anthropocene

This is going to be a blog post about overpopulation and having children in the age of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene, as I am sure you know, is the geological epoch we live in, the one where the earth itself has been shaped by humans. This is, like most claims about humans, kinda a lie. Depending on when you want to start dating the Anthropocene from will determine how much of a lie. But clearly not all humans are equal members in this geological formations (for better and for worse). Claims about the anthropos are never really about only and fully the anthropos. But that is fine, we know that we are living in an age where some humans have managed to create geological and climate realities. This reality has brought heighten feelings that humans have a moral duty to decrease their population. Fears about overpopulation, of course, are in no way new, and are not only caused by knowledge of the Anthropocene. One of the things that is new to me is the particular ways certain vegans are taking up the fears of overpopulation.

If you look at this blog post entitled "Liberation, not procreation" for one example. This powerful post is from a vegan mother and moves within the animal liberation community to shame her (or even make her justify) having had a child. Before I go any further, I want to make a few statements: Pro-natalism is almost always sexist, heterosexist, and often fascist (at the least). And while I might have some disagreements, I agree with Lee Edelmen that there are certain problems with reproductive futurism. But just because I oppose pro-natalism does not mean I think we need to advocate a politics of anti-natalism. Nevertheless, a politics of anti-natalism seems increasingly common in vegan community, and I want to focus on the arguments against overpopulation in anti-natalism arguments.

It was helpful that while I was figuring out how to respond, we got these two articles in the NY Times about the carrying capacity of earth (see here and here). What Ellis is arguing is both fairly simple and rather convincing. The short version is that there are many times that humans would have been projected to hit the carrying capacity of earth at the time, and every time the carrying capacity of earth increased. There is, according to Ellis, no predetermined amount of humans that will exceed the carrying capacity of earth. Does this mean we will never hit a carrying capacity? No, but if we do it will almost certainly be through a failure of social systems, not through an absolute limit in carrying capacity. I agree with Tim Morton that Ellis' framing is anthropocentric, but I see no reason this rules out the basic principles of Ellis' argument.

I also know these sorts of arguments are often put forth by conservatives, many of whom use these arguments as part of their kettle logic on global warming. You know the one I mean, (1) there is no such thing as global warming, (2) global warming is happening, but not anthropogenic, and (3) global warming is happening, but it now so badly advanced only unfettered capitalism can produce the technology needed to save us all. Conservative denial about global warming is part of a broader denial of the Anthropocene, and the solutions we have to the problems that the age of the Anthropocene are raising. So, when Ellis argues that advances in social systems and technology means we cannot know the absolute carrying capacity of the earth, many conservative hear that as saying "FREE MARKET CAPITALISM TO THE RESCUE", which is bunk. While Ellis is a little cagey in those articles about what the social system changes will require, we know it will include many of them that look nothing like the conservative agenda. And indeed, veganism strikes me as one of the most likely social system changes we can take on to increase the carrying capacity of the earth and to fight many of the threats produced by the Anthropocene.

As with factory farming, our inability to stop global warming is mostly what Peter Hallward, in his best Green Lantern Corp moments, would call a failure of the will (see here and here). We know what needs to be done, but we somehow lack the popular will to make it happen. There is no reason to believe that children will have to live in the same world we were brought into. There is no reason to believe we will live in the same world we live in today. The bad news of the Anthropocene is that certain humans have made the ability of living on this planet harder for so many types of beings. The good news of the Anthropocene is that it means that certain beings would therefore have the power to reshape the earth in different ways--the earth is not done becoming. Vegans worry that another life would be another murderer, speaking to our own great guilt on never actually being able to be vegan, just becoming-vegan. The challenge, then, is to create a world that is different. I don't know why we would then encourage vegans to be uniquely the ones to stop having children?

Ursula Heise has recently written a beautiful essay on literature trying to come to grips with the environment in the age of the Anthropocene. In it Heise starts mapping out the possibilities of hybrid ecologies and natures for the future. And one gets the feeling that the anti-natalism of certain vegans come not from a radicalism, but from a profound conservatism, a conservatism that is based on conservationism. Perhaps what we need is less conservationism, and more constructivism for thriving ecologies for nonhumans and humans-- a constructivist ecofeminism, if you will. Perhaps we need less Heidegger, and more Arendt.  Deleuze and Guattari, in What is Philosophy, wrote about the importance of producing a new people and a new earth. Perhaps it is time we focus on both of those terms.

Gary Francione tends to end his emails and blog messages with the announcement that the world is vegan, if we want it. I'd only make a small, but important correction-- The world is vegan, if we make it so. Here is to the constructivists ecofeminists, and to all the vegans (parents and nonparents, bioparents and nonbioparents) who are working to make it so.

Eating Grass-Fed Animals Will Not Save Us, Part 1 of 3

I wrote this a while back, but I never got around to posting them (there are, shall we say, several posts like this). I wanted to write about this post in something I was working on, and realized I never had posted these, so, all three parts today. Enjoy. Part 2 here, part 3 here.


This is in response to this article. Here is part one of my response, focusing on the environmental impacts of eating grass-fed cattle. The ethical issues will be addressed next. [This article was brought to my attention from one of my colleagues, and he was told to bring it to my attention from Cameron. This part, and the next part, are developed from emails I sent in response].

I am going to address the concerns of the article in two sections. The first is going to be the environmental reasons that grazing land-based mammals is worse, and the second one will respond to the ethical questions about grazing land-based mammals [There will be a surprise third part!]. I will be cribbing pretty hard from James McWilliams’ Just Food, Erik Marcus’ Meat Market, Howard Lyman’s Mad Cowboy, Lori Gruen’s Ethics and Animals, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. Whenever I quote directly from a source, I will cite it, but otherwise I will not be giving proper credit in terms of “I was first alerted to this in so-and-so’s brilliant etc etc”. But all of those are books worth reading.

Also, the author I am responding to is specifically talking about Australia, which I know very little about in specifics. So, I will just have to talk about what I know, and assume it applies to Australia.

One other general remark: The idea that eating animals that have been raised in a grazing situation, and from a “beyond organic” situation (no hormones, no antibiotics, no gmo stuff) is clearly better, both environmentally and ethically, than eating all your meat from CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations)/Factory Farms. But this author is disingenuous in the extreme for not pointing out that in order to do so, and to do so consistently, will require an extreme decrease in animal flesh consumption. And just because it is better than factory farms, doesn't even make it closely comparable to vegetarianism and especially veganism on both the environmental and ethical fronts.

The Environmental Issue

Let’s put the conclusion ahead of the rest of the argument. From McWilliams:

The specialized approach might be environmentally sound, and even profitable, for a few small-scale ranchers making grass-fed beef for privileged eaters worried about their omega-3s. However, this approach cannot […] produce enough grass fed beef to replace the conventional beef consumed in dangerous quantities[.] (p. 147)

In other words, as McWilliams further argues, “the major problem is that the sustainable scenario works well only as a boutique endeavor. Scale is everything when it comes to raising animals to feed billions of people" (p. 147).

If the whole world was to eat land-based mammals (what I will occasionally refer to as meat, despite its inaccuracy) at the same rate as we do in America, Canada, and Europe we would create, with no exaggeration, an apocalyptic hellscape. To the numbers!
“Between 1961 and 2002 the worldwide consumption of meat rose from 71 million metric tons a year to 247 metric tons a year—almost a fourfold leap” (McWilliams p. 124). This assumes, even with feedlots and CAFOs and other horrible but land-saving strategies, that “if the world’s growing population decided to eat the same amount of meat as the world’s affluent now consume, we would need 67 percent more land than the earth has” (McWilliams p. 126). Of course, the land itself is not well-treated by keeping lots of cattle on it.
“In Uganda, as a result of overgrazing in its drylands known as the “cattle corridor,” soil compaction, erosion and the emergence of low-value grass species and vegetation have subdued the land’s productive capacity, leading to desertification.3 In the Gambia, it is reported that fallow periods have been reduced to zero on most arable lands.4 Between 1950 and 2006, the Nigerian livestock population grew from 6 million to 66 million, a 11-fold increase. The forage needs of livestock exceed the carrying capacity of its grasslands.5 It is reported that overgrazing and over-cultivating are converting 351,000 hectares of land into desert each year.6” (from the UN’s Economic Commission on Africa, Africa Report on Draught and Desertification 2008, ch. 2).
Furthermore:

Because livestock have degraded rangelands worldwide, water has been unable to replenish itself as it woul in ecosystems left ungrazed. Because cows, sheep, and goats press on the land with the same weight as a tractor, watersheds have altered to the extent that precipitation cannot do what it would normally do in a properly functioning hydrological cycle.
Under ungrazed conditions, rainfall is held by soil vegetation and gradually spread across a watershed, infiltrating and replenishing groundwater at a relatively slow pace. When this happens, erosion is kept to a minimum and the soil’s fertility is continually enhanced. With intensive livestock grazing, however, the infiltration process is drastically undermined. Surface flows increase, run-off leaches minerals from the soil and deposits them in oceans, and, most critically, the physical health of the soil is degraded.
With the basic physical alteration of the soil, the preconditions for persistent animal manure contamination of downstream freshwater sources are well established. What we’re left to endure is therefore a kind of double whammy: more manure than the soil can accommodate hitting soil so damaged that precipitation carries that manure, as well as the microbes and chemicals in it, into the water supply we drink (McWilliams, pp. 143-144).

This is what reveals the fundamental misconceit of the original article. There is land that is so destroyed and degraded that we cannot grow crops on it because of the over-grazing by animals! “Many grazing areas are so desolate that, at first glance, it seems they might as well be stocked with cattle, since it appears that few other animals could survive in these areas. But the truth is that America’s rangelands have become inhospitable precisely because they are grazed by cattle. Take away the cattle, and in a surprisingly short amount of time, most ranching areas become revitalized. Within just a few years, plant life makes a strong recovery, and this regeneration attracts wildlife to return” (Marcus, p. 197).
This brings us to global warming, and another long quotation from James McWilliams:

With some estimations attributing about 20 percent of all global warming gases to ‘land use change’, of which desertification is a major component (deforestation being another). […]Making matters worse, the inability of destroyed vegetation to capture carbon dioxide ultimately leads to what scientists call a ‘desertification-global warming feedback loop.’ In this scenario, carbon that’s released from desertification causes global warming, and then in turn global warming exacerbates desertification. […].(McWilliams p. 129)

According to the The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) report Livestock’s Long Shadow, livestock is the single largest contributor to global warming gases. Now, while some of that will be answered with grazing issues, there are still problems. “Even if cattle and vegetation coexisted in harmonious ecological balance, though, the respiratory impact of livestock would continue to be an issue. Livestock give off 86 million metric tons of methane a year. Methane is twenty-one to twenty-four times more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Moreover, it can linger in the atmosphere for as long as fifteen years. […] When it comes to methane emissions from cows, buying grass-fed hardly lets the consumer off the hook: grass-fed cattle actually produce four times more methane than feedlot cattle, when measured on a per-cow basis. (McWilliams, p. 130).
This is why I talk about increased global meat eating as producing an apocalyptic hellscape. If the world were to eat the amount of meat that people in the US do, even if we were to shift to an entire grass-fed—and no hormone and antibiotic—livestock diet, we would still be eating a diet incompatible with future human life. It would be a world of deserts. It would be a world of manure flowing streams, water basins, and oceans. It would be a world of a rapidly heated globe, with all the environmental and weather related awfulness that occurs. The consumption of other animals is a direct move to poisoning our water, destroying our soil, and wreaking the climate of the globe.

Next Up, the Ethics! here.

Dark Animal (Studies)

I recently received a rather odd email from someone who came across my blog, and the response to this email is something I feel the need to post here, as well. Mainly because it deals with some misconceptions of vegetarianism and veganism that seem very common. So, here's the response:

***

It seems to me that your email misunderstands what is at stake with trying to create ethical relationships with non-human beings (in particular here, those beings we call animals). There is an indictment against vegetarianism and veganism that it is motivated by a naive escapism and utopianism. In this argument, vegetarianism and veganism are conceived not as ethical responses to violence, but rather as a way of being unable to think through violence. The ethical equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going lalalala over and over again. Under this view vegetarianism and veganism is about keeping our hands clean, about purity and innocence and the sacred. This is the mistake that Derrida makes in his interview with Nancy, "Eating Well." In it he argues that vegetarians have yet to sacrifice sacrifice. Well, no duh. Now, I've hung out with plenty of vegetarians and vegans, and in general they are crowd less congratulatory on their innocence as consumed by their own guilt. The blame they lay at the feet of those who still consume animal flesh and products is meet by an almost Newtonian response of equal and opposite blame upon themselves. This is the guilt that Adorno describes as a "guilt of a life which purely as a fact will strangle other life". Indeed, the escapist and utopian drive that seeks to ward off this guilt is to be found just as often (if not more so!) among those who deride vegetarianism as utopian. If you look at Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Jose Ortega y Gasset you see again and again a desire to expiate this guilt by sublimating their violence into a sacred ritual. It's like something straight out of Durkheim or Mauss.
Vegetarians and vegans are seldom Hegel's beautiful soul who faces the "silent fusion of the pithless unsubstantial elements of evaporated life," but are instead the other side of the dialectal coin, a damaged soul who has seen the face of the gorgon. This is exactly what I have tried to address in my discussion of vegetarian vampires and vampiric vegetarians. The vegetarian vampire is the liminal figure that exists on both sides, both beautiful soul and damaged soul. On the one hand the vegetarian vampire uses vegetarianism as a marker of innocence (this is one way to understand Hitler's propaganda around his non-existent vegetarianism, and also a way to understand the British National Party's Land and People campaign for animal welfare). On the other hand, the vegetarian vampire is a brooding, reflective creature; a guilt-ridden being. We need to escape these economies of innocence and guilt, of purity and pollution, of the sacred and the profane (this is a difference between myself and Agamben, who embraces the profane as a way out). What we need might be less of a critical animal studies, and more of a dark animal studies.
The critique, as Kant explains to us from the very beginning, has a policing and tribunal function. The critique distances and judges. I think that ground has very little to offer us, at least now. So, a dark animal studies repeats Tim Morton's move towards a dark ecology. The point isn't for innocence, the sacred, or distance. At the same time, it isn't for guilt, the profane, or redemption. It is, rather, to exit from these economies entirely. This is the point of ethics -- it is only because innocence and purity cannot exist that ethics can. As I have said elsewhere: Ethics is not about finding innocence, but about living after innocence. Ethics is about thinking and living in our postlapsarian world without alibi. It is from this position that we can begin to think about vegetarianism and veganism, or at least the vegetarianism and veganism of dark animal studies-- a becoming-vegetarian, a becoming-vegan.
As with all becomings what is at stake are alliances, packs, relations. Vegetarianism and veganism are practices of the self (a la late Foucault). As Foucault teaches us; following the return to certain Classical philosophical schools like the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Cynics; we need to reverse the Cartesian moment by which right knowledge produces right action (this is, in some ways, most explicit in Badiou's theory of revolution). Rather, certain practices allow us to access certain truths. These practices and productions of the self are not simply of the self. Rather, they open us to alliances with other beings, beings that may have existed for us before these practices as "sub-ontological" (to borrow a phrase from Nelson Maldonado-Torres). The navigation of these alliances; the force and diplomacy involved; are not automatic or always obvious. There are complex and rigorous philosophical questions involved. This is another reason to think of a dark animal studies, as an invocation of a double sense of opacity against comprehension. We need to both recognize the opacity of other beings, but also the greyness, the opacity from ever knowing fully ahead of time how such relations are going to play out. Becoming-vegetarian, becoming-vegan, are practices of self and other, pacts we make to packs.

Bennett, ch. 8

Sorry again for running late. Hopefully in the next few days I will have a post on the book in toto. This will be a short one on chapter 8. Also, if you haven't already, read Adrian on the final chapter here and here.

First, let me say I liked this chapter a lot. It's important and interesting. Her arguments for what a vital materialism can bring to the green movement is strong and important (though her object of critique, environmentalism, seems a little unclear to me. But critique isn't the most important thing here). Her criticism of portrayals of nature as harmonious is key here. And it ties into her closing point that we need to be careful of our only environmental maxim being to tread lightly. This image of nature is one where it is passive and perfect until the evil humans come and muck everything up. I doubt highly it is accurate, and probably doesn't help us figure out better models of interaction and communication with everything that isn't human. Rather, echoing the conclusion by Bennett, sometimes we need to tread lightly, and sometimes we need a Bataillian expenditure, and sometimes we need other levels of action. What we need is a Kairos, a sense of time that is bound to action and inaction, to the opportune time. We need an archer's sense of time, a time that cares about hitting our target, and that takes into account all sorts of nonhuman interactions like bows, strings, wind, force and velocity.
While I think it is clear what benefits vitalist materialism brings with it for the green movement, my only worry is the language is filled with far more radical conditions for success. Complete revolutions in relations to ourselves and to others. I am not saying all of that is not needed, but something like cap and trade whose benefit is that it manages a goal without requiring a revolution should not be lost. We cannot be like, "Let's stop cap and trade because it keeps the market system in place!", because such a move would surely be suicidal as well. This too must be kairos, a sense of timing of when to take a revolutionary step, and when to take a reforming step. Deleuze liked to speak of the importance of stammering, but I think stumbling is also a necessity.

Though my favorite part of this chapter was Bennett's defense of anthropomorphism. Adrian wrote on this, but I think it is also one of the things that would seem the most familiar and important to many of the readers of this blog. Bennett argues, "[m]aybe it is worth running the risks associated with anthropomorphizing [...] because it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism" (p. 120). I cannot possibly remember the number of times I have said some version of anthropomorphism might not be the worst thing ever. If one is willing to risk anthropomorphism, it is often because anthropocentrism is seen as a greater enemy. However, if you think that human exceptionalism is actually a good thing or a necessary thing, then anthropomorphism would be one of the worst sins you could commit. I'm not sure I want to defend anthropomorphism as always a good thing, but it is certainly a risk I don't mind running. Maybe we can turn to the both familiarizing and de-familiarizing effect of anthropomorphism later, but this stumbling and stammering end seems a good place to end this post.

The Story of Cap and Trade: A Rebuttal

I know I need to respond to some emails and comments still. I also need to get back on the summer reading group horse. But, here is an off-topic post anyway.

While I was at the wedding my brother brought up Annie Leonard's short animated film, "The Story of Cap and Trade." Now, I know that I am well behind the curve here, but I hadn't seen the film before. So, I know that for many of you this is already a decided and done issue one way or another. I am also sure there are probably several more thorough responses out there, and maybe I should have just searched for them and linked here. Regardless, this video both angered and worried me, and I felt it deserved a direct response since I have come across it.

It angered me for the way it depicts supporters of cap and trade. Leonard at least implies (if not quite argues) that cap and trade was somehow developed by evil market speculators; like Enron, Goldman Sachs, and Bernie Madoff (wtf on this last one); and that supporters of cap and trade are either dupes or complicit co-conspirators in some new speculative bubble that puts all of us in danger. Whatever your feelings about the effectiveness of cap and trade to handle the problem of rapid global climate change, let's me honest: there are many tireless activists and policy wonks who are fighting for cap and trade and they are not delusional, duped, greedy, or complicit. And many of them not only think cap and trade is the best thing we can get through Congress, they think that a well designed cap and trade program is an essential component of any bill to fight global warming. You can disagree with them without turning them into villains or idiots. Many people on the right, like the Heritage Foundation, are opposed to cap and trade, but I don't claim that Annie Leonard is in league or been duped by the far right. It would be both irresponsible and mean-spirited to do so.

So, cap and trade doesn't get birthed from speculative traders, where does it come from? You won't learn this in something called The Story of Cap and Trade, so let me elucidate. The original cap and trade system was first installed in the 1990 Clean Air Act (which is valorized in this program). If you remember at the time there was a fear of Acid Rain caused by too much production of SO2 and NOx. Both SO2 and NOx were put under a cap and trade program, and it was an amazing success. Levels were reduced far more quickly than anticipated, and for far less than anticipated. We have seen this idea expanded to carbon in the European Union in 2005 and in a regional program in the Northeast US.

What does all of this tell us? It tells us that cap and trade was invented by scientists and policy wonks, it has a record of success and models that we can investigate to make better policy, and it seems politically feasible. The roles of speculative marketers to promote cap and trade are rather marginal to this story, whereas they are central to the story that Leonard tells.

So, that's why it angers me, it worries me because Leonard's video frequently misleads or tells only part of the story. I think if we who are concerned about the environment and ecology depend on information like this, we cannot begin to have the sort of conversations necessary to figure out what is best. So, here are some responses to her video:

(1) It seems to be working in Europe. Leonard points out how rocky the beginning of cap and trade was in Europe. It did result in price fluctuations, and too many permits were given away at the beginning. However, Europe's system was designed in phases, so that things could be fixed. And sure enough, since Phase II began in 2007, things have gotten better. As this German Marshall Fund report (.pdf) explains, much of Europe is set to meet their Kyoto goals because of cap and trade. Indeed, cap and trade seems to be reducing between 2.5 and 5% of carbon annually from Europe. Moreover, prices have largely stabilized.

(2) I think everyone agrees that fully auctioned permits is the best idea for cap and trade. It is unclear from the video if Leonard would be for a system that had fully auctioned permits and strong regulations on offsets. She nowhere says she would be, even though her two concrete problems with cap and trade can be fixed by stronger bills, they are not inherent to the system itself. Anyway, fully auctioned credits would be best. The bill that passed the House a while back, Waxman-Markey, took a hybrid approach to this issue. It gives away most of the permits to begin with, and then gives away less and less of them over time. Moreover, most of permits given away are given away to protect consumer interests, not polluter interests. Would a fully auction system be better? Of course! But better for what? For reducing carbon? That seems unlikely, the cap is the main thing that decides that. So, the auctioned credits are a way of raising revenue, and that strikes most of us as important and good. But it is unclear why Leonard implies that it would make matters worse for the planet if we gave away permits rather than auctioning them off.

(3) The issue of offsets is one that I share a certain amount of skepticism over. And in this case I can see why a system with bad or unregulated offsets might make a system that is worse (though hard to see how it is worse than the status quo) but at least a system that wouldn't be effective enough. My understanding is that Waxman-Markey do a lot to make sure that offsets are abused. This is something I don't know nearly enough about, and am open to learning more. I do know that one of the reasons that offsets are seen as a possible benefit is to jumpstart international action. Basically companies in the US could bribe countries and companies in the rest of the world to act in ways that are important for lowering carbon emissions. To install methane captures and to stop destroying rain forests. But this is something I am skeptical of, and not fully on board with.

(4) Leonard implies that the US starting to tackle carbon emissions itself will somehow undermine international cooperation. I don't even begin to understand this argument. How can us showing that we are serious about tackling carbon emissions make us less serious on the international scene? Wouldn't the opposite be true? Moreover, how do any of her solutions help international confidence? Paul Krugman has suggested two ways with dealing with carbon emissions in the other world (this whole article is worth reading). The first is that if we set up an international market for the cap and trade, then countries that produce less carbon would have more permits to sell. In short, companies form the EU and US would pay companies in China, India, Brazil, etc not to produce carbon. A fairly direct bribery scheme. Another possibility is to enact carbon tariffs. Neither of these are perfect solutions, but I remain confused how focusing on passing a workable national cap and trade program is a distraction from international solutions.

(5) Leonard makes two more arguments for cap and trade as dangerous distraction. The first is that the EPA can somehow cap carbon emissions. Well, it can regulate carbon as a pollutant, but it is unclear how it can cap industry specific carbon emissions. Moreover, the EPA's enforcement will be up for grabs each time the white house changes hands. A law that compels enforcement and sets specific guidelines for caping is far more effective for large scale and continuous change. Now, it is true that some of the cap and trade bills proposed will weaken the EPA's ability to regulate carbon unilateritality. That's not great, but if we get a strong enough bill out of congress it will be worth it. The other argument is that it will make people complacent. If we are actually caping carbon, I don't understand what you want people to be doing. Now, there are ecological issues outside of rapid global climate change, but I don't see how a carbon cap and trade will make us care less about those issues. It is true that an effective cap and trade destroys the meaning of individual actions when it comes to carbon. Deciding to produce less carbon will (seldom) matter because if you produce less it gives room for someone else to produce more. This is either a feature or a bug of the system, depending on who you are. Either you feel this will destroy individual morality, or you feel that a system that doesn't require self-conscious sacrifice but systematic changes is a better thing is up in the air from an ethical perspective. From a getting stuff done perspective, I'd prefer an effective systematic changes.

(6) Cap with no trade strikes me as somewhat problematic. First of all, I don't see the added benefit. If the caps are the same, we would be reducing carbon at the same rate. On the other hand, without trade it would produce much higher costs on consumers. That has its own set of problems. Also, just as I am wary of an unregulated market, I am also wary of the government, of centralized planning. I think we need a system that allows a degree of flexibility internally with a hard cap externally. I guess being for cap without trade makes sense if you are inherently opposed to all markets. The fact that Leonard only speaks in terms of ponzi schemes, bubbles, etc. makes it clear that she seems opposed to all speculative markets. I'm not sure I am, or at least certainly not to the degree I'd be for giving up an effective global warming opposition. As Paul Krugman explains why cap and trade doesn't lend itself to the sort of speculation that Leonard's language emphasis. Seriously, being opposed to the trade of cap and trade only makes sense if you are opposed to all trading, to the trading of wheat futures for example. Also, there is has been no gaming the market system of SO2 cap and trade (.pdf), and no evidence of any gaming the US regional carbon cap and trade (.doc). I don't know about problems of gaming the EU system, and if any of you know I'd be interested. Ultimately my view of markets are similar as those put forward by Braudel in Capitalism and Civilization and Delanda's Braudelian view in A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History. Basically, that markets are powerful and productive. The real problem isn't with markets, but with anti-markets trying to pass themselves off as markets. The creation of an actual market with cap and trade strikes me as beneficial addition to the policy.

At the end, this is a complex issue. Leonard is right that some of the people who first devised cap and trade to handle acid rain are worried about its effectiveness to handle carbon. There are a lot of problems and potholes to be dealt with. But "The Story of Cap and Trade" seems more devoted to rallying troops than it does to grapple with complex issues. That's not at all what we need.

A Green Humane Movement

Good news, EPA takes a slightly tougher stance on CAFOs (aka factory farms, aka hell on earth). This link comes from this post from Dylan Matthews, who ends his post on this point, "Given some coordination, a green/Humane alliance on tougher factory farm regulation could be pretty formidable." Too true, and a great hope. And while many people in the movements know this (and there is a great overlap between the green movement and the animal movement), for now there basically should be no difference between the two movements. They both should be working to abolish factory farms whose toxic chemicals and greenhouse gas production are amazing. They both should be working to stop global warming (which endangers entire species) and preserve ecological systems.

Now, some of you might not know this, but within the academic and sometimes radical articulations of ecological and animal rights thinking, these movements have often been at cross-purposes. This will be really surprising to those of you who think that the intellectual movements are basically interchangeable (we are frequently treated that way by people outside of environmental and animal studies). Now, a major part of this comes from academic discourses that tend to focus on fairly marginal questions or questions that assume a particular future rather than dwelling on the immediate crisis that we all agree on (those being the need to stop factory farming and rapid global climate change). But it is important to stop and remember that we really are profoundly on the same side, at least for the foreseeable future.

I also don't really get where the animosity comes from between green people and AR people. A plant based, sustainably produced diet is obviously the best.

Ecology Without Nature: The Blog

Appropriate discovery on Earth Day, but it seems Tim Morton, author of Ecology Without Nature, has a blog of the same name.

While I have some disagreements with his work, in general I think Morton is one of those essential thinkers producing work that bridges the gap that has emerged between ecologists and animal studies people. So, I'm really quite excited about the discovery of his blog, and I have high hopes for it.

A complication to flat ethics and relational ethics

I am absurdly busy this week, so of course one of the more interesting cross-blog conversations has broken out. Let's see if I can trace this for everyone. Paul made the original post, following up on a discussion we were having about anti-correlationist thinking and the animal. Levi followed up by combining some of his earlier analysis on inhuman ethics with Paul's post. That then generated an excellent discussion in comments (read them), Peter made some short comments on his blog (here and here), and then both Paul and Adrian followed up on stuff they had said in comments in full length blog posts, and of course Levi found the time to already respond. (oh yeah, meanwhile Craig also decided to write an interesting post at his blog you all should read, even if it isn't directly a part of this conversation).

I don't have the time to respond to all of this stuff. Really any of it right now. So a short problematic that needs to be worked through in both flat ethics and relational ethics (not that those are necessarily different?). The problem is similar but slightly different for each.
In flat ethics we are trying to talk about how we can conceive of ethics (is it appropriate to say do justice?) that isn't just anthropocentric, or animal-centric, or even biocentric (right, Levi?), but rather does justice to all entities that are real. So, that's hard enough to even formulate the proposition, much less answer. But the fear is that such an extension could cause a defacto anthropocentricism (or pick your favorite -centrism). Let's bring this discussion to something those of us in the CAS movement understand, which is the extension of ethical treatment towards plants, which we dealt with briefly before on this blog. It is not uncommon for someone to respond to finding out someone is vegan (or vegetarian) by responding "What about plants?" sometimes this is meant as a joke, usually it is meant as an excuse not to explore the ethical. Though perhaps in the strongest formulation you will find this concept as part of what Derrida calls eating well, or what Haraway translates into the notion of killing well. If in order to live we have to eat/kill, than how should live in such a way to eat/kill well? In Derrida there isn't much to go on in his formulation, and it is a frustrating and interesting interview. In Haraway's boook When Species Meet, she develops her notion of killing well. And there is some thoughtful writing here about other animals, and balancing issues of ecology, etc. But she (and in many ways Derrida as well) doesn't deal with the question of killing humans. In short, it is hard to imagine she has created the same system for killing well humans as she as for animals. While human actions are under scrutiny in the work, an implicit anthropocentrism still seems to have hold over her notion (and I'd love nothing more to see her more directly take up this issue). By extending the ethical, we have to make sure that it doesn't foster a type of anthropocentrism (because I am concerned of plants and socks and Harry Potter and my cat and the bird he tries to hunt, etc) we end up declaring that tough choices have to be made! that still somehow excuses those same choices being made about humans. Obviously this is not at all a problem inherent in flat ethics, but is a problem that must be repeatedly and obviously guarded against.

In the relational ethics we have a similar issue, as I see. Adrian writes that:

But maybe there is a difference here after all... It's quite possible that an object-oriented ontology makes it easier to measure things that are fundamentally of the same kind (objects as defined in such and such a way), and is therefore more amenable to egalitarianism to the extent that "equality" is considered a kind of sameness that is distributed across a certain set of entities. A relational ontology, on the other hand, prefers to focus not on equality but on qualitivism -- that is, the notion that we should act in a way that preserves and enhances the quality of relations. I’ve argued elsewhere for an “ethic of circulating agency,” where what we value is that the ability to act, to pursue one’s goals, to respond to others, to grow and to flourish, is kept in motion , i.e., that it is actively distributed across the terrain within which the capacity emerges for such action, pursuit, responsiveness, and growth. I have yet to develop that idea in any philosophical depth, but I think it’s consistent with a poststructuralist and post-constructivist process-relational approach to politics.

First, let me clarify. By egalitarianism (which is my emphasis with the concept of flatness with ethics) I do not mean sameness, homogeneity, static being, etc. As I stated in a comment over at Levi's place, ethics means affirming both equality and difference. This is obviously a tricky thing, and my favorite formulation of it, perhaps weirdly, is by Peter Singer (I hesitate to ever bring him into discussions, because of how much weight dragging his name into a conversation tends to have. So let me state I do not mean to bring his philosophical apparatuses in whenever I quote him. I sometimes don't even mean what he means when I quote him, sometimes I just like his formulations), when states that we have to give equal consideration of interests. Now, he has some technical meanings for the terms interest and consideration, but of which I think we might be challenging. But this is what I mean by equality, in which an exceptionalism doesn't form in our ethical relationships. I like the idea of an ethic of circulating agency. But I would too wonder what it does with something like the notion of killing well or eating well. In short, how does an ethic of circulatory ethics deal with situations that are not win-win? How does it deal with situations where choices have to made that for some being to continue flourishing means that another being cannot continue to flourish? This is where egalitarianism becomes all the more necessary, otherwise some group or person or whatever will always cheat at these moments. Will claim that their interests are obviously more important than others. (And this might also be a good way to rethink interests, in terms of collective relations toward flourishing, rather than an individualistic utilitarian calculations). Again, not something inherent, but something that needs to be watched and guarded against.

Anyway, I think this discussion has been wonderful so far. I know we are all busy, but I hope it continues. And maybe when the blogging begins to slow down we can formulate some sort of more concrete exchange (special journal issue, formalized virtual conference, real conference, etc.).

Ecology and Marxism, pt. 1

I highly suggest reading Levi post, Inhuman Ethics. I hope to make a fuller response later. Right now, I want to quote some things to provide a beginning for later posts (when I get the chance).

The first is a quotation from Reviel Netz's Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity:

Marxism was lacking not merely in the understanding of agriculture but in the understanding of ecology and therefore of history itself (p. 180).

The second quotation is from Adorno:

In Marx the principle of the domination of nature is actually accepted quite naively. According to the Marxian way of seeing there is something of a change in the relations of domination between people -- they are supposed to come to an end, that is, such domination should disappear -- but the unconditional domination of nature by human beings is not affected by this, so we might say that the image of a classless society in Marx has something of a quality of a gigantic joint-stock company for the exploitation of nature, as Horkheimer once formulated it. The fact that, according to Marx, the labour performed by animals does not lead to the production of surplus value -- even though the costs of reproduction is lower in animals than the time or energy expanded -- the fact that, according to an explicit passage in Capital, their labour produces no surplus value is merely the crassest symbol of this. I have no wish to become embroiled in romantic reflections on nature, but I believe that, when I say there has been too little interpretation, we have alighted on a very crucial problem. If there is only one truth, it is not possible to criticize radically the principle of domination on the one hand, while unreservedly acquiescing in it in a undialectical manner on the other. If it is the case -- as Marx and Engels taught, although I am by no means sure it is the case -- that domination over external nature called for societies in which domination prevailed through the millennia because things would not have worked otherwise -- and that this situation is now supposed to be radically transformed all of a sudden, then you need a very strong faith (to put it mildly) to imagine that the forms of domination of nature should persist in accordance with idealism, in accordance with a Fichtean idea of absolute subjectivity, without forms of domination making their appearance [in society]. If in the Eastern-bloc countries the bureaucrats have eaten their fill and have formed themselves into a class, this is undeniably connected to the process of industrialization with its utterly ruthless and undialectical demands for the domination of nature, whereas for a seriously liberated vision of society that includes the relationship of man and nature, the relation to the domination of nature has to be changed if it is not constantly to reproduce itself in the internal forms of society. (Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments on a Lecture Course 1965/1966, pp. 58-59, emphasis in the original).

I will have more to say later, I just wanted to type these up as a beginning.

PS on Marx and ecology

In my last post I quoted Netz accusing Marx of not understanding ecology, and therefore of not understanding history. I want to clarify that I don't think that Netz is saying that Marx never attempted to think ecology, merely that his thoughts were at least not enough, and at worst incorrect. As most know, Marx certainly advanced a thought of ecology in his concept of Stoffwechsel (metabolism). While Netz doesn't talk about this concept at all (and, in general, doesn't spend a lot of the book talking about Marx), I would certainly agree that Marx's notion of Stoffwechsel remains far too anthropocentric. Both in his earlier works (principally the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) and his later works (principally in Capital, vols one and three). I am not saying that from Marx we cannot work a strong thought of ecology (and therefore history). I am saying that the concept, in Marx, remains impossibly anthropocentric and woefully insufficient.