Abstract
The Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, The World Commission on Environment and Development. Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, 1987) envisaged a ‘Common Future’ in which humankind would undertake ‘sustainable development’, in theory including the interests of the non-human. In the same year, James Lovelock proposed that humankind comprised the ‘brains’ of Gaia, with a directive role in relation to other species and things. Since then, in a globalised market economy, discourses have increasingly framed ecosystems and their non-human inhabitants as providers of ‘services’ to human communities. Resource use has intensified exponentially, and other species are facing unprecedented rates of anthropogenically caused extinctions. Questioning both the propriety and the wisdom of adhering to anthropocentric positionality, ethicists have underlined the need to consider more equally the interests and the agentive capacities of the non-human. For anthropologists, traditionally focused on humankind, this presents some ethical and practical challenges. This chapter considers how we might address some of these.
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