Nonhuman Forms Of Life Research Articles

The Ethics of Human⁻Animal Relationships and Public Discourse: A Case Study of Lions Bred for Their Bones.

Simple SummaryIn South Africa, lions are farmed, and a product of that farming is lion skeletons that form part of an international trade to supply traditional medicine markets in Southeast Asia with felid bones. As a matter of public policy, the practice is a complicated nexus of concerns for entrepreneurial freedom, wildlife conservation, and the fair treatment of animals. We used this case to demonstrate how public discourse about ethically-charged policies can be aided by a technique from the academic field of applied ethics, i.e., formal argument analysis. We showed how the technique can be integrated into existing frameworks for public decision-making. To further facilitate the application of this technique to other cases, we also offered ten general lessons for formal analysis of ethical arguments.Conservation and natural resource management are increasingly attending the ethical elements of public decisions. Ethical considerations are challenging, in part, because they typically require accounting for the moral consideration of various human and nonhuman forms of life, whose interests sometimes conflict (or seem to conflict). A valuable tool for such evaluations is the formal analysis of ethical arguments. An ethical argument is a collection of premises, logically interrelated, to yield a conclusion that can be expressed in the form, “We ought to…” According to the rules of logic, a conclusion is supported by an argument if all its premises are true or appropriate and when it contains no mistaken inferences. We showed how the formal analysis of ethical arguments can be used to engage stakeholders and decision-makers in decision-making processes. We summarised the method with ten specific guidelines that would be applicable to any case. We illustrated the technique using a case study focused on captive-bred lions, the skeletons of which form part of an international trade to supply traditional medicine markets in Southeast Asia with felid bones. As a matter of public policy, the practice is a complicated nexus of concerns for entrepreneurial freedom, wildlife conservation, and the fair treatment of animals.

Victorian Lyric in the Anthropocene

When Charles Lyell chronicles humankind's rise to geologic power in thePrinciples of Geology, he talks out of both sides of his mouth. Detailing the human species’ seemingly unmatched force as a terrestrial “levelling agent,” he ruminates on an unsettling possibility that haunts the present: “it admits of reasonable doubt whether, upon the whole, we fertilize or impoverish the lands we occupy.” Already at the time of Lyell's writing, the human species had “displaced” or altogether extinguished “a number of beasts of prey, birds, and animals of every class” (2:148) through deforestation, hunting, and the “progress of colonization” (2:150–51). But elsewhere in thePrinciples, Lyell puts into question what this history of environmental degradation otherwise seems to assert: that to be human is to possess a singular capacity for mastery. Thus, Lyell declares, “we ought always, before we decide that any part of the influence of man is novel and anomalous, carefully to consider all the powers of other animate agents which may be limited or superseded by him” (2:206). Tracing how swarms of insects gave dramatic and lasting shape to the German arboreal landscape in ways that humans could never replicate, he concludes: “[I]t does not follow that this kind of innovation”—human innovation—“is unprecedented” (2:206). Even as Lyell imagines humankind as “superior” in its capacity to act as “a single species,” he persistently lingers with the very real possibility that humans donotpossess a “novel and anomalous” hold over the world (2:207, emphasis original). Instead, thePrinciplestraces how the world is shaped by “physical causes” and nonhuman agencies that elude control and unmask the relative “insignifican[ce]” of humankind's “aggregate force” (2:207). Inasmuch as humans comprise only one part of an agential assemblage whose shifting interactions elude anthropogenic mastery, thePrinciplesimagines humankind as interpenetrated by and profoundly susceptible to nonhuman life-forms and forces. According to Lyell, then, deep history speaks not only of the human species’ seemingly privileged capacity for action but also its nonintentionality, noninstrumentality, and vulnerability. That thePrinciplestells a story about the porous interfaces between human and nonhuman geologic agents is perhaps surprising, given that it emerged and participated in a moment which, for many, marks the zenith of imperial and anthropogenic power.

Spectral Depth

Abstract Deep ecology holds that profound inner transformation is a necessary part of entering an ecological age and building a society that includes nonhuman lifeforms in meaningful ways. I am going to argue that this is definitely the case, and that the shock of realizing the truth of the Anthropocene amounts to a first step on a pathway that one might accurately see as ‘spiritual,’ if only for its profundity—though certainly not for any disengagement with the political. What this transformation amounts to in part is a new way of experiencing ‘selfhood’ or the ‘inner self’ (or whatever we want to call it). This new mode sees existence to contain a necessarily spectral dimension. While it obviously makes reductionist forms of materialism untenable, such a dimension also troubles some of the ideas we might have about spirituality. I seek to show how the spectral is a vital element of being an ecological being, and argue that this spectrality affects how we conceptualize all kinds of other domains, such as ethics, politics and art.

윌리엄 블레이크의 『델서』 : 낭만주의적 생태학을 넘어서

This essay is an attempt to read William Blake"s The Book of Thel as an ecocritical text that challenges two major ecological thoughts that emerged in the eighteenth century, an “arcardian” stance of British nature poetry and the idea of “economy of nature” that emphasizes wise human stewardship. Blake"s greatest contribution to the ecological thought is his continual sensitivity to the life of the body, which resists both the subjectless immersion into nature and imperial imposition of human values onto nature. The Poetic Genius is central to this essay"s understanding of Blake"s proto-ecological thought. Even though it differentiates the human from the non-human, its seemimg anthropocentrism is curbed by its promotion of malleability and fluidity, pushing the human subject to move outside the cave of the self and to help encounter other human and non-human life forms. Thel in The Book of Thel is seduced by nature to give up her human identity, including not only her anthropocentric idea of utility but also her life of the body as an embodied form of the Poetic Genius. Thel gives up the former willingly embracing experiential possibilities that her selfhood does not already know. However, she decide not to let the latter go, realizing it reduces her to a vegetable body with its five vitiated senses. Thel"s rejection of the vegetable body is directly related to Blake"s notion of the “spiritual body,” which benefits contemporary environmental thinking. The notion of the “spiritual body” limits the exercise of the human destructive will on nature, while promoting the emergence of new energy and possibilities in nature.

Mobile Disasters

Sociologists of disasters and those agencies dedicated to disaster risk reduction and emergency relief tend to fix disasters, to confine them in time and space. This article argues for the necessity of a mobilities turn within mainstream disaster studies, demonstrating what the new mobilities paradigm (NMP) can contribute to disaster scholarship. Disasters should be seen as mobile agents with spatially and temporally dispersed effects. They are mobile because people, nonhuman life-forms, information, and commodities move. The ecosystems and earth systems that sustain us are also always in flux. Instead of focusing on isolated disaster cases, this article calls for a “big picture” ecological sensibility that recognizes the complexity and interconnectivity of our world, and addresses the new forms of mobility, temporality, spatiality, and potency inherent to today’s disasters. This task is urgent: while previous eras may have announced the apocalypse, ours may well be the last one to do so.

“The Sea, Not the Ocean”: Anthropocene Fiction and the Memory of (Non)human Life

Starting from the observation that the notion of the Anthropocene invites us to alter the ways in which we imagine human life (and the relations between different human lives), this essay argues that transnational accounts of literature and culture—in the fairly new field of oceanic studies, for instance—need to expand their scope from intercultural relations to include the relationships between different (human) forms of life and (human as well as nonhuman) life forms. The essay develops this argument through a dialogue between J. M. Ledgard's planetary novel Submergence from 2011 and contemporary theories of the posthuman (Ray Brassier, Eugene Thacker) and the Anthropocene (Ian Baucom, Dipesh Chakrabarty), in order to demonstrate that the literary novel has a vital role to play in the imagining of new forms of (non)human relatedness. Developing Submergence's distinction between the (radically nonhuman) ocean and the (human-related) sea, the essay puts forward the argument that human life in the Anthropocene is marked by what the essay theorizes, with the help of Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, and Walter Benjamin, as “immemorial life”: a relation to radically nonhuman life forms that cannot be actualized in the imagining and remembering of human life in the Anthropocene.

Hunting the Beast on YouTube

Abstract Humans’ perceived relationship to nature and non-human lifeforms is fundamental for sustainable development; different framings of nature – as commodity, as threat, as sacred etc. – imply different responses to future challenges. The body of research on nature representations in various symbolic contexts is growing, but the ways in which nature is framed by people in the everyday has received scant attention. This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the framing of nature by studying how wild-boar hunting is depicted on YouTube. The qualitative frame analysis identified three interrelated frames depicting hunting as battle, as consumption, and as privilege, all of which constitute and are constituted by the underlying notion of human as superior to nature. It is suggested that these hegemonic nature frames suppress more constructive ways of framing the human-nature relationship, but also that the identification of such potential counter-hegemonic frames enables their discursive manifestation.

Disturbing Hospitality with The Young Family

Taking Patricia Piccinini’s 2002 artwork, The Young Family, this article looks to interrogate how the liminal role of the mother within the sculpture can aid in a re-articulation of hospitality as offered to non-human life forms. The artwork depicts a strange creature, part human part pig, surrounded by her children. With her face like a dog, lying on her side with her primate hands and surprisingly human flank, she is rendered in silicon, fibre-glass and human hair, but what is not clear is that The Young Family have been ‘bred’ for the specific purpose of organ donation. Through this work Piccinini asks for the human animal to take up an orientation of care towards these creatures. Following the failures of the ‘father’s of science’ this attitude would be rendered in the name of the mother. I read the role of the mother in this artwork through the lens of hospitality. Rather than being an individuated pregnant body, the mother in The Young Family acts as a metaphor for a care-focused, community-building ethic grounded in the maternal. This shifts the maternal away from pregnancy and birth and towards concepts of renewal, restoration and growth – linking the maternal with environmental and ecological concerns. In representing multiple generations this artwork calls for responsibility to be reconsidered outside of teleological progress. This piece presents a continuum – rather than portraying a singular triumph of the laboratory we are shown a complicated family where responsibility is enduring. In so doing Piccinini’s artwork can offer a new perspective into how we, the human-animal, offer hospitality to the living products of technoscience and beyond. I argue this alter-hospitality, in the mode of mutual thriving, co-evolution and flourishing, could be brought to bear on the collapse of any notion of a sustainable global ecology.

Should We Ascribe Capabilities to Sentient Animals? A Critical Analysis of the Extension of Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach

Originally, the Capabilities Approach had a strong anthropocentric orientation because of its focus on the entitlements of individual humans. However, as a part of the interest to employ it within animal and environmental ethics, it has been discussed whether the Capabilities Approach should consider also non-human life forms for their own sake. The most influential and elaborated contribution to this debate is Martha Nussbaum’s extension of the Capabilities Approach to include sentient animals. In this article, we argue that Nussbaum’s ascription of capabilities to animals is problematic, since the concept of a capability normally denotes an opportunity to choose between different functionings. When Nussbaum ascribes capabilities to animals, the concept seems to simply denote specific abilities. Such a use is problematic since it waters down the concept and makes it less meaningful, and it may obscure the fact that normal, adult humans, in contrast to sentient animals, can act as conscious moral agents. The aim of granting moral status to sentient animals can be achieved more convincingly by describing our moral relationship to animals in terms of the functionings we should promote, instead of ascribing capabilities to them. Originally, the Capabilities Approach had a strong anthropocentric orientation because of its focus on the entitlements of individual humans. However, as a part of the interest to employ it within animal and environmental ethics, it has been discussed whether the Capabilities Approach should consider also non-human life forms for their own sake. The most influential and elaborated contribution to this debate is Martha Nussbaum’s extension of the Capabilities Approach to include sentient animals. In this article, we argue that Nussbaum’s ascription of capabilities to animals is problematic, since the concept of a capability normally denotes an opportunity to choose between different functionings. When Nussbaum ascribes capabilities to animals, the concept seems to simply denote specific abilities. Such a use is problematic since it waters down the concept and makes it less meaningful, and it may obscure the fact that normal, adult humans, in contrast to sentient animals, can act as conscious moral agents. The aim of granting moral status to sentient animals can be achieved more convincingly by describing our moral relationship to animals in terms of the functionings we should promote, instead of ascribing capabilities to them.

Ecopoétique du regard et de la liminalité : entrelacs des formes du vivant dans la fiction de Linda Hogan

Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan builds on a Native American tradition of creative story-telling which interweaves history with myth, science, poetry, and imagination. Her focus on Native Americans and on the rootedness of humans in non-human-nature coalesces with a greening movement in postcolonial literature and studies. Delving into Linda Hogan's ecopoet(h)ics, this paper examines her novel People of the Whale, and contributes to the fields of ecocriticism and ecopoetics by showing the centrality of gazes and liminality in her fiction. Not only can Victor Turner's anthropological theory of liminality shed light on the experiences of Hogan's characters, their manifold in-betweenness leads to threshold states and places revealing the multitudinous entanglements between humans and non-human life forms. In this paper, I argue that Hogan's fiction moves her readers to experience empathy and syneasthesia while immersing them in an organic realm composed of a biotic communitas. I first analyze the hybridity of her characters and the magical realist mode Hogan opts for, drawing on totemism to define notions of kinship. I then explore some of the exchanges between humans and non-humans in her fiction that may help one regain awareness of the world as an interdependent whole, the balance of which depends upon humans to either destroy or preserve.

Energy decisions reframed as justice and ethical concerns

All too often, energy policy and technology discussions are limited to the domains of engineering and economics. Many energy consumers, and even analysts and policymakers, confront and frame energy and climate risks in a moral vacuum, rarely incorporating broader social justice concerns. Here, to remedy this gap, we investigate how concepts from justice and ethics can inform energy decision-making by reframing five energy problems — nuclear waste, involuntary resettlement, energy pollution, energy poverty and climate change — as pressing justice concerns. We conclude by proposing an energy justice framework centred on availability, affordability, due process, transparency and accountability, sustainability, equity and responsibility, which highlights the futurity, fairness and equity dimensions of energy production and use. The structure of the global energy system and the pending consequences of climate change are among the central justice issues of our time, with profound implications for human happiness, welfare, freedom, equity and due process1. One global study distinguishing between ‘experienced’ and ‘imposed’ effects of climate change — essentially separating out primary emitters from those suffering from climate change — concluded that people in rich countries impose 200–300 times more health damage on others than they experience themselves as a result of their nation's historical emissions2. Others argue that the costs of climate change will befall the weakest and least developed countries as well as the poorest in developed nations, while the benefits, if there are any, will probably be accrued by the rich and powerful3. Meanwhile, serious environmental burdens can arise from having too much energy (from waste, over-consumption and pollution4) or from not having enough (from lack of access to modern forms of energy, under-consumption and poverty). With increasing wealth, these environmental burdens shift in terms of severity, geographic scope and temporal reach. For instance, a decline in household environmental risks through enhanced access to modern energy services, clean water and better healthcare coincides with an increase in global risks such as climate change and other forms of transboundary environmental pollution. While solutions to some problems, such as poverty, obviously require an increase in energy consumption, solutions to other problems, such as climate change, might well require a decrease in energy consumption. Clearly, the current fossil fuel-based global energy system has many benefits but also many disadvantages, including significant health burdens that shorten lives, undermine the conditions for happiness and impede a more just and equitable society. Yet most of us confront and frame such climate and energy risks within a moral vacuum. It has been argued that our moral systems are ill-equipped to handle the complexity and expansiveness of modern-day energy and climate problems5,6, and that individuals will work to avoid feelings of responsibility for climate change or energy insecurity; some will even have optimistic biases, downgrading any negative information they receive and counterbalancing it with almost irrational exuberance7. In this Perspective, we argue that concepts from ethics and justice provide an important structure to think about, and approach, the world's climate and energy dilemmas. We reframe five contemporary energy problems — nuclear waste, involuntary resettlement, energy pollution, energy poverty and climate change — as justice and ethics concerns. We then synthesize justice elements into a common framework that energy decision-makers can utilize to create a more just and equitable energy future. By ‘decision-makers’, we refer not only to the more traditional notion of policymakers and regulators, but also ordinary students, jurists, homeowners, businesspersons, investors and consumers — essentially, anyone that makes decisions or choices about energy conversion and use8. Admittedly, we take an anthropocentric perspective based on social justice principles, though there are certainly justice claims that arise with how humans interact with non-human forms of life. Some have called this human-centered approach ‘cosmopolitan justice’, as it acknowledges that all ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a collective morality9. Many scholars have taken up modern manifestations of these ideals, and have advanced the core arguments presented in Table 110,​11,​12,​13,​14,​15,​16,​17,​18,​19. These arguments underscore how all human beings have equal moral worth and, as we will argue, are deserving of ‘energy justice’.

Ethnic Tourism and the Big Song: Public Pedagogies and the Ambiguity of Environmental Discourse in Southwest China

The article examines two forms of public pedagogies in a rural region of Southwest China—tourism and ethnic songs—to illustrate their contested roles in transforming local relations with natural and built environment. While tourism development daily alters the village landscape by spatial intervention, demolition, and construction, the ‘landscaping’ is both a visual and conceptual device that produces a pleasurable environment as the ‘other’ and signifies what is tourable and what is to be seen. On the other hand, the echoes of the environment and human-nature relations are central elements in ethnic songs that have been sung for centuries as a major music genre to transmit ancestral, historical, and cultural understandings. Indigenous worldviews and ecological awareness are expressed in songs through imitation of nature and worship of various nonhuman forms of life. The paper argues that a nascent environmentalism and ecological significance of the ethnic songs are increasingly oriented towards instrumental development rationality, while at the same time revived and choreographed in staged tourism performances. Both tourism and ethnic songs offer powerful forms of public pedagogies through which to rethink how incommensurable discourses generate new environmental crises by drastically altering not only the vernacular landscape but also local cosmological beliefs. The short-lived developmental zest and the longstanding local ecological consciousness play out complex dynamics in ‘teaching’ the locals and the tourists about the changing environment of rural ethnic China, and the ambiguities and tensions that exist within the notion of sustainable development.

Second Finitude, or the Technics of Address: A Response

AbstractThis response article argues that the question of “extrahuman relations” obtains on not just one level but two. It is not just a question of our relations to nonhuman forms of life—such as, for example, the embodiment and finitude we share with other beings. It's also a question of a second form of finitude that obtains in our prosthetic subjection to any semiotic system whatsoever that makes possible “our” concepts, “our” recognition and articulation of our “nonhuman relations” in the first place. By examining the bird poems of Wallace Stevens, I demonstrate that with the question of extrahuman relations we are always talking, in other words, not about a thematics but about a technics of address.

Algumas notas sobre a dimensão ecológica da dignidade da pessoa humana e sobre a dignidade da vida em geral

O presente estudo, à luz da teoria dos direitos fundamentais e de ordem jurídico-constitucional brasileira, analisa a dimensão ecológica da dignidade humana, bem como o reconhecimento da dignidade inerente a outras formas de vida não-humanas e à vida em geral.

Deterritorializing Extraction: Bioaccumulation and the Planetary Mine

Two independent technical developments have transformed the metal mining industry in considerable ways: the increasing share of waste materials in the feedstock of metallurgical operations has partially transformed metal extraction into a recycling industry, and the employment of microorganisms in the extraction of metals from mineral ores has rendered metals mining a biologically based industry. Increasing industrial interest and research activity in the application of biotechnologies to the extraction of metals from waste, particularly electronic waste, intimate a potential intersection of those two processes, destabilizing further the analytical distinctions between extraction and manufacturing, biologically based and nonbiologically based production, waste and resources. This combined deterritorialization of metal extraction requires a theoretical deterritorialization: rethinking extraction beyond extractive industry narrowly defined and the role that nonhuman forms of life play in the production of value in nonbiologically based (extractive) industries. This article is a first step toward outlining the effects of such developments on understanding extraction. It begins by reflecting on the effects of recycling on the spatiality and materiality of the mine and then it proceeds to examine the productive role of microorganisms in mining, the limits of biomining, and the biotechnologies that have developed to transcend those limits. The conclusion draws out theoretical implications of those ongoing lines of deterritorialization and their combination on understanding the spatiotemporality of extraction and the active involvement of nonhuman nature in the production of value.

Nature Routines and Affinity with the Biosphere: A Case Study of Preschool Children in Stockholm

Do nature-deficit routines undermine affinity with the biosphere? We assessed social-ecological features in Stockholm that afford nature experiences and analyzed the accessibility of these natural areas to preschools. We then selected preschools with contrasting accessibilities. The nature routines resulting from differing outdoor possibilities in preschool life were investigated in relation to children's affinity with the biosphere. Preschools with routines closer to nature have children who are more empathetic and concerned for non-human life forms, and more cognitively aware of human-nature interdependence. We conclude that, nature-rich routines in cities significantly correlate with higher children's ability to develop affinity with the biosphere.

Nature Routines and Affinity with the Biosphere: A Case Study of Preschool Children in Stockholm

Do nature-deficit routines undermine affinity with the biosphere? We assessed social-ecological features in Stockholm that afford nature experiences and analyzed the accessibility of these natural areas to preschools. We then selected preschools with contrasting accessibilities. The nature routines resulting from differing outdoor possibilities in preschool life were investigated in relation to children’s affinity with the biosphere. Preschools with routines closer to nature have children who are more empathetic and concerned for non-human life forms, and more cognitively aware of human-nature interdependence. We conclude that, nature-rich routines in cities significantly correlate with higher children’s ability to develop affinity with the biosphere.

How Do You Dress a Body Without Organs?: Affective Fashion and Nonhuman Becoming

How Do You Dress a Body Without Organs?Affective Fashion and Nonhuman Becoming Stephen D. Seely (bio) Alexander McQueen's final collection, Plato's Atlantis, of 2009, was an untimely meditation in the Nietzschean spirit, a rumination on what might come after the human (fig. 1). The collection's title signaled lost civilizations to pose the question of what happens when the human is no more, or what comes next in human evolution. And while human extinction has long been fodder for the dystopian, this collection offers one of the most stunning imaginings of such a future yet. Using fabrics printed with multiple animal patterns and aerial, celestial, and oceanic imagery and incorporating animal skins, plastics, and metals, McQueen's collection draws on aquatic and terrestrial animals, aliens, cyborgs, and ancient mythology in order to create a new, nonhuman "species." Neither fully animal nor human, alien nor mechanical, future nor past, the nonhumans in this show are beautiful reverberations of a people to come or, perhaps, a people long gone. Either way, they provide a remarkable example of the use of fashion to decenter the human, to imagine the future otherwise, and to transform the body in nonhuman or other-than-human ways. In this essay, I seek to explore these very nonhuman registers of fashion, its use of affect in the provocation of becoming. Such an attunement to the affective dimensions of fashion requires a shift in the conceptualization of art and fashion from epistemological frameworks of signification, subjectivity, performance, and representation to an ontological framework of affect, sensation, and material transformation. Thus, the motivating queries of this project are not, What does this garment represent? What are the semiotics of fashion? What identity, idea or social position does it signify? But rather, What can fashion do? How does it actually transform bodies? [End Page 247] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Alexander McQueen, Plato's Atlantis, 2009. FIRSTVIEW.COM To approach these questions, I will examine what I call affective fashion, or fashion that seeks to harness the body's capacities for transformation and connection (i.e., affect), in order to force it to become-otherwise, beyond the dominant modes of organizing and imagining bodies. An affective approach to fashion, moreover, involves an attention to its political implications, rather than reducing it to the wholly aesthetic, and brings out the value of fashion for feminist and queer theory and politics. Instead of dismissing fashion as a patriarchal tool for disciplining women's bodies, a greater consideration of its affective capacities foregrounds fashion's power to literally open the body beyond—and not just accentuate or subvert—its (hetero)normative, (re)productive and human functions, giving it access to a virtual field of potentiality. While this essay will focus on McQueen, Rei Kawakubo, Hussein Chalayan, and Gareth Pugh, these are by no means the only contemporary designers to produce this type [End Page 248] of affective fashion. Each of these designers employs features of machines and technology, as well as animal, extraterrestrial, and other nonhuman life forms in ways that facilitate the becoming-nonhuman of the wearer's body and problematize the privileged Western binaries of human/animal, organic/inorganic, real/artifice, and male/female. Through their use of affective fashion, these designers harness the transformative potential in both bodies and material objects in order to imagine a radically open future in which we become attuned to our bodies and to the world in entirely new ways. What Is Affective Fashion? The garments in Rei Kawakubo's controversial 1997 collection for Comme des Garçons frustrate many of the conventional ways of seeing both clothing and bodies (fig. 2). They obfuscate the model's "natural" body, making it impossible to tell where her body ends and the dress begins. They do not demonstrate precise tailoring or craft; the dress pictured here seems as if it could be constructed simply by wrapping a single piece of fabric around the model's body. One cannot tell whether the "lumps" are deformities Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 2. Comme des Garçons, body becomes dress becomes body. and they are one, 1997. FIRSTVIEW.COM [End Page...

Krishna’s Cows: ISKCON’s Animal Theology and Practice

Abstract This article addresses the cultural influence of Hindu reflection on human attitudes toward animal welfare at a time of rapid globalization and worldwide environmental destruction. The hope is that it can contribute to deliberations on practical ethics across religious and cultural boundaries. It considers the extent to which existing Vaishnava resources have the potential to advance new transcultural orientations toward the protection of nonhuman forms of life by exploring what the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), a monotheistic Hindu-related movement, says about the condition, purpose, and rights of animals. It analyzes whether in rejecting anthropocentric worldviews ISKCON is able to contribute to broader theological discussion about the place of animals in the world.

Both Red and Green but Religiously Right: Coping with Evil in a Religion of Nature

The problem of evil of which Mary Midgley speaks is not just the rela tively narrow theoretical one familiar to us in the West of how conceptu ally to reconcile an alleged absolute goodness and power of God with the rampant evil in the world, but the much broader existential one, applicable everywhere, of how to interpret, respond to, and cope with the presence and power of evil in daily life. It is the problem of how to find courage and strength in the face of the relentless perils, sufferings, and losses experienced on an everyday basis by the world's creatures, and with full awareness of the threat of abrupt calamities that can wreak havoc in the natural world and pose dire threats to human well-being. This existential problem of evil is also posed by the struggle with dark propensities to evil that lurk within every human breast, are entrenched in the institutions of human societies, and can and frequently do cause incalculable and pervasive harm for humans, for nonhuman forms of life, or for the natural environment as a whole. Evils or threats and tendencies to evil menace us from without and within, and if powerfully experienced or deeply reflected upon, they have the potential to reduce us to hopelessness and despair. A business of all religions?if not, as I firmly believe, their principal business?is to point the way beyond this brooding hopelessness and despair and to provide us with visions, goals, and resources to live positive and meaningful lives. We live in a world of natural laws. Were it not so, there would be no world and no we. There would be only chaos. Not only do such laws provide the large measure of stability, predictability, and dependability without which no creature could exist or have hope of survival, but natural laws provide a neces