Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 1, Page 119-124, March 2012.

I identify a commonly held position in environmental philosophy, “the received view,” and argue that its proponents beg the question when challenged to demonstrate the relevance of environmental aesthetics for environmental justice. I call this “the inference problem,” and I go on to argue that an alternative to the received view, Arnold Berleant’s participatory engagement model, is better equipped to meet the challenge it poses. By adopting an alternative metaphysics, the engagement model supplies a solution to the inference problem and (...) thereby provides a more useful theoretical framework for application to pressing concernsin environmental justice, such as the plight of the historical Ironbound District of Newark, New Jersey. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 227-229, June 2012.

This essay is an edited version of a paper submitted for a third year, undergraduate course in Issues in Environmental Ethics, at the University of Toronto. The course aims to bring together thinking from the intersection of the fields of Continental and Environmental Philosophy.

Throughout the paper, I intersperse intimate movement episodes where I respond through my body and personal self to Naess. In grounding his own ecosophy, Naess makes his stand on a very certain place high up in the mountains called “Tvergastein.” His ecosophy T springs directly from his personalhome. Engaging with his texts I find I am not merely immersed in the usual way into a symbolic realm of ideas detached from my body, but have the odd feeling that I must (...) tilt my head to one side and slightly back so I can listen from where he speaks up there on that mountain. Thinking on an incline like this, I become aware that I am listening from down here. But from where down here? From where do I respond? Where is my home? Reading Naess in his place compels me to place my own response more particularly, more intimately. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 222-224, June 2012.

Natural science and economics are regularly used as means for adjudicating environmental controversies. But can these become stalking-horses for other concerns? Might some environmental controversies be aesthetic in nature and likely to resist resolution unless and until we acknowledge this? This paper uses the case study of a proposed wind farm to examine the relationships between the humanities, sciences, and stakeholders in environmental decision making. After providing background on wind power and the proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm, it addresses four (...) questions: What does “aesthetics” mean? Howwere aesthetic concerns expressed in the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), and what were the shortcomings of the EIS process? How could it be improved? This last question raises issues about how to rationally adjudicate matters of aesthetics in environmental policy making. The paper concludes with some thoughts on why this is such an important (and thorny) issue and what role humanists should play in environmental disputes. (shrink)

If how we envisage substances prepares the trajectory of our behavior towards them, art objects, substantial through the manner of their fashioning, can reorderhow we comport ourselves in a world that is not for us, to the extent that what we call by the name of “world” cannot be apprehended as the price paid for humanavarice when confronting a global plenitude sacrificed, always, to the scale of our need for it. To frustrate that desolation, we must enrich our view of (...) things, andthis essay examines the thinking of Merleau-Ponty and Virginia Woolf at the service of that imperative. (shrink)

This comment argues for the importance of global institutions to regulate nuclear power. Nuclear power presents challenges across national borders irrespective of whether plants are maintained safely. There are international agreements in place on the disposal of nuclear waste, an issue of great concern in terms of environmental and health effects for any nuclear power policy. However, there remains a pressing need for an international agreement to ensure the safe maintenance of nuclear facilities. Safe nuclear power beyond waste disposal should (...) receive more attention. Nuclear power policy is often a matter of pure state interest with national governments alone responsible for regulating the safe maintenance of nuclear facilities. It ought not be left to national governments alone to regulate the safe administration of nuclear power given the many threats to environmental safety and public health. This comment argues that global institutions may best address this problem. The comment concludes with recommendations on how nuclear power policy might be regulated. (shrink)

Heidegger’s characterization of Dasein as Being-in-the-world suggests a natural relation to environmental philosophy. Among environmentalists, however, closer inspection must raise alarm, both since Heidegger’s approach is in some senses inescapably anthropocentric and since Dasein discovers its environment through its usability, serviceability, and accessibility. Yet Heidegger does not simply adopt a traditionally modern, instrumental view. The conditions under which the environment appears imply neither that the environment consists only of tools, nor that what is true of the parts is also true (...) of the whole, nor that an orientation to use—where appropriate—precludes any other orientation. Heidegger’s anthropocentric commitments thus do not rule out the possibility of a non-instrumental perspective on the natural world. (shrink)

Wilderness and wildness are not related isomorphically. Wildness is the broader category; all instances of wilderness express wildness while all instances of wildness do not express wilderness. There is more than a logical distinction between wildness and wilderness, and what begins as an analytic distinction ends as an ontological one. A more rhetorical representation of this confusion is captured by the notion of synecdoche, where, in this case, wilderness the narrower term is used for wildness the more expansive term. Although (...) this might seem obvious at first glance, I contend that the two concepts are often misused taken as synonyms thus equivocally, setting back the cause of conceptual clarity in environmental philosophy in general, and environmental restoration in particular. One notable outcome has been the unfortunate dichotomy between preservation and conservation resulting in policy choices that needlessly deny integrated alternatives by illicit exclusion. This paper will clarify this confusion by demonstrating instances where the two concepts have been systematically abused—conflated—and show how Henry David Thoreau saw them as importantly separable. Finally, a clearer understanding of the distinctions between the two concepts provides the basis for a viable program of restoration based on an ethics of place. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 239-242, June 2011.

This essay investigates the correlation between theological investigations of culture and those of the natural world. A fruitful question emerges when reflecting on how theological thinking resides between these subjects: how does our theological reflection on art meaningfully inform our consideration of nature? The path to exploring this question takes the form of questioning three different works of art: Willem Moreelse’s A Portrait of a Scholar, Francis Bacon’s Landscape,and Joseph Beuys’ Lightning with Stag in Its Glare. Exploring the interconnection between (...) these works, a hermeneutical mediation between art, place, and the spiritual is suggested. (shrink)

This essay explores Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” and Andrew Goldsworthy’s artworks. Both Heidegger and Goldsworthy can be seen as refashioning our ontological bearings towards nature through the work of art. After introducing a set of distinctions (e.g., world/earth) in the context of Heidegger’s conception of the artwork as the event of truth, I argue that Heidegger’s releasing of the work of art from metaphysical notions of “the thing” illuminates the ambiguous status of Goldsworthy’s artworks as things. (...) Goldsworthy’s crafting of artworks from natural materials exemplifies Heidegger’s concept of technē as the bringing forth of a work in the midst of phūsis, or beings that arise of their own accord. (shrink)

Although Heidegger thinks cybernetics is the “supreme danger,” he also thinks that it harbours within itself poiēsis, the “saving power.” This article providesa justification of this position through an analysis of its relation to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s Santiago theory of cognition and James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’ Gaia theory. More specifically, it argues that Maturana and Varela’s criticism of cybernetics and their concomitant theory of “autopoiesis” constitutes the philosophical disclosure of “Being itself,” and that the extension of Santiago (...) theory’s various different conceptualizations of poiēsis to Gaia theory makes possible the rise of the “saving power.”. (shrink)

This essay examines how becoming familiar with trees in their specificity might impact how we position ourselves in the ongoing debate among environmental philosophers regarding anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric approaches to environmental ethics. It begins with an analysis of what the process of learning to identify trees entails, and a discussion of how this often involves the development of non-instrumentalist evaluative attitudes towards them, an axiological orientation at odds with the instrumental reductivism characteristic of anthropocentric views. It is then argued that (...) a basic concern we might have with anthropocentrism is that it does not admit what are perhaps the most significant values that emerge in relationship with other-than-human entities. (shrink)

This essay questions the place of other-than-human animals in Levinas’s thought. After detailing how animals and animality figure in Levinas’s work, it is claimed that his ethical exclusion of animals is due to a conception of animals as wholly accountable for in terms of species-being, wholly within “naturalhistory.” It is then suggested that Levinas’s position is ill-founded, and at odds with his claims about the importance of suffering and the vulnerable body in the encounter with the other. The essay concludes (...) by arguing that speaking of other-than-human animal “faces” is not necessarily an unduly anthropocentricextension of thinking-of-the-other. (shrink)

The following interview was conducted by Christian Diehm in the home of Arne Naess near Oslo, Norway, in December of 2001. At eighty-nine years of age, Naess was preparing for the English-language release of his latest book, Life’s Philosophy. We are pleased to provide a transcript of a large part of the conversations that spanned two afternoon dialogues.

In this paper, I address the normative power of place, specifically the place of home, on our embodied constitution. I explore the Husserlian notion of homeworld and its counterpoint, alienworld, to address the reasons why place would have a normative power and to what extent that normativity can be drawn into question through encounters with the alienworld. I address this with a focus upon the interconnection between place and body. Finally, I briefly think through theramifications of this priority of the (...) homeworld for “displaced” peoples questioning whether alien place can ever take on the normative and identity power of homeplace. (shrink)

In the debate over the role of science in environmental policy, it is often assumed that science can and should be clearly demarcated from policy. In this paper, I will argue that neither is the case. The difficulty of actually differentiating the scientific arena from the policy arena becomes apparent the moment one attempts to actually locate the boundary. For example, it is unclear whether scientific summaries to be used by regulatory agencies are in the realm of science or policy. (...) If science, then should the authors consider the regulatory implications of uncertainties? If policy, then what is the relevance of a peer review of the document solely by scientists? This descriptive problem is only accentuated by a normative problem: should we try to keep the two realms distinct? The traditional answer has been yes, for the primary reason that the science should not be infected by the social and ethical values so prevalent in the policy realm. I will argue that, to the contrary, social and ethical values are desirable components of scientific reasoning. Indeed, on closer examination, the norms for valuesin reasoning are the same for science and policy. If I am correct, the pressure to delineate science from policy abates. (shrink)

In 'Respect for Everything', David Schmidt rightfully criticizes species egalitarianism, buts neglects an even more fundamental problem. Ecocentric egalitarianism is not only self defeating, but in fact ultimately entails a morally dubious radical anthropocentrism. Perhaps the morally most troubling aspect of anthropocentrism is not its assumption that humans are superior to non-humans, but that what matters to human beings is true in an absolute sense. Taylor's argument that there are no valid moral reasons to consider humans superior, assumes that it (...) is in principle possible to compare the value of both humans and non-humans, and that it would make sense to use normative expressions such as ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ objectively, e.g. outside the particular context of a human ethical outlook. Yet, evaluative concepts only have meaning within that context. To suggest that ethical concepts have meaning in an absolute sense, implies that the human moral perspective has absolute validity, and thus entails a radical form of anthropocentrism. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 1, Page 21-24, March 2012.

To establish a starting point for a phenomenological theory of the science of primate ethology, this essay first reviews how the phenomenological philosophers Aron Gurwitsch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty made use of the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler’s description of chimpanzee consciousness and its objects and then considers primate ethology in light of the theory of the cultural sciences in the work of Gurwitsch in addition to that of Alfred Schutz.

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 155-157, June 2011.

Natural environments differ from artworks in two ways: (a) they are surroundings filled with objects, processes, and the observer, (b) they are natural, not intentionally created to be appreciated. I show that this serious problem for accounts of aesthetic appreciation of nature has led many thinkers in environmental aesthetics (e.g., Carlson and Rolston) to claim that appreciators should be actively engaged with a natural environment. But how? One suggestion has been that appreciators play the role of creative performers in the (...) arts. I explore this analogy, distinguishing three different kinds of performance. I argue that none is a good fit as a model of nature appreciation but that the analogy sheds considerable light on environmental art, especially the site-specific artworks of Andy Goldsworthy. (shrink)

Recent efforts among environmental theorists to think past human alienation from nature have made the question of the animal central, as Agamben and Derrida have shown. Expanding this question beyond the concern with suffering, Donna Haraway’s investigations of companion species take seriously the interspecies relations of work, play, and joy. The engagement of plant-human coevolution in the work of ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan complicates these questions, revealing the porous boundaries between human cultures and the plant companions that sustain them. This (...) essay proposes Nabhan’s work as a response to Haraway’s questions, exploring four mutually constitutive relations between humans and plants: lures, tricks, grief, and sacrament. (shrink)

The beauty of nature has been neglected both in the history of aesthetics as well in environmental philosophy. Considering four philosophers of the last two centuries (Nietzsche and Heidegger in Germany, and Soloviev and Florensky in Russia) this paper outlines an understanding of the beauty of nature that is ontological rather than subjectivistic, and that terminates in a view of nature’s beauty as rooted in the phenomenon of the holy. This understanding, in turn, allows us to include certain important, but (...) neglected issues within environmental philosophy, in addition to providing a unifying principle for environmentalphilosophy as a whole. (shrink)

This paper explores the construction of habitat that potentially imperils its inhabitants by considering the case of Toronto’s Leslie Street Spit and specific threats to coyotes and gulls occupying this urban dump and wilderness refuge. The paper argues that while there are many positive dimensions of aesthetic engagement, aesthetics may also blind humans to ecological problems experienced by nonhumans, and suggests a need to enhance aesthetic awareness with accounts derived from natural history and sciences.

The relationship between philosophy and the community has become relevant again. It has been the government itself, in the form of public science agencies, which has turned to philosophy and the humanities for help, rather than vice versa. Since 1990, US federal science agencies * agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation * have steadily increased their support of social science and humanities research. This support is all the more striking in that it has (...) happened at a time when federal support for direct humanities research, through the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, has declined. The times demand a corollary to the field of science policy. Just as science policy seeks to offer a systematic evaluation of how science contribute to decision making, humanities policy can methodically investigate how the humanities can better contribute to policy making and how it can help science and technology take better account of societal values. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the sorts of arguments that motivate skepticism about the predictive powers of global climate models. I contend that these arguments work by contrasting the development and testing of global climate models with an idealized image of science drawn largely from a theologized model of fundamental physics. A richer appreciation of the methodology of a full range of successful empirical predictions—particularly in practical fields that study complex systems––can dispel some of these skeptical worries about climate science. (...) If this is right, the good company into which climate science will have been drawn may help to save it from contemptuous ill-treatment at the hands of a theologized image of physics. (shrink)

This paper discusses the suitability of using systemic thinking for teaching environmental rehabilitation to undergraduate students at Federal Universityof Viçosa. This is a predominantly agricultural sciences-based institution located in southeast Brazil. Student receptivity is discussed given concurrent campus paradigms of positivism, Marxism, and individualistic utilitarianism. Student projects using causal-loop diagrams to model degradation and land reclamation are presented. Eight archetypes common to systemic thinking are explained in reclamation contexts. Limitations of systemic thinking are discussed, including theoretical modeling problems and practical (...) teaching considerations. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 263-265, October 2011.

(2012). ‘Pass the Cocoamone, Please’: Causal Impotence, Opportunistic Vegetarianism and Act-Utilitarianism. Ethics, Policy & Environment: Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 368-383. doi: 10.1080/21550085.2012.730258.

Merleau-Ponty advances a notion of witness in The Visible and the Invisible, which could be termed “gestate.” Gestate witness involves an acknowledgement through one's own body of how another living entity is born into its own body. This notion of witness is helpful in answering Anthony Weston's challenge that a sufficiently positive notion of environmentalism and so of environmental responsibility be developed, one that takes seriously how we come into contact with a more-than-human animate world. The work of biologist Tarn (...) Ream with Trillium ovatum serves as a case study in the aesthetic, ethical and ontological significance of gestate witness. (shrink)

There is a sense in which poetry can re-inscribe humans in their natural surroundings, but language—even poetic language—is also always problematic. In conversation with and in response to recent works by David Abram, I will delineate at least two ways in which poetic language separates and distinguishes humans from nature. I also argue for the importance of what is implicit or invisible (as opposed to tangible and sensuous). Language is a mode of human responsibility for the world, not just a (...) sign or result of being part of it. (shrink)

The night sky has been radically altered by light pollution, artificially produced light that obscures the stars. The effects and costs of this are diverse and poorly appreciated. A survey of the economically quantifiable aspects of this problem demonstrates that the value of the starry sky is immense, and yet it remains stubbornly beyond the ken of the market. The attempts to quantify this value and the ultimate impossibility of the task give lie to the economic pretense that the dollar (...) can commensurate all value. The case of light pollution exemplifies the importance of regulation to the protection of environmental value. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 159-162, June 2011.

This essay inaugurates a commitment to devote a small part of Environmental Philosophy to reflection on how environmental philosophers can better engage scientists and decisionmakers already involved in their own conversation about the environment. Philosophers generally have not made the question of how to make philosophy a relevant or useful part of their philosophical research. By way of introduction, we begin to articulate a theoretical framework for how we might integrate the humanities, philosophy in general, and environmental philosophy in particular (...) with issues of public policy via a practical engagement of scholars across the humanities in a conversation that simultaneously invites non-academics within and takes us beyond the walls of academe. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 377-392, October 2011.

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 1, Page 25-28, March 2012.

This paper initiates a phenomenological study of the aesthetics of forest and wood in three main phases. First, we consider the modalities of wood’s sensuousness and argue against the formalist tradition that restricts aesthetic appreciation to visual forms. Second, we examine the structural, eidetic features of hand-made wooden objects in the “second life” of trees. Third, we engage in reflections on the communities gathered by the first and second lives of trees. These themes outline an aesthetics of the beautiful, the (...) given, and the gathering. We take philosophical inspiration from Merleau-Ponty throughout, and in the end, also Thoreau. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 1, Page 37-43, March 2012.

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 1, Page 45-50, March 2012.

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 279-283, October 2011.

Two protracted debates about the moral status of animals in ecological restoration projects are discussed that both testify to the troubling aspects of our inclination to think in terms of dualisms and dichotomies. These cases are more or less complementary: the first one is about the (re)introduction of species that were once pushed out of their native environment; the other one concerns the elimination or eradication of “exotic” and “alien” species that have invaded and degraded ecosystems. Both cases show the (...) detrimental impact of dualistic thinking on ecological restoration projects. In the first case, communication and cooperation between stakeholders is frustrated by the opposition of zoocentrism and ecocentrism; in the second case the opposition of nativism and cosmopolitanism appears to be a major stumbling block for consensus building and conflict management. I will argue that “gradualization”—thinking in terms of degrees instead of boundaries—can offer a way out of this black-and-white thinking and can open up space for negotiation and deliberation among different and sometimes diverging perspectives. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 237-240, June 2012.

On the way to a phenomenology of the moral space within which people make decisions about the built environments they inhabit, I take up Bryan Norton’s proposal for a non-linear, multi-scalar approach to environmental ethics. Inspired by a recent development in ecology, hierarchy theory, Norton’s key insight is that ethical concerns play themselves out across distinct spatio-temporal scales. I adapt this insight to the context of the built environment by way of a phenomenology of constraint as a scaling criterion, then (...) go on to specify how ethical concerns might be mapped onto the complex scalar relationships thus revealed. (shrink)

This essay pursues a double strategy to transform our human collective relation to animal life. On the one hand, and this strategy is due to Derrida’s thought, it attempts to criticize the belief that humans have a kind of subjectivity that is substantially different from that of animals, the belief that humans have in their self-relation (called auto-affection) a relation of pure self-presence. On the other hand, the essay attempts to enlarge the idea of auto-affection to include the voices and (...) looks of animals in us. Being in us, the image of animal suffering changes who we are. Hence the subtitle. This second strategy is due to Deleuze’s (or more precisely Deleuze and Guattari’s) thought. In fact, a large portion of this essay is devoted to a conceptual reconstruction of Deleuze and Guattari’s important concept of becoming. I argue that there are two central features of this concept. First, the concept of becoming involves a process of desubjectification which allows for the image of animal suffering to inhabit our consciousness as a “feverish thought.” Second, the outcome of becoming is not only that, due to the feverish thought, we change, but also that we write about this experience in order to lead others to it. The essay ends therefore by invoking a kind of writing—folktales—as a way of calling for a “people to come” (Deleuze) or a “democracy to come” (Derrida). (shrink)

Environmental philosophers tend to be particularly wary of the language of “transcendence.” From Heidegger to contemporary feminism, we find the idea that the failure to respect nature is grounded in Platonism and Abrahamic religion. The denial of earth began, we are told, with the separation of the intelligible form from the actual thing, or, even worse, of the creator from the created. From this point of view what we need is a restored pantheistic sense, a new and revitalized paganism. I (...) counter this assertion by a reading of Plato’s Phaedrus that shows that respect itself is grounded in the recognition of transcendence. With the Bookof Job, I maintain that the voice of the transcendent God is what enables Job not only to see past his sufferings but for the first time to encounter the beauty of nature. Overcoming anthropocentrism requires a relationship to transcendence as such. (shrink)

Environmental pragmatism is rightly described as “cynical” if good reasons exist to worry its advocates would endorse oppressive measures to achieve its goals. Given the history of human chauvinism, moreover, this worry is not far-fetched. It is, however, misguided: conflation not-withstanding, human chauvinism and human-centeredness (anthropocentrism) are not the same thing. “Chauvinism” describes an objectionable but alterable course of human history; anthropocentrism is an indigenous feature of the experiential conditions of Homo sapiens from which no particular course of human history (...) necessarily follows. Properly understood, I argue, human-centeredness is an ally in the quest for environmental responsibility—not its foe. (shrink)

The essay discusses the significance of narrative for environmental ethics by attending to the conventions of autobiography in Farley Mowat’s anti-whaling text, A Whale for the Killing. A tension emerges in environmental nonfiction narrative between the desire to transcend the self and its expression in autobiographical form, which necessarily places the self at the centre of the narrative. I trace the construction of the narrator’s and whale’s ethical personae to argue that even as Mowat’s narration of a subject-to-subject encounter challenges (...) the ontological and ethical divide between “human” and “animal,” it nevertheless reconstructs a liberal-humanist notion of subjectivity. (shrink)

A current issue in environmental ethics concerns the role of scientists as advocates for environmental policy. Some have argued that scientists should not be permitted to be policy advocates. I will argue that it is morally permissible for scientists to be advocates for environmental policies for four reasons. First, since scientists are also citizens it is improper to deny them the opportunity to advocate for certain policies. Second, scientists possess some expertise in these areas should be sought out to advocate (...) for these positions precisely because they are the ones with the knowledge, understanding and access to objective studies relating to policy issues. Third, I will argue that while objectivity is required for research, advocacy for policy issues does not entail the failure of objectivity. Last, scientists advocating for environmental policy meets the ethical requirements for advocacy generally offered by Robert Audi. These give us good reason to think it is morally permissible for scientists to act as advocates for environmental policy. (shrink)

Knowing the Latin binomial name for a species opens up a world of knowledge, but there is another way of knowing that does not involve names.

Where is the disconnect between what we consider beautiful, and how we actually shape our surroundings? Is there something about humans coming together as civilizations that results in the destruction of beauty and biodiversity? This essay examines the world through the history of forests – and it raises more questions than it answers – but the questions are of vital importance.

In this paper, I propose an ontological-hermeneutical approach to the question of vegetative life. I argue that, though it is a product of the metaphysical traditionthat from Aristotle to Nietzsche ascribes to the life of plants but a single function, the notion of plant-soul is useful for the formulation of a post-metaphysicalphilosophy of vegetation. Offered as a prolegomenon to such thinking about plants, this paper focuses on the multiplicity of meanings, the obscurity, and thepotentialities inherent in their life.

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 231-237, June 2011.

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 225-226, June 2012.

Using grizzly-human encounters as a case study, this paper argues for a rethinking of the differences between humans and animals within environmental ethics. A diffractive approach that understands such differences as an effect of specific material and discursive arrangements (rather than as pre-settled and oppositional) would see ethics as an interrogation of which arrangements enable flourishing, or living and dying well. The paper draws on a wide variety of human-grizzly encounters in order to describe the species as co-constitutive and challenges (...) perspectives that treat bears and other animals as oppositional and nonagential outsides to humans. (shrink)

This article looks at the question of animality and silence in terms of developing a theory of interspecies cosmopolitics based on ecological dissensus. By starting with the author’s own experiences taking care of chickens, this article engages the question of environmental ethics within the gastronomic axis, theweb of life that binds all beings in the shared need to eat. By examining the philosophical roots of silence and abjectness that often characterizes the animal, the author argues for an ecologically oriented celebration (...) of bare life as a means of recognizing silence as a form of politics that moves beyond the human. (shrink)