by Dr. Steven Best -
sbest1@elp.rr.com
"The great fault of all ethics hitherto," argued
scientist and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, "has been that they
believed themselves to have to deal only with the relationships of man
to man." Happily, this tragic and myopic outlook which has shaped so
much of Western history is changing decisively today. Human culture is
in the midst of a paradigm shift from a human-centered (anthropomorphic)
to a life-centered (biocentric) outlook that dethrones "Man" from his
self-assigned Kingdom and recognizes the
inherent value of all living beings. Humanity is broadening the
boundaries of the moral community such that more and more people are
recognizing that nonhuman animals too have rights and that the earth is
more than just a warehouse of materials for human consumption.
The crisis in the human relation to nature is blatantly
manifest in a world of global warming, rainforest destruction, species
extinction, overpopulation, desertification, pollution, resource
scarcity, and the rise of disease. At the root of the human crisis and
our spiritual malaise is our alienation from the living world from which
we emerged and a pathological Western worldview that believes our
mission is to dominate nature, lord over all life, and reduce everything
to mere resources for human use. In conjunction with the current global
capitalist system predicated on incessant growth, accumulation, and
resource extraction, this worldview is directly responsible for the
numbing spectacle of ecocide currently unfolding on this planet.
Other hominids such as Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon have
become extinct, and nothing guarantees homo sapiens will not meet the
same fate. Unless human beings dramatically change their methods of
energy production, consumption patterns, and population rates, they will
continue to devastate their planet and soon find themselves living out a
dystopian Mad Max or Waterworld scenario. But we cannot heal ourselves
until we heal our relation to the earth and our fellow species. Thus, it
is in our own interests to transform our violent and degraded
sensibilities, but, more profoundly, the court of ethical reasoning is
bringing forth solid arguments that other sentient beings too have
rights and these place direct obligations on us to respect their needs
and interests.
While anthropocentrism has been the hegemonic heritage
throughout Western culture, there has always been an underground,
counter-tradition, that argued sympathy and respect for other living
beings and the natural world. Certainly, the main Eastern religions --
Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism -- professed an ethic of ahimsa
(non-violence) as their core teaching. But from Pythagoras, Plato, and
St. Francis of Assisi to Tolstoy, Darwin, and Einstein, many of the
great Western figures have challenged
standard ethical views about animals and nature.
The turning point for animal rights in contemporary
times clearly was the publication of philosopher Peter Singer's book
Animal Liberation in 1975. Widely credited with starting the present-day
animal rights movement, Singer argued from utilitarian grounds that all
sentient animals should be protected from the multiple modes of
suffering human beings inflict on them. Part of the great power of
Singer's book is not only his forceful arguments to bring animals into
the moral community, but also his vivid and appalling descriptions of
their suffering in hellholes like commercial laboratories and factory
farms. While Singer presents health arguments that one should be a
vegetarian, he mainly roots this conclusion in ethical reasons relating
to the obligations we have not to cause unnecessary harm to animals, and
in the fact that there is no nutrient in animal products that cannot be
attained in plant-based foods.
In the 1960s, social protest movements erupted
throughout the United States and the entire world. Along with the
liberation movements of women, students, people of color, colonial
nations, and gays and lesbians, there emerged an environmental movement
that brought to public awareness the extent of environmental degradation
and the urgent need for change. As popular concerns became translated
into law, the 1970s became the environmental decade" that passed
important laws such as the Clean Air and Water Act.
But a debate soon erupted as to whether the mainstream
environment movement could accomplish the goal of protecting nature and
achieving a sustainable society. Could legal reform and technological
fixes truly stop the assault on nature waged by capitalism, or would a
more radical approach be needed?
As activists and theorists debated the merits of a
"shallow" vs. "deep" ecology approach, with the latter calling not only
for legal and technological changes but also a revolution in our
consciousness and relationship to nature, the "greening of philosophy"
was underway. Environmental ethics, along with animal rights, became
considered legitimate, relevant, and important topics of philosophical
analysis. Consequently, numerous people were rediscovering the
importance of Aldo Leopold's work, especially his seminal essay "The
Land Ethic" from his book A Sand County Almanac (1949).
In "The Land Ethic," Leopold advocates an extension of
human ethics to include an environmental ethic that assesses human
actions from the perspective of whether or not they help sustain the
natural world and biodiversity. From this new table of value, human
actions considered acceptable or even good -- such as building a new
shopping center to promote economic growth and provide jobs -- would
have to be revaluated in terms of their impact of the environment. Thus,
Leopold says that "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the
integrity, stability, and of the biotic community; it is wrong when it
tends otherwise."
Leopold believes the human species will not survive
unless it develops such an ethic, and he is attempting to promote a new
sense of connectedness to nature that many premodern and nonWestern
peoples possessed, but is conspicuously absent throughout Western
culture. Leopold makes the
profound observation that in the great human journey of moral evolution,
it has taken millennia to develop a "decent man-to-man ethic," as he
wonders how long it will take to develop a sound "man-to-land ethic."
Clearly, time is running out and the next stages in human moral
evolution must involve both animal rights and environmental ethics.
To grasp the connections between these two issues, to
demonstrate how in eating animals we are destroying the environment, one
needs to read Jeremy Rifkin's selection, "Cattle and the Global
Environmental Crisis," from his provocative book Beyond Beef: The Rise
and Fall of the Cattle Culture (1992). While many people are aware that
animals are horribly abused by agribusiness and that a meat-based diet
is the principle contributor to heart disease, cancer, strokes,
diabetes, and other serious conditions, few understand that raising
animals for food is the primary cause of global environmental
destruction. As Rifkin describes, animal agriculture not only is a
tremendous waste of land, water, and energy resources, it also erodes
the topsoil, releases enormous quantities of waste into water systems,
demands killing potential "predators" of cattle and razing vast tracts
of land to graze the future burgers and beefsteaks, and creates ozone
destroying gases.
Thus, as individuals, as a culture, as a species, we
have momentous and profound choices to make, choices that will greatly
effect what kind of future we and other species will have on this planet
and, indeed, if we will have a future at all. What we're beginning to
learn now in this exciting adventure of change and evolution is that at
root of these decisions lie the kinds of food choices we make, and the
sensibilities that underlie them. We're learning that the earth is not a
cornucopia of inexhaustible resources that we can exploit at will
without grave consequences, that what we do to the animals and the earth
ultimately we do to ourselves, and that a meat-based diet is
unsustainable and hostile to life.
We need a new ethic to guide our relations to other
species and to the land, an ethic rooted in reverence for animals and
respect for the earth and living processes from which have come, an
ethic that unavoidably demands a vegetarian lifestyle. I invite you to
join the growing legions of enlightened human beings in this profound
process of change.
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