Mar 10, 2023 04:18 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 10, 2023 05:12 PM by C C.)
https://undark.org/2023/03/09/the-case-a...vidualism/
EXCERPTS: . . . In her December piece, Martha C. Nussbaum proposes that sentient animals should have the chance to live flourishing lives, free of suffering inflicted not only by human activity but also by wild predators. [...] This kind of thinking is well outside mainstream conservation practice. No major environmental group, to my knowledge, is working in any organized way to thwart orcas, lions, peregrine falcons, owls, and other predators...
Nussbaum’s approach, however, is arguably an outgrowth of a less radical, more widely held worldview of animal individualism, characterized by a focus on the rights of specific animals. Highly developed consciousness in many of these creatures is thought to make them susceptible to the sort of suffering our ethical systems seek to avert in human individuals. But individualism — also at the heart of our legal and economic systems — is a terrible guide to stewarding the natural world.
The crusade for individual animal welfare treats wild animals like pets, often reducing conservation to the protection of hand-picked mascots in isolated bits of habitat that are inadequate to safeguard the climate and large-scale ecological phenomena, such as migration. It causes us to look at nature as an assortment of beings with different ethical standings, rather than as intricate living systems that require a lot of space and a tolerably slow pace of change.
Over my three decades in the conservation movement, I’ve learned that the best approaches set out to save and connect natural systems, not specific animals. True, some commercially prized species of plants and animals — mahogany and pangolins, for example — need special protection from overexploitation. But any approach that fails to conserve ecosystems at large scales will fail sentient and nonsentient life forms alike.
[...] At its extreme, the zealous defense of individual prey animals can provide an intellectual fig leaf to scorched-earth predator control. Government-sponsored killing of wolves, pumas, and grizzly bears throughout the 19th and much of the 20th century eliminated these animals from vast areas of North America to keep livestock safe. An awakening to the ecological and moral costs of the slaughter brought reform to these programs, but the reflex to treat predator control as the solution to ecosystem imbalances persists.
[...] In his 1949 essay “The Land Ethic,” conservationist Aldo Leopold exhorts people to admit all the non-human beings with whom we share territory into our ethical community and to acknowledge the roles various beings play in the ecosystem, rather than focusing on their independent individual destinies. “The Land Ethic” recognizes that the best thing we can do for any individual animal, regardless of whether it is sentient, is love the system in which it’s embedded... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: . . . In her December piece, Martha C. Nussbaum proposes that sentient animals should have the chance to live flourishing lives, free of suffering inflicted not only by human activity but also by wild predators. [...] This kind of thinking is well outside mainstream conservation practice. No major environmental group, to my knowledge, is working in any organized way to thwart orcas, lions, peregrine falcons, owls, and other predators...
Nussbaum’s approach, however, is arguably an outgrowth of a less radical, more widely held worldview of animal individualism, characterized by a focus on the rights of specific animals. Highly developed consciousness in many of these creatures is thought to make them susceptible to the sort of suffering our ethical systems seek to avert in human individuals. But individualism — also at the heart of our legal and economic systems — is a terrible guide to stewarding the natural world.
The crusade for individual animal welfare treats wild animals like pets, often reducing conservation to the protection of hand-picked mascots in isolated bits of habitat that are inadequate to safeguard the climate and large-scale ecological phenomena, such as migration. It causes us to look at nature as an assortment of beings with different ethical standings, rather than as intricate living systems that require a lot of space and a tolerably slow pace of change.
Over my three decades in the conservation movement, I’ve learned that the best approaches set out to save and connect natural systems, not specific animals. True, some commercially prized species of plants and animals — mahogany and pangolins, for example — need special protection from overexploitation. But any approach that fails to conserve ecosystems at large scales will fail sentient and nonsentient life forms alike.
[...] At its extreme, the zealous defense of individual prey animals can provide an intellectual fig leaf to scorched-earth predator control. Government-sponsored killing of wolves, pumas, and grizzly bears throughout the 19th and much of the 20th century eliminated these animals from vast areas of North America to keep livestock safe. An awakening to the ecological and moral costs of the slaughter brought reform to these programs, but the reflex to treat predator control as the solution to ecosystem imbalances persists.
[...] In his 1949 essay “The Land Ethic,” conservationist Aldo Leopold exhorts people to admit all the non-human beings with whom we share territory into our ethical community and to acknowledge the roles various beings play in the ecosystem, rather than focusing on their independent individual destinies. “The Land Ethic” recognizes that the best thing we can do for any individual animal, regardless of whether it is sentient, is love the system in which it’s embedded... (MORE - missing details)