{"id":1616,"date":"2017-03-30T11:11:24","date_gmt":"2017-03-30T10:11:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/sci\/?p=1616"},"modified":"2022-05-20T11:51:36","modified_gmt":"2022-05-20T10:51:36","slug":"overcoming-speciesism-how-to-include-other-living-beings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/sci\/2017\/03\/30\/overcoming-speciesism-how-to-include-other-living-beings\/","title":{"rendered":"Overcoming \u2018speciesism\u2019: how to include other living beings"},"content":{"rendered":"

[et_pb_section bb_built=”1″ admin_label=”section” fullwidth=”on” next_background_color=”#000000″ global_module=”322″][et_pb_fullwidth_menu global_parent=”322″ _builder_version=”3.0.106″ menu_id=”7″ submenu_direction=”downwards” fullwidth_menu=”off” background_layout=”dark” module_class=”main-navigation” \/][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section bb_built=”1″ fullwidth=”off” specialty=”on” prev_background_color=”#000000″ next_background_color=”#1d1d1d”][et_pb_column type=”2_3″ specialty_columns=”2″][et_pb_row_inner locked=”off”][et_pb_column_inner type=”4_4″ saved_specialty_column_type=”2_3″][et_pb_post_title _builder_version=”3.0.106″ title=”on” meta=”on” author=”on” date=”on” categories=”on” comments=”on” featured_image=”on” featured_placement=”above” text_color=”dark” text_background=”off” locked=”on” parent_locked=”off” \/][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.17.6″ background_layout=”light” parent_locked=”off”]<\/p>\n

In this contribution, Anna Wienhues and Steffen Hirth use theoretical considerations from philosophy and sociology to explore the ways in which \u2018the nonhuman\u2019 is \u2013 or is not \u2013 taken into account. They argue that academics – and society as a whole \u2013 must move past \u2018speciesist\u2019 perspectives that prioritise humans over other living beings.<\/p>\n

Racism, sexism, homophobia – a critical awareness of these issues is well-established among social scientists and philosophers. In contrast, the issue of\u00a0speciesism<\/em>\u00a0still has not reached the mainstream academic awareness. In an era called the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002), humans\u2019 hegemonic claims of world ownership are the speciesist counterparts to white, male, and heterosexual dominance. Framing humans as outranking other species\u2019 needs is part of speciesist practice (cf. Singer 2009). In one way or another, and especially when it comes to eating, most people – the authors included – are involved in speciesist practices. But inferring that these practices are \u2018natural\u2019 reminds us how naturalisation was and is still deployed to enact and legitimise racist, sexist, and homophobic practices.<\/p>\n

Methodological\u00a0<\/em>speciesism refers to the exclusion of what has been termed by Whatmore (2006) as the \u2018more-than-human\u2019 in academic debates and research. Sociologists, for example, still tend to regard \u2018the social\u2019 as emerging from interactions between humans, but \u201c[e]ven if the goal of sociology is to explain\u00a0human<\/em>\u00a0behaviour\u201d, as Craig McFarlane (2013: 53) argues, \u201cthis goal is not obtainable if the analysis is\u00a0limited to humans<\/em>\u201d (italics original). Limiting the analysis to humans-in-relation-to-humans is what \u201cwe might term \u2018methodological speciesism\u2019\u201d (ibid.) (1).<\/p>\n

In Western philosophy, it is at best the fields of environmental ethics and environmental political theory which deliberately take into account the non-human, while in \u2018conventional\u2019 philosophy and political theory discussions, the default position is still to perceive humans as separate from \u2018nature\u2019 without necessarily much thought about what \u2018nature\u2019 is or might include (2). Hence, it becomes too easy to perceive all non-humans as merely a heap of resources that are there for human use and pleasure. This human-nature dualism then easily leads to\u00a0normative\u00a0<\/em>speciesism of ethical frameworks that exclude nonhumans from mattering in theory (and ultimately in practice).<\/p>\n

Speciesism in practice<\/h2>\n

We hope to illustrate speciesist thinking by adopting a biocentric methodological focus (considering all living beings such as animals, plants and bacteria) that may help to realise a sustainable food system (3).<\/p>\n

Vine House Farm<\/em>\u00a0is an organic farm in Lincolnshire providing supermarkets with courgettes, beans, sweetcorn, brassica, and potatoes. They also produce bird feed. Being \u201ca keen bird enthusiast\u201d,\u00a0farmer Nicholas Watts, \u201chas for many years been managing the farm in ways best suited to improving wildlife habitat and biodiversity. Shocked at what modern agriculture was doing to bird populations, Nicholas has been monitoring and improving the situation on his land since the early 1990s, planting spinneys, widening dykes, putting up nest boxes and generally managing crops with wildlife in mind\u201d.<\/p>\n

Whilst Vine House Farm may appear a non-anthropocentric enterprise, there is a twist to this story which embraces the complex constellation of farmers, wild birds, human \u2018wild bird-lovers\u2019, the practice of agriculture, the practice of eating meat and dairy, bovines, feed crops, pastures, and – last but not least – suet balls. The purchasable suet balls, designed to \u201cgive birds an immediate and important source of high-energy [\u2026] for survival particularly over the winter months\u201d\u00a0contain beef and lamb suet<\/a>. This meat content can be quite baffling when combined with a little background knowledge of the flows of energy in agricultural production. There is already something awkward in the thought that it is only with the help of humans that wild birds \u2013 apart from carrion-eating species \u2013 become capable of devouring parts of giant mammals, but our point here concerns energy and land use. Animal agriculture needs more land than stock free agriculture because each step of energy conversion (solar energy to plant biomass to herbivore biomass to carnivore biomass) involves losses of nutritional energy. For this reason, relative to soy protein the production of meat protein needs 6 to 17 times more land (Reijnders & Soret 2003: 665). It is precisely because of the high energy and large land-use of animal agriculture that wild birds lack habitat and often struggle to survive. In particular, animal husbandry creates fields and meadows which neither provide sufficient food nor shelter for wild birds. While suet balls are supposed to protect the latter, the production of beef and other animal products is part of the problem. Therefore, it is quite ironic when humans feed birds with beef suet \u2013 the\u00a0high-energy<\/em>\u00a0food that literally incorporates \u2018devoured\u2019 forests.<\/p>\n

Speciesism in theory<\/h2>\n

If considered at all, non-human life such as animals and plants are usually afterthoughts in academic theories that are grounded in deeply human-centric perceptions of the world that normalise the exclusion of the nonhuman. Such starting points attribute, for example, natural ownership rights over the Earth to humanity, implicitly leaving nonhumans dispossessed. In addition, such perspectives often only consider the needs of nonhuman individuals if they are perceived as capable of suffering. Even if the ultimate goal of sustainable development was to save humanity, we believe that the methodological and normative speciesism engrained in mainstream thinking limits the ability of sociologists to explain the nature of social relations, as well as the ability of philosophers to understand the world and prescribe how we can act justly.<\/p>\n

In order to remedy some of these theoretical exclusions within political theory, justice \u2013 one of the political theory\u2019s central concepts \u2013 can be reconceptualised in\u00a0biocentric<\/em>\u00a0terms by taking into consideration all living beings (4). Such an account challenges us to acknowledge their needs as well as the multitude of relationships that link humans with non-humans. This then brings us closer to consider what justice requires on a planet where humans are part of \u2018nature\u2019, rather than regarding justice as something that applies merely to human relationships outside of \u2018nature\u2019 and only with regard to environmental \u2018resources\u2019. Methodological and normative speciesism draw a boundary that makes humans appear exceptional which, in turn, legitimises the exclusion of nonhumans and human dominance (e.g. carnism[5]). In practice, it enacts and maintains power inequalities within social relations that work to exclude others from the realm of justice, from the matter in the sense of meaning and in the sense of being: \u201cThey\u2019re just animals!\u201d (6).<\/p>\n

In the long run, raising domesticated farm animals on a large scale, and feeding them incidentally to wild birds, will neither be beneficial to birds, nor to humans, and it surely does not do justice to bovines and sheep. If we want to stop the species extinction we have initiated, \u2018we\u2019 (the human we) need to claim less methodological and living space so that \u2018we\u2019 (the earthling we \u2013 all living beings) are able to thrive. Hence, in order to do justice to nature (including but not limited to ourselves), it is crucial to eat food which is less land and energy-intensive. Why not go with the courgettes, beans, sweetcorn, brassica, and potatoes organically produced by\u00a0Vine House Farm<\/em>\u00a0in Lincolnshire?<\/p>\n

References<\/h3>\n