(This video is only tangentially related to my post – but Tyson’s cautionary tale about nonhuman animal communication informs most of the following discussion on autonomy and dignity.)
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why I seem to be approaching animal studies from a different angle than most of the (largely abolitionist) animal-related blogs I follow. It’s probably mostly because I’m a stubborn contrarian who runs like hell from anything resembling groupthink. But I’m also a pragmatist who is loath to apply rights claims willy-nilly without thinking about implementation; a secularist who is skeptical of the idea that rights claims, whether human or nonhuman, are ever inherent rather than instrumental; a reformed Kantian who thinks, with some caveats, that Enlightenment reason has been unfairly pummeled by critical theory, but that ‘humanism’ is perniciously anthropocentric; and a Rawls-leaning semi-egalitarian who is reluctant to throw the capitalist baby out with the bathwater of inequality.
All of which is to say: the language of domination and liberation is not my preferred vocabulary, and nor is the language of inherent rights. So This essay by Anat Biletzki from the NYT Opinionator’s the Stone column (Boghossian’s “The Maze of Moral Relativism” has also been getting a lot of attention) caught my eye. A previous post, by Lori Gruen on the ethics of captivity, from the National Humanities Center’s ‘On the Human’ project, is also worth a read. I’d like to address an issue raised indirectly by Biletzky and directly by Gruen–the centrality of one’s view of ‘dignity’ and autonomy as it relates to rights claims for both human and nonhuman animals.
I haven’t done much research on the ‘dignity and rights’ subfield, but my impression is that dignity, when used in the human context, is too often a catch-all term that rapidly becomes void of specific meaning. I guess this is the consequentialist in me coming out, but I think it’s more useful to refer to the specific harms caused to an individual when its dignity is violated, and, where no such harms can be tallied, to look at what we’re really talking about when we talk about dignity (to re-paraphrase Raymond Carver). In some cases, I can see the point of dignity-speak (to take Gruen’s example: the assaults on dignity suffered by humans who have been incarcerated can be tallied using other language, but some of the less tangible psychological harms may be difficult to quantify), but it too often degrades into things like defending the dignity of a collection of cells in an embryo, which, to be blunt, makes very little sense to me. Bernie Rollin’s view on telos, which is closer to Nussbaum’s virtue ethical capabilities approach referenced by Gruen, strikes me as a better approach.
On autonomy, Gruen rightly points out that the term means different things to a neo-Kantian contractarian and to those who, like Gruen, adopt a broader definition that encompasses various forms of preference satsifaction. (This also gets us into Dennett/Frey/Cohen territory, all of whom deny, to various degrees and on various grounds, that it’s really “like” anything to be a bat–to use Nagel’s famous case–but I’m not going there right now). She also distinguishes between autonomy’s instrumental and inherent values:
Freedom or liberty is sometimes thought to entail acting autonomously and making our own choices and being in a condition in which there is an absence of arbitrary interference. Depriving someone of her freedom is also thought to be one of the things that can make a life go badly for that individual. There are two ways that denying individuals their liberty may negatively impact the quality of their lives. If we understand liberty to be an instrumental value then respecting an individual’s liberty is important because it is conducive to other things that are valuable, like pleasure and well-being. Doing what one wants, being free to make choices and to act on them, following the desires one wants to satisfy, and not being interfered with in the pursuit of one’s desires are all freedoms that are important, because they contribute to making an individual’s life go better by allowing that individual to satisfy her desires. Individuals who are confined, restrained, or subordinated cannot act freely upon their desires and live their lives as they want. But liberty can also be thought of as an intrinsic value, a value that in itself, regardless of anything else, is constitutive of living a good life.
Setting aside for a moment my view that what we call inherent values can just as easily be formulated as meta-instrumental values using a rule utilitarian metric, I think this paragraph both captures the nuance of Gruen’s piece (after all, all she’s arguing is that “Denying [captives] the freedom to exercise their autonomy by keeping them under captive control is…ethically problematic.” This seems to me unarguable.) and what I perceive to be one of its key shortcomings.
In the case of nonhuman animal captivity, the distinction between quality-of-life and autonomy is often very different from the same distinction in the case of human captivity. (Again, how one views this distinction will depend on one’s view concerning the scope of autonomy.) (One of) the reason(s) autonomy is perceived as inherently valuable in human society is precisely because it forms the backbone of the system of rights and property from which so many of our institutions emanate. In the case of, say, a farm animal, I think there’s a reasonably strong argument to be made, following Rollin on telos, that the animal in question has a different set of relevant parameters in determining its quality of life. A broiler chicken would not thrive in the forests of its genetic ancestors. Again, Gruen acknowledges this distinction when she says that we have to live with the structural legacy of nonhuman animal captivity–hence my guardianship of our research veteran beagle, Rodney…
If we do cause a mass extinction and we thrive anyway–so what? What difference does it make if we kill off species if they don’t do us any material good? It just means more earth for us.
The author goes on to defend the Dominion-as-stewardship thesis (itself defended by people as diverse as Matthew Scully and E.O. Wilson), but the question itself got me thinking about tactics, framing, and environmental activism.
While at the Fletcher School studying international environmental policy, I was struck by how often multilateral treaties danced around the issue of nonhuman animal worth – issues concerning conservation and biodiversity preservation are almost always framed anthropocentrically: rainforests are a reservoir of potential bioprospecting resources, aesthetic human value, carbon sinks, etc. In other words, delegates were being ‘utilitarian conservationists’ (read: Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt) rather than ‘biocentric preservationists’ (read: John Muir).
(I suspect that many of the delegates to the Stockholm Declaration and the Rio Summit believed in the inherent – rather than merely instrumental – worth of other animals. But they knew that they had to sell their negotiated language to publics and to politicians.)
This question of how to frame nature is hotly debated, and recently headlines seem to show that quantification is winning out. I’ve struggled with the quantification of qualitative and otherwise incommensurable or indeterminate goods. Asking ‘how much money is a pig’s preference to root worth’ is a different question from ‘how much money would consumer x be willing to pay (WTP)’. The second can be answered, albeit with various statistical caveats; the first can only be answered in the same way that an average American citizen’s life is apparently worth seven million dollars.
Does the cause of conservation benefit from such quantification? When we say that ecosystem services provide enormous monetary benefit (which they undeniably do, in the form of air and water purification, flood protection, etc.), are we reshaping the public discourse to the detriment of the nonhuman animal world? Or are we merely acknowledging the dominance of public choice-type thinking in our policy paradigm? I don’t know, but I do know the anthropocene is hurtling us towards a future where most of the animals we’ll see in zoos might be extinct in the wild.
I don’t understand why these questions of worth have to be all or nothing. But then again, I tend much more towards utilitarianism than deontology, and am skeptical of the very concept of inherent value.
Marginal Revolution just ran a post on “Globalization and the Expanding Moral Circle,” citing a passage by Irish historian William Lecky that is often quoted by animal advocates:
At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity…
MR guest-blogger Alex Tabarrok goes on to question whether or not globalization contributes to this effect (focusing on Apple and the Foxconn suicides), but what caught my attention was what should have come after the dot dot dot above:
At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world…
I can see why the author avoided this line of reasoning–it’s quite different from expanding the moral circle along purely speciesist lines, and the case for the benefits of economic globalization beyond species lines is much more difficult to make–but the casual slicing of the last line radically alters the original quote.
One of the commenters, seemingly drawing a page from Schopenhauer’s 38 Ways to Win An Argument, picks up on this obvious omission, albeit caustically:
If moral progress is “all about extending the moral circle”, then why don’t we treat rocks as moral agents and end the whole deal. Because it’s not that simple, idiot.
Argumention ad absurdem to the rescue (pace deep ecology). The idea that empathy skids to a halt at the species line is rejected not only by Sapolsky and Rifkin (as noted in my first post), but by anyone who plays a nonzero-sum game with their companion animals on a daily basis.
I’m teaching on Burke/Oakeshott tomorrow, and Bentham/Mill/Singer next week, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of moral boundaries. Burke and Oakeshott would reject what they perceive as the revolutionary/rationalist (animal abolitionist would fit here too) project under which “innovation is an activity which generates not only the ‘improvement’ sought, but a new and complex situation of which this is only one of the components. The total change is always more extensive than the change designed” (Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics). This is a far cry from Singer’s “equal consideration of interests”, speciesism or no. What’s curious to me is that welfare economists accept both utilitarianism and, usually, strict speciesism, without much of a justification of the latter.
In short, I can see why MR skirted the nonhuman animal wrench-in-the-works issue, but they should at least have the intellectual honesty to note the omission. Or, as Tyler Cowen recently put it, is the cow really just a silo of option value?
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/03/globalization-and-the-moral-circle.htmlAt one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity…
I watched this video late last night, and loved almost every minute of it. Sapolsky treads a fine line between the ideological defenders of human exceptionalism and those whose anti-speciesist leanings may be tampering with their objectivity, as Dennett claims. Sapolsky distinguishes where we are like our primate cousins from where we are not, using the following categories: aggression, theory of mind, the golden rule, empathy, gratification/anticipation, and metaphor. He then closes with a (quite sudden, but not entirely unexpected) critique of Kierkegaardian leap-of-faith Christianity.
In each of the above categories, Sapolsky shows that the Western tradition’s millennia-long anthropocentric shibboleths are groundless, but from that shattered ground we build up a newly unique human identity. Since Darwin–well, since Galileo, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, but especially since Darwin–the Thomist hierarchical view of man and Dominion have been under threat, but the past 30 years have accelerated the pace of the ‘assault’ on unthinking anthropocentrism.
Primatologists and others only had to look at the natural world (I could put many hotlinked youtube videos of Ravens, chimps, dolphins, etc. here, but am still new to this game…) to see that the old saw that ‘man is the tool-using animal’ doesn’t hold up. Not only that, but chimps engage in war (it doesn’t rise to the level of human destruction, but arguably that has more to do with their lack of technology, and its resultant destructive capacity, than anything else), cetaceans and others have varying degrees of a theory of mind, Sapolsky shows baboons empathizing, primates in behavioral research can delay gratification (the dopamine-related passages in Sapolsky’s talk, which include tangents on casino designers and ‘neuroeconomists’, are fascinating).
When we approach metaphor and the range of subjects with which humans can empathize and form complex networks of mutual knowledge, however, humans really are a species apart. Not only can we empathize with a picture of an injured dog, as Sapolsky demonstrates, but also with Picasso’s “Guernica” and abstractly visceral art.
In my political philosophy class at UMass Lowell, my students and I have been discussing the concept of human nature (as filtered, so far, through Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant). I was struck by how removed most of my students feel from the rest of the animal kingdom vis-a-vis humans (and they are by no means in the minority–Indeed, I’m pretty sure I am). There are animals (read: Lockean objects of property), and then there are people.
Descriptively, Sapolsky’s work help us to understand our primate natures. Normatively, we can use this knowledge to construct an increasingly empathic civilization in an age when, for a range of possible reasons, the young are less and less empathic.
I can see why some reviewers have their reservations, especially when comparing this to Mieville's other work, but I thought this was a brilliantly done deconstruction of the nature of sovereign authority. (This was the first book of his I'...
tagged:
favorites, reviewed, and speculative-fiction
It's hard to review this book without spoilers, and, as with the City and the City, the core "trick" is at the heart of this book. But, as with The City and the City, the trick doesn't feel like a trick, and it's woven seamlessly ...
tagged:
cognition, fantasy, favorites, reviewed, speculative-fiction, and to-r...
The first book was a fun page-turner and the second a passable reboot, but good lord this was a pitiful conclusion. Just read Hunger Games as a stand-alone and skip the rest, because you're not going to be satisfied. Far from it.
This is only listed as 'abandoned' because I made the mistake of seeing the movie before reading the book - the 100 or so pages I read of the book were engrossing, but too fundamentally similar to the film to make me want to keep reading. W...
I started skimming this book after a few chapters, but was engaged at first. My main gripe is that Caplan bows down too far at the altar of economics and public choice, while at the same time bending over to crap on democracy.
tagged:
democracy, economics, rationality, and reviewed
A broad-ranging and informative overview without descending into the muck of Smith-worship or ad hominem Marx-bashing (or worship) that characterizes so much of our political discourse. The supplementary focus on Ricardo and George was also...
tagged:
capitalism, economics, intellectual-history, reviewed, and socialism
This book needs to be understood as what it is, and not warped into something it isn't. (What it is, however, is an oddly secular stepchild of thoroughly Christian tradition.) Walzer's proclamantions about what 'counts' in just war - whethe...
If you're looking for an introduction to Singer's version of anti-speciesist utilitarianism, I would actually recommend some of his shorter work before this classic, which is actually quite dated. (indeed, it would be shocking if it weren't...
tagged:
animals, ethics, moral-philosophy, reviewed, speciesism, and utilitari...
If you can get past the God-speak, this is a really well written book. Scully is a former speechwriter for Dubya and Palin, and it shows (in multiple respects). This book makes odd bedfellows with Singer's Animal Liberation, to put it mildl...
A brilliant but deeply depressing and even wrong-headed book. It's the kind of work I might have loved in an alternate reality where I was an eco-ideologue and/or a near-nihilist pessimist, but as a pragmatist I just can't buy it. A fascina...
How could I not like Zodiac? It's a zany adventure caper about environmental policy set in my backyard. So what if it clearly has the amateurish air of an early novel - it's good, fast thinking fun.
This is one of the few works of speculative fiction that be read as essentially rephrasing one of the core tenets of Burke and Oakeshott's traditional conservatism: that social engineering projects often take you in very different direction...
Wu's book was a real eye-opener for me, as it was my first foray into the field of information theory. His overview of telegraphy, radio, telephone, television, and the internet all flowed seamlessly into his discussion of what he terms the...
This is a review of the whole trilogy, but is really a commentary on the bioethical question at the core of the third book. The idea that we could genetically evolve aggression out of our genome is presented here in the context of a fascina...
PKD was one of my favorite authors throughout high school, and it was fascinating to read this biography almost a decade later and to realize that one of the reasons I may have liked him so much is may latently possess some of the same neur...
Captures the absurdities of war and the morass of partisan infighting, and it does so with the honest and open tone that makes Orwell's work always many steps above the rest. My favorite: the scene where the fascist is running around withou...
Whatever else your views of the man, or this book, you have to admit that Orwell was legit. He worked in a coal mine. He tramped around before it was hipster-grotesque-cool. He fought the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and got shot in th...
This underlooked Orwell classic documents and equally underlooked phenomenon: the struggles faced by those living not in poverty but on the outskirts of 'respectability': those who cannot give in to living poorly and dirtily, and being cont...
I use this book as the textbook for the animal studies class I teach both at UMass Lowell and at the Tufts Experimental College (wikis: ikesharpless.pbworks.com / animalethics.pbworks.com). There are a couple of other readers in the field, ...
tagged:
animals, ethics, food, language, reviewed, and science
My biggest takeaway when I read Gilgamesh was how universal, even somehow modern, most of its themes were. Pair this with the fact that it's among the oldest - if not the oldest - extant work of written fiction, and, well, that says somethi...
Twain and Orwell top the list of 'authors whose collected works are ignored because they have one or two really famous, now even cliched, books'. (On the case of Orwell, pretty much every book of his other than the Clergyman's Daughter is a...
tagged:
favorites, reviewed, and speculative-fiction
The only reason I can surmise that this work doesn't get more attention is because Joan of Arc is so different from Twain's other books. But it truly is a thing of beauty, his lack of satiric bite and surprisingly pro-French (or maybe just ...
A gorgeous work; rarely have I felt such a sense of reality in the way Banks paints his portraits of individual lives and blends them into a collage depicting how communities respond to senseless tragedies.
Yes, he's pretty much a neocon. And yes, this is a pugnaciously aggressive book. But the basic argument - that it's rational for both Europe and American to behave as if they live in posthistory and history, respective - is an important ins...
As with many such classics, this book requires a substantial background in the social contract tradition to properly engage with its core arguments. (I could write a similar review of various other works - reviews of Leviathan that take no ...
I liked these essays a lot, probably because I agree with Berlin's conception of rights as being often in both internal and external conflict (as Sandel put it, of Berlin, that we live in a 'tragically configured moral universe'). Too bad a...
tagged:
human-rights, moral-philosophy, political-philosophy, and reviewed
Provides an overview of the laws, actors, and strategic challenges surrounding ten different international environmental regimes: whaling, toxics, climate change, ozone, biodiversity, fisheries, forests, and a coupla others.
Dahl argues that the term 'polyarchy' is a more accurate description than 'democracy' when it comes to most countries we tend to call democracies (he also has a very high bar for what it would be required for a country to be a democracy - a...
There's definitely a fine line between historical fiction and utter garbage, but this fun series maintains something like a skein of attempted accuracy while crafting a romping fun yarn.
tagged:
historical-fiction, reviewed, and trashy-fun
It may have helped that I read this book, set partly in the Mediterranean, while on honeymoon in Greece. But I thought it was a masterfully crafted work, and it avoided the trap of being 'a book about a hermaphrodite'. Instead, it was a bea...
I'm a huge fan of Bittman's work, both in his minimalist and post-minimalist stages, but I couldn't help but see this as a lesser hybrid of Omnivore's Dilemma (the text part) and Diet for a Small Planet (the recipes part). It was good for w...
tagged:
environment, food, food-ethics, and reviewed
I agree with Keith's review (below): "With its heart in the right place, this book needs an editor--it reads like a rambling, book-length review article." The topic is clearly important, and I'm happy that it has spawned a bunch o...
A wordy and disturbing mess - I only made it through around book five - but Donaldson's stories are powerfully told and deeply polyvalent. Maybe I'll finish the Chronicles one of these days...
tagged:
dark, disturbing, fantasy, reviewed, and wordy
At this point, Feist's just totally lost me - I was a big fan for a while, but every new iteration seems little more than a trite, hackneyed, and predictable serving of more of the same.
This is the closest I have come to that elusive great American novel. If all you want is narration of a story, look elsewhere, but anyone who thinks that the English language lacks exuberance needs to read this book.
tagged:
favorites, great-use-of-language, and reviewed
I read this as background to prepare for a trip to Chile, and it definitely helped add both a personal and political layer to my understanding of the Pinochet years.
A fabulous, multilayered text. I can only begin to appreciate Ariosto's masterpiece, approaching it as I did through the lens of a third language (Italian). An understanding of Ariosto's patronage situation -- and of Dante and the Bible, at...
Peter Singer, one of the most philosophically consistent thinkers out there (for better and for worse, many would say), discussing the inconsistencies of Dubya's ethics. This book is pretty much what you think it's going to be.
These books should *not* be approached as anything even vaguely resembling practical, serious, or useful. They're for play, and do a fantastic job at that.
tagged:
favorites, funny, polemicists-curmudgeons, reviewed, silly, and words
Another one of those works that I think are thrust on people too young - this trilogy really gets at the core of a lot of key aspects of the human condition. I especially like the conflict between state and family laid out in Antigone, as i...
tagged:
civilization, classics, human-nature, reviewed, taboo, and tragedy-con...
Aeschelus' trilogy leaves me with one overpowering message: he demonstrates the need to overcome blood feuding cycles in which everyone is to blame and everyone has cause for retribution (a catch-22, if you will). Although Aeschelus' soluti...
A beautiful book, in many different ways. It's also fun to assign some Leopold to my environmental studies students, because the writing is so different from most of the ethics, policy, and science stuff we look at. 'Thinking Like a Mountai...
tagged:
environment, ethics, great-use-of-language, and reviewed
I added some of Rand's nonfiction to my Political Thought syllabus after soliciting input from my students (I paired her with Milton Friedman for the day). Although I haven't read much other than this and her Introduction to Objectivist Epi...
I browsed rather than read this, and I think it can be summarized thus: 'people used to play in the woods, but now we think it's full of homeless people and pedophiles.'
This book was great. I'll admit, it probably wouldn't speak to a non-Scrabbler, but it showed just how far down the rabbit hole one can go. On the one hand, Fatsis gave me a number of tactical tools for a Scrabble arsenal and painted master...
I loved this book when I read it in high school, but in retrospect I think a lot of that is because it filled a number of niches I was craving at the time: 'secret knowledge' (hence the 'gnosis' in gnostics - a lot of the PKD stuff I was re...
The reviewer who indicates that this is not a good introduction to the thinkers in question is probably right - this book is best read with a fair amount of relevant reading under your belt. Personally, I think Kaufmann's analysis is brilli...
tagged:
intellectual-history, philosophy, and reviewed
Funny how a book called One-Dimensional Man could be so, well, one-dimensional. As in: the critique of homo economicus is well taken, but the caricature is beaten to death.
tagged:
capitalism, critical-theory, obscurantism, and reviewed
If I had to pick between Asterix and Tintin, I'd go with Asterix for sure. Yes, it's sillier and more childish, but they withstand read after read without getting stale. The delicious wordplay helps, too.
I'm probably biased in favor of this play - I saw a production of it in LA with Ian McKellan as Stockmann. McKellan could play a garbage can and make me think it was the most interesting garbage can in the world.
tagged:
against-the-grain, civilization, and reviewed
This was easily the best book I read for an Anthropology of Development course I took as an undergrad. Lesotho is geographically, historically, and culturally a fascinating case study, and this is a good primer on how the World Bank can mes...
A smorgasbord of mini-biographies, a farrago of informational facts. I was expecting this book to be similar to Wu's The Master Switch, but it's a very different breed. Gleick pastes together a rough chronology of the history of language, g...
This book helped to shape my views on the role of technology in society - it's a fascinating overview of the machine gun's integration into warfare from the Maxim gun in the late 19th century to the brutally asymmetrical colonial wars in Af...
There are some books that I think are unfortunately lost on the high schoolish audience to which they are universally subjected: this is one such book. (Moby Dick and Jekyll/Hyde are others, the former for its girth and the latter for its r...
tagged:
biotech, classics, favorites, reviewed, and science
A serious attempt at addressing a monumentally difficult issue, with mixed success. Some might say he 'sold out' his domestic conception of justice to appease what is clearly a "reasonable" version of political Islam. Either way, ...
tagged:
international, political-philosophy, political-science, and reviewed
I think the issue of branding and the omnipresence of advertising should be taken seriously (hey, I gave Farenheit 451 five stars and I write a food policy blog on these issues...), but I can't help but think that Klein is both a hack and a...
(This is a review of all the Sandman graphic novels...) Gaiman works best in this hybrid form - I loved most of these books, even though the shifting illustrators took some getting used to, and I liked some a lot more than others. The theme...
tagged:
comics-broadly, fantasy, favorites, monsters, myth, reviewed, and spec...
An excellent overview of an important and nuanced figure who sadly gets drowned out in the capitalist-v-socialist poo throwing competition. What I most remember about this book, though, is that I was reading it on an airplane and the person...
tagged:
intellectual-history, political-philosophy, reviewed, and socialism
The English translation of Levi's title, "Survival at Auschwitz", is one of the worst mistranslations in history. A literal translation is "if this is a man", which has literally the opposite meaning, and which more clos...
This book captures both Dawkins greatness and his debilitating hostility to any perspective other than his own. His description of how a primitive eye could and did develop through descent with modification through natural selection - essen...
tagged:
evolution, religion, reviewed, and science
The closest I've found to a kindred philosophy to my pick-and-choose blend of various schools of moral, political, and aesthetic thought. I really loved this book, and I'm surprised I hadn't come across Rorty earlier.
tagged:
empathy, moral-philosophy, pragmatism, and reviewed
Read this as background for my honeymoon in Greece. It is what it says it is, although my level of knowledge about modern Greek politics was precisely zero before reading this. I can know say that it's at least a little better than zero, wh...
It's hard to understate the importance of this work, which should really be thought of as a relic of an oral tradition: reading it, alone, from a page doesn't capture the original intent of its rhythm and rhyme. That said, I agree that tran...
This line still sticks with me, a decade after first reading this fabulous translation: "Down through the moors, in off the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping."
tagged:
classics, great-use-of-language, monsters, reviewed, and the-other
A truly devastating collection - I read these stories almost a decade ago, and some of them stick with me to this day. The core lesson here is a difficult one to swallow: one of the greatest crimes of the Holocaust was that, in many cases, ...
tagged:
empathy, human-rights, really-sad, reviewed, and wwii
A solid introduction to ecofeminism in particular and Shiva's brand of anti-globalization agroecology more generally (although Earth Democracy provides more of an 'entry level' critique). As with most work of this nature, I think this book ...
tagged:
dark-green, development, environment, feminism, reviewed, and science
I've used this book in my Intro to Comparative Politics class to help my students understand electoral reform, but I suspect I enjoyed it a lot more than they did. It's pretty dense and technical, but provides lots of comparative data to di...
