UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies (E-Journal - York University)
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The Modern Battlefront of Natural History and the Emergence of Animal Heroes
Get PDFThe popular nature writer and conservationist Ernest Harold Baynes (1868-1925) was instrumental in bringing the issue of the place of animals in war to the attention of nature historians in the United States. In Animal Heroes of the Great War,1 Baynes presented a general overview of the use of animals in the Allied war effort of World War I, describing the service of horses, camels, mules, donkeys, oxen, dogs and pigeons. As a representative of Harper's magazine, he travelled through England, France, Belgium, Italy, Egypt and Palestine from the winter of 1919 to the summer of 1920, collecting material for Animal Heroes and "Our Animal Allies in the World War," which appeared in Harper's in 1921.
The Dog and the Wolf: Some Thoughts on Biological Shackles and the Trap of Humanism
Get PDFThere are many different themes running through this Aesop fable which are applicable to trends in Western culture. One way to interpret this piece is to think of the Wolf as representing "wildness" and the Dog as representing "domestication."2 The collar and chain that rub around the neck of the Dog are like our own tie to the, Western technological mind-set. It appears that the Dog is living a comfortable, safe, easy life, just as we feel that the benefits of our technological world have brought us a similar security. The Wolf, in choosing not to accept the collar and chain of the Dog, maintains the freedom to follow his own will and purpose. He retains his wildness. The Dog has had this wildness, this independent purpose, bred out of him by the Master. His purpose is not his own, but that of the Master. We, in Western culture, tend to see ourselves as like the Master, possessing control over what purpose the rest of nature will serve for us. We fail to recognize that, nature, like the Wolf, has purpose independent from us. We also fail to recognize that the very mechanisms and techniques which we use to exert control, have placed us in the position, not of Master, but of the Dog. The trap of humanism, therefore, is that in attempting to domesticate nature, we domesticate ourselves.
Toward an Original Forestry
Get PDFOn a day in early spring, I was sitting on a small hummock eating lunch, enjoying the warmth of the spring sun and relieving my legs after a good, long walk in the Woods when it happened. It takes a while, it never happens right away but sometimes, after hours of walking, thinking, and feeling my way along the paths of the Woods, it can happen. The wall drops and conversation begins. I breathe in fresh spring air and I feel my blood go rushing through me in a flood of exhilaration. "LIVE, BREATHE, AWAKEN" the Woods say, "Let us begin again." The ground, the smell of fresh rotting leaves, the sound of the trickling water, the hum of the first bumblebee in the nearby leaves, the unhurried wariness of the wolf spider hunting in the leaf mold, the up-shooting lush green of the trilliums and other wood spring flowers--all these things create a rhythm. I feel the rhythm coursing through me; I feel like I too am being renewed. I leap up and caper around briefly, then stop. And the moment is gone. But it is not completely gone. Many times now I have re-called that moment, and I am there. I and the Woods are speaking, the Woods saying LIFE and I exclaiming yes! here, life dig, root, push, lift, spread! The rhythm of spring echoes in my ears and fills my nose with its vibrant odour
The Moral Status of Animals: Ethical Crossroads, Dead Ends and the Road Not Taken
Get PDFIf ethical thinking is an evolutionary process, as Aldo Leopold, the father of modem environmental ethics, thought it was, 1 then today we stand at a crossroads in that discipline. Or is it instead, a dead end? For thousands, if not tens-of-thousands of years, human beings have despotically ruled the rest of the animal kingdom. Believing ourselves to be superior, other species were categorized as existing "merely as a means to an end," 2 a human end, that is. Animals, other than humans, held no moral status.
Towards an Urban Ecological Consciousness: Experiencing Wild Places in the City
Get PDFThe "Green City"2 has in recent years emerged as an integrated conceptual framework with which to respond locally to the global environmental crisis. In theory, a Green City is "in harmony with ecosystems that support it, and ... contains a populace that considers itself a part of the biosphere and acts accordingly."3 The concept, in short, addresses the need for our society to respectfully build with, rather than impose upon, the land and the natural world
Speaking Animals: Notes on the Human Voiceover in Wildlife Documentaries
Get PDFNature conservationists have often credited wildlife documentaries with doing much to awaken public environmental concern. But these assertions have given too little critical thought to what I take to be a central problem: the failure of such programs to address what we might term issues of ideology. Wildlife documentaries present a view of the world in which such issues are deliberately kept underdeveloped, and are isolated conceptually from other· social and political domains. We need then to ask the following questions: In what ways do these documentaries serve to legitimate existing human relationships with the nonhuman? And how do they affect our perception of, and our willingness to take action on, environmental problems
Three Visions of an Ecological Self
Get PDFEnvisioning the possibility of an ecologically appropriate society involves being able to imagine, not just a different way of living, but also a different way of being. Deep ecology, social ecology and ecofeminism are approaches which both critique the current dominant society and attempt to envision how this society might look and behave, given a more ecologically appropriate self-understanding