Anthrozoology: Embracing co-existence in the Anthropocene
by
Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison. Cham: Springer, 2017. ISBN
978-3-319-45963-9 £24.00 (GBP). 338pp.
Paul
R. Ehrlich. Department of Biology, Stanford University
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DOI: 10.3197/jps.2018.2.2.63
Licensing: This article is Open Access (CC BY 4.0).
How to Cite:
Ehrlich, P.R. 2016. 'Anthrozoology: Embracing Co-Existence in the Anthropocene. Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison'. The Journal of Population and Sustainability 2(2): 63–65.
https://doi.org/10.3197/jps.2018.2.2.63
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Most
thoughtful people understand that very fundamental changes in the global
culture of Homo sapiens are required if civilization is to
persist. That means ending the wrecking of its life-support systems, of
which the microorganisms, plants, and other animals of our planet are critical
parts, and becoming a civilization not focused on money, competition,
consumption, efficiency, and colonialism.
Following
work summarized in this brilliant book, in Carl Safina’s superb volume Beyond Words (2015),
and in David Montgomery’s excellent Other Half of Nature (2015), many of us are already altering
our views of the living world. We are realizing that people are basically
cooperative assemblages of human and microbial cells, that other organisms (the
“Others” in Anthrozoology) are
often more “sentient,” “conscious,” “intelligent,” or “feeling” than usually
assumed, and that humanity’s insane growthmania,
combined with its uncaring annihilation of other life forms, is leading
civilization directly toward collapse.
Tobias
and Morrison, the authors of Anthrozoology, are
both leading ecological philosophers and friends of mine (full disclosure), and
I share many of their attitudes and conclusions. Nonetheless, I found
this a tough but entrancing book – forcing me to reexamine
many of my own feelings, even while agreeing with its general thrust.
More and more people are recognizing that there is a crying need for reexaminations of humanity’s ethical duties to other human
beings and (if any) to the other organisms with which people share Earth. Anthrozoology is a reexamination
of the latter – basically a long poem to the Others, and a long indictment of Homo sapiens for
its ignoring of the Others’ needs and wants in service to humanity’s
culturally-evolved wants.
And at the moment the most obvious of those wants is also lethal to
civilization and to most of the visible Others (what will happen to Earth’s
microbes is a more complex issue). That lethal want, the perpetual
expansion of human numbers and per capita consumption, also turns out to be
impossible, as a horrific collapse will sooner or later amply demonstrate.
In
many of today’s cultures some of Tobias and Morrison’s ideas will be pleasant
if different. That a parrot can communicate much to human beings, and
even change their lives for the better and alter their thinking in significant
ways, is a good example in the book. More difficult to deal with are
issues like vegetarianism (should the deaths of billions of chickens annually
for human consumption be considered a “holocaust”?) and whether the feelings
and desires of worms, cockroaches, or even Norway rats, should be a subject for
human consideration. Such questions are examined in Anthrozoology from
a stunningly broad array of perspectives, including, literature, philosophy,
religion, psychology, ecology, and evolution. It deals with topics as
diverse as Dunbar numbers and pyromaniac hawks to the art of Albrecht Dürer.
Science
certainly gives little guidance in answering many of the questions Anthrozoology raises,
but its poetry may be helpful. In the end, though, much depends on the
receptivity of the person and society to the themes of the poem. Ethics
are agreed-upon standards of behavior about what is
good and bad. They are entirely human decisions and become norms when
there is broad concurrence. Such concurrence requires advanced language
with syntax, about the only major species feature that still can be viewed as
characteristic only of Homo sapiens.
So we can have Jain ethics and SS ethics but (sadly) no Bonobo ethics.
Most human beings have decided that the unquestionable suffering of chickens being
slaughtered is balanced by the nutritive and satisfaction benefits consumers
receive – just as they (if they ever think of it) find that a captured impala’s
terror and pain is balanced by the lion’s survival and satisfaction. But
having known a few chickens personally, and having watched a lot of impalas in
the field, I can’t find an answer so easily. When we’re considering the
fates and feelings of individuals we can relate to (frightened pigs about to be
slaughtered) or we can learn to relate to (brilliant octopuses that can
sometimes outwit us), it becomes more difficult to continue long-established
dietary habits.
There
are a few places where I thought I detected mistakes in Anthrozoology, and then I thought: “There really can’t be mistakes
in a poem.” All would be trivial, even in an essay. At one place,
though, Michael and Jane jabbed me right in the ego. They write (loc. 781) of
the “famed Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, Barry Commoner
I=PAT equation.” The equation was actually developed by Holdren
and Ehrlich to show how ridiculous was Commoner’s continuous claim that
population growth and increasing consumption were not important
in causing environmental problems, only faulty technologies were to
blame. With that claim, widely believed by non-scientists, he was
probably the scientist who did the most to block solving humanity’s
environmental crisis. The details of his ideology and gross dishonesty
need not concern us here, but John Holdren, just
retired as head of the Government Office of Science and Technology Policy and
President Obama’s science advisor, has permitted MAHB to publish his 1993 memo,
“A brief history of IPAT” below.
I
find myself uncertain or ambiguous on many of the themes of Anthrozoology, but of its most basic themes I’m
convinced. The human enterprise – a product of numbers of people and how
much on average each consumes – is much too large, and our treatment of the
Others is much too cruel and unthinking. What to do? Read Anthrozoology and
then discuss it with your friends.
This review and the following
paper by John Holdren, was previously published on
the MAHB blog: https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/review-anthrozoology/
Safina
C. 2015. Beyond Words: What Animals
Think and Feel. Henry
Holt.
Montgomery
D.R., Biklé A. 2015. The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health. WW
Norton & Company.