Conservation scholarship and policies are concerned with the viability of idealized ecological communities constructed using human metrics. We argue that the discipline of conservation assumes an epistemology and ethics of human sovereignty/dominion over animals that leads to violent actions against animals. We substantiate our argument by deconstructing a case study. In the context of recent bushfires in Australia, we examine recent legislation passed by the parliament of New South Wales, policy documents, and academic articles by conservationists that support breaking communities (...) of horses and/or killing 4,000 horses in Kosciuszko National Park, NSW. Theoretically framing our deconstruction against human sovereignty over animals and anthropocentrism, we affirm an intersectional, ecofeminist approach that values animals as relational and vulnerable agents. We uncover first the epistemic violence of categorizing horses as “pests,” and the anthropocentric nature of recently passed legislation in NSW. We analyze next the deficient ethics of NSW's government, and the argument that killing animals is justifiable when they suffer from starvation and dehydration. We close with a realistic proposal that does not involve breaking horses’ communities and/or killing horses, and a plea to the government of NSW and conservationists not to harm any horses in KNP. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

The idea that animals should have the right to vote sounds preposterous. Accordingly, most authors who have touched on the issue dismiss it in few words as obvi.

he territorial impacts of climate change will affect millions. This will happen not only as a direct consequence of climate change, but also because of policies for mitigating it—for example, through the installation of large wind and solar farms, the conservation of land in its role as carbon sink, and the extraction of materials needed for renewable energy technologies. In this article, we offer an overview of the justice-related issues that these impacts create. The literature on climate justice and territory (...) is vast and spans a range of disciplines, so we limit our discussion to a specific understanding of territory and a specific understanding of injustice that arises from its loss. We understand territory as a normative concept that describes a place under some agent's jurisdiction, where the agent is a politically organized collective and where the jurisdictional rights over that place secure a relevant degree of self-determination for that collective. Accordingly, we consider that the main injustice connected to the loss of territory due to climate change is the loss or undermining of the ability to exercise the collective right to self-determination, which requires some control over the place. This can happen if a territorial agent literally loses the ground where to stand as a direct effect of climate change, raising issues of justice in relocation; or if their place changes due to mitigation policies, affecting their use and understanding of territory, raising issues of justice in energy transition. In concluding, we point to topics for future research. (shrink)

The concept of service found in Christian theism and related religious perspectives offers robust support for a political defense of nonhuman animal rights, both in the eschaton and in the present state. By adapting the political theory defended by Donaldson and Kymlicka to contemporary theological models of the afterlife and of human agency, I defend a picture of heaven as a harmoniously structured society where humans are the functional leaders of a multifaceted, interspecies citizenry. Consequently, orthodox religious believers (concerned with (...) promoting God’s will “on Earth as it is in Heaven”) have a duty to promote and protect the interests of nonhuman creatures in the present, premortem state. (shrink)