anthropocene Archives - When We Talk About Animals

Ep. 25 – Doug Kysar and Jon Lovvorn on law in the Anthropocene

“In a very short time period, essentially since the Great Acceleration after World War II, we’ve engineered these vast industrial systems the planet over that are designed to generate food in a particular way for humans, and as a result humans have been more and more distanced from the possibility of right relations with the non-human world,” Kysar says. “How do we recreate those conditions that enable understanding of ourselves as part of a community of communities with intercommunal obligations?” Photo by Harold Shapiro/ Yale Law School.

Our species’ treatment of other animals raises deep questions of conscience, of consciousness, and of the consequences of human actions for other living beings. These are questions of science, but also questions of law and of power. Often, they are questions of who counts and who doesn’t. Throughout their careers, in distinct but related ways, our two guests today have made the case — in writing, in the courtroom, and in the classroom — that harms to other forms of life, including animals, the environment, and future generations, matter profoundly. Rather than accepting that these “other” beings reside outside the scope of law, they have argued that we must work to expand our moral imaginations and strive, be it ever asymptotically, toward the goal of universal recognition and respect for life.

Professors Doug Kysar and Jonathan Lovvorn are the Faculty Co-Directors of Yale Law School’s new Law, Ethics & Animals Program, also known as LEAP. LEAP is a multidisciplinary think-and-do tank dedicated to inspiring and empowering Yale scholars and students to address industrialized animal cruelty and its impacts, and to advance positive legal and political change for animals, people and the environment upon which they depend. In fall 2017, Lovvorn and Kysar co-taught the first full-credit course on animal law offered in Yale Law School’s history, building on years of growing student interest and reading groups. The class marked the beginning of a creative partnership and a dynamic collaboration between one of the nation’s most distinguished environmental law scholars and one of the nation’s most accomplished animal law practitioners.

“After I figured out the basics of how to be a lawyer, I quickly set about trying to make more animal lawyers because there weren’t enough of them,” Lovvorn says. Photo by Hope-Bigda Peyton.

Ep. 19 – Robert Macfarlane on being good ancestors across deep time

In eastern Greenland, Macfarlane descends a moulin, a smooth ice shaft cut into a glacier by meltwater. “When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert,” he writes. “New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless earth.” Photo by Helen Spenceley.

In 1994, three French cavers came upon the oldest human-painted images yet discovered. In his new book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, the writer Robert Macfarlane describes the December day in which the trio descended into the chamber, passing stalactites that reached from floor to ceiling. Suddenly, the flashlight of one caver illuminated a mammoth, then a bear, then a lion with a mane speckled with blood. It was soon revealed that the gallery of Chauvet Cave, also known as the Cave of Forgotten Dreams, houses hundreds of animals — mammoths, rhinoceroses, lions, bison, owls, stags, panthers and bears — painted over 30,000 years old. Many of the creatures are now extinct or nearing extinction.

Macfarlane writes: “The art of the chamber has an astonishing liveliness to it. Despite the rudimentary materials and the lack — to our knowledge — of any kind of training or tradition on which the artists could draw, the animals of Chauvet seem ready to step from the stone that holds them. The horns and cloven hoofs of the bison are painted twice, the lines running close to one another, to give the impression of movement — a shake of the head, a stamp of the foot. The horses are painted with soft muzzles and lips, which one wishes to reach out and touch, feel, feed. Sixteen lions — muscles tensed, eyes fixed with hunting alertness on their quarry — pursue a herd of bison from right to left across a wall of stone. This is, you realize, an early version of stop-motion; a proto-cinema.” Macfarlane quotes John Berger: “Art is born like a foal that can walk straight away. The talent to make art accompanies the need for that art; they arrive together.”

In Andoya, Norway, Macfarlane visited off-shore oil fields with a local fisherman and activist, Bjornar Nicolaisen, as his friend and guide. “What Bjornar fears is a version of ‘solastalgia,’ the term coined by Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to mean a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’ …” Macfarlane writes. “Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognizable by climate change or corporate action: the home becomes unhomely around its inhabitants.” Photo by Bjornar Nicolaisen.

Ep. 10 – Dale Jamieson on love and meaning in the age of humans

Philosopher Dale Jamieson, pictured here with co-professor Danny, leads the NYU Animal Studies Initiative. “Part of the problem that we have is that we think we’re too important in all sorts of different ways,” he says.

For most of our planet’s history, geologic change on earth was steered by inanimate forces. Then modern humans arrived, triggering a new geological epoch now known as the “Anthropocene.” Coined in the 1980s by biologist Eugene Stoermer and popularized in 2000 by Nobel-prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, the word marks the transformation of the biosphere over the past 250 years—a change wrought not by solar radiation, tectonic activity, or volcanoes, but by human beings.