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Environmental Philosophy

In the Approach of a More-Than-Human World

Volume 5, Issue 2, Fall 2008
Species of Thought

Table of Contents

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contents
1. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
James Hatley Editorial Preface
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features
2. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Anthony Lioi “The Art of Poetry” (poem)
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3. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Christian Diehm Staying True to Trees: A Specific Look at Anthropocentrism and Non-Anthropocentrism
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This essay examines how becoming familiar with trees in their specificity might impact how we position ourselves in the ongoing debate among environmental philosophers regarding anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric approaches to environmental ethics. It begins with an analysis of what the process of learning to identify trees entails, and a discussion of how this often involves the development of non-instrumentalist evaluative attitudes towards them, an axiological orientation at odds with the instrumental reductivism characteristic of anthropocentric views. It is then argued that a basic concern we might have with anthropocentrism is that it does not admit what are perhaps the most significant values that emerge in relationship with other-than-human entities.
4. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Joan Maloof The Naming of Things
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Knowing the Latin binomial name for a species opens up a world of knowledge, but there is another way of knowing that does not involve names.
5. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Janet Fiskio A World of Difference: The Lure of Plants in Gary Paul Nabhan
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Recent efforts among environmental theorists to think past human alienation from nature have made the question of the animal central, as Agamben and Derrida have shown. Expanding this question beyond the concern with suffering, Donna Haraway’s investigations of companion species take seriously the interspecies relations of work, play, and joy. The engagement of plant-human coevolution in the work of ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan complicates these questions, revealing the porous boundaries between human cultures and the plant companions that sustain them. This essay proposes Nabhan’s work as a response to Haraway’s questions, exploring four mutually constitutive relations between humans and plants: lures, tricks, grief, and sacrament.
6. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Laura Geuy Akers Lessons Learned from Yellowjackets
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Interactions with yellowjackets offer opportunities to reflect on what it is to encounter radical alterity and the conditions that are necessary for the limited empathy such encounters afford us. Effort must be made to set aside automatic judgments, and neither simulation nor theorizing can be sufficient to give us reliable insights, but mindful attentiveness can at least help us attend to the possibilities of interaction and tentative interpretation.
7. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Patricia Monaghan “The Shaman Spiderthrasher Relates the Legend of Massagu, the Mosquito Hero” (poem)
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8. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Deborah Bird Rose Judas Work: Four Modes of Sorrow
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In this essay I examine four modes of thinking about the betrayals involved in the planned mass deaths of animals, specifically the wild donkeys of North Australia. I consider the wild, but in contrast to the positive valence this concept has acquired in environmental literature, I work with a set of negative connotations that I encountered in conversations with Aboriginal people in North Australia. I explore the wild as a form of narcissism, to use Hatley’s terminology, and I engage with animal mass deaths as an outcome of processes of disconnection and catastrophe. My analysis examines how the colonising wild is the tearing apart of the fabric of life and death on earth.
9. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Lisa Kemmerer “No One Likes” (poem)
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10. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Glen Mazis The World of Wolves: Lessons about the Sacredness of the Surround, Belonging, the Silent Dialogue of Interdependence and Death, and Speciocide
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This essay details wolves sense of their surround in terms of how wolves perceptual acuities, motor abilities, daily habits, overriding concerns, network of intimate social bonds, and relationship to prey give them a unique sense of space, time, belonging with other wolves, memorial sense, imaginative capacities, dominant emotions (of affection, play, loyalty, hunger, etc.), communicative avenues, partnership with other creatures, and key role in ecological thriving. Wolves are seen to live within a vast sense of aroundness and closeness to aspects of their surround (compared to humans), a highly charged intimacy and cooperation with other wolves, and a caring and non-aggressive attitude that goes beyond the pack, despite their loyalty and defense of territory. The cultural myths and history that absurdly demonize the wolf are explored in their self-righteous attempts to exterminate wolves, which I call “speciocide” and probe for projections of human viciousness. The supposed rapaciousness of wolves is re-examined by expanding Barry Lopez’s sense of the silent dialogue of death with other creatures to be reconsidered as a kind of respect, assertion of vitality, recognition of mortality, and cooperation.
11. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Judith Roche “Salmon Suite” (poems)
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12. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Jacob Metcalf Intimacy without Proximity: Encountering Grizzlies as a Companion Species
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Using grizzly-human encounters as a case study, this paper argues for a rethinking of the differences between humans and animals within environmental ethics. A diffractive approach that understands such differences as an effect of specific material and discursive arrangements (rather than as pre-settled and oppositional) would see ethics as an interrogation of which arrangements enable flourishing, or living and dying well. The paper draws on a wide variety of human-grizzly encounters in order to describe the species as co-constitutive and challenges perspectives that treat bears and other animals as oppositional and nonagential outsides to humans.
13. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Cheryl Lousley When the Whale Responds: Narrating the Ethical Subject in Farley Mowat’s A Whale for the Killing
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The essay discusses the significance of narrative for environmental ethics by attending to the conventions of autobiography in Farley Mowat’s anti-whaling text, A Whale for the Killing. A tension emerges in environmental nonfiction narrative between the desire to transcend the self and its expression in autobiographical form, which necessarily places the self at the centre of the narrative. I trace the construction of the narrator’s and whale’s ethical personae to argue that even as Mowat’s narration of a subject-to-subject encounter challenges the ontological and ethical divide between “human” and “animal,” it nevertheless reconstructs a liberal-humanist notion of subjectivity.
14. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Daniela Elza “In the Eye of the Crow” (poem)
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15. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Notes on Contributors
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book reviews
16. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Timothy M. Costelloe Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida
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17. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Scott Samuelson The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature
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18. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Jason Wirth When Species Meet
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19. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Kirsten Jacobson Sprawling Places
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20. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 2
Keith Peterson The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?
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