Episode 19: Multispecies Entanglements in the Anthropocene: Ecocide, Speciesism, Vulnerability

Posted Date: March 12, 2021

Episode Description: In a conversation with LAC member Müge Gedik, Rimona Afana discusses the ties between speciesism and ecocide. She argues that without challenging our speciesist beliefs and institutions, we cannot advance justice and peace in the Anthropocene. Rimona’s cross-disciplinary research informs her multimedia artwork and activism. We will also listen to an excerpt of her poem “wood” (turned into an audio–video collaboration) and learn about the story behind it.

Guest Biography

Rimona Afana is a Visiting Scholar with the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative (Emory University School of Law, Atlanta). Her work integrates cross-disciplinary research, civic activism, and multimedia artwork to track how meaning is created, institutionalized, and contested on violent conflicts, state crimes, colonial legacies, and environmental harms. For the past two years, she has been working on two book projects: one revisits through vulnerability theory her doctoral findings on the justice–reconciliation nexus in Palestine/Israel; the other project looks at how jurisprudence can engage with the ties between ecocide and speciesism. This last project has been recently awarded a peace research grant by the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) Foundation. Her PhD, concluded in 2017 at the Transitional Justice Institute in Northern Ireland, examined the synergies, tensions, and tradeoffs between justice and reconciliation in the (com)promised lands, documenting the challenges presented by settler–extractive colonialism to transitional justice. Over the past fifteen years she has been active civically, mainly in Europe and the Middle East, on human rights, peacebuilding, international justice, corporate accountability, development, culture and arts. Inspired by her research and activism, she encrypts rootlessness–transience–dissonance in words and visuals: poems, flash fiction, photography, drawing, painting, collage, and audio–video collaborations.

Contact Information:  rimona [dot] afana [at] yahoo.com

Project Title: Ecocide, Speciesism, Vulnerability: Revisiting Interdependence in the Anthropocene

Description: Sociolegal research needs to revisit the anthropocentric foundations of our individual beliefs and communal structures. This ethos drives my examination of the ties between ecocide and speciesism, through vulnerability theory. Speciesism, as a form of discrimination, manifests as violence against “inferior” non-humans. Since speciesism and its deriving violence are structural globally, discussions of justice and peace in the Anthropocene cannot obscure how speciesism marks our everydayness. I explore the speciesist substrata of environmental harm and the contours of critical ecocide jurisprudence by combining cross-disciplinary research (environmental ethics, green criminology, climate and conservation psychology, peace studies, critical legal theory, environmental law, international criminal law), expert interviews surfacing contested interpretative terrains, multimedia artwork, and online community engagement. Internalizing the brutal evidence of human impact on our common home, I seek to unearth the consequences of interdependence and hierarchy. This project invites me/us to wonder–worry.

Recent Work (please click on the titles)

“Wood”

“Forest Nativity”

“The Map is (k)Not”

“Ecocide, Speciesism, Vulnerability: Revisiting Positive Peace in the Anthropocene”
(chapter forthcoming in the Palgrave Handbook of Positive Peace)

Glossary of Terms

Ecocide is the destruction of or damage to ecosystems. While processes considered natural, such as invasive species wreaking havoc on ecosystems, fall within the scope of ecocide, the concept often designates ecological destruction as a crime. It differentiates natural disasters from man-made processes systematically harming the environment, prevalent currently. These crimes are seldom individual, isolated acts of negligence or malfeasance; more commonly they can be classified as state crimes (actions or inactions which breach a state’s own criminal law or its international law obligations) or state–corporate crimes (wrongdoing involving both business conduct and governmental actions/inactions).

Speciesism is a form of discrimination based on a being’s species. Speciesism often manifests as violence against “inferior” non-humans and is prevalent in most societies: most of us value humans more than non-humans and non-humans are themselves hierarchically treated: we exploit, torture, and kill certain animals but protect others as pets, and some cultures revere certain animals as sacred. Speciesism is a core driving force behind anthropogenic environmental degradation, including ecocides, yet it remains neglected in scholarship and activism. My project seeks to understand the ties between ecocides and speciesism.

Vulnerability theory, alternative to human rights, formal equality, and identity politics, posits vulnerability not as exceptional (i.e., “vulnerable populations”), but as universal and constant. Vulnerability stems from our human condition: embodied (we all live in a fragile material case, the body) and embedded (we are never autonomous but depend on others in complex ways). In Prof. Martha Fineman’s jurisprudence, the opposite of vulnerability is not invulnerability but resilience, which becomes the role of the state through its laws and institutions. Thus, the focus in analysis is the differential in resilience between various entities. Vulnerabılıty theory has been used to critically examine US domestic affairs like the regulation of the family and of work, and gradually extended to other social issues. While a few environmental applications exist, they do not deal with the links between ecocide and speciesism. I believe vulnerability theory intersects on multiple levels with ecocide and speciesism, as they all elicit questions on inevitable dependency and interdependence between beings, and on socially created hierarchies. Vulnerability theory helps me interpret the ties between ecocide and speciesism, and what the legal and political systems can/should do to prevent, mitigate, and repair environmental harms.

Environmental Organizations

Recommended Readings

Animal Ethics (n.d.). Speciesism. https://www.animal-ethics.org/speciesism/

Ecological Defence Integrity (2019). Stop ecocide: Civil vs criminal law [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC_Y7qzv128

Falk, R. A. (1973). Environmental warfare and ecocide — Facts, appraisal, and proposals. Bulletin of Peace Proposals, 4(1), 80–96.

Fineman, M. A. (2004). The autonomy myth: A theory of dependency. New York, NY: The New Press.

Fineman, M. A. (2008). The vulnerable subject: Anchoring equality in the human condition. Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, 20(1), 1–23.

Fineman, M. A. (2010). The vulnerable subject and the responsive state. Emory Law Journal, 60(2), 251–276.

Fineman, M. A. (2012). Vulnerability and the human condition: A different approach to equality [Video recording]. The University of British Columbia, Green College, Richard V. Ericson lecture series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seC6hqnpkPU

Gagliano, M. (2018). Thus spoke the plant: A remarkable journey of groundbreaking scientific discoveries and personal encounters with plants. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Gauger, A., Rabatel-Fernel, M. P., Kulbicki, L., Short, D., & Higgins, P. (2012). Ecocide Project: ‘Ecocide is the missing fifth crime against peace’. London, England: University of London Human Rights Consortium. https://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/4830/1/Ecocide_research _report_19_July_13.pdf

Heinrich Böll Foundation & Friends of the Earth Europe (2014). Meat Atlas: Facts and figures about the animals we eat. Ahrensfelde, Germany: Möller Druck. https://www.boell.de/ sites/default/files/meat_atlas2014_kommentierbar.pdf

Higgins, P. (2015). Eradicating ecocide: Laws and governance to stop the destruction of the planet (2nd edition). London, England: Shepheard–Walwyn Publishers.

Hoggett, P. (Ed.) (2019). Climate psychology: On indifference to disaster. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Joy, M. (2015, December 16). The secret reason we eat meat [Video recording]. Beyond Carnism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao2GL3NAWQU

Low, P. (2012). The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. Written by P. Low, edited by J. Panksepp, D. Reiss, D. Edelman, B. Van Swinderen, P. Low, C. Koch, signed by participants at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals, University of Cambridge Churchill College, July 7, 2012. http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf

Mancuso, S., & Viola, A. (2015). Brilliant green: The surprising history and science of plant intelligence, 2nd edition (Trans. J. Benham). Washington, DC: Island Press.

Mégret, F. (2010). The case for a general international crime against the environment. https://ssrn.com/abstract=1583968.

Michalowski, R. J. & Kramer, R. C. (2006). State–corporate crime: Wrongdoing at the intersection of business and government. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Real Media (2019, April 16). The crime of ecocide: Polly Higgins interview [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfUamcJgAOA

Ryder, R. D. (2011). Speciesism, painism and happiness: A morality for the twenty-first century. Exeter, England: Imprint Academic.

Ryder, R. D. (2014). What is speciesism? [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8g_qJ08QLhw

Sapontzis, S. F. (1980). Are animals moral beings? American Philosophical Quarterly, 17(1), 45–52.

Sapontzis, S. F. (1987). Morals, reason, and animals. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Satz, A. B. (2009). Animals as vulnerable subjects: Beyond interest–convergence, hierarchy, and property. Animal Law, 16(2), 65–122. https://www.animallaw.info/sites/default/files/ lralvol16_p65.PDF

Sollund, R. A. (Ed.) (2015). Green harms and crimes: Critical criminology in a changing world. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ultraventus Films (2012). The superior human [Documentary film]. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mqT82oGeax0

United Nations Environment Programme (2010). Assessing the environmental impacts of consumption and production: Priority products and materials. Report of the Working Group on the Environmental Impacts of Products and Materials to the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management. http://www.unep.fr/shared/publications/pdf/

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (2006). Livestock’s long shadow: Environmental issues and options. Livestock, Environment and Development Initiative. Rome, Italy: FAO Publications. http://www.fao.org/3/a0701e/a0701e.pdf

Weitzenfeld, A., & Joy, M. (2014). An overview of anthropocentrism, humanism, and speciesism in critical animal theory. Counterpoints, 448, 3–27.

White, R. (2020). Climate change criminology. Bristol, England: Bristol University Press.

Zierler, D. (2011). The invention of ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the scientists who changed the way we think about the environment. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.