Bridging the Gap Between the Human and the Non-Human

There is a gap between knowing the scientific facts about environmental crisis and understanding what actually drives it. I've known how forests are cut down for timber, machines, and metal smelting — how this displaces animals, how the processing of metal ores poisons rivers and streams. But knowing these facts is not enough. There are other discussions and debates that are equally necessary in order to discover answers to this problem, and they concern not ecology but economics: not the Anthropocene but the Capitalocene. Reading Jason W. Moore's 'The Capitalocene, Part I' made it clear that capitalism is the operating process behind it all.

The term Anthropocene refers to the current geological age that has been influenced by human activity (Crutzen and Stoermer 17). The mainstream Anthropocene thesis fits neatly inside a traditional modernity narrative. The Industrial Revolution is defined as a series of technological, social, and occasionally political ties that emerged around coal and steam beginning in 1760, and we are told that this represents the beginning of modernity (Moore "The Capitalocene, Part I" 2). Here, the Anthropocene's periodisation collides with a long-standing environmentalist claim about the Industrial Revolution as a watershed moment in human history when people began dramatically altering the world — but this rejects a longer history of capitalism that began with Columbus. The erasure of capitalism's early-modern roots, and its tremendous remaking of global natures even before the steam engine, is therefore essential in our efforts to establish effective political activism around climate challenges (Moore "The Capitalocene, Part I" 3). Moore's argument caused me to consider if we are living in the Anthropocene, with its Eurocentric views, or the Capitalocene — the 'age of capital' — the historical epoch marked by the ceaseless accumulation of capital. The Anthropocene, at its foundation, is a profoundly bourgeois idea that informs us that the Anthropos is to blame for the current awful condition of world events. It is a ruse by the wealthy and powerful to cause issues for the rest of us and then accuse us all (Moore "The Capitalocene, Part I" 5–6).

Moore's article draws on Foucault to discuss how capitalism causes us to perceive nature as something external, comparable to how it formerly did not grant many humans — most women, most people of colour, and nearly all Amerindians — full, or even partial, membership in Humanity. This primordial accumulation period gave birth not only to the 'accumulation of wealth' and the 'accumulation of mankind' (Foucault 221) but also to a new world-praxis: Cheap Nature. This practice involved not just gathering and arranging human beings, but also assigning value to them via the Humanity/Nature binary (Moore "The Capitalocene, Part I" 7). The emergence of capitalism cannot be explained just by economics. The Capitalocene defines capitalism as a system of power, profit, and re/production in the web of life. It considers capitalism as if human relationships emerge from life's geography. Far from rejecting the problem of political economy, it emphasises capitalism as a history in which commodity production and exchange islands function amid oceans of Cheap — or potentially Cheap — Natures. Robust accumulation requires the existence and active production of human and non-human natures whose reproduction costs are hidden from view. This is also a process of 'putting Nature to work,' which is why it is critical to allow Nature its own rights — just as companies and humans do, although this is easier said than done. Because existing legal and commercial systems consider nature as property that may be destroyed for profit and human desire, we need a more environmentally protecting legal structure (Hillebrecht et al. 5).

Several significant obstacles impede the development of legislation for nature: cultural views, legal difficulties, and the refusal to grant other species the same standing as people.

It is impossible to study the evolution of scientific conceptions without considering the huge cultural context that permits scientists to first animate and then, but only later, de-animate them. The primary phenomenon is animation; de-animation is a secondary, supplementary, contentious, and frequently vindicatory one (Abram 82). Not that there are those who are still animistic, but the rather naive conviction that many still have in a de-animated world of plain material — precisely as they themselves multiply the agencies with which they are more intimately intertwined every day — is one of the fundamental riddles of Western history. The further we get in geo-story, the more difficult it appears to be to grasp this notion (Latour 7–8).

Another issue is that legislation's wording may be difficult to grasp. Furthermore, as compared to literary narratives and historical records, legal literature may be quite dry, and hence unattractive to individuals without legal training (Hillebrecht 5). As a result, the only way to bridge the gap between legal concepts and reality is to use an interdisciplinary approach with inputs from fields like sociology and anthropology as well (Hillebrecht 6).

The most worrisome issue — and the underlying cause of the other concerns described above — is that none of the natural objects, whether held in common or on private property, meet any of the three conditions of a rights-holder. They have no standing in their own right; their specific damages are not considered in determining the decision; and they are not the recipients of rewards. In this sense, common law, and even all but the most recent laws, have always seen these objects as objects for man to conquer, master, and use — much as the law formerly treated "man's" connections to African Negroes. Even where particular measures to protect them have been implemented, such as game seasons and wood cutting limitations, the overarching goal has been to conserve them for us — for the greatest good of humanity (Stone 463). Humans become Humanity, a solitary human enterprise, in the Capitalocene. They influence — or are influenced by — the 'vast powers of nature.' Humanity, however, continues to be cast as a geophysical force. This is the 'One System/Two Systems' conundrum that environmentalists face throughout the Two Cultures (Moore "Capitalism in the Web of Life" 173–174). Humans are seen as a single species within the web of life (One System). However, recognition is achieved by abstracting — rather than synthesising — the biology from human sociality. Society is represented as being apart from Nature (Two Systems) (Moore "The Capitalocene, Part I" 4). This also implies that capitalism operates in two registers: project and process. The overarching illusion of capitalism is that it can do anything it wants with Nature, that Nature is external and can be divided, measured, and rationalised to serve economic progress, social development, or some other greater good. This is capitalism as a project (Moore "The Capitalocene, Part I" 8).

Even great thinkers such as Immanuel Kant have claimed that animals are not self-conscious and exist just to serve a purpose — that end being man (Kant 239). Kant's argument for why humans are ends in themselves is that they are autonomous creatures, which in Kantian philosophy means that they can reason. But Kant shifts from arguing the virtue of autonomy or self-consciousness to claiming that "man" is the ultimate goal. It follows that human beings who are not self-conscious — perhaps because they are profoundly intellectually handicapped — are likewise only means to an end. As a result, even the Kantian method does not indicate that all humans have a higher rank than nonhuman creatures (Singer 573–574). Singer demonstrates how some humans have little or no speech, are capable of following simple directions, lack academic skills, and are unable to perform useful work. He gives us instances of nonhuman species' capabilities and cognitive abilities in terms of IQ and language comprehension — with an emphasis on great apes, border collies, and grey parrots (Singer 568) — and demonstrates how they are comparable to humans with impaired mental capacity. It is therefore apparent that humans do not have cognitive abilities superior to all other animals. On the contrary, many nonhuman animals have cognitive abilities that are much higher than those of certain humans, particularly those with serious mental disabilities (Singer 570).

If a person shows signs of senility and has affairs they are unable to manage, those worried about their well-being make such a showing to the court, and someone is assigned by the court with the responsibility of managing the incompetent's matters (Stone 464). According to the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, those with severe mental disability will always require considerable supervision, though they may learn some self-help skills (Singer 569). When a company becomes "incompetent," the courts appoint a trustee in bankruptcy or reorganisation to manage its business and advocate for it in court when appropriate (Stone 464). On the same lines of logic, we should have a mechanism in place wherein a friend of a natural object might petition to a court for the establishment of guardianship. As a result of the crossover in cognitive capacity between some humans and some nonhuman animals, attempts to establish a moral line based on cognitive ability will necessitate either the expulsion of some people, for example those who are profoundly mentally disabled, or the inclusion of some nonhuman animals whose levels of cognitive ability are equal to or superior to the lowest level found in humans (Singer 574).

Taking these considerations into account, Singer recommends that we forsake the concept of equal worth for all people in favour of a more graduated perspective in which moral standing is determined by some features of cognitive capacity, and that this graduated view applies to both humans and nonhumans (Singer 574–575). Singer suggests that the ability to talk or reason is irrelevant to the importance of avoiding pain and facilitating an enjoyable life (Singer 575). Pain and suffering are equally bad, and pleasure and happiness equally good, regardless of whether the being experiencing them is human or nonhuman, rational or nonrational, capable of discourse or not (Singer 576). As a result, the emphasis should be on sentient creatures. The cost of the boundary we erect between humans and nonhuman animals is enormous for millions of sentient beings — rights should be conferred to beings that can experience pleasure or pain, and this argument can be extended to some plants that can experience pain and qualify as sentient beings (Sopory and Kaul ii).

From the Capitalocene's diagnosis of ecological crisis as capitalogenic rather than anthropogenic, to Latour's Parliament of Things, to Singer's graduated moral standing — what emerges is a consistent argument: the gap between the human and the non-human is not natural. It is a construction, one that capitalism finds useful, and one that we have the conceptual tools to dismantle. The question is whether we have the legal and political will to follow through.

Works Cited

• Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Vintage, 1997.
• Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. "'The Anthropocene'" (2000). The Future of Nature. Yale University Press, 2013. 479–490.
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage, 1977.
• Hillebrecht, Anna Leah Tabios, and María Valeria Berros (Eds). "Can Nature Have Rights? Legal and Political Insights." RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society 2017, no. 6. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/8164.
• Kant, Immanuel, and Infield. Lectures on Ethics. Van Haren Publishing, 1980.
• Latour, Bruno. "Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene." New Literary History 45, no. 1 (2014): 1–18. doi:10.1353/nlh.2014.0003.
• Moore, Jason. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso Books, 2015.
• Moore, Jason W. "The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis." The Journal of Peasant Studies 44.3 (2017): 594–630.
• Singer, Peter. "Speciesism and moral status." Metaphilosophy 40.3–4 (2009): 567–581.
• Sopory, Sudhir, and Tanushri Kaul. "Sentient Nature of Plants: Memory and Awareness." Sensory Biology of Plants, 2019, pp. 621–42. doi:10.1007/978-981-13-8922-1_23.
• Stone, Christopher D. "Should trees have standing — toward legal rights for natural objects." S. Cal. L. Rev. 45 (1972): 450.