Respect or Die: Why Human Survival Depends on How We View Nature

Contemporary academic, political, and public debates teem with manifestos defining the rights of animals other than humans. At the same time, the rights of plants as well as the security of ecosystems and the Earth as a whole are gradually becoming a legitimate and popular topic in social discourse. Environmentalists have long been calling for a re-evaluation of the human attitude to nature.

Consequently, more and more people realize that Mother Nature can no longer be ruthlessly exploited. This gradual change of our approach to the natural environment is largely based on psychological factors: we’re empathetic and sensitive to suffering. In other words, our own heart tells us to respect and care for animals, plants, and nature as a whole. Indeed, emotions are a powerful motivator for taking action, but their force doubles when combined with the rational factor: scientific knowledge.

The Rational Stance: Freedom for Animals and Plants

Steven Best, an American philosopher from the University of Texas at El Paso and a co-founder of Journal for Critical Animal Studies, is a long-term advocate of animal rights. He argues that acknowledging other animals as moral agents is a logical continuation of the evolution of human morality. His works promote a balanced approach situated in between the extreme views of activists (such as those from the Animal Liberation Front) and the in-depth academic discourse of animal studies. It is a research perspective in which humanist reflection provokes an intellectual and conceptual transformation of the human attitude to other living beings.

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One of the first animal emancipation manifestos was drafted by Australian ethicist Peter Singer in his book Animal Liberation (published in 1975). More recently, an interesting attempt at developing a synthetic set of arguments supporting the rights of nonhuman animals was presented by American biologist Marc Bekoff, Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

His book The Animal Manifesto: Six Reasons for Expanding Our Compassion Footprint puts forward the following points: all animals share the Earth and we must coexist; animals think and feel; animals have and deserve compassion; connection breeds caring, alienation breeds disrespect; our world is not compassionate to animals; acting compassionately helps all beings and our world. Although Bekoff himself underlines his manifesto isn’t a radical one, its implementation certainly requires serious intellectual and emotional effort.

Animal emancipation is discussed from several perspectives, including the philosophical, ethical, religious, and legal one. This Gordian knot remains hard to cut, but intuition suggests that it’s the human who needs to take the first step and shed the conceptual limitations of late capitalism which prioritizes human profit and benefits.

Plant Emancipation: The Time Has Come

Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso, professor at the University of Florence and director of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, has proclaimed a ‘declaration of plant independence’. His book The Nation of Plants: A Radical Manifesto for Humans contains several theses which make up a broadly understood ecological manifesto: the Earth is home to all life forms; natural communities have indispensable rights; both present and future life deserves respect; access to clean water, soil, and air is a necessity; unlimited exploitation of natural resources must be prohibited; we should strive for a harmonious coexistence of all natural communities.

Today, researchers dealing with life sciences and natural sciences, environmentalists, and philosophers speak with one voice: the time has come to finally embark on a serious re-evaluation of the human attitude to the natural environment.

Acknowledging Nature: A Task for the Heart and Mind

The animal emancipation manifesto and the plant ‘declaration of independence’ are just two of the many calls for action published by the scientists who base their work on the rejection of speciesism. According to this view, the human is a special life form which enjoys a dominant and privileged position in nature; consequently, its interests prevail over those of other species.

Chantal Delsol, a French philosopher, political historian, and novelist, underlines that speciesism discriminates the natural environment and as such is destructive to our own world. To negate it, however, humanity needs to abandon its demiurge-like attitude and adopt the ways of a gardener. As demiurges, all we expect from our presence in nature is effective actions, material benefits, and accomplishment of utilitarian, marketable goals. Such behavior perfectly matches the reality created by profit-oriented capitalism.

A gardener in turn prioritizes fertile and biodiverse surroundings, believing that human coexistence with the natural environment bears the fruit of a good future. Life can be liberated and saved only if we develop the sense of a supraspecies community. The transformation postulated by Delsol is possible owing to the ‘heart’ factor: empathy, sensitivity, and a truly intimate relationship with nature will ultimately make us realize that non-human beings also have the right to live. Such a revision of attitude will then highlight the importance of a symbiotic coexistence with the environment as its further degradation will cause our demise too.

Once emotions rise, it’s easy to feel compassion for the endangered mountain gorillas, especially when pictured in the mist. We’re also instinctively sorry for a cat or hedgehog run over by a car. On the other hand, many people readily agree that a horse pulling a heavy cart overloaded with tourists is simply doing its job, or that farm animals are but a meat supply. Emotions trigger fierce reactions and then fade away as quickly as they rose. That’s why it’s so important to employ reason as the basis for our environmental awareness and our recognition of the rights due to other living beings. Contemporary science, especially ethological studies (like the one conducted by primatologist Dian Fossey, whose life is shown in a movie entitled—you guessed it—Gorillas in the Mist), keeps broadening our knowledge of nature.

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In other words, we know so much more today about the flora and fauna than we did, say, a hundred years ago. The dynamically developing natural sciences, in particular life sciences (such as evolutionism, neurobiology, and cognitive science), prove that the life of plants or animals cannot be reduced to simple instincts or the stimulus–reaction pattern. The existence of nonhuman beings is also complex, emotionally determined, empathetic, and sensitive to suffering. It proves more ‘human’ than we ever thought.

Safeguarding the rights of plants and animals is the guarantee of our own continued existence. Further deprecation of this discussion as an intellectual fancy good for philosophers, activists, or environmentalists is an action directed against humanity. Today, both our emotions (the ‘heart’) and science (the ‘mind’) teach us that the emancipation of all living beings is the precondition for the survival of life on our planet—and that includes human life too.

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Translation: Eleonora Joszko