Placing Animals in Urban Environmental Ethics

Placing Animals in Urban Environmental Ethics

Introduction

This article originates in twin concerns relating to animals and ethics. One concern relates to dominant ethical approaches to animals, the other to the apparent absence of animals from some work in environmental ethics, in particular, nascent research in urban environmental ethics. In this article, I want to explore both different ways of thinking about animals ethically and some aspects of how animals might be placed in urban environmental ethics.

For several decades now, the work of Peter Singer and Tom Regan has dominated animal ethics and has been the subject of classroom teaching, student texts, and academic discussion. Yet Singer's and Regan's respective utilitarian and rights approaches seem, as feminist writers such as Val Plumwood, Josephine Donovan, and Deborah Slicer claim, problematic in a variety of ways. I will not, in this article, revisit already well-made criticisms of the 'Singer-Regan approach.' Rather, I will think specifically about particular ethical issues raised by relationships with animals in urban environments. This approach differs from the thrust of utilitarianism or rights theories, since they tend to the view that ethical prescriptions are invariant among urban, rural, oceanic, and wilderness environments. In this sense, animal ethics in urban environments would be no different from animal ethics anywhere else. Rather, I will suggest that the complex nature of urban areas and the diversity of human-animal relationships within these areas raise very different questions for animal ethics than those raised within wilderness areas.

This leads to my second concern. As it is widely acknowledged, urban environmental ethics is an underresearched area. But in the literature which does exist, animals play very little part. Take, for example, the recent essay collection Ethics and the Built Environment. Only two papers in the volume mention animals at all, and both mentions are fleeting. Or, equally, consider Roger King's article "Environmental Ethics and the Built Environment." The article discusses the 'nonhuman' in general terms, but does not speak of animals specifically. It concludes by recommending four principles for the built environment. One of these is "The built environment should show respect for its users, both contemporary and future." The following discussion makes it clear that the users he has in mind are human users. Yet animals of different kinds use the built environment constantly, just as human users do. Urban environmental ethics has tended to focus on impacts of urban environments on human life, health, and happiness, and, in addition, on the environmental impacts of urban living. But in this important discussion of human/environment urban relations, animals disappear. They clearly do not fit into the human side of the discussion. So they become swallowed up into 'environment' or the 'nonhuman world.' But the place of animals in urban environmental ethics is not adequately considered by subsuming them into discussion of the environment in general. They are not just a contributing factor in the effects that urban environments have on people, nor are they just a part of the environment affected by human urban lives. Animals, as individuals and as groups, are invariably present in urban areas, where they live their own lives in relation to humans and human infrastructure, and their presence raises ethical questions and problems that require serious consideration in work on urban environmental ethics.

Clarifying Meanings: 'Animals' and 'Urban Areas'

Before proceeding with this discussion about placing animals in urban environmental ethics, I should clarify how I will be using the term "animal." Of course, as was acknowledged by Henry Salt in the nineteenth century-an acknowledgement repeated many times since-the term "animal" itself is a problematic one, both inasmuch as in this use it implies that humans are not animals, and also in that it collapses many different kinds of being into one class. Further problems are generated by the boundaries of what kinds of being are encompassed by the term "animal." For the sake of simplicity I will, in this article, limit myself to considering a certain limited group of beings: mammals and birds. This is not because I am setting up boundaries of moral considerability which disqualify other beings; rather, I am using mammals and birds to suggest some starting points from which broader work on animal ethics in urban areas might follow.

Second, I should explain in very broad terms how I am conceptualizing the animals I am discussing. Even within the boundaries I have already suggested, there are substantial differences among animals. But in simple and general terms, I am assuming that the animals I am considering are sentient; that it makes sense to say that there are things which are (or are not) in their interests and things which are capable of harming and benefiting them; that they have some kind, at least, of minimal practical consciousness; and that they have emotional experiences such as fear. This seems to be a reasonably uncontroversial view of animals (much less demanding, for instance, than the description Regan suggests in his characterization of being-subject-of-a-life in The Case for Animal Rights). Alongside this description, I also want to maintain the importance of two other animal characteristics. First, I want to work with the idea of animals as beings that can react to humans and other animals, or even resist them. I use the terms "react" and "resist" here in a sense derived from Foucault: to emphasize practices and actions rather than intentions. This ties in with Ingold's idea of minimal practical consciousness. Second, and relatedly, I want to emphasize the importance of animal relationships: both the relationships animals have with one another and the relationships they have with humans. Rather than thinking about urban animals as isolated individuals, I want to think of them as (like humans) enmeshed in a network of relationships. However, I do not intend by this use of 'relationship' to suggest that the relationship is necessarily one of affect-that is, as Noddings maintains, "saying something about the subjective experience of members in the relation." It may, and often will, have this characteristic; but some relations of material dependence, with which I am concerned in this article, may be without affect on one or both sides. In summary, then: in this article I will be thinking about mammals and birds as sentient, able to be harmed and benefited, with some kind of practical consciousness, and as reactive and relational beings. On this basis, I will assume that it is appropriate to think of animals as the kinds of beings to whom humans can have moral responsibilities, though to what degree and in what ways I do not want to specify more closely here.

Having said something about this understanding of animals, it would also seem appropriate to say something about how I am using the idea of the urban. This is, of course, a controversial subject. All kinds of issues are raised about (for instance) criteria for 'urbanness'; whether there is some kind of ontological divide between the urban and the wild (as is suggested, for instance by Keekok Lee); how to think about suburban areas; whether rural and 'wilderness' areas are equally human constructions, and so on. I do not intend to enter these debates here. I am working with a somewhat vague idea of urban areas as areas of dense human populations (though the degree of density, of course, varies) dominated by human constructions. I am not thereby intending to imply any ontological distinction between 'the urban' and 'the wild.'