Environmentalism and Posthumanism

Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism vol. 21, no. 2 (2013), 63–73 The American Humanist Association © 2013 Environmentalism and Posthumanism Paul B. Thompson Dr. Paul Thompson is a philosopher at Michigan State University, where he holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural Food and Community Ethics. The term ‘posthumanism’ has not been promoted by many environmental philosophers, and it is not clear how the figures I discuss would react to be being characterized as posthumanist. It is more typical for advocates of the perspectives I discuss to characterize them with labels such as ‘nonanthropocentric,’ ‘ecocentric’, or ‘deep ecology.’ Yet, as I will argue, the ideas that have emerged in these lines of thought reflect philosophical commitments that could aptly be characterized as posthumanist. Like most post isms, posthumanism designates a very obscure set of philosophical themes. In 2002, the conservative social critic Francis Fukuyama published a book entitled Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. Fukuyama’s use of the word ‘posthuman’ was intended to provoke a line of questioning directed at the possibility of technologies that would substantially re-shape the nature of consciousness and human experience. Although Fukuyama pointed toward biotechnology, the potential for intelligent robots and interfacing the brain with electronic sensing or processing capabilities was an important component of the potential to reshape consciousness into presumably unrecognizable forms. Posthumanism was something that Fukuyama was against (Fukuyama 2002). He was laying the foundations for an argument to regulate these technologies on grounds not unlike those discussed by Leon Kass, former chairman of the Bush Administration’s advisory panel on bioethics (Kass 1997). More generally, posthumanism is a term that has been used to classify a number of theorists in the continental tradition who, in some respects inspired by Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” argue that one should be skeptical about all claims to the effect that humanity or “the human” represents a stable or valid metaphysical category. A third strand of posthumanism emerges directly out of work in environmental philosophy and animal ethics over the last four decades. Its focus has been to challenge the view that all moral values must be grounded in human experience. My main focus here will be this last strain of posthumanism, though there are interesting an important ways in which this line of thought intersects with recent French and German philosophy. I will not be directly discussing the usage introduced by Fukuyama at all. The generally conservative elements in Fukuyama’s reaction to the 64 PAUL B. THOMPSON posthuman future may intersect with certain old school debates over the role of religion and religious faith in grounding value judgments, and I am sure that there are humanists who would find an examination of that intersection worthwhile. Nevertheless, these questions are somewhat indirectly related to the focus of my inquiry, and they shall remain tacit in my exposition. Indeed, the term ‘posthumanism’ has not been promoted by many environmental philosophers, and it is not clear how all the figures I will discuss below would react to be being characterized as posthumanist. It is more typical for advocates of the perspectives I will discuss to characterize them as ‘non-anthropocentric,’ ‘ecocentric’ or ‘deep ecology.’ Yet as I will argue, the ideas that have emerged in these lines of thought reflect philosophical commitments that could aptly be characterized as posthumanist. The contemporary era in environmental philosophy blends longstanding themes in the philosophy of nature and nature aesthetics with the understanding that the world is enduring an environmental crisis. While the former themes are seen to be as old as philosophy itself, the latter are viewed as being somewhat recent. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, published in 1962 is often credited as the touchstone for widespread awareness of environmental crisis, though certainly much earlier works, including George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864) or Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (Leopold 1949) could also be cited. John Passmore’s Man’s Responsibility for Nature (1974) established an enduring philosophical dialectic for analyzing environmental crisis and decay. Passmore asked if duties to preserve and protect nature and natural process required innovations in ethical theories, on the one hand, or whether they could be grounded in more conventional forms of moral obligation amongst human beings, on the other (Passmore 1974). This has proven to be an extremely fertile philosophical debate, with literally hundreds of contributions that have explored alternative interpretations of Passmore’s basic framing. I submit that a loose group of philosophies we might well refer to as ‘posthumanism’ emerges from those who have argued against Passmore’s conclusion. These theories hold that our responsibilities to nature cannot be derived from more conventional duties that people in the present generation owe to other human beings, including those in generations yet to come. There are a number of reasons why one might take this tack. First, as Richard Routley (later Richard Sylvan) argued, it is not difficult to generate widely shared intuitions that seem to indicate such duties. Routley proposed the “last man” thought experiment in which one assumes the role of the last person living and ponders whether it would be permissible to destroy intact ecosystems for one’s own amusement (Sylvan (né Routley) 2003). Few think that it would be. The project of arguing for direct duties to nature can be understood as one of first accounting for and then ratifying those intuitions. Second, some arrive at the articulation of duties to nature out of a more deeply felt dissatisfaction with mainstream neo-Kantian and consequentialist moral theory. Arne Naess’s version of deep ecology would be an example of a view that seeks to ground the aesthetic appreciation of nature experienced by many wilderness enthusiasts in a moral epistemology that interprets these experiences as cognition of something objective, real and actually existing in nature. Environmentalism and Posthumanism 65 Still other motivations for innovation in environmental philosophy had more of a practical and instrumental source. Much public policy analysis based on economic methods was effectively committed to the notion that preferences revealed in human behavior were the sole basis for evaluating the costs and benefits of a policy. Arguing for intrinsic values was strategically attractive for those who objected to the environmental policies that these methods were indicating. In legal settings, the question of “standing” was critical to whether a given set of interests could be viewed as material to the decision. Christopher D. Stone’s hugely influential Should Trees Have Standing? (1972) was originally conceived as a friend of the court brief intended to open the way for decisions that would recognize non-human entities including animals and ecosystems as having interests worthy of protection in the courts. The metaphor of legal standing shaped the philosophical debate launched by Passmore, as environmental philosophers questioned which entities are recognized as having moral standing, and which should be? As the question of moral standing was enjoined by those attempting to frame a philosophical response to environmental crisis, their enquiries converged with those of philosophers who had been arguing for a renewed attention to the interests of non-human animals. The current era in animal advocacy had its own origins at Oxford University in the 1960s, when a multidisciplinary group was moved to enquiry by Ruth Harrison’s 1964 book Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry. The discussion eventuated in the publication of Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Nonhumans, which was reviewed in 1973 by Peter Singer in The New York Review of Books. From the U.S. perspective, it was Singer’s review and his subsequent book Animal Liberation (1975) that brought the moral standing of animals to widespread attention. Singer’s core argument is widely known: It would be unethical, on any of many ethical theories, to allow a relatively trivial interest to override one’s obligation to alleviate pain and suffering being endured by others. In the case of his work on animals, this principle is combined with an empirical argument to show that animals used in laboratory settings and in industrial farming endure pain and suffering. He goes on to argue that species difference offers no ground to ignore this pain and suffering (Singer 1975). A second major line of thought in animal ethics was contributed by Tom Regan in The Case for Animal Rights. Regan argues that Singer’s view has all the faults of its utilitarian origins: It is possible to generate arguments that rationalize sacrificing fundamental interests of individuals to alleviate suffering among a larger group. But Regan’s basically Kantian form of moral theory engages the animal question at a metaphysical level. Kant is mistaken to presume that only human beings exhibit the traits requisite for generating duties of respect. Indeed, Kant’s view does not adequately protect human beings who lack the capability for acts of autonomy. If we view children and people suffering from dementia as having moral standing, we must adopt a metaphysical standard for moral standard that is much lower than full rationality. Animals, he argues, are subjects-of-a-life, so to be consistent we must accord all animals that have a sense of self, of their own interests and of the future the full consideration that we extend to all moral patients (Regan 1983). Certainly all of the themes discussed above could be and have been amplified and subjected to criticism. What is important to notice in the present context is the way that 66 PAUL B. THOMPSON Singer and Regan’s arguments in animal ethics intersect with a set of questions raised by philosophers attempting to understand and defend direct duties to care about and subsequently protect nature and ecosystems. The convergence of these two lines of thought has been characterized as “extensionism”: a strategy in philosophy that begins by noting that those features thought to ground obligations among members of the human community are not unique to human beings. If features such as having an interest, experiencing pain and suffering, or being the subject of a life are the basis for articulating a moral responsibility to other humans, they would also be a basis for justifying moral responsibilities to non-humans. Aside from Singer and Regan themselves, the most important extensionist in environmental philosophy may be Holmes Rolston III. Rolston has produced a number of works in which he motivates his view of duties beyond the human sphere in stages, beginning with arguments which note that ecosystems are the home of many non-human animals. Considered as individuals, these animals have interests in continuing to reside in ecosystems that go beyond interests they may have in avoiding the experience of pain or suffering. Humans and other animals share these interests, Rolston notes, though his point is to take us beyond a view of moral standing based on the capacity to experience pain and suffering. Rolston goes on to argue that the survival interest of individuals is grounded in the survival interest of a non-sentient entity, the species or breeding population. He argues that as individuals, both human and non-human animals have an interest in future generations that is transcended by the species’ collective interest in survival. But this interest does not depend on the survival of any particular individual. Rolston thus argues that it is possible to see the nature of survival interests being transformed as one extends the notions of reproduction and survival through ever more comprehensive biological systems (Rolston III 1999). There are, in fact, many points of difference among these environmental philosophies, as well as many points on which critics would note difficulties. For example, while Singer and Regan begin with an other-regarding feature (suffering in Singer’s case and subject of a life status in Regan’s) and then extend this to non-humans, Rolston begins with a self-regarding value, survival, and then argues that this value is adumbrated systemically throughout the natural world. Clearly, these orientations will generate rather different conceptions of moral obligation. Rolston’s strategy also shares elements with that of non-philosophers such as James Lovelock who argue that we should see the earth itself, or even the entire universe as a living entity. Despite all these differences, the crucial similarity lies in the way that these theorists begin by noting something about individual human beings that could be thought to ground a conception of moral obligation, and then attempt to show that this feature is not unique to individual human beings. Furthermore, all these theorists would disagree with Passmore’s original contention that duties to nature can successfully be articulated and defended within the constraints of moral theories that limit moral standing to the human species. Self-professed humanists will undoubtedly have a variety of responses to the lines of thought outlined above. However, to the extent that humanism is understood in terms of moral theories that are grounded in terms of duties that human beings have to other human beings, as distinct from duties that are owed to supernatural beings, we may speculate that Environmentalism and Posthumanism 67 the passel of theories just described violate the letter but perhaps not the spirit of humanist philosophies. To the extent that humanists argue against the idea that intentions of supernatural minds could be ultimate sources of direction or change in the cosmos, the theorists I have just described would almost certainly agree. Even those, such as Lovelock, Rolston or Naess, who entertain the existence of entities that transcend human consciousness do so in a thoroughly naturalistic vein. Those, such as Rolston or Regan, who are in dialog with religious thought construct that dialog in a manner consistent with many religious humanists. Humanists, and indeed anyone, might express concern that these extensionist trends might license forms of inference that would subjugate vital human interests to putative environmental values. Indeed, there is little doubt that the intent of all the philosophers discussed above has been to assert that there are some circumstances in which duties to non-humans would override at least some interests of human beings. However, it is also true that in no case have those cited above developed philosophies that would give the interests of nature untrammeled authority over those of human beings. All have developed highly nuanced ethical theories that discuss how vital human interests would be respected even given an axiology that implies moral standing for non-humans. Adequate discussion of this point would require delving into the details of these theories in manner that is not germane to the present context. Yet it is worth stressing that while some minor figures in environmental thought have expressed genuinely antihumanist sentiments, there is little reason to think that any of the theorists discussed above have views on moral standing that entail the sacrifice of those human values that humanists have elevated to the highest levels of moral importance. While there will certainly be room to debate the implications of extensionism on a case by case basis, extensionists have generally been careful to qualify their views in ways that leave considerable room for protecting human life and liberty. However, other trends in environmental thought owe a profound debt to critics of humanism that emerged from in the Continental tradition. These trends have focused especially on animals. The Continental thread in environmental philosophy has taken up the critique of dichotomous categories inherited from modern philosophy. The early versions of this critique arose from Henri Bergson, Wilhelm Dilthey and Edmund Husserl, all of who were reacting to the unprecedented rise of the natural sciences at the end of the nineteenth century and the accompanying transformation of the academy. A succinct statement of their concerns and counter-proposals defies imagination, but much potency was derived from noticing that the scientific worldview was built upon a set of implicit distinctions such as man vs. nature, nature vs. society, mind vs. matter and society vs. the individual. While implicit acceptance of the dichotomous nature of the categories implied by these distinctions had created an institutionalization of knowledge production activities that had enormous fecundity, the distinctions themselves were patently pragmatic in nature and their categorical institutionalization left many lacunae in academic practice. Later European philosophers that include Horkheimer and Adorno, on the one hand, and Foucault and Derrida, on the other, saw grave ethical and political implications as this compartmentalization of knowledge production became wedded to economic interests and the structures of state power. 68 PAUL B. THOMPSON Derrida in particular became interested in the implicit categorical distinction between the human and the animal. In one of his last works, he argues much of Western philosophy has been built on a presumptive dichotomization between human beings, or “man,” on the one hand, and all other animals. The lectures published in English under the title The Animal that Therefore I Am (Following) were delivered in Derrida’s usual inimitable and wandering style, and the text has numerous openings where multiple interpretations or developments might be inserted. However, a few points are made with uncharacteristic clarity. Most important is simply the assertion that a dichotomous categorization of humans and other animals has been assumed under a number of different guises in Western philosophy. Although Derrida sees the human-animal divide through the history of philosophy, he sees Descartes’ denial of mind to animals as its apogee. We are only now beginning to explore the implications of Bentham’s riposte: “But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” (Derrida and Wills 2002) Derrida is keen to suggest that the implications of Bentham’s challenge go well beyond our moral obligations to non-human animals. He notes that when “human” and “animal” marks the categorical divide, the enormous differences in the capacities and needs among non-human animals become sublimated into a generic, undifferentiated notion of “the animal”. He notes further that the prospects of seeing non-humans as individuals become diminished, as does the potential for interacting with individual animals in a manner that is presumed giving and receiving responses: response-ability. Derrida also undertakes a detailed discussion of the way that Freudian and post-Freudian thought, including that of Lacan, Deluze and Guaterri continues the Cartesian tradition, responding to Darwin by incorporating the human/animal divide into the subconscious. Various theorists in the tradition have reconfigured Freud’s original views on the sublimation of an animal id through the socialization process, but none have challenged the way in which “the animal” stands as that element in the human psyche that comes first, with humanity to follow through a process of differentiation and taming. Derrida is also careful to qualify the thrust of his remarks, emphasizing that it would be asinine to equate humans and other animals, or to regard humans and other animals as incapable of being differentiated. The ethical implications of his musings are taken up by theorists such as Mathew Calarco, Cary Wolfe and Kelly Oliver. All stress that it is the uncritical acceptance of dichotomous categories that permits the emergence of institutions and practices in which animals are subjected to abuse, or in the case of wild animals, where their homes and habitats are destroyed wantonly. All also stress an important distinction between an animal ethics that draws upon Derrida and the extensionist approaches developed by Singer and Regan. Succinctly, the problem with Singer and Regan is that both of them use cognitive properties characteristic of the human species to rationalize and justify extension of moral standing to non-humans. It is because non-humans experience pain, or are subjects-of-a-life, in either case just like humans, that non-humans deserve moral standing. In arguing this way, they never consider whether properties characteristic of a given non-human species, but not characteristic of human beings, could have importance for members of that species (Calarco 2008; Oliver 2010; Wolfe 2010). Environmentalism and Posthumanism 69 For example, hens have a biological drive to build a nest, but humans do not. On the animal ethics developed by Singer and Regan, affording moral consideration to this drive depends on reconciling whatever experience chickens have in connection with the frustration of this drive with the human-centered notions of suffering, in the case of Singer, or interests, in the case of Regan. Even more problematically, in navigating and controlling their environment many animals process sensory signals such as the polarity of light or sound waves that are unavailable to the human sensory apparatus. Actions that interfere with this processing seem to prima facie candidates for making a difference to these animals, yet it is difficult to see how the extensionist argument form that stresses the continuity between species can accommodate this profound difference. This type of critique, it should be noted, appears to be most persuasive among theorists who have argued against enlightenment moral theories on the grounds that they are insensitive to difference in race, gender or ethnicity. I do not propose to undertake a detailed evaluation of the posthumanist argumentative strategy in the present context. Wolfe, Oliver and Calarco develop somewhat more detailed versions of the general strategy I have outline here. I note also that it is theorists who argue along these lines that seem to be most comfortable calling themselves posthumanists. They share a generally pro-animal orientation with extensionists such as Singer and Regan. That is, they want to assert that moral obligations to non-humans are both more secure and farther reaching than many traditional ethicists might have thought. However, they distinguish their positions from those of Singer and Regan by arguing that Singer and Regan are still operating within the parameters of enlightenment philosophy. Enlightenment moral theories seek universally shared traits on which to ground moral duties, but this very orientation disrespects the multitude of ways in which individuals differ from one another. A truly posthumanist ethic recognizes the moral significance of difference and builds its understanding of recognition and response on the theme of respect for difference. However, these theorists also adopt a philosophical stance that is classically humanist in an important respect. All of them, and especially Wolfe, argue for the primacy of the humanities, by which we can understand discursive forms that stress narrative, metaphor and expressive potential, over empirical, analytic and quantitative forms of knowledge production more traditionally associated with the sciences. Wolfe is particularly effusive in making this argument as part of his attempt to dissociate his own form of posthumanism from the putatively posthumanist futures that were the subject of Fukuyama’s critique. Wolfe sees this “bad” posthumanism as an unconstrained development of the enlightenment project through technoscientific means. He seizes in particular on the work of Daniel Dennett as exemplifying the kind of posthumanism from which he wishes to dissociate himself. In his critique of Dennett, Wolfe ties Dennett’s interest in the scientific study of consciousness and his willingness to entertain the theoretical possibility of conscious robots to classically reductionist attacks on the validity of narrative discourse, on the one hand, and to anti-animal attempts to ground a sharp distinction between humans and non-humans in virtue of human linguistic capacities, on the other. 70 PAUL B. THOMPSON There is little doubt that Dennett has made a sophisticated cognitive science version of this latter argument in his book Kinds of Minds. There Dennett assembles a variety of findings from the study of animal behavior and the human brain to develop a hierarchy of self-replicating systems to which the general explanatory category of intentionality might legitimately be applied. Dennett finds even microbes and plants to exhibit forms of directedness and functionally purposive behavior. As he has argued throughout his career, Dennett believes that the animate control distributed throughout body tissues in all animals is the basis for more the complex central nervous systems in vertebrates that allow an organism to monitor first its own internal states, and subsequently the movement and intentions of other organisms in its environment. Dennett does not shy away from classifying these forms of systemic monitoring and control as forms of intelligence, but he does argue that the potential for symbolic labeling of items both within and outside the organism’s representational system facilitates levels of complexity in intentional systems that amount to a unique status for human capabilities (Dennett 1999). Dennett does indeed argue that human beings’ capacities for linguistic representation and manipulation of the complex of processes we typically call ‘thinking’ is the basis for a distinction between pain and suffering. In contrast, Wolfe argues that Dennett’s distinction “is based on a set of phantom abilities, anchored by but not limited to language and its imagined representational capacities in relation to the world of things, that no subject, either nonhuman or human, possesses in fact.” This critique forms the basis for a reassertion of the pro-animal stance that Wolfe reconstructs through quotations from Derrida: “the question [of human moral responsibility to non-humans] is disturbed by a certain passivity… a not being able… What of the vulnerability felt on the basis of this inability? … [W]hat is this non-power at the heart of power? … What right should be accorded it? To what extent does it concern us?” (Quoted in Wolfe, p. 46). This line of questioning suggests to Wolfe that the urspring of morality, so to speak, consists in responsiveness to this passivity, this vulnerability. The heart of posthumanism for Wolfe is summed up in his concluding riposte to Dennett: If it is true that cognitive science has an enormous amount to contribute the area of philosophy that we used to call phenomenology – if it has even, in a way, taken it over – then it is also true that the textually oriented humanities have much to teach cognitive science about what language is (and isn’t) and how that, in turn, bears on any possible philosophy of the subject (human or animal). This is simply to say that it will take all hands on deck, I think, to fully comprehend what amounts to a new reality: that the human occupies a new place in the universe, a universe now populated by what I am prepared to call nonhuman subjects. (Wolfe 2010, p. 47) Wolfe goes on to create a four celled diagram in which the philosophical positions of are positioned with respect to their commitments to humanism. The vertical axis of the diagram indicates the extent to which a philosophy is humanist in the sense that its ethical commitments are “pro animal” or “anti animal,” as I have been using these terms here. The horizontal axis indicates the extent to which a philosophy has metaphysical and epistemological commitments that are derived from what might be called “enlightenment Environmentalism and Posthumanism 71 humanism”: the presumption that forms of rationality, perception and experience characteristic of the human species – some would say the white male property owner – are taken be paradigmatic universals. Wolfe’s own labeling scheme for these cells places the thought of Rawls and Habermas into the Humanist Humanism category: philosophies that both retain enlightenment commitments and that afford no moral standing to nonhumans. The Humanist Posthumanists include Singer and Regan, who find a basis for pro-animal views within the enlightenment traditions. Wolfe classifies Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault as Posthumanist Humanists. They make the critique of foundationalism, yet show little affinity for nonhumans. Among a cluster of Posthumanist Posthumanists Wolfe includes Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway along with Derrida. Although there are any number of comments and criticisms that might be put forward with respect to each of the views that I have outlined here, I will conclude with three brief points. With the self-declared posthumanists and Derrida, I think that it is both correct and insightful to notice cultural and intellectual trends that can be usefully characterized as posthumanist. Just as many diverse philosophical viewpoints that emerged during the enlightenment and modernist eras can be characterized as broadly humanist in their respective commitments to forms of naturalism, to moral ontologies that enable human liberation and self-realization and to modes of expression celebrating the autobiography of the human species, the viewpoints surveyed above mark shifts in the trajectory of humanism that for all their diversity nonetheless add up to what Wolfe calls “a new reality.” I would go on to say that this characterization becomes increasingly less useful as one delves more deeply into the details of any given philosopher’s respective position. In the details, all these varieties of posthumanism diverge from one another. At the same time, none of the thinkers I have discussed here advocate a return to the philosophical/cultural constellation of ideas that humanism has opposed. In fact, I would go on to argue that the diversity could be expanded even more by recognizing how deeply it penetrates into the sciences themselves. Dennett’s own views notwithstanding, the scientific study of animal behavior and ecology contributes much to our species’ appreciation and grasp of value and our recognition of responsibilities to the other than human world. The presumption that the natural scientific disciplines are committed to foundational epistemology is not, in my view, borne out by the encounter with working scientists. When I proposed a sketch of posthumanism to one of my colleagues who studies the molecular biology of plants, her response was “All biologists have that view.” She retreated a bit when I pointed out that in my experience many scientists who work with laboratory animals seem wedded to a dichotomous view of humans and nonhumans almost as a psychological defense mechanism. It keeps them from having to think too much about the implications of their work. Nevertheless, in the writing of figures such as Donna Haraway, not to mention John Dewey, we find a perspective that retains a commitment to scientific methods as indispensible modes of knowledge production, yet which recognizes fully the contingency, fallibility and perspectival nature of the knowledge those methods produce. It is thus 72 PAUL B. THOMPSON possible, I claim, to maintain greater openness to intersubjective validity claims generated through methods specifically designed to generate such claims among a community of inquirers than Wolfe’s sweeping critique of cognitive science would seem to admit. To the extent that Derrida’s reflections are viewed as exercises in maintaining critical distance from our own community commitments, they are fully compatible with such openness. When our inquiries adopt the wide view of cultural process and intellectual trends that a meaningful interpretation of either humanism or posthumanism seems to demand, I am not sure that posthumanism is in any sense contrary to the general spirit of humanism. Post in the sense of after humanism it may nonetheless be. If this formulation helps us locate our current locus in the continuing autobiography of our species, that is enough to make a meditation on posthumanism worthwhile. REFERENCES Calarco, M. 2008. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press. Dennett, D. 1999. Kinds of Minds. New York: Basic Books. Derrida, J. and D. Wills 2002. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Critical Inquiry 28(2): 369–418. Fukuyama, F. 2002. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kass, L. R. 1997. “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” The New Republic 216: 17–26. Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oliver, K. 2010. Animal Lessons: How Animals Make Us Human. New York: Columbia University Press. Passmore, J. 1974. Man’s Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Regan, T. 1983. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rolston III, H. 1999. Genes, Genesis and God: Values and their Origins in Natural and Human History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Singer, P. 1975. Animal Liberation. New York: Avon Books. Environmentalism and Posthumanism 73 Sylvan (né Routley), R. 2003. “Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental Ethic?” in Environmental Ethics: An Anthology, ed. Holmes Rolston and Andrew Light (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell), pp. 47–52. Wolfe, C. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.