Ethos

Last April, I had the opportunity to do a twenty-plus minute radio interview for ACT Radio, a bi-monthly program on KTEP–the NPR station in El Paso, Texas. It was broadcast as their Earth Day edition on April 22, 2007.

ACT Radio, or Animal Concerns of Texas, is produced by co-hosts Greg Lawson, Steve Best, and Elizabeth Walsh. Every other Sunday evening at 7:30, these radio activists offer a unique radio program in Texas that focuses on animals rights, human health, and related issues such as vegetarianism and the environment. I was very pleased when Steve Best called the EAOP office and asked if he and Greg could interview me on activist training in general and the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program at Antioch University New England in Keene, New Hampshire, in particular.

Well, I have now received the permission of KTEP’s general manager to offer this Earth Day edition of ACT Radio as a downloadable audio file through Real Player to all of you. (If you don’t have Real Player, you can download it for free right here.) My interview starts about 7 minutes into the program. You can jump to that if you like, but you might want to listen to the interesting news and commentary at the top of the show.

Once the program turns to my interview, I get to tell about my own journey to activism, the growth of my concern for environmental issues, two of the key educational inspirations behind the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program, some key elements of the EAOP curriculum, and the importance of increasing the number and quality of activist training programs within institutions of higher learning. I hope you enjoy the interview. I know I enjoyed doing it. Steve and Greg were great interviewers.

Steve Chase :: Jul.30.2007 :: Environmental Studies, Politics :: Comments Off

Readers of the Practical Ethics Blog may find the following site of real interest. It is Tierethikblog, an international blog and online journal about animal ethics. It is located in Germany, many of its features and posts are available in both English and German, and it is developing a wonderful set of links and resources. I will be adding Tierethik to my weekly reading list of blogs, and want to congradulate them on a job well done!

Here is how Tierethik describes itself.

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The Animal Ethics Blog is a bilingual online journal publishing articles related to animal ethics.

Blog articles are grouped in the following sections: Essays, Interviews, Literature, Proceedings, Science, Today´s Thinkers, Upcoming Events and Miscellaneous. After publication these articles are open for online discussion.

The journal was established and is run by the Interdisziplinäre Arbeitsgemeinschaft Tierethik (IAT), which is an initiative mainly consisting of Heidelberg University students but includes people of different backgrounds who want to offer a neutral discussion platform on issues concerning the moral status of animals.

Articles are written in English or German. Authors are students, IAT members, researchers and other people who want to support the discussion on animal ethics competently. In principle, The Animal Ethics Blog is open for everyone to write and submit an article.

After submission, an article has to undergo a closed review by IAT who has to grant permission before it will be published on The Animal Ethics Blog. Also all comments on articles are reviewed previous to publication.

The views expressed by the authors in their articles are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Interdisziplinäre Arbeitsgemeinschaft Tierethik, the IAT’s members or of anyone else associated with the IAT.

Please note: Any comments containing expletive language; personal attacks, in particular regarding the sexuality, gender, race, religion or nationality of another person; any illegal information or material; or any comments that contain subject matter deemed inappropriate by the website administrators will not be published on The Animal Ethics Blog.

Articels may be cited as follows:
Author Name, “Titel of the Article”, The Animal Ethics Blog, Date of Publication, Interdisziplinäre Arbeitsgemeinschaft Tierethik Heidelberg (ed.), URL: “URL of the Article”.
Example:
Katharina Blesch, “Emotionen und Gefühle bei Tieren”, The Animal Ethics Blog, 12. November 2006, Interdisziplinäre Arbeitsgemeinschaft Tierethik Heidelberg (ed.), URL : “http://tierethikblog.de/2006/11/12/emotionen-und-gefuhle-bei-tieren/”.

William Lynn :: Jul.03.2007 :: Animal Studies, Ethics :: 1 Comment »

At the recent Psychology-Ecology-Sustainability conference at Lewis and Clark College, I attended a workshop on the ethics of deep ecology. The facilitator of this one-hour session distributed a one-page handout with the eight core principles of the deep ecology movement. He then posed the question of whether we found it easy or hard to accept each particular principle.

My own response in the group was that while I might have worded some of these classic principles a bit differently, I have been strongly influenced by all of them-and they have shaped my work in creating an environmental activist training program at Antioch University New England. I then explained that my one big worry about these principles is that there is nothing explicit in them that articulates a clear ethical commitment to social justice, human rights, and the humane treatment of other human beings. I said this could leave these great principles of deep ecology ungrounded or unconnected in practice to an appropriate social ethics. If individual deep ecologists made these connections between social and ecological ethics then this made for a powerful ethical system, I explained. However, I worried out loud about the potentially nasty possibilities if a connection between social and ecological ethics was not made.

By way of example, I pointed out that a few Nazi leaders, and many of the German environmentalists that ended up supporting the Third Reich, held to many if not most of the deep ecology principles–and clearly did not connect them to a humane social ethic. At this point, the facilitator interrupted me and said that his workshop on deep ecology principles was no place to raise such questions and that I was being disruptive. He might have had a point there, though that was not my intent. Perhaps raising this issue was not helpful in an hour-long workshop among people who were mostly new to any consideration of the principles deep ecology. That seems like a possibility to me upon reflection.

What disturbed me afterwards, when the facilitator and I were talking about why he was so upset with me, was how important it felt to him that we needed to keep the eight deep ecology principles completely separate from any clearly articulated social ethics. He said any attention to social ethics would detract from a commitment to working for the earth. He repeatedly said to me that people who care about social justice “can’t be good allies for the earth.” He also said that trying to add some stated commitment along these lines to the deep ecology principles would take all the power and clarity out of them. He said it was his experience that no one resonates with a combination of social and environmental ethics and it had to be one or the other if you are going to inspire people and be an effective organizer.

Frankly, I was more than a bit dismayed by his claim that it would ruin the deep ecology and sustainability movement to do anything to help clarify a deep ecology position on social ethics. Nor did I agree with him that people would never resonate strongly with such an integration of social and ecological ethics. In my keynote address the next day, I added a section right in the beginning of my talk that would clarify my own integrative view of social and ecological ethics. To do this, I told a story about a small community organizing campaign in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Seattle some years back. The goal of this particular community coalition of churches, civic groups, and small-business leaders was to get the city council to change the name of the main street running through their neighborhood. They wanted to change the name of this street from the “Empire Way” to the “Martin Luther King, Jr. Way.” Here’s what I said during my talk:

After a few months, they got the city council to agree. The night after the vote, the neighborhood organizers invited community members to a large Baptist church for a victory celebration. That night, Vincent Harding, a long-time associate of King’s, spoke to the assembled community. He urged everyone there to fully embrace the deep symbolism of what they had just accomplished. As he said, “You have now changed the road you travel from the Empire Way to Martin’s way.” That has always stuck with me. Isn’t that exactly the challenge we all face today-changing the road we travel from the Empire Way to Martin’s Way?

For me personally, this means doing whatever I can to help weave together the “Beloved Community” that King so often invoked as his deepest, long-range vision. My sense is that this is also the deep, long-range vision of almost everyone here at this conference. I’m guessing that most of us here want to create a beloved community that includes in its circle of moral concern all people alive today, all future generations, and the more-than-human world that makes up our larger biospheric community.

Interestingly, in contrast to the workshop facilitator’s fear, this integrative ethical formulation resonated deeply with the participants at the conference and prompted a standing ovation. This was heartening to me. I urge us all to find a way to integrate a coherent, strong social ethic along with a profound commitment to deep ecological principles. I don’t want to pick one or the other. Nor do I think this either/or mentality is the best guide for our work in the future.

Steve Chase :: Jul.01.2007 :: Animal Studies, Environmental Studies, Ethics :: Comments Off