Anna Peterson

Scientists are increasingly expected to not only produce objective science but also to use their science and expertise to support the public good. Prior studies indicate that scientists see both responsibilities as important; however, it is not clear how scientists manage these responsibilities when they are perceived to be in tension. In this study, scientists at land-grant institutions (n = 87) were presented with binary choices to identify where tensions may exist and how scientists make decisions between competing responsibilities. We examined nine categories of potential tensions: direct conflicts between objectivity and public impact, engagement in public outreach, communication priorities and approach, political engagement and perceived bias, the media, funding and disclosure, supporting/protecting specific causes, diversity, and ethical decision making. Results indicate that scientists belong to three cultures of ethical thought: arbiters, advocates, and brokers. These cultures roughly align with the scientist roles described by Pielke and suggest different prioritizations of commitment to public service relative to commitment to objective science, though both commitments were valued. There was variation across cultures of thought on whether scientists should openly support policies based on their research. Broad areas of agreement across cultures of thought were also identified. Scientists of all cultures of thought indicated a willingness to see themselves in a public role, communicating openly with non-experts on issues where scientific research intersects with the public good. There was also an expressed need for scientists to receive better training and tools to manage conflicting responsibilities.

Canine rescue is a growing movement that affects the lives of tens of thousands of nonhuman animals and people every year. Rescue is noteworthy not only for its numbers, but also because it challenges common understandings of animal advocacy. Popular accounts often portray work on behalf of animals as sentimental, individualistic, and apolitical. In fact, work on behalf of animals has always been political, in multiple ways. It is characterized both by internal political tensions, especially between animal rights and welfare positions, and by complex relations to the broader public sphere. I analyze canine rescue, with a focus on pit bull rescue, to show that an important segment of canine rescue movements adopts an explicitly political approach which blurs the divide between rights and welfare, addresses the social context of the human-animal bond, and links animal advocacy to social justice.

Americans increasingly cite moral values as a factor in how they vote, but when we define morality simply in terms of a voter's position on gay marriage and abortion, we lose sight of the ethical decisions that guide our everyday lives. In our encounters with friends, family members, nature, and nonhuman creatures, we practice a nonutilitarian morality that makes sacrifice a rational and reasonable choice. Recognizing these everyday ethics, Anna L. Peterson argues, helps us move past the seemingly irreconcilable conflicts of culture and refocus on issues that affect real social change. Peterson begins by divining a "second language" for personal and political values, a vocabulary derived from the loving and mutually beneficial relationships of daily life. Even if our interactions with others are fleeting and fragmentary, they provide a viable alternative to the contractual and atomistic attitudes of mainstream culture. Everyday ethics point toward a more just, humane, and sustainable society, and to acknowledge moments of grace in our daily encounters is to realize a different way of relating to people and nonhuman nature—an alternative ethic to cynicism and rank consumerism. In redefining the parameters of morality, Peterson enables us to make fundamental problems such as the distribution of wealth, the use of public land and natural resources, labor and employment policy, and the character of political institutions the preferred focus of debate and action.

Scholars have long recognized the central importance of the sea in the life and literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Thanks to the so-called spatial turn in the humanities and a growing interest in environmental studies among classicists, recent approaches have ranged from studies of the microecologies of the ancient Mediterranean to more focused discussions of maritime literature, culture, and history. These varied approaches are important because they have effectively made us as scholars less landlocked, reorientating our focus toward the sea as a pivotal space for the social, economic, and cultural life of the Greco-Roman world. In doing so, they have helped to expand the so-called canon of Greco-Roman... Read More.

In Thinking Like a Mall, Steven Vogel proposes an environmental philosophy “after nature,” meaning one that rejects the division of the world into wild and humanized spaces. This division is false because environments are always constructed by people, who are enmeshed in landscapes and ecological processes. The opposition between wild and humanized parallels the religious division between sacred and profane, according to Vogel. He believes this dualism is an inextricable part of religious worldviews and thus that environmental philosophy must reject religion. This understanding of religion echoes the work of many scholars of religion, who define religion in terms of an opposition between sacred and profane. However, this approach fails to take into account the many traditions that do not divide the world this way. In many cultures, the sacred is connected to the profane much as the natural and the human are intertwined in Vogel’s materialist philosophy. This entanglement is evident in ecological restoration, in which human actions help construct processes that ultimately transcend human intentions and control. I argue that this is a kind of transcendence, which points to a way in which religious language can help us think about a post-natural environmental philosophy.

Nonhuman animals play various roles in environmental ethics, often as charismatic symbols of wilderness or active participants in the natural dramas we seek to preserve. Sometimes, however, nonhuman animals do not fit into—and may even threaten—the “nature” that we value. There are two especially problematic animals: white-tailed deer and feral cats. Together, these creatures shine light on a number of important issues in environmental ethics, including the tensions between animal welfare and environmentalism, the ways human interests and categories pervade even ecocentric perspectives, and the complex place of science in environmental ethics and advocacy. Thinking through the issues raised by debates about deer and cats can contribute to a more adequate treatment of nonhuman animals in environmental thought and advocacy.

This review essay considers five recent books that address the ethical dimensions of human–animal relations. The books are David Favre, Respecting Animals: A Balanced Approach to our Relationship with Pets, Food, and Wildlife; T. J. Kasperbauer, Subhuman: The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes to Animals; Ben Minteer, The Fall of the Wild: Extinction, De-Extinction, and the Ethics of Conservation; Heather Swanson, Marianne Lien, and Gro Ween, eds., Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations; and Thom van Dooren, The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds.

For most people, animals are the most significant aspects of the nonhuman world. They symbolize nature in our imaginations, in popular media and culture, and in campaigns to preserve wilderness, yet scholars habitually treat animals and the environment as mutually exclusive objects of concern. Conducting the first examination of animals' place in popular and scholarly thinking about nature, Anna L. Peterson builds a nature ethic that conceives of nonhuman animals as active subjects who are simultaneously parts of both nature and human society. Peterson explores the tensions between humans and animals, nature and culture, animals and nature, and domesticity and wildness. She uses our intimate connections with companion animals to examine nature more broadly. Companion animals are liminal creatures straddling the boundary between human society and wilderness, revealing much about the mutually constitutive relationships binding humans and nature together. Through her paradigm-shifting reflections, Peterson disrupts the artificial boundaries between two seemingly distinct categories, underscoring their fluid and continuous character.

_Being Human _examines the complex connections among conceptions of human nature, attitudes toward non-human nature, and ethics. Anna Peterson proposes an "ethical anthropology" that examines how ideas of nature and humanity are bound together in ways that shape the very foundations of cultures. Peterson discusses mainstream Western understandings of what it means to be human, as well as alternatives to these perspectives, and suggests that the construction of a compelling, coherent environmental ethics will revise our ideas not only about nature but also about what it means to be human

I agreed to review this book based on the title alone (coupled with a cover picture of a adult pig and several piglets outdoors in the grass). My decision was justified, since it offers a coherent, detailed response to an important problem in animal ethics and animal welfare: the question of humane (or “animal friendly”) animal husbandry, especially in the meat industry, in which animals are raised with the end of being killed long before the end of their natural lifespan.Humane animal husbandry is based on two distinct assumptions. The first is that animals’ welfare matters, so that they should have pleasant lives and avoid unnecessary suffering. The second is that killing animals for food is morally justified. This is commonly justified, in both popular and philosophical discourse, with the claim that “the animals are granted pleasant lives, usually in connection with the claim that they would not exist at all if it were not for the purpose of our consumption. By consuming and farmin

This book explores the moral, social, and spiritual dimensions of ecological restoration. Gretel Van Wieren, a religion scholar, builds on the work of both critics and advocates of restoration to develop a balanced and well-informed approach to a controversial topic in environmental ethics. Ultimately she finds much value in restoration, as much for its ability to help build human community as for its contributions to ecological well-being. Restoration, she summarizes, is “the attempt to heal and make the human relationship to nature whole” (2).While she holds a generally positive view of restoration, Van Wieren consistently faces the ambivalence inherent in human efforts to recreate wild habitats. Restorationists are faced, as she explains, with “the simultaneous realities that they are in some sense making up nature as they go… and that natural processes are in some sense other than and beyond the human mind” (20). By keeping both these dimensions in mind, Van Wieren presents a balan

Themes of Christian martyrdom were central to popular political mobilization in El Salvador, as in much of Latin America, during the 1970s and 1980s. The story of Christ's sacrifice provided a powerful narrative for explaining injustice and political violence, a frame for interpretation as well as action during the twelve-year Salvadoran civil war, which ended in 1992 by a negotiated settlement. In the first part of this article we trace the politics of martyrdom and sacrifice through the war. The final sections of the article examine the place of narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice in post-civil war El Salvador. While most Salvadorans today continue to experience high levels of inequality, poverty, and violence, the narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice that animated the revolutionary movements and liberation theology of the 1980s have lost much of their resonance. We suggest that the dispersion of both the perceived sources of, and the imagined solutions to, injustice contribute to the diminution in the importance of Christian narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice in El Salvador today.

Environmental ethics has been dominated by an idealist logic that limits its positive impact on the natural world about which environmental philosophers care deeply. Environmental ethicists need to alter the ways we think and talk about what we value and the relations among ideas, values, and actions. Drawing on the sociology of religion and Marxian philosophy among other sources, a new approach may increase our understanding of how ideas are lived out and how we might increase the impact of our ideas about the value of nature.