Sixteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

In the field of sustainability studies, the question of ethics as it pertains to humanity’s understanding of the animal-as-subject remains largely uncharted. Concern with social equity constitutes a crucial element in any theoretical paradigm of sustainability, yet virtually nowhere within narratives of sustainability, broadly conceived, is the animal included within the conceptualization of the “social.” This refusal to legitimize the animal as subject, pervasive in the academic imagination as well as in real-world “sustainable” practice, and often induced by the privileged primacy of economic structures and cultural tradition, emerges as a profound and unacknowledged moral crisis in the underpinnings of sustainability discourse and practice. In narratives of sustainability, that crisis is thereby both theoretically and practically elided, the animal being negated, the animal body stripped of subjectivity and subsumed within anthropocentric categories of social and economic value. The animal as subaltern, however, is foundational to most of humanity’s structuring narratives– religious, cultural, social and, by extension, legal—and thereby central to the dominance of an anthropocentric worldview. Such a view, in addition to ignoring its own logical dissonance, capsizes the spiritual needs that underpin sustainability. The animal, in short, has become sustainability’s ghostly haunt. What is at stake in the acknowledgement of and subsequent inquiry into the animal’s subaltern status, and what fear of loss lurks therein in the human imagination, specifically with regard to cultural and spiritual awakening in response to environmental crisis?