Inside the Global Industry that's Slaughtering Africa's Elephants
Somewhere along the way, our modern environmental movement took on an impersonal, abstract mindset, more about "habitat" than animals, and so fixated on broader economic agendas as to lose its basic moral vision as guardian of our fellow creatures in the here and now. Protecting animals from vicious people and reckless industries wasn't enough anymore. Economies had to be redirected, paradigms shifted, structural transformations of one kind or another set in motion. It's all carbon, all the time, and for all of the movement's alarmism on other fronts, somehow the end days of the earth's largest land animal has gone practically unremarked. Habitat without animals is just backdrop, quiet of life and morally meaningless. Environmentalism, without animal protection in the foreground, is just an argument about aesthetics and consumer rights. It's cheap nature worship, about us and not really about the world around us. I'm all for going green, but as a rallying cry it lacks something. "We lightened our carbon footprint," as a measure of virtue and moral endeavor, just doesn't have the solid, selfless ring of "We saved the elephants."
Then, too, whenever the travails of any African animal are offered as a serious public concern, there's always someone who thinks we all need reminding that great, too, is the human suffering there, and so why on earth are we so concerned about Africa's animals? The objection, for one thing, attempts to give a high-minded ring to an evasion of human responsibility. This is suffering of human agency, these are man-made miseries on a grievous scale, and that is always sufficient reason to stop the wrongdoers and protect the victims. Listen carefully to such criticisms, moreover -- lately offered under the prissy heading of Human Exceptionalism -- and you'll notice they are rarely arguments saying that we should do more for other humanitarian causes in Africa: more for the afflicted of Darfur, more for the victims of AIDS, more to reform our country's own food aid so that it serves African farmers instead of just American agribusiness, and so on. Mostly, they're just arguments for doing nothing about the elephants, or whatever, as if it is somehow offensive in principle to advocate all of these causes simultaneously. The complaint is a form of moral preening, more "exceptional" than human, and more irrelevant than ever at a time when Africans themselves are seeking our help, and when -- as we have learned in recent years -- their worst enemies and ours are profiting from the massacre of the elephants. You might say, again to borrow from Pope Francis, that helping afflicted humans and animals alike all has to do with "the advance of this world."
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/inside-the-global-industry-thats-slaughtering-africas-elephants/276582/?single_page=true
= new reply since forum marked as read
