No Climate Justice Without Justice for Animals
Image: Percy J. Billinghurst, “An Animal Concert,” from Anecdotes of Animals (1905)
Zipporah Weisberg and Carlo Salzani
No Climate Justice Without Justice for Animals
As a social justice movement, climate justice recognizes the connection between the marginalization and exploitation of vulnerable human groups and the destruction of the natural world. However, climate justice falls short of fulfilling its mandate of inclusivity when it comes to other animals. While it does address factory farming, the climate movement focuses on the pollution, carbon emissions, and other environmental hazards associated with it, hardly uttering a word about the unspeakable suffering to which tens of billions of sensitive beings are subjected in factory farms. The silence around this topic is not only unjustified but also counterproductive. Just as there can be no climate justice without social justice, there can be no climate justice without justice for animals.
1. “We Have Cut Away the Very Foundation of Life”
The Living Planet Report 2022, released in October 2022 by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in collaboration with the Zoological Society London (ZSL), draws attention to the alarming rate at which the world’s wildlife populations have been decimated in recent decades. The report documents an average 69% decrease in monitored populations between 1970 and 2018, with Latin America showing the steepest regional decline (94%). Meanwhile, freshwater fish have seen the greatest overall global drop (83%).[1] Key drivers of species depletion are listed as loss and fragmentation of habitat, deforestation, overexploitation, pollution, disease, so-called “invasive” species, and climate change. Andrew Terry, director of conservation and policy at ZSL, laments that “we have cut away the very foundation of life,” joining the chorus of scientists and activists who have been calling for decades (and in vain) for governments and international organizations to “take action.”[2]
The human cost of climate change is no less enormous. The decimation of habitats, the contamination of water supplies, the degradation of the soil, and the pollution of the atmosphere are growing threats to human life. They lead to droughts, floods, poverty, and famine, exacerbate geopolitical conflict, and cause the displacement of entire populations. Meanwhile, the spoliation of ecosystems impedes the “ecosystem services” that support and regulate human life (such as the pollination of crops),[3] and the growing anthropization of increasingly large territories contributes to the introduction and diffusion of virulent pathogens that pose a major threat to human health. As Dave Goulson has remarked, the war we are waging against nature is inevitably a war against ourselves.[4]
The climate justice movement addresses these problems head-on, providing a much-needed alternative to mainstream, pro-business, government-led approaches. The notion of “climate justice” dates back more than two decades, with one of the first uses occurring in a 1999 report by the NGO CorpWatch titled “Greenhouse Gangsters vs. Climate Justice.”[5] The following year, the first Climate Justice Summit was organized by CorpWatch in parallel (and contrast) to the COP6 negotiations in The Hague. Many events followed, including the Earth Summit in Bali in 2002, the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in 2010, and the People’s Summit for Climate Justice in November 2022. Dozens of climate justice groups, such as Global Justice Now, Climate Justice Alliance, Climate Justice Coalition, and Climate Justice Action, formed over the decades.
As a social justice movement, climate justice highlights the inequities created by the climate crisis, including its starkly disparate impacts on human populations across the planet. It points out that gender, race, ethnicity, age, and income are determinant factors in how people are affected, and that those most harmed by climate change are the most vulnerable members of the population: the poor, racial minorities, women, and indigenous people. However, other animals are largely absent from discussions about the climate catastrophe, even though they are among those most gravely impacted. In animal agriculture, one of the most environmentally destructive industries on earth, hundreds of animal species are going extinct while tens of billions of animals are forced to live in factory farms under abominable conditions before being shipped off to their violent deaths. 7 billion animals, most of them infants, have so far been killed for food and other by-products in the United States this year alone, and more than 150 billion animals are slaughtered globally each year.[6]
Climate justice advocates criticize Agribusiness for the harm it does to the environment but remain virtually silent on its harm to other animals. While methane gas production, carbon emissions, and the burning of the Amazon to create grazing ground for cattle arouse disquiet, the mutilation, extreme confinement, beating, and mass killing of animals go largely unmentioned. In its silence on systemic violence against animals, the climate justice movement renders itself complicit in one of the gravest injustices of our time. Just as there can be no climate justice without social justice, there can be no climate justice without justice for animals.
2. Climate Justice Is Social Justice
The climate justice movement has made it abundantly clear that climate change is a question of human rights[7] and, most of all, of social justice. The movement poses a robust challenge to global leaders and governmental organizations who ignore the core injustices underlying climate change, perpetuate a myth of technological fixes, and make false promises to reduce carbon emissions year after year. In contrast to the mainstream, pro-business, Euro-American-led approach to the climate crisis, climate justice groups challenge elitism, promote grassroots democracy, and draw attention to the plight of the global south. Global Justice Now, for instance, declares itself to be “a democratic social justice organisation working as part of a global movement to challenge the powerful and create a more just and equal world. We mobilise people in the UK for change, and act in solidarity with those fighting injustice, particularly in the global south.”[8] Climate Justice Alliance focuses on the relationship between exploitative systems of production and political oppression, insisting that race, gender, and class equity are integral to transformation:
Our translocal organizing strategy and mobilizing capacity is building a Just Transition away from extractive systems of production, consumption and political oppression, and towards resilient, regenerative and equitable economies. We believe that the process of transition must place race, gender and class at the center of the solutions equation in order to make it a truly Just Transition.[9]
Climate advocates identify a “triple injustice” at play in the climate crisis: 1) disadvantaged groups, who are the least responsible for climate change, suffer its worst consequences; 2) affluent countries of the global north, and affluent classes everywhere, who are the most responsible for global warming, are the least impacted by it; 3) marginalized groups, who have the fewest resources, are left to cope with little or no support. To redress the many social injustices, they call for a fair distribution of benefits and burdens.[10] But in the urgent and important work being done by climate justice groups around the world, one particularly vulnerable group is conspicuously absent: nonhuman animals.
3. The First Extermination Event?
It is now widely accepted that humans have brought about the “Sixth Mass Extinction.”[11] There is a clear sense of panic about what we have done to create this apocalyptic scenario, and ordinary people and grassroots activists, if not governments, are making a genuine effort to find solutions. Our sense of culpability is demonstrated in the names we give to this latest extinction event: “Anthropocene Extinction,” “Capitalocene Extinction,” and “ecocide.”[12] Justin McBrien proposes fully renaming it as “The First Extermination Event” to highlight that it is not a passive geological event like the previous five extinction events, but an extermination event, an “active, organized eradication” that is pushing the earth to the brink of what McBrien calls the “Necrocene.”[13] To this already long list of ghastly neologisms, Danielle Celermejer adds that of “omnicide,” the “killing of everything,” threatening the very existence of life on earth.[14]
The alarmist language is quite appropriate: these cataclysmic events are crimes on a planetary scale, the responsibility for which can and must be identified and the culprits held accountable. Although no single entity can be blamed, human hubris, coupled with an inherently exploitative economic system, are ultimately at fault. But even the neologisms cited above do not capture the specific problem of animal extermination. The use of the term “ecocide” rather than “zoocide,” for example, glosses over the confinement, torture, and killing of animals in factory farms and research laboratories, zoos, circuses, rodeos, county fairs, and so on. “Omnicide” properly highlights the totality of the destruction, but another term that underlines the ruthless taking of nonhuman animal life would ensure that violence against other animals is no longer overlooked or overshadowed.[15]
To be sure, animal agriculture is often identified as a major contributor to climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly urged the public to reduce its meat and dairy consumption and shift toward a plant-based diet.[16] However, human atrocities against animals themselves seem to carry no moral or political weight in the climate movement. When activists do express concern about (rather than for) domesticated animals, it is typically in instrumentalist terms, as food or resources. When nonhuman animals, such as the ubiquitous panda or polar bear, are invoked in climate justice campaigns, it is typically as symbols of a threat to human survival. In documents and declarations such as the Principles of Environmental Justice (1991) or the Bali Principles of Climate Justice (2002),[17] other animals are relegated to secondary or indirect moral concern: while nonhumans may also impacted by ecological crises, humans remain the primary focus.[18]
Extinction Rebellion, one of the most radical climate justice movements in recent years, which calls for immediate and urgent attention to the climate crisis through direct action and spectacle, is a case in point:[19] it refuses to acknowledge that the systematic torture and killing of animals in factory farms is in itself objectionable. The movement holds public funerals for extinct species but neither acknowledges nor honors animals who do not fall under the category of “wild.”[20] Its insistence on drawing a line between lives and deaths that matter and those that do not is so strong that a breakaway group (Animal Rebellion, now known as Animal Rising) had to form to address atrocities against animals.[21] With its integrated focus on interlocking oppressions, Animal Rebellion is perhaps the only truly multispecies climate justice group in existence. But it cannot win the fight alone, and certainly not as an appendage to another, more powerful group. Some climate justice activists, such as Greta Thunberg, are vegan, but they remain the exception. In its silence on animal oppression, the climate justice movement comes to resemble its mainstream counterparts and undermine its own commitment to justice.
The omission of animals from the climate justice debate is no accident. It is part of a millennia-long campaign of literal and figurative animal-erasure. Human beings have been systematically liquidating other animals through agricultural, industrial, and economic activities for millennia, with the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries proving to be the most catastrophic thus far. In the words of Dinesh Wadiwel,[22] animals are under siege, captured, and at perpetual risk of injury and death in the “topography of enmity”[23] human beings have created. Whether domesticated or undomesticated, confined or “free,” whether on land or in the sea, other animals are victims of a monumental ideology and system of extermination.
One might go so far as to say that farmed animals, reproduced by the billions, are among the greatest victims of “extinction,” if we understand extinction to include the elimination of certain species as subjects of meaningful lives. Other animals are extinguished as subjects through their over-(re)production as commodities and doubly liquidated by way of aggressive genetic manipulation. The death of one individual is merely a question of economic value. In itself, the individual animal is worthless. Another will be produced to replace it. And then another to replace it. Farmed animals are so expendable that their disposal in “dead piles” or their status as “dead on arrival” are factored into costs at little or no loss. Farm subsidies make up for any expenses that might otherwise be incurred and keep the price of flesh and body fluids low.
Small-scale farming is no less exterminationist than Agribusiness. Eager as we are to indulge our pastoral fantasies of “happy animals” and “humane” farming, of which many climate justice activists are proponents, “local” farms are just as nefarious as factory farms and grounded in the same zoocidal ideology. No matter how “nicely” animals are treated (and they are, more often than not, not treated nicely), they are property, not individuals or subjects. In some cases, animals on small farms might be named and even cuddled and coddled for a time, but they are eventually snuffed out at the whim of their owners. Just like their factory farmed counterparts, animals in local outfits have no claim to freedom, or to life as such, let alone a meaningful life. Their function is to provide consumable and profitable products.
4. Why Us and Not Them? Why Not Us and Them?
The anthropocentric tendency in the climate justice movement is contradictory. The climate catastrophe cannot be curtailed, let alone overcome, without addressing the plight of arguably the most vulnerable beings affected by climate change and by human activity as a whole, the victims of the most brutal forms of injustice, the same beings that are least responsible for it[24] and have the fewest resources to cope with it: nonhuman animals. There is no question that human beings living in the global south are victims of the triple injustice of climate change, but there is no reason why recognizing their horrible predicament should require ignoring that of other animals. Doing so only exacerbates the problem, not least by reinforcing an arbitrary binary between “us” and “them,” a binary that underlies all forms of injustice. Just as human families, communities, and societies in the global south are being torn apart, destroyed, and wiped out because of climate change, so are nonhuman families, communities, and societies. Just as human beings are subjected to hideous suffering because of climate change, including starvation, disease, forced migration, and homelessness, so are other animals. Just as human beings are ruthlessly exploited and enslaved by big business, so are other animals.
The fact that humans and other animals are systematically abused on an unprecedented scale in the name of profit should inspire a sense of transspecies solidarity. But speciesism has been so deeply internalized by humans, and violence against other animals so normalized across time and space, that it does not even occur to most people, climate activists included, to question human entitlement to other animals’ bodies.
There must be a reason why the dread and anxiety we all feel when we learn of yet another “wild” animal species going extinct is replaced by total indifference when we learn about the slaughter of domesticated animals for profit, whether on family farms or in industrial slaughterhouses. Is it because we have aestheticized, reified, and fetishized “the wild” (and the beings who inhabit it) as an object of wonder and enchantment to the point that we are loath to lose the aesthetic pleasure it brings us? Is it because, if we faced the horror of what we are doing to pigs, chickens, cows, goats, sheep, and other domesticated animals, we would have to give up eating them, wearing their skin and fur, and drinking their mothers’ milk?
The climate justice movement, as well as the wider public, seem to be much less bothered by the suffering of individual animals than the disappearance of (wild) species. Perhaps this is because a “species” is, in its abstractness, less threatening to consider than an “individual” or a “person.” The moment one considers the experience of an individual animal, an animal person witnessing the death of their family and friends, one is likely to be more emotionally disturbed. We run from this feeling, even if it might lead us to greater awareness, compassion, and genuinely transformative action—genuine social justice for all, not just for an elect group (humans).
5. No Multispecies Justice with Capitalism
To meet the urgent need for a more inclusive concept of (climate) justice, animal advocates and scholars have developed theories of “multispecies justice.”[25] Broadly understood, multispecies justice rests on two fundamental principles: a relational approach to justice and the decentering of the human. The former principle needs to acknowledge the differential histories and practices of environmental and ecological violence; only thus will it be able to foster inclusive, interacting, functioning, and flourishing environments as well as possible pathways toward more just futures. At the same time, while decentering the individual, a theory (and practice) of justice also needs to decenter the human (or, which is the same, the individualist and exceptionalist notion of human subjectivity) and recognize the network of multiple, everyday interactions that binds together all beings, human and more-than-human. To acknowledge the complex and inextricable web of relations upon which our very life depends is an essential component of any attempt to address the climate crisis.[26]
Notable theories of animal justice exist: Martha Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, and Species Membership (2006) and, more recently, Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility (2022); Sue Donaldson and Will Kimlicka’s Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (2011);[27] Alasdair Cochrane’s Animal Rights Without Liberation (2012);[28] Robert Garner’s A Theory of Justice for Animals (2013);[29] and Brian Baxter’s A Theory of Ecological Justice (2005), which includes provisions of justice for nonhuman beings.[30] Nussbaum proposes a “capabilities approach,” grounding justice on the satisfaction of species-specific capabilities.[31] Donaldson and Kymlicka offer a robust political theory of animal rights in which animals are considered sovereign subjects, denizens, and citizens, or fully-fledged members of a diverse, dynamic, and democratic political community. Angie Pepper, another animal studies scholar, attempts to bridge the gap between theories of animal and climate justice by arguing for a cosmopolitan approach to climate justice. Developing what she calls a “radical equality thesis,” Pepper holds that climate justice for nonhuman animals cannot be limited to “duties of mitigation” (i.e., reducing the pressure of human exploitation) but must include “duties of adaptation” that facilitate the adjustment to anthropogenic climate change.[32] Pepper’s proposal is certainly compelling but, as Charlotte Blattner and Eva Meijer remark, it remains within the traditional purview of animal ethics and fails to address the inherent and fundamental political dimension of the problem.[33]
As important and diverse as these contributions are, they share a foundation in the Western liberal political tradition and therefore take capitalism for granted as an economic system that, though it might require reform, is not otherwise mutually exclusive with justice. In reality, though, all these forms of injustice are inextricably linked with global capitalism. Climate change is undeniably the product of an economic, social, cultural, and political system that, in little more than two centuries, has dramatically changed the world (the most appropriate moniker for our age is, therefore, “Capitalocene”[34]). The scale of injustice humans, other animals, and the earth are facing would never have been reached without global capitalism.[35] While it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss in detail the role of capitalism in exacerbating the climate crisis (and other injustices),[36] it is evident that the global system of mass production and consumption is hugely destructive, generating enormous amounts of plastic waste, industrial waste, toxic run-off, and carbon emissions, and causing enormous pain and terror to both humans and other animals, to say nothing of the outrages of the equally lucrative and exploitative extractive industries.[37]
It is misguided, to say the least, to assume that justice for anyone can be achieved while such an inherently violent system remains in place. And to assume that social and climate justice can be achieved while other animals continue to be massacred without a second thought only intensifies the crisis. For there to be any hope of achieving social and climate justice, there must be justice for other animals. The first step to achieving justice for animals is to oppose their exploitation and killing. Then the real conversation can begin.
ZIPPORAH WEISBERG is an independent scholar based in Vienna, Austria. CARLO SALZANI is a research fellow at the department of philosophy of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and a faculty member of PICT.
zipporah.weisberg@gmail.com; carlo@parisinstitute.org
dePICTions volume 3 (2023): Critical Ecologies
[1] R.E.A. Almond, M. Grooten, D. Juffe Bignoli, and T. Petersen, eds., Living Planet Report 2022 – Building a Naturepositive Society, Gland: WWF, 2022.
[2] Emphasis added. The report received heavy press coverage; for some examples, see “‘Lights flashing red’ for wildlife amid 69% populations decline,” Al-Jazeera, 13 October 2022 [21 December 2022]; Hafsa Khalil, “Global wildlife populations have declined by 69% since 1970, WWF report finds,” CNN, 13 October 2022 [21 December 2021]; Gloria Dickie, “Global wildlife populations have sunk 69% since 1970 – WWF report,” Reuters, 13 October 2022 [21 December 2022]; Patrick Greenfield and Max Benato, “Animal populations experience average decline of almost 70% since 1970, report reveals,” The Guardian,13 October 2022 [21 December 2022].
[3] This point is also emphasized in the WWF press release for the Living Planet Report 2022: “These plunges in wildlife populations can have dire consequences for our health and economies,” says Rebecca Shaw, global chief scientist of WWF. “When wildlife populations decline to this degree, it means dramatic changes are impacting their habitats and the food and water they rely on. We should care deeply about the unraveling of natural systems because these same resources sustain human life” (“69% average decline in wildlife populations since 1970, says new WWF report” [22 December 2022]).
[4] Dave Goulson, Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse, New York: Harper Collins, 2021, quoted in Alice Crary and Lori Gruen, Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022, 126.
[5] Kenny Bruno, Joshua Karliner, and China Brotsky, Greenhouse Gangsters vs. Climate Justice, San Francisco, TRAC—Transnational Resource & Action Center, 1999 [22 December 2022].
[6] See AnimalClock for the latest numbers.
[7] See, for instance, Amy Sinden, “Climate Change and Human Rights,” Journal of Land, Resources, and Environmental Law 27.2 (2007): 255-273; Ottavio Quirico and Mouloud Boumghar, eds., Climate Change and Human Rights: An International and Comparative Law Perspective, London: Routledge, 2016.
[8] https://www.globaljustice.org.uk
[9] https://climatejusticealliance.org/about/
[10] For a general introduction to these issues, see Dominic Roser and Christian Seidel, Climate Justice: An Introduction, London: Routledge, 2017.
[11] The scientific and popular literature on this topic is extensive. For some basic (and popular) references, see Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind, New York: Doubleday, 1995; Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2014.
[12] See, for instance, Franz J. Broswimmer, Ecocide: A Short History of the Mass Extinction of Species, London: Pluto Press, 2002.
[13] Justin McBrien, “This is Not the Sixth Extinction. It’s the First Extermination Event,” Truthout, 14 September 2019 [21 December 2022]. See also Justin McBrien, “Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene,” in Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Oakland: PM Press, 2016, 116-137.
[14] Danielle Celermajer, “Omnicide: Who is responsible for the gravest of all crimes?” ABC Religion and Ethics, 2 January 2020 [21 December 2022].
[15] Celermajer’s attempt to capture the breadth of the crime with a neologism certainly does not intend to erase the importance of individual deaths, and in Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2021), the scholar explicitly addresses the critical importance of individual lives and the danger of “flattening” individual deaths as if they were mere units. Our point, however, is that, in grouping all these different crimes under one label, these terms defuse the specificity of the crimes proper to animal agriculture and animal exploitation.
[16] For an example (among many), see Quirin Schiermeier, “Eat less meat: UN climate-change report calls for change to human diet,” Nature, 12 August 2019 [17 February 2023].
[17] “Principles of Environmental Justice,” First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, Washington, D.C., 24-27 October 1991 [23 December 2022]; “Bali Principles of Climate Justice,” International Climate Justice Network, 28 August 2002 [23 December 2022].
[18] Claire Palmer, “Does Nature Matter? The Place of the Non-human in the Ethics of Climate Change,” in Denis G. Arnold, ed., The Ethics of Global Climate Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 272-291, here 272. This also seems to be the bottom line in many discussions on animal ethics and climate change, for instance in Jeff Sebo’s new book, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves: Why Animals Matter for Pandemics, Climate Change, and other Catastrophes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). While the argument is that we should save nonhuman animals, the ultimate reason is that it is the only way to save ourselves.
[20] Before learning about and joining Animal Rebellion (UK), one of us was a member of Extinction Rebellion and tried to draw attention to farmed animals in the funeral processions. Their proposal was swiftly and firmly rejected.
[21] https://www.animalrising.org/
[22] Dinesh J. Wadiwel, The War Against Animals, Leiden: Brill, 2015.
[23] Timothy Pachirat, “Sanctuary,” in Lori Gruen, ed., Critical Terms for Animal Studies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018, 339.
[24] There is an unsavory argument that blames domesticated animals, and especially those raised in animal agriculture, for being destructive to the environment. The livestock sector is said, for example, to be responsible for up to 51% of greenhouse gas emissions (for a discussion of these numbers, see the appendix to Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, 227-232). We do not think it necessary to emphasize the distasteful hypocrisy of this blaming of the victims.
[25] See, for instance, Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011; Eben Kirksey, ed., The Multispecies Salon, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014; Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. See also Danielle Celermajer et al., “Multispecies Justice: Theories, Challenges, and a Research Agenda for Environmental Politics,” Environmental Politics 30.1-2 (2021): 119-140; Petra Tschakert et al., “Multispecies Justice: Climate-just Futures With, For and Beyond Humans,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 28 December 2020 [26 December 2022].
[26] Charlotte Blattner and Eva Meijer, “Animals and Climate Change,” in Hanna Schübel and Ivo Wallimann-Helmer, eds., Justice and Food Security in a Changing Climate, Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2021, 64-70, here 69.
[27] Sue Donaldson and Will Kimlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
[28] Alasdair Cochrane, Animal Rights Without Liberation: Applied Ethics and Human Obligations, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
[29] Robert Garner, A Theory of Justice for Animals: Animal Rights in a Nonideal World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
[30] Brian Baxter, A Theory of Ecological Justice, London: Routledge, 2005.
[31] Martha Nussbaum, “Beyond ‘Compassion and Humanity’: Justice for Nonhuman Animals,” in Cass R. Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum, eds., Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 299-320; Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006; Martha Nussbaum, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023. See also David Schlosberg, who tries to adapt the capabilities approach to climate justice in “Ecological Justice for the Anthropocene” [REFERENCE MISSING].
[32] Angie Pepper, “Beyond Anthropocentrism: Cosmopolitanism and Nonhuman Animals,” Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric, 9.2 (2016): 114-133; “Justice for Animals in a Globalizing World,” in Andrew Woodhall and Gabriel Garmendia da Trinidade, eds., Ethical and Political Approaches to Nonhuman Animal Issues, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 149-176; “Adapting to Climate Change: What We Owe to Other Animals,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 36.4 (2019): 592-607.
[33] Blattner and Meijer, “Animals and Climate Change,” 67.
[34] See, for instance, Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Binghamton: PM Press, 2016; Armel Campagne, Le Capitalocène: Aux racines historiques du dérèglement climatique, Paris: Éditions Divergences, 2017.
[35] For some discussions of the relationship between climate change and capitalism, see Max Koch, Capitalism and Climate Change: Theoretical Discussion, Historical Development and Policy Responses, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; Mark Pelling, David Manuel-Navarrete, and Michael Redclift, eds., Climate Change and the Crisis of Capitalism: A Chance to Reclaim, Self, Society and Nature, London: Routledge, 2011; Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014; Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg, Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-Destruction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015; David Camfield, Future on Fire: Capitalism and the Politics of Climate Change, Binghamton: PM Press, 2022.
[36] This role has been extensively theorized in eco-Marxist literature. The relationship between capitalism and animals has been specifically addressed, for instance, by Maan Barua, most recently in Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023.
[37] Some multispecies justice theorists have indeed addressed the problem of capitalism. See, for instance, Celermajer et al., “Multispecies Justice”; Tschakert et al., “Multispecies Justice”; Danielle Celermajer et al., “Justice Through a Multispecies Lens,” Contemporary Political Theory 19.3 (2020): 475-512; Danielle Celermajer, David Schlosberg, Dinesh Wadiwel, and Christine Winter, “A Political Theory for a Multispecies, Climate-Challenged World: 2050,” Political Theory 51.1 (2023): 39-53.
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