Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
exclusion of non-humans from normative ethical considerations, has led not only to
this fragmentation of the ethical nature of these encounters, but has also rendered
many of these spaces of (un)ethical encounter closed from view. These hidden
spaces demand consideration because of the deeply questionable nature of some
relationships, and because of the huge range of inconsistency between them. Within
the processes implicated here, it will be argued, the ethical invisibility of the
individual
non-human other is a key factor in the spatialisation of ethical relations
and in how such issues should be addressed. From this position, it can be seen that
all of the many differing material and imagined spaces of the world carry differing
(un)ethical freights which need to be drawn out and addressed when questioning
human—animal relations. This is quintessentially a geographical issue.
Fitzsimmons and Goodman (1998:194) suggest that across the social sciences and
humanities there has emerged a broad if somewhat disjointed front, the concern of
which is 'to bring “nature” “back in” to social theory by contesting its abstraction
from “society”'. Work such as that by Whatmore and Thorne (1998), Wolch and
Emel (1995a, 1995b, 1998), Whatmore (1997), Anderson (1995, 1997) and Philo
(1995) indicates that 'human' geography is playing a important role within this new
front, particularly in relation to animal geographies of one kind or another. But,
despite the work highlighted above, there still remain large gaps in the focus of 'non-
human geography'. For example, Whatmore and Thorne (1998:436) point out that
'geographers have paid remarkably little attention to wildlife in recent times'.
Addressing the other half of the animal world
not
seen as 'wild', Anderson (1997:
464) feels that the human sciences have mostly failed to engage critically with the
processes of animal domestication, and that this failure 'continues to constrain the
imagining of alternative ethical and practical relations between humans, animals and
environments'. Similar concerns to these above have been expressed by Philo (1995:
656-657, emphasis added) about animal geographies in general:
The tendency has been to consider animals as marginal 'thing-like' beings
devoid of inner lives, apprehensions or sensibilities, with little attempt being
made to probe the often take-for-granted assumptions underlying the
different uses to which human communities have put animals
in different
times
and places
.
My chapter supports this position by trying to show that within all of these
geographies of human—animal relations (as perhaps in all spatial practices), there
are accompanying issues of ethics which are always shadowing these spatialities. As
such, my aim follows Proctor's (1998:15) call for 'understanding ethics as an
inextricable part of geography's ontological project', and in particular his call for a
consideration of the geographies of environmental ethics.
Lynn's (1998a, 1998b) deployment of what he terms 'geoethics' should be seen as
a significant attempt to address the issues that Proctor raises. Lynn (1998a:280) uses
the concept of geographic context to build a spatially sensitised 'argument on the
