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respects to man's
[sic]
. Wildlife and plant life had homes and families just as
man did.
Such views of non-human others are also described by Jay, in his account of the
relationship between salmon and American Northwest Coast Indians:
[S]almon were people who lived in houses far away under the sea. [They
were] great generous beings whose gifts gave life…. The Indians understood
the salmon's gift involved them in an ethical system that resounded in every
corner of their locale. The aboriginal landscape was a democracy of spirit
where everyone listened.
(In Cheney 1989:123)
The moving away from these 'face-to-face' positionings of non-humans to making
them 'faceless' things must contribute to the cruelty many face today, because '[h]
umanity turns into cruelty because of the temptation to close the openness, to recoil
from stretching out towards the Other' (Bauman 1993:89). Any possible switch
from relating to non-human others as collectives to relating to them instead as
individuals has profound implications for how we live on this planet, and may be a
significant narrative for the future. However, there are glimpses of some (re-)
emergence, or perhaps persistence, of this latter kind of relation in modern society,
and these clearly reflect the deep but often latent tensions within human—non-
human relationships when compared with the fate of the unimagined other.
There has been a large output of theory addressing the aim of extending our
ethical structures to take in some parts or all of nature. A few of these are based on
the recognition of the non-human
individual
as an ethical entity (for commentaries,
see Agar 1995; Attfield 1983; Whatmore 1997). Most obviously this is the drive
behind the work of animal rights theorists such as Clark, Regan and Singer. A huge
amount of thought and debate has gone into pursuing the holy grail of a clear,
indisputable 'proof' that nature, or certain sections of nature (particularly animals),
must be taken seriously in ethical terms, the assumption being that such a shift in
ethical understandings will drag the practices of society toward more just and
ecologically sustainable (Naess 1997) forms. But all of these endeavours meet with
at least two sets of difficulties. First, the pushing back of the ethical horizon away
from its anthropocentric epicentre runs into formidable obstacles, chiefly because
established human ethical conceptualisation tends to focus not only on the human
individual as an ethical unit, but also on the specific attributes which humans
seemingly hold as the grounds of judging and acting within ethical terms (see
Rolston 1999). Second, there is the problem of the high degree of complexity and
contradiction which is the starting-point: that is, the messiness, as already noted, of
present circumstances. There is a need to open up these spaces, and to attend to the
fates that non-human others meet in them, fates that will vary wildly. This shows
