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human bodies which might now be written. What of the implications of differing
types of body, the non-mammalian bodies of reptiles for instance? What are the
implications of this otherness of embodiment, and how does body scale cross-cut
this? The enormity of the bodies of whales and the smallness of insects seem to have
to set up body-space challenges to our ethical sensibilities.
Other space(s)
My additional concern is that (otherly embodied) lives may be positioned yet
further towards the margins, or beyond, of our ethical imagination due to the very
spaces that they occupy being profoundly other to the one(s) that humans generally
occupy. These are lives which may be lived in spaces such as water, soil, sky,
(perpetual) darkness, forest canopy, and so forth, and (again) those lived on
differing scales. I will not develop any form of typology of these other spaces, but
will proceed by considering some of the encounters which take place in the
profoundly other spaces of water. Water constructs forms of life spaces which are
markedly alien to the 'airy' spaces that we humans inhabit. Water has a number of
unique and peculiar qualities (see Farber 1994:13-14), and to live in it must present
utterly differing ways of embodied being. Space, scale, dimension, direction, light,
sound, pressure, movement/resistance, gravity, body/element interactions are totally
other to those of the air. Bodies and senses are (mostly) exclusively adapted to one
or the other. My suggestion is that our (human) ethical imaginations also find water
a hostile, impenetrable space, and that as a result many of the lives lived there are
ethically invisible to us. The obvious exceptions to this, notably the concern for
dolphins and some whales, may be due to their being in some ways like us (live
young-bearing, air-breathing, language-using mammals), thus (partially)
overcoming the otherness of body- and life-space.
It is striking that in all of the debate, controversy and ongoing disputes within the
European Union about fishing quotas, relatively little attention is paid to the ethical
dimensions of these issues. The over-fishing and fish quota debates are conducted
almost entirely in terms of economics, employment, territorial rights, stock
depletion and rescuing sustainable-use equilibrium. The fact that these are (perhaps
some of the last) wild ecosystems, now being strip-mined, hardly arouses any debate
at all. Visser (1998:22) gives a graphic account of this process, a startling glimpse of
human intrusion into this other world:
Factory ships have grown to a 4000-ton capacity or more, dragging huge nets
and hauling them up every four hours, 24 hours a day. Sonar devices and
spotter aircraft hunt down the prey. 'Rockhoppers' see to it that rocks present
no obstacle to shaving the ocean floor. 'Tickler chains' create dust and noise
in order to flush out every lurking fish. Such a ship leaves a desert in its track.
No matter how large the holes of a net's mesh, dragging means that once a
number of fish have been caught all the holes fill up; the tiniest fish is trapped
as surely as the largest. Gill nets, made of almost invisible monofilament, are
