Toward eco-justice for all - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 148

• who speciically [indigenous Australian, Indonesian, Papua New
Guinea, Torres Strait Islander]
• how speciically [methods, techniques and technologies]
• where speciically [traditional fisheries for particular coastal groups].
Conflicts can arise when modern technologies are utilised for what
used to be simply subsistence fishing. The use of motor boats, nets and
fishing rods, and sonar equipment allows for overexploitation to occur
(Caughley et al, 1996). Moreover, overexploitation may be generated in
the new methods of production themselves. For example, on the one
hand, the mobility, range, and efficiency of 'traditional' fishing are all
enhanced through modern methods and technologies. On the other
hand, these technologies generate the need for cash to supplement
subsistence for example, buying the boat and petrol for the boat. The
net effect is pressure to fish beyond immediate consumption needs.
In such ways, the 'traditional' is both affirmed and challenged at the
same time.
The specific relationship that humans have with nature requires
ongoing scrutiny. It also requires a sense of complex relationships, and
that things do indeed change over time.
Conventional animal rights proponents and conventional
conservationists have tended to place emphasis on only one part of
the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. This is well
captured in the following passage (Plumwood, 2004: 56):
Although each project has a kind of egalitarianism between
the human and nonhuman in mind, their partial analyses
place them on a collision course. The ecology movement has
been situating humans as animals, embodies inside ecological
systems of mutual use, of food and energy exchange, just as
the animal defence movement has been trying to expand
an extension to animals of the (dualistic) human privilege
of being conceived as outside these systems. Many vegans
seem to believe that ecology can be ignored and that the
food web is an invention of hamburger companies, while
the ecological side often retains the human-centred resource
view of animals and scientistic resistance to seeing animals
as individuals with life stories of attachment, struggle and
tragedy not unlike our own, refusing to apply ethical
thinking to the nonhuman sphere.