Interspecies Injustice
This note collects evidence and examples demonstrating the need for interspecies justice. It does this by showing the damage emanating from its absence.
Cf.
Many early environmentalists had exclusionary views towards human minorities and towards 'despoiled' human-modified landscapes. Such view separate 'nature' from 'humanity', 'civilisation' from 'savagery' etc. with detrimental effects.
Examples:
See the discussion on the geographies of attraction and fear in the chapter Part 3 in:
Haskell, David George. The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors. New York: Viking, 2017.
- Muir praised brave and clean mountaineers whom he saw as superior to the people in towns. He also thought white men could outwork "Sambos and Sallies" and described Indians as living dirty and irregular lives in clean wilderness.
- Gifford Pinchot, founder of the national forests, was a supporter of the eugenics movement. He compared human races to species of trees and argued that both were limited by their places.
- Aldo Leopold did not react to racial injustices of his day and argued that wilderness should be segregated and preserved. He wrote that the supply of wilderness was unlimited when Pilgrims landed.
The result is that cities and human-modified environments are seen as separate, less worthy, and - therefore - are afforded less care and protection.
Schell, Christopher J., Karen Dyson, Tracy L. Fuentes, Simone Des Roches, Nyeema C. Harris, Danica Sterud Miller, Cleo A. Woelfle-Erskine, and Max R. Lambert. “The Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences of Systemic Racism in Urban Environments.” Science 369, no. 6510 (2020). https://doi.org/10/gg8r7q.
On the survival/perishing of trees in cities.
"Survival increases when saplings are embedded within the human social network. A tree planted by its human neighbors will live longer than one placed by an anonymous contractor. When a tree bears a tag naming it and listing its needs—water, mulch, loose soil, no litter—its probability of survival jumps to nearly 100 percent. A street tree that is granted personhood and membership, one that is noticed, loved, and given identity and history, lives longer than a municipal object, arriving with no context and living with no collaborators."