A Visit with Brain & Ethics Expert Dr. Syd Johnson

A Visit with Brain & Ethics Expert Dr. Syd Johnson

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In May, I had the opportunity to visit with Dr. L. Syd M Johnson, a philosopher, bioethicist,  neuroethicist, and professor in the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at Upstate Medical University in New York. Dr. Johnson is a former film critic, and today she is a member of the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative Neuroethics Working Group and an associate editor for the journal Neuroethics. Dr. Johnson teaches students and colleagues alike about the law, population health, and healthcare ethics.

Her current research in neuroethics focuses on ethical issues related to brain injuries, including sport-related neurotrauma, brain death, and disorders of consciousness. Her work is situated at the intersection of ethics, medicine, and law, and she has published on disorders of consciousness, sport-related concussion and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, reproductive ethics, research ethics, and animal ethics. Her interest in all things with brains/minds includes every kind of critter, zombies, and robots.

We originally visited in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic before the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent uprisings following his death. After Mr. Floyd’s death, I circled back to Dr. Johnson to ask her what opportunities she sees in education to advance ethics, including racial justice, within healthcare.

HF: Tell me about your everyday work, including how it’s changed with the coronavirus pandemic.

SJ: It seems like I am busier than ever these days. There are two major differences in my everyday work. One is that I don’t have to commute into the office anymore. That is, honestly, a benefit. That travel time was not very useful. Before this started, I was already trying to cut back on the number of days I drove in to the office. The other change is that my kids are home. My teenager can look after herself, but my fourth grader needs help structuring her days and her online schoolwork. The frequent interruptions and distractions make it difficult to do anything that requires sustained attention. I’m trying to work like a bee—flitting from one flower to the next, but with a destination and an objective to move towards.

I’m working on a few collaborative projects right now, and between those and work-related meetings, it seems I’m spending a lot of time on video conference calls, just like everyone else.

HF: How did you become interested in brains?

SJ: In graduate school, I was interested in philosophy of mind and consciousness, and also bioethics. I had a postdoc in neuroethics immediately after graduating, so that got me to thinking more about brains, and brain-related issues. I got interested in the specific issues I work on—disorders of consciousness and sport-related concussion—because there were a lot of interesting developments happening in those areas at the time.

HF: What do you see as our most significant cognitive strengths and limitations, as human beings? 

SJ: The most significant cognitive strength of humans is our empathy—our capacity to think about what matters to someone else, to imagine ourselves standing in someone else’s shoes, to feel. It’s a basic capacity that drives us to create and consume art and literature and film, to help others, to keep the world going. Unfortunately, limitations in our empathy are our greatest weakness. We try to carve the world and its creatures (including our fellow humans) into manageable, familiar spheres—the things we decide we have the ability, the means, the bandwidth, and the desire to care about. The challenge is doing that—doing what is practically necessary—while remembering that things outside those spheres are still things worth caring about. It’s easier to turn them into things towards which we have apathy or antipathy.

HF: Tell me about how ethics has weaved its way through your life and career, including how you came to include nonhuman beings among your concerns.

SJ: When I was a kid, my family used to go camping and fishing in eastern Washington. When I was about 12, I was out in the rowboat fishing by myself, and I guess I was right above a school of perch. I would drop my fishing line in the water and immediately hook a fish. This went on and on, but after a while, I started to feel bad about it. I felt like it was unfair, that I was taking advantage of the fish because they didn’t know I was dangerous. That was the last time I went fishing. It would still be quite a while before I stopped eating fish or other animals, but when I did, I went vegan overnight. That was 1986, when I was in college, and it was in the middle of a cross-country road trip. I got pretty hungry for the rest of that trip!

Many months later, I read a book called Radical Vegetarianism by Mark Braunstein, and I learned the world “vegan.” Mark lived not far from me in Providence, Rhode Island, and he was nice enough to meet with me. I was introduced to the local animal rights group—the Rhode Island Animal Rights Coalition—and spent several years working with them before I moved to New York. We had two claims to fame—in 1987 we successfully lobbied the Cambridge, MA city council to ban the LD-50 Acute Toxicity Test and the Draize Eye-Irritancy Test in Cambridge, and we were infiltrated by an FBI agent who investigated us for several months. She got to witness us doing things like dress up in dog suits to protest the use of dogs in medical device marketing. We must have been a pretty weird and boring assignment for her. We never, ever did anything illegal. We engaged in activism-by-theatre and activism-by-annoyance. But I suppose that somewhere in the FBI archives there is a file on me, with a photo of me as Dr. Dog, dressed in a dog suit.

My interest in animal advocacy and animal rights was for a long time something I was philosophically interested in, but I didn’t see a clear contribution that I could make. I worked on it a little, at the margins of my scholarship, usually in conference presentations or in blog publications. I always found ways to work it into the ethics courses I was teaching. But people started asking me to write things—papers, book chapters, blogs, some amicus briefs for legal cases, and eventually a book. Now, it’s a pretty significant part of my scholarly work.

HF: What are you working on now?

SJ: I just finished an edited book called Neuroethics and Nonhuman Animals, which I’m quite proud of. It’s the first book to explicitly consider how neuroethics and animal ethics should be in conversation, and how the extensive animal ethics literature—which has for a long time been marginalized and siloed even in philosophy—can inform our approach to neuroethical issues related to both humans and nonhumans.

Right now, I’m working on my next book, and it’s a project I’ve been working on for years. It’s on disorders of consciousness, and how medical and scientific uncertainty about those disorders should prompt a change in our ethical thinking about them and our approach to other bioethical and neuroethical concerns. I’ve just been working on a chapter on moral status and personhood, where I can really incorporate animal rights and animal ethics thinking—because it’s the same issue, whether we are talking about humans with disabilities, humans with brain injuries, or nonhuman animals. In particular, I’m thinking about how consciousness is often thought to be a criterion for moral status or personhood. I think consciousness might be enough (or sufficient, in philosopher-speak) but it isn’t necessary for moral status. I suspect there are a lot of sufficient conditions for mattering morally, but none that are necessary.

HF: Commonly, I ask about what gives people hope. It would be interesting to hear from you what gives you hope, and what you think of hope as a neurological construct.

SJ: In the midst of this pandemic, one of the things that gives me hope is that we have shown ourselves to be flexible enough to change. We stopped driving and flying and going out. We found workarounds. Wildlife and other nonhuman animals emerged to fill the spaces we left empty. The air and water got cleaner. This year, I suspect, will buy us just a little bit of time to address climate change. Obviously, all of this has had pretty profound effects on human lives, but I hope that we can come out the other side of this with the recognition that we can respond to great challenges and do the things we must do to have a positive impact on the world.

HF: A follow-up question…since we last spoke, George Floyd was killed by police, sparking nationwide and international protests. His death and the killing of other Black people by police has also raised the level of public consciousness about how to better address structural racism and its effects on education, healthcare, and justice. What opportunities in education do you see now to better advance ethics, including racial justice, within healthcare?

SJ: It feels like we are on the verge of a momentous change in public consciousness. I really hope so. And coming in the midst of the pandemic, when attention was already turning to the devastating effects of structural racism on the health of Black people, Indigenous persons, and other people of color, it’s extraordinary to see a clear picture emerging amidst all the tumult. My experience with my students has been that once you lay out all the pieces, tell them the history, show them the effects, they can connect the dots and understand clearly how structural racism and injustice affect health for Black people, Indigenous persons, and other people of color. In my experience, they are astonished to learn about these things. When I taught my students about Black infant and maternal mortality in the US this past spring, they were aghast. So, future healthcare workers and doctors are ready to lead, and they are ahead of their teachers, but they need the information. The challenge, in my view, is to get health faculty onboard, to get them to recognize their moral and pedagogical responsibility to teach about the effects of racism and injustice.

Photo by Denise Rego Bass.

Interview with Mia MacDonald of Brighter Green

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Mia MacDonald is the founder and executive director of Brighter Green, a public policy action tank that works to raise awareness of and encourage policy action on issues that span the environment, animals, and sustainability. Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with Mia about what led her to found Brighter Green and why the organization is needed.

HF: You’ve had an incredibly far-reaching career spanning the fields of environmentalism, sustainable development, women’s rights and gender equality, and animal protection. What brought you to found Brighter Green, and how has your prior work influenced the organization’s aims and approach?

MM: I decided to start Brighter Green because, as someone who cares deeply for nonhuman animals and the environment, I didn’t see a lot of organizations working across these two sets of concern that have many similar objectives and underpinnings. As a consultant for international environmental organizations, I also saw that animal agriculture was a key driver of biodiversity loss, deforestation, and other ecological damage, and, yet, it was so rarely acknowledged as a problem. That seemed very strange to me and like a big gap. With my background in international development and plenty of work in the civil society and United Nations (UN) space, as well as my commitments to animals, the environment, and social justice, I thought it might be a good idea to start a new organization. I didn’t really think of myself as an entrepreneur and still don’t, but I saw a need for this work and an urgency about it. (Remember that Livestock’s Long Shadow on the immense and wide-ranging impacts of animal agriculture had been published in 2006.) And, at least in the English language, I didn’t see a lot of work that Brighter Green would duplicate.

And, yes, to the second part of your question, I definitely think that my previous work, which was mainly global (as opposed to U.S.-focused), has had a significant effect on how Brighter Green works. For example, we bring a strong concern for equity to all our work—across species, genders, and regions of the world—and a commitment to working in non-hierarchical partnerships with colleagues in the global South, or the global majority. I think my previous work also informed how Brighter Green does its research, which is very cross-sectoral, and how it seeks to create or contribute to networks of people and organizations.

HF: As a professor within the human rights program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and the environmental studies department at New York University (NYU), have you observed whether your students increasingly see the connections between human, animal, and environmental rights, health, and wellbeing?

MM: Yes, very much so, especially among students who are studying environmental and food systems issues, and among many of the animal studies students as well. (NYU has a minor in this subject now, as well as a new one-year M.A. program.) Here, the “silos” that too often prevail around animals and the environment, domestic and global, north and south, are much less prevalent in the younger generations (and even among some of the professional students I’ve taught). This shift is really encouraging. I’ve actually seen this evolution in many parts of the world among young people. In the human rights space, probably less so, but then again I taught at Columbia’s SIPA grad school more than 10 years, so the situation has probably changed to more embrace of rights being broadly conceived. But when I did teach at SIPA, I developed courses on globalization and human rights and on human rights skills and advocacy, and, in each, I used case studies and readings that also focused on animals, and the students were receptive. There was no backlash, or at least not any that I heard about!

HF: Brighter Green is working globally, particularly in China and India. Tell me a bit about your efforts in Asia as they relate to food systems, climate change, public health, and animal welfare.

MM: Well, these efforts all started with research and examined the consequences of the growth of industrial animal agriculture and the livestock sector more broadly. (I don’t love the term “livestock” since it seems too mechanistic, but it is a term of global use, still, so I do refer to animal agriculture this way from time to time.) That research began with the entry point of climate change, but very quickly expanded to document the impacts of animal agriculture on natural resources, public health, food security, animal welfare and rights—of course, since this is a key concern of Brighter Green—and also on human livelihoods and issues of power and control in food and agricultural systems. That research helped us build contacts in China and India, and, later, in other parts of Asia when we completed a policy paper on the growth of “big dairy” in the region. From there, we’ve developed stronger alliances in India and a whole program of work in China. The China Initiative includes quite a number of programs and projects, but, for the sake of time, I’ll just list a few: research, film-making, information-sharing, capacity development, some advocacy, network development, media education, and outreach to academic institutions and the culinary world and chefs (a recent development).

Much of the growth of the program has been organic as we’ve come across people and institutions who have an interest in sustainable food systems, but from really varied entry points spanning veganism, ethics, food safety, healthy diets, climate change, and food security, to name some. By and large, issues around food and its impact on the environment and other species, and the growth and scale of factory farming, are not yet mainstream issues in China. We’re really working to help create a movement for sustainable food that’s plant-forward and that keeps problems with animal agriculture and the expansion of meat and dairy production, consumption, and imports very much central to the work. That’s still pretty rare. There is a lot of work to be done in China and so we really try to be helpful to others who are seeking to start or expand aspects of this work, both in China and globally.

HF: You’ve also been particularly active in international climate conferences. What could these summits be doing better and what has Brighter Green done to encourage policy action on the part of entities such as the Conference of the Parties?

MM: Very good question. Many people involved in UN climate work wonder how the process and the annual summits (called COP, or the Conference of the Parties) could be better organized in terms of concrete outcomes and raising ambition and action. A lot of the seeming lack of progress is a result of geopolitics and the global North—and now especially the U.S. in this hopefully very aberrant era we’re in—not wanting to interrupt the industries fueling the climate crisis or to help pay for the global South to “leapfrog” the dirty systems we’ve made central to our economies, or even to help these regions of the world adapt to the very real and devastating effects of climate change. So that’s a real dilemma. However, I can say I see some progress. Of course, we see the climate crisis rising up the list of priorities for people around the world. We see the fantastic youth-led climate action. We see new modes of framing and acting on climate change and biodiversity loss like Extinction Rebellion and Animal Rebellion.

But a real bottleneck is that food and agriculture are still relatively marginal to the climate talks, despite the really strong scientific case for how these issues are crucial to meeting the Paris goals and, within this framework, meat and dairy and animal feed are the real drivers of greenhouse gas production, forest loss, and land-use change that’s also contributing to the climate crisis. That being said, though, the issues are less marginal than they were before, and more groups and scientists have real concerns about the consequences of animal agriculture. So that’s good. The main ways we’ve tried to work so far include raising awareness through formal side events (panels) and exhibits, sharing our research and policy recommendations, contributing analysis to technical bodies within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that are open to civil society input, linking academics with policy processes, and forging links with other civil society organizations—including youth climate activists—around the world. The next several years are really crucial for concerted climate action, as scientists are telling us, and the next 10 to 11 years will really set the course for what we do or don’t do as human societies. So those of us who care about nonhuman animals and the natural world ought to find more ways to engage, at local and global levels.

HF: When few others were, Brighter Green began focusing especially on the globalization of industrial animal agriculture in places like Brazil, China, and India. Where do you think there is the greatest opportunity to reverse harmful trends in the globalization of industrial animal agriculture, and what do you anticipate for the future?

MM: This question is great but really big. I’d probably ask readers to visit the Brighter Green website and to look at our research and the policy recommendations we make there. But, briefly, I think the biggest opportunity is that the science is on our side, and the ethics are, too, and both make the case that industrial animal agriculture is the opposite of sustainable or desirable. I find real gaps in knowledge, still, in many places, including within the U.S. It’s a challenge to get accurate information out, for sure, but it is not insurmountable. As Greta Thunberg and her peers have said: it’s really about the science. The science is there; now it’s about acting on it. I’d say something similar in this case.

I’d also add that the public health aspect, about which you know far more than I do, is also likely a driver of change because the individual and societal costs of more Western-style diets are huge—really immense. And governments are concerned about that. I’d also say that a reawakening of humans’ connections to nonhuman animals is also crucial to change, and I see that happening in many parts of the world. What do I anticipate for the future? Well, on some days I see the glass as half full and believe we’ll wake up and do what’s needed; other days, I see it as half empty and think we’ll have to experience enormous losses; of course we already are. There’s an insanity to the fact that many of these losses already are due to industrial animal agriculture and it seems hard to believe that will continue. I think I’ll stop there, but would definitely welcome others’ feedback on these matters.

Photo: Mia MacDonald.

In Conversation with Cultural Anthropologist Elan Abrell

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Recently I had the opportunity to talk with Elan Abrell, a cultural anthropologist whose research and writing focus on human-environment interactions, scientific knowledge production, and food-related technological innovation. Elan is currently a visiting assistant professor in the Animal Studies Program at Wesleyan University and an adjunct assistant professor in the Animals Studies MA Program and the Anthropology Department at New York University. Previously, Elan served as a 2017-18 Farmed Animal Law & Policy Fellow at the Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard, a visiting assistant professor in the Urban Studies Department at Queens College, CUNY, and a Senior Regulatory Specialist at the Good Food Institute. We’re fortunate to have Elan join us at our Phoenix Zones Initiative Summit in November of 2019.

HF: Tell me about how your broad professional background in law, philosophy, and anthropology has informed your approach to issues affecting the rights, health, and wellbeing of people and animals?

EA: I think each of these disciplines highlights in different ways how socially-constructed categories of difference (including species) shape relationships of inequality and exploitation. In my own work, I try to draw on the different perspectives they each provide for analyzing how these relationships are affected by mutually constitutive processes of difference-making. For example, as much brilliant work on histories of racist oppression and violence has highlighted, the socially constructed (and historically shifting) dividing line between who does and does not count as human has played a significant ideological role in justifying the mistreatment of particular groups of people. Likewise, economic processes—especially under capitalism in its various historical stages—have reinforced this dividing line to rationalize and justify the exploitation and mistreatment of both human and nonhuman animals. 

HF: Several years ago you wrote about the de facto legalization of torture and its longstanding consequences for those deemed as “enemies.” Talk a little about how the sanctioning of torture, along with other anti-civil rights policies and related discourse, has contributed to systemic discrimination. Do you see any relation between these policies and discourse and the ways in which animals are treated in society?

EA: Yes, definitely. I think this directly relates to how socially constructed categories of difference contribute to relationships of inequality and violence. In that article, I analyzed how the US government during George W. Bush’s administration used the de facto legalization of torture to contribute to the racialization and vilification of Muslims during the “War on Terror.” I basically argued that by establishing a group of people who could be subjected to torture, the Bush regime was doing a particular kind of cultural work to justify their military actions as well as other Islamophobic policies. It creates a sort of circular logic feedback loop in which people who can be deprived of civil rights, especially the right to bodily autonomy and freedom from violence inflicted by the state, are justifiably deprived of those rights because they are bad enough or inhumane enough that they are not entitled to those rights like other people. Trump boils this logic down to its most basic kernel with his “bad hombres” designation for any group he wants to target with the apparatuses of state violence (such as all Muslims and non-white immigrants).

I think, to some extent, this kind of cultural work has already been completed for most nonhuman animals, especially farmed animals. Nonhuman animals are at a stage where the routine systems of  violence in which they are entrenched are such a taken for granted aspect of human society that they do not even need to be conceptualized as “bad” in order to justify; the fact that they are not humans is sufficient (although we still see this logic used to justify violence against  invasive or “pest” species, like Florida’s Department of Fish and Wildlife recently encouraging people to kill wild iguanas because of the risk of property damage they were perceived to pose).

Just as in the examples related to violence against humans, though, I think the ongoing violence inflicted on animals helps to maintain categories of difference (in this case species-based) that maintain nonhuman animals as beings that can justifiably be exploited and killed to benefit humans. To some extent, I also think that perpetuating violent systems of animal exploitation, like industrial animal agriculture, allows the ongoing avoidance of any real large scale reckoning with such atrocities. To stop it would mean to acknowledge that nonhuman animals should not be subjected to it, while perpetuating it also perpetuates animals’ relegation to a category for which such violence is tolerable and perpetually delays any large scale moral reckoning. 

HF: On the subject of farmed animals, until recently, you served as Senior Regulatory Specialist for the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit that promotes plant-based alternatives to meat, dairy, and eggs as well as “clean meat,” as alternatives to the products of conventional animal agriculture. Please tell me some about the work you did for GFI.

EA: My position at GFI, which ended in June of this year, involved working to help establish a clear and fair regulatory path to market for cell-cultured meat products. Prior to starting at GFI in the fall of 2018, I was a Farmed Animal Law and Policy Fellow at the Harvard Animal Law and Policy Program. While there, I was researching the regulatory challenges facing cell-cultured meat products as part of a larger ethnographic project on cellular agriculture. This experience made me a good fit for the regulatory specialist position at GFI, which allowed me to continue researching these issues while more directly advocating for a beneficial regulatory framework for these innovative products. While at GFI, I worked on a public comment to the FDA and USDA proposing the best approach to regulating these products.

In early 2019, the agencies announced a shared framework that would give FDA responsibility over the culturing process of meat and poultry products, and USDA responsibility over the final products. FDA will also have responsibility over the final products for cell-cultured “seafood” (as they also do for conventional “seafood”). In addition to this work at the federal level, I helped lobby against several label censorship bills introduced in state legislatures in early 2019. Largely backed by the cattle industry, these bills were intended to prevent the accurate use of meat-related terminology of cell-cultured meat (which is not yet on the market) and in some cases plant-based meat products as well in order to protect conventional meat from commercial competition. 

HF: You’ve written a fair amount about sanctuary, and you’re working on a book related to animal sanctuary now. Tell me about the book, what you’re exploring, and what you hope to accomplish.

EA: Saving Animals: Practices of Care and Rescue in the US Animal Sanctuary Movement is an ethnography (based on my dissertation research) that examines animal sanctuaries as a model for creating the kind of liberatory interspecies politics that I think will be necessary to move toward a positive vision of the future, or at least to move away from the disastrous one. I compare different kinds of animal sanctuaries (for formerly farmed animals, “exotic” animals, and companion animals) and analyze how sanctuary caregivers navigate the practical and ethical dilemmas created by balancing the unique needs of different kinds of animals within the material constraints of captivity. I hope to show some of the ways that humans are endeavoring to carry out the difficult task of creating new ways of living with other animals during this time of ecological crisis. But I also hope to highlight the importance of this work as a potential model for other liberatory activist projects as well as the limits our capitalist economic system places on such efforts. 

HF: When you consider the world as it will be for your child, what do you envision?

EA: This is a difficult question. I have an answer about what I would like to see, which is that human societies have broadly embraced liberatory politics that guide them away from the violent exploitations of other humans as well as other animals and the rest of the environment. But unfortunately the answer about what I expect will happen should we continue to allow global capitalism to shape our social relations is that the ongoing anthropogenic ecocide of the planet that we are watching unfold before our eyes will continue to accelerate leading to social destabilization much worse than what we are currently experiencing under the Trump regime. The one thing that gives me hope is that when I have brought this question up in classes I’ve taught on animals and the environment, college students have expressed an encouraging openness to replacing our current political economic system with social relations built on mutual aid and environmental sustainability. I don’t know that there is enough time to turn our Titanic in a different direction, but I am heartened that younger generations seem so open to radical transformations and I hope that openness continues to grow with the ones following them. 

Photo rights: Elan Abrell.

A Conversation with Journalist & Author Brandon Keim

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Brandon Keim is one of my favorite writers, so it was a joy (if at first a bit intimidating) to interview such an insightful author. Brandon is a freelance journalist specializing in animals, nature, and science, and he is currently working on a book proposal provisionally entitled Meet the Neighbors: Stories of a More Than Human World, about how new insights into animal minds are transforming the way we treat them. His first book, The Eye of the Sandpiper, was published in June 2017 by Cornell University Press. Also in 2017, National Geographic published Inside Animal Minds: What They Think, Feel and Know, an issue-length exploration of animal intelligence. Brandon’s work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, WIRED, National Geographic News, Aeon, Nautilus, Scientific American Mind, The Guardian, Chronicle of Higher Education, Audubon Magazine, Mother Jones, Conservation, NOVA and Stanford Social Innovation Review. He has made broadcast appearances on NPR’s Science Friday and Here & Now, PRI’s The World and CBC’s As It Happens. Brandon is also a photographer. You can find many of his longform pieces as well as some of his photographs on his website.

HF: As an author and photojournalist, you primarily write about and photograph the natural world, including how nonhuman animals navigate a human dominated world. How did you become interested in the lives of other animals?

BK: I’ve been interested in other animals for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of caterpillars, a neighborhood cat—in recollection I fed the cat a leaf and he never came back, which doesn’t make sense but there it is—and watching prairie dogs on family vacation. Whenever I met an animal, I’d be very curious and affectionate. Which I think is pretty typical for a kid—but fortunately I ended up with a career that let me pursue and share that interest. 

HF: What has studying nonhuman animals taught you about us as human beings?

BK: So much! I don’t know where to start, but one thing that’s been on my mind a lot lately is how so much of what we do is like what they do. 

By that I mean, so much of what we do is cognitively “simple.” It doesn’t require the arguably ultra-sophisticated cognition that’s been said to be uniquely human, or at least unique to a few extra-smart species. 

Take communication: language as we’ve defined it—with syntax and referentiality and recursion and the ability to coin new words and so on—seems to be something that only humans do. Which isn’t to say other animals don’t have some of this complexity; they absolutely do. Domestic chickens, quite wonderfully, were the first birds in whom referentiality—which means referring to some specific entity outside yourself, not just making emotional noises—was scientifically demonstrated. Plenty of other birds use syntax. So do prairie dogs, and cephalopod skin patterns are grammatical, and so on. 

Full-blown language, though, seems to be a human thing. And historically so much baggage has been laid on that. Philosophers have said that language makes us human, that possessing it makes us so different from and superior to other creatures. And when scientific findings on communicative complexity in other species are reported, there’s a tendency to frame it in terms of their now being qualified to cross that gap and join us. 

But so much of our own communication doesn’t involve all that high-level stuff. A gesture, a comforting touch, a hug, a meaningful look: that’s not language at all. But it’s extraordinarily important to us. It makes up a big part of our own interactions. And it’s ubiquitous among other animals. Rather than assigning so much significance to language, I now think of communication as being what’s really significant, and language as just this strange sub-category of communication. A remarkable and special sub-category, but not some kind of pinnacle. 

Which is ironic for a writer to say! But there’s other traits that fit this pattern. Empathy, for example, or self-awareness; I’d argue that much of our empathy and sense of self is so-called animal-like. 

HF: Unlike many journalists writing about animals, you also commonly write about insects—including the ethics of how we treat them. For example, you wrote an article for Aeon about cockroaches who could be electrically shocked and controlled remotely by children. Why are stories such as this one as important to write about as questions about the legal personhood of chimpanzees?

BK: I’d like to say it’s because every insect’s life is just as important and worthy of regard as a chimpanzee’s life. In practice, though, I clearly don’t live that way; I don’t lament the bugs on my windshield like I would a frog or a squirrel, much less a chimpanzee. 

That said, their lives are valuable. I do my best not to kill mosquitoes. And while most people won’t ever meet a chimp, we encounter insects all the time. 

For kids, insects are often the most common animals in their lives. Their experiences with them may be profoundly formative. Habits and perspectives developed with insects might later be applied to other animals. Insects challenge us in some profound ways, too: even a little kid has life-or-death power over a caterpillar or ant or moth, and bugs seem quite alien in comparison to most vertebrates. They challenge us to empathize with creatures, with people, who are very different from us. 

I wish I could say I met those challenges well. I shudder to think about what I did to ants for several childhood summers. But then, I didn’t think of them as having inner lives of any sort; they might as well have been mechanical. Caterpillars, on the other hand, seemed quite personable, perhaps because they’re fuzzy and have big eyes, and I cared for quite a few of them. 

HF: You have also written about the promise and limits of technology in medicine, markets, and science. What have you learned about how we approach technology and how it limits or extends our progress?

BK: I’m ambivalent about technology. On the one hand, tools can help us accomplish remarkable things. They can ease suffering and relieve people from drudgery and reduce our impacts on the rest of life. On the other, tools can be fetishized. They can limit our vision even as they extend our power. 

Take the development of artifically intelligent robots designed to kill crown-of-thorns starfish in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Populations of those starfish have exploded; they just obliterate coral reefs. Something needs to be done—but I read gee-whiz story after gee-whiz story about starfish-hunting robots, and the stories rarely mention the pollution that helps crown-of-thorns proliferate. They rarely mention that crown-of-thorns have natural predators, such as giant snails, who humans have obliterated. The robots are just a stopgap solution that—at least in the way they’re understood and portrayed—normalizes a profoundly [messed-up] state of affairs. 

That dynamic can be found in so many contexts: agricultural biotechnology, human enhancements, and so on. But it’s really important not to let skepticism turn into pessimism. That’s something I’m prone to, I think, and in the last few years I’ve spent more time engaging with ecomodernist thinkers. That’s been good for me. The folks over at the Breakthrough Institute have actually turned me into a fan of nuclear energy. 

HF: How has your writing, and the research involved, changed how you approach ethical questions about how we as human beings interact with each other, other animals, and the greater natural world?

BK: That’s a challenging question. There’s many answers to it. 

To start with, I want to emphasize that so much of my research amounts to just talking to other people and learning from them. They’re the ones who’ve done the really hard work. Then they’re patient and generous in sharing with me. 

Hopefully I’ve become more consistent in my approach to ethical questions. Over the years I’ve realized just how profoundly our ethics for animals change depending on context. In our homes, in a lab, on a farm, in the wild: the frameworks for each setting are totally different. The ways those animals are seen is totally different. I think much more critically about that than I once did. I’m also far more appreciative of just how much the inner lives of animals has in common with our own, which certainly bears upon the ethics. 

I don’t know if this has much impacted my thinking about human interactions. I’ve always been motivated by the belief that people should treat one another fairly, with kindness and respect. Before I started writing about science and then animals, I wrote about politics and was much more of a social justice activist. If anything, my interest in animal ethics was fueled in part by how I thought about human relations. 

As for the greater natural world, I’ve also become more aware of how relationships to nature are socially and historically constructed. And for the most part animals as thinking, feeling, community beings are formally absent from contemporary traditions of nature; from transcendence and beauty and the Land Ethic and conservation and environmentalism and so on. The book proposal that I hope will soon be a book is about the intersection of animals—of animal intelligence research, animal ethics, human-animal studies theorizing—with classical ideas of nature. 

Sometimes I wrestle with how to write about issues I now understand more clearly than before, and about which I have stronger opinions—stronger judgements—than I did. Thinking one knows the answers is a trap, and this is where the journalistic tradition is very important. It obligates me to seek out other perspectives and be open-minded to them. 

HF: Which questions are most at the top of your mind now?

BK: So many! I mentioned the book proposal, which revolves around the question of what it means for “nature” to think of other animals as fellow persons. I’ve also quite a few more nature-y articles that I’d like to write, and at the heart of each article is a question: Can ecosystems and ultimately the biosphere be understood as organisms evolving over time towards certain states of being? What are the lessons of paleoecological research on pre-industrial societies who occupied a peripheral rather than central position in their ecological networks? How does plant cognition differ from animal cognition, and what does an old tree know? Can autonomous vehicles be designed to avoid all animals, not just the big ones? 

And, an animal-specific article I’d like to write: Is it possible to eat and use animals in ways that provide those animals with truly good lives, with lives that we’d accept for ourselves and our loved ones? If that’s possible, how can it become practically feasible? 

HF: In thinking about if it is possible to use animals in ways that provide those animals with truly good lives, with lives that we’d accept for ourselves and our loved ones, how has observing animals—or learning about them in other ways—changed how you think about the desire for life, or the desire to avoid death? For them, for us, and for other nonhuman entities?

BK: I’d put those concepts in a different order: reflecting on how animals desire life has influenced my thinking about whether it’s possible to eat and use animals in an acceptable way. Clearly every animal does desire life, does value life, for themselves and other animals they love. Recognizing that helped me feel the weight and tragedy of how animals are presently used. So does that mean they can’t ever be used? Should the only cows or pigs or sheep or chickens in existence be wild animals or pets? Or are other relationships possible? 

HF: Thank you, Brandon. I have so enjoyed our conversation, and it has filled my mind with more questions. Often, if I need a reminder of the wonders of the world, I go back to many of your articles. I can’t wait to read your new book.

Photo credit: Brandon Keim.

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