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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.

Freedom of Movement in the Wake of Coronavirus

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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the coming weeks will test how Americans and global citizens respond to voluntary and involuntary restrictions of their civil liberties. Surges in beach and grocery store visits combined with elevating panic on social media suggest that challenges are ahead.

There are serious questions about whether mass quarantines during pandemics are as effective as other interventions, in part because of inadequate compliance with public health recommendations. If recent history serves as an example, legal tests of mandatory quarantines will not necessarily favor public health mandates. Following the 2014 Ebola outbreak, a civil rights lawsuit filed against New Jersey officials led to new requirements that respect individual privacy during public health emergencies. Since then, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention enacted a rule that asserts the right to legal representation during mandatory quarantines, although it still allows for some relatively minor restrictions on freedom of movement, including attendance at public gatherings and certain forms of travel.

More concerning restrictions on freedom of movement are those that affect some of the most vulnerable populations to the pandemic, including asylum seekers held at the southern border and in detention centers across the United States. Countries in Europe, Canada, the United States, and other nations have already tightened or closed their borders to migrants fleeing realities far worse than the novel coronavirus. As a result, migrants are often forced to stay in small camps, where the risk for disease transmission rises with increased crowding. Likewise, an outbreak can spread quickly in detention centers, where detainees have very few liberties and limited access to healthcare.

Paradoxically, it is probable that restrictions on freedom of movement led to this pandemic. The likely source of COVID-19 was animal markets in China, where the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic—also a coronavirus—similarly emerged. In these markets, animals are kept in small cages, piled on top of one another, and bought alive to be killed on the spot. The practice is not unique to China. Nor is the practice of confining mammals, birds, and other animals for food production. In the United States, almost ten billion animals are killed every year after being kept in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), often called factory farms. In 2009, the H1N1 virus (the so-called “swine flu”) most probably emerged as a result of pig confinement in the United States and Mexico. Factory farms also inflict significant environmental injustices on neighboring communities, including through air, water, and soil pollution.

Once we get through the current pandemic—and we will—we will have serious occasion to reevaluate how we treat the right to freedom of movement, including that of animals. Seen through a clear lens, the newest coronavirus is a symptom of our global inattention to rights, the biological link between basic liberties and health, and the indisputable connection between the welfare of people, animals, and the planet. We should not miss this opportunity to look more deeply at the roots of “symptoms” such as COVID-19 or H1N1 in order to abate further disease and suffering.

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina in 2006, the federal government passed the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards (PETS) Act. Now, in order for states, cities, and counties to receive federal funding for their disaster relief plans, their plans must account for the needs of people with companion animals before, during, and after a major disaster or emergency. Resounding public support for the PETS Act implicitly acknowledged the connection between human and animal rights and wellbeing.

As people across the globe find themselves increasingly unable to travel amid the COVID-19 outbreaks occurring worldwide, now is the time for us to think more broadly about the links between the basic rights and health of people and animals. Medical and public health professionals, historians, and scientists increasingly recognize these relationships, which are borne out in our communities and in our global market. Although we can each make a difference through individual choices, we also need policy change to help shift norms and everyday practice.

International leaders and institutions must be proactive and alter the lens through which health is viewed. National governments, state and local health departments, and international organizations like the World Health Organization can take this chance to fully embrace the importance of rights in their mission—including those that other animals share with us. Some policymakers are already moving in this direction. China banned the sale of wildlife, and Vietnam’s prime minister called for a similar ban. Closer to home, in 2019, U.S. Senator Cory Booker unveiled legislation that would place a moratorium on large factory farms.

All of these measures would lead to health benefits for some of the most vulnerable people and animals, and they should be viewed as important first steps. Without increased attention to the relationship between human and animal rights, health, and wellbeing, one global crisis will continue to follow another.

 

Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash.

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.

Dr. Emily Peitzman: Pediatrician & Animal Advocate

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As part of an ongoing interview series with leaders who will join us at our forthcoming Phoenix Zones Initiative Summit, I had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Emily Peitzman, who is a physician and educator at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Children’s Hospital. Emily received her medical degree from The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences and she completed a Pediatric Medicine residency at UCSF Children’s Hospital. She works in both inpatient and outpatient settings as a primary care/urgent care physician and as a hospitalist on the UCSF Children’s Hematology and Oncology Bone Marrow Transplant unit. Emily is passionate about healthcare delivery and outcomes for children with increased exposure to adverse childhood events, particularly children in the foster care system and those with chronic illness. In her time outside of work she is passionate about animal rights advocacy, especially the needs surrounding pitbulls. She is a volunteer at the San Francisco SPCA in multiple programs including fostering and the mobile health clinic which provides free preventive care to animals and their human caregivers in the surrounding communities.

HF: Emily, thanks for talking with me. Can you share how your experiences within clinical medicine, including mental health services, have shaped your view of what children need from their families, friends, teachers, doctors, and society?

EP: Within my general pediatric training I try to incorporate pediatric mental health at every opportunity, such as asking a teenager the right question only to learn that they are thinking about hurting themselves, or wondering why a young patient would have a tantrum during a genital exam. Mental health issues are always present, but sometimes they take a little more directness and digging, which some clinicians find awkward. That awkwardness may prevent clinicians from asking the obvious next question. 

My experiences in clinical medicine have helped me to understand that children’s needs are simple in theory, but made incredibly more complicated by the quantity, quality, and timing of the needs being met. 

Here’s what I mean by that:

Quantity: Children’s needs must be met by a large variety of people in their lives—including immediate family, extended family, teachers, peers, daycare providers, nannies, and so on. 

Quality: Their needs must be met in a way that makes children feel secure and confident, and if the quality is lacking and that goal is not fully achieved, the consequences can be similar to those that result if those needs were not met at all. 

Timing: Where children are developmentally when needs are not met drastically changes the impact of failing to meet their needs. 

HF: How did you come to include animals in your scope of concern, and what in particular unites your concern for children and animals?

EP: I’ve always been an animal lover, growing up alongside rescue dogs. I thank my mom for introducing me to animal shelters and for taking me to visit them at a young age. Seeing the need—animals without homes—left an irreversible impression on me as a child. But my passion and advocacy really matured after my husband and I rescued our first dog, an anxious and loving pitbull named Kai. 

We both quickly learned about the stigma and plight surrounding shelter animals, particularly pitbulls. It happens organically—you watch how the world (including friends and family) judges your animal and you, and it’s hard to look away from what you experience. And these aren’t innocent judgments. Such stereotypes permeate our society, resulting in the [killing] of hundreds of thousands of innocent dogs annually. I believe those who adopt shelter animals must be more than simply owners—they must become tireless advocates too. 

In addition to our two rescued pitbulls, I volunteer at the SF SPCA and my husband and I serve as dog foster parents. 

I see my pediatric work and my rescue dog work along a continuum and they are very much linked. Both [children and animals] are especially susceptible to vulnerabilities. They both require allies with deep levels of empathy, and both also need advocates to give them voices. 

HF: You’ve talked with me before about your future desire to provide a safe place for children and animals. Can you talk a bit more about what you’d like to accomplish in this area? 

EP: There is something about animals that makes them incredible teachers of the intangibles—patience, compassion, kindness, and empathy. They also provide something we all need—companionship and loyalty (especially in a world that is increasingly lonely and isolating). Record levels of adults and teenagers report not having a close friend or someone they can trust. Animals can’t replace human connection, but they can go a long way.

Finding ways to connect youth in need with animals in need combines two problems and creates a [unified] solution. Take the epidemic of dogs without homes in the overcrowded shelter system. These are pack animals that usually sit alone in a small kennel for 23 hours a day. It’s devastating for them physically and emotionally. 

Imagine taking kids in need, such as foster children or children with chronic diseases or mental illness, and pairing them with a dog in need for walks, training, and play. In the short term, each provides the other companionship and a sense of purpose that teaches discipline, responsibility, and the joy of impacting another life. In the long term, kids learn about animal welfare, causing them to be more mindful of the work our society must do to create more just outcomes for animals. 

If kids are raised with a commitment to animal justice, they’ll become the adults that end animal injustice.

HF: You are a great example of living your values, and you appear to do that as a team with your husband. What drives your efforts to translate the political into the personal, and vice versa?

EP: If we don’t live our values, then it’s a stretch to call them “our values.” In such a case, we are merely saying the words, but not doing the work. And values only mean something when they’re backed by action. 

For us that means adopting dogs who may have issues, fostering dogs despite limited space and time, and eventually adopting children. On one hand, this decision is a more uncomfortable path that can come with a lot of challenges and stress. But, on the other hand, it feels far more uncomfortable to know of a need and to do nothing about it. We have to put skin in the game if we want to be true to ourselves and see change. This effort needs to extend to our day to day personal lives, and it means working on systemic change and getting at the root causes of challenges via political action and advocacy.

Photo courtesy of Emily Peitzman.

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.

A Conversation with Dr. Amy Zeidan

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As part of an ongoing series of interviews with people who are partnering with the Phoenix Zones Initiative, I had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Amy Zeidan. Amy is a trailblazer inside and outside of medicine. She is an assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine, and she received her medical degree from The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences and completed an Emergency Medicine residency at The Hospital of The University of Pennsylvania where she was Chief Resident. Amy is passionate about healthcare delivery and outcomes for refugee, immigrant, and asylum populations. Her research focuses on barriers to acute care for refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers, and she is a cofounder and director of the Society of Asylum Medicine. Additionally, she holds a national position with The Academy for Women in Academic Emergency Medicine (AWAEM) and serves as Finance Co-Chair of FemInEM, and she is committed to addressing gender inequities in medicine. 

HF: You’re trained as an emergency medicine physician but much of your work extends beyond emergency medicine and beyond medicine more generally. Tell me about the balance of professional responsibilities you maintain inside and outside of medicine.

AZ: I was initially drawn to emergency medicine because I view the emergency department as a lens to the social constructs and challenges of our healthcare system and our society. As emergency room (ER) clinicians, we provide a safety net for patients, particularly vulnerable patients who feel they have limited options other than the ER. We see the ugly and the beauty. We see so-called “frequent fliers” who either have multiple comorbidities that require near daily medical support or individuals who have such significant food, housing, employment, or financial insecurities that the emergency department (ED) becomes their most accessible source for social services, food, and safety.

As a result of my “day” job as an ER provider, I feel an urgent need to advocate for patients outside of the emergency department, where many of their health disparities that bring them to the ER start and flourish. My work outside of the ER fuels my ability to engage on shift and it makes me better equipped to support the social needs of patients in the ER. Without my outside work, I think burnout would be inevitable given the challenges we face as physicians navigating the complex healthcare system.

In medical school, I learned about the pathophysiology of disease. In residency, I learned about the pathophysiology of healthcare disparities. Now as an attending physician, I am learning about how structures of racism, sexism, and classism catalyze and perpetuate disease. Since many of the problems I see in the ER start outside of the ER, my responsibilities now push me more toward dismantling structures of injustice and poverty. I think, for me, it is more about integration instead of balance. The ER is a microcosm of our society and connecting the ER to the outside world helps me make sense of things.

HF: How did your early experiences in life influence your career path and your advocacy interests?

AZ: My first month of residency was a one month intensive care unit (ICU) rotation. My first patient was a woman from South America who was five years younger than me. She had a young child, and a concerned family in her home country—none of whom she could see because the sequalae of her disease required her to be isolated. She had spent weeks in the ICU previously and she had showed no signs of improvement. The underlying cause of her illness could have been treated with a lung transplant. When I assumed care for her, I inquired about her status on the transplant list. I learned she was not eligible because of her status as an undocumented immigrant. She wasn’t even on the list. Every day, a new problem would arise and she decompensated rapidly. One morning, she worsened acutely and all interventions had been exhausted except for comfort care (palliative care). The day before, she asked me to take a picture of her without any medical equipment so her son could remember her as close to normal as possible. I told her there was no need as we were planning a surprise for her son to visit the following day….a visit that required multiple hurdles, phone calls, favors, and days of planning. She did not live long enough to see her son. I held her hand and sobbed for hours until she stopped breathing.

While this experience may seem extreme, there are countless other situations in which patients receive inadequate care because of vulnerabilities beyond their control. In this case, citizenship status. We do our best as physicians, but we often don’t truly understand barriers faced by individuals seeking refuge in the United States—individuals who have been displaced and often persecuted because of their gender, religion, sexual preferences, or simply because of where they were born.

There are so many important issues we can and should advocate for as physicians. My advocacy efforts focus on reducing barriers to care that refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers often face.

HF: Early in your career, you have already become a champion on human rights issues, particularly for individuals seeking asylum. What drives your work in this area and what do you hope to accomplish in this area in the future?

AZ: I am driven by the hope that every asylum seeker has a chance at freedom. That I may play a very small role in an individual obtaining asylum status is beyond incredible. The stories of asylum seekers drive me. I think about how many individuals are currently being persecuted due to factors beyond their control and who do not have the option of asylum. In many of the asylum cases I have assisted with, the fear of return for individuals is debilitating. A forced return is often equivalent to a death sentence. Conversely, the joy of being granted asylum is overwhelming.

Our current asylum process is being threatened unnecessarily and unethically. I hope to not only uphold current asylum standards but expand asylum protections. A lot of great asylum work is possible in progressive states, where communities of advocates are doing great things together. I hope to unite communities in locations where asylum grant rates are less favorable, and to hold elected and appointed officials accountable.

Additionally, I hope to reduce barriers to care faced by asylum seekers and to improve their experiences in seeking acute care. A few years ago, I read a study conducted at an urban ER in New York City in which the authors attempted to identify the prevalence of survivors of torture in their ER. They found that 11.5% of their patients self-reported a history of torture. I suspect this number is much higher given the language barriers and disclosure challenges patients may face when self-reporting. As ER physicians, we are skilled at evaluating victims of acute trauma. But we often forget about how prior trauma affects health and health outcomes of our patients. I think about how potentially traumatizing a visit to the ER may be for patients who are survivors of torture. I suspect that we unknowingly treat survivors of torture frequently in the ED and I push myself to think about a trauma informed approach to care in the ER. My asylum work has helped me think about this approach, and how to identify prior trauma and treat patients with a history plagued by displacement and persecution. I hope to establish standards and best practices in the care of refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers in the emergency department.

HF: In addition to caring for vulnerable people, you are also concerned about the treatment of animals. How did you come to include animals in your scope of personal concern?

AZ: This is an important question and one I am still figuring out. It finally made sense when I read your book, Phoenix Zones, as you wrote so eloquently about a connection I had been feeling. What I interpreted was an alignment with the mistreatment of animals and mistreatment of humans, and the union of animal rights and human rights. To mistreat a human or an animal suggests the capacity for personal violence with a foundation of structural violence. Only by addressing both can we fundamentally change the pillars of violence that propagate hate. I often think about the existence and development of emotions in species. Do all species feel, and to what extent? How do we know? Our two incredible dogs, Rolo and Bosco, have taught us a lot about both human and animal needs. To be loved and protected, but also to be part of a pack—a community. The community unit seems to be very essential. Rolo was our companion during the long grueling hours of residency. Bosco recently entered our lives and his presence is beyond transformative. He was surrendered at eight years old and experienced terrible anxiety and depression in a shelter. He was rescued and fostered by my incredible best friend and his dignity has returned. He reminds us that the process of recovery is arduous yet joyful and that everyone deserve a chance to recover.

HF: You’re a very calm yet energetic and outwardly optimistic person. It’s a combination of qualities that was apparent even when I first met you years ago. What fuels your optimism?

AZ: I have wondered this as well! The easiest, and maybe somewhat honest response, is I don’t know. Recently I have needed more avenues for recharging my optimism. It is multifactorial but can be broken down into short-term and long-term drivers. In residency, I worked at an amazing clinic, Puentes de Salud. Our patients were primarily under/uninsured, 99.9% spoke Spanish as a first language, and their gratitude was overwhelming. Working at Puentes is what allowed me to return to ER shifts feeling like my tank was full. Many of our patients had significant barriers to care and Puentes gave them a safe and just space built around reaffirming dignity. Along the same lines, my work with individuals seeking asylum restores my optimism. Hearing their stories, witnessing their perseverance amidst pain, and sharing their joyful relief after being granted asylum reveal a real truth that is often overlooked.

But there is more that deeply sustains my drive.

When I was a teenager, my brother died unexpectedly as a result of a hunting accident. While I could write endlessly about personal loss, grief, and long-term sequalae, what comes to mind, in addressing your question, is survivor’s guilt. Survivor’s guilt is the guilt one feels when someone close to them dies because they lived. I remember feeling perplexed for years about why it was my brother and not me. I did in fact feel guilty that he died and I lived. He had so much promise and potential. The manner in which he colored the world was a work of art. So I have tried to transform my guilt into action. To the best of my abilities, I try to do the work he would have wanted to do in the ways I can. Our talents and art forms may be wildly different but I feel a drive every day to live his purpose in addition to mine. It almost seems easy to move forward optimistically when such a purpose is fundamental to my being.

HF: Thanks, Amy, for taking the time to answer my questions and for all you’re now doing for people and animals. I feel privileged to work with you on a variety of projects.

Interview with Photojournalist Jo-Anne McArthur

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As part of an ongoing interview series with global leaders, I recently had the opportunity to talk with Jo-Anne McArthur, a photojournalist and the founder of We Animals Media. Through her long-term body of work, We Animals, she has documented our complex relationship with animals in almost sixty countries over the last fifteen years. She was the subject of the acclaimed 2013 documentary The Ghosts in Our Machine, and she is the author of We Animals and Captive, as well as the co-founder of The Unbound Project, which celebrates women animal advocates worldwide. Her work has been used by hundreds of organizations, media, and academics. She has spoken extensively in North America, Australia, and across Europe on the subjects of photography, animals, social change, and empathy.

HF: Through photography, the We Animals project documents the experiences of nonhuman animals in a human-dominated world. Why did you decide to launch We Animals Media, and how have your expectations for the project evolved over time?

JM: The intention of the We Animals project has always been to address a massive blind spot for we humans. We love companion animals, revere wildlife, but ignore—and intentionally make invisible—the animals we use. For over fifteen years now, I’ve been documenting those animals who we use as food, in fashion, for experimentation, for work, for religious practice, and for entertainment.

This work has now taken the team and me to almost sixty countries. I say “team” because this solo-pilot mission has grown into a small but mighty media organization, telling the stories of animals worldwide. We are called We Animals Media. We are a team of staff, journalists, photographers, and filmmakers.

This journey has not been planned, but grew out of the desire to do better, and to do more, for animals. Creating a donor-based organization, making sure our repository is available and free for anyone helping animals, and expanding our reach to larger audiences have all been part of this journey of entrepreneurship and advocacy.

HF: Can you talk a little about your approach to photographing animals, particularly when you are embedded in exploitive situations while trying to capture their lived experiences?

JM: I stick to some basic principles. I’m not there to further alarm the animals, so I keep very quiet. I make myself small in my demeanor, and I move mindfully. It’s important for photographers to not shoot from a typical human-eye vantage point, as that’s how we so often see images, and they aren’t engaging. I have a “get down, get close” mantra when photographing animals. I try to observe them close up and quietly and capture some essence of not only the individual but their experience of confinement and exploitation. That’s why my images are very much about context and place.

HF: Please tell me about the We Animals humane education program.

JM: One of the main ways we can change things for animals is to strike at the roots of the problem. That means education! I believe that we need to infuse young people with a reverence and respect for all animals. I do this through images, film, and storytelling. I want students to feel empowered to care, and to feel they can speak up. I want them to talk amongst one another about standing up for animals. Our We Animals humane ed programs are a small but necessary drop in the bucket. I remember many of the speakers who came in to my schools when I was a kid. I’ll never forget a man who worked with UNICEF who came to speak with us; he broadened my view of the world, even at the young age of nine. The students enjoy the learning and discussions, and so I do believe that humane ed is a vital part of the animal advocacy movement.

HF: You’ve also launched the Unbound Project, which highlights women on the frontlines of advocacy and activism for animals. What was the impetus behind this project, and why do you think it is so important to share stories of women advocating for animals?

JM: It’s important because women are underrepresented in positions of power in the movement, and men often get more of the accolades for work and progress. This is changing—history in the making!—and Unbound aims to be part of this history making and history recording. We want women’s work to have a home and historical footprint. In Europe and North America (I do not know about other continents), women make up the vast majority of animal advocacy work. We celebrate this!

HF: What changes have you seen—positive or negative—in the ways animals are portrayed in the media? Are you hopeful that we will see more positive changes? If so, what brings you the most hope?

JM: Animal sentience and welfare are much more visible in the media in recent years. It’s heartening. We also know, though, that the rise of veg*anism moves alongside the rise of meat-eating in growing economies. We have much work ahead of us to mitigate (obliterate!) that growth.

The investigative work I do is painful, and it takes stamina and grit to stay positive and focused in the animal movement, because the realities of mass suffering are horrifying, and it can be debilitating. Every day, I choose to focus on what I can do, and I choose to focus on the good, and on change. If I have a secret to success, that would be it. To do the best I can every day. Sometimes that’s a lot, and sometimes it’s not much. For me, action is catharsis.

HF: Would you mind sharing a bit about anything else in the works?

JM: We are excited about working with a growing number of contributors. Lots of conversations and project-building currently happening! Personally, I’m looking forward to continuing the growth of our work with NGOs in Asia, for the We Animals Media Asia series. I’m so happy that We Animals Media already has a small but really talented roster of journalists, filmmakers, and photographers.

HF: Thank you, Jo-Anne McArthur, for all you do. For all the readers out there, please check out We Animals Media.

Photo credit: Kelly Guerin (2019).

 

 

 

An Interview with Writer & Publisher Martin Rowe

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Martin Rowe is the cofounder of Lantern Books and author of The Polar Bear in the Zoo: A Speculation and The Elephants in the Room: An Excavation (both Lantern, 2013), and co-author of Right Off the Bat: Baseball, Cricket, Literature, and Life (with Evander Lomke, published by Paul Dry Books). He is also the editor of The Way of Compassion (Stealth Technologies, 1999) and the founding editor of Satya: A Magazine of Vegetarianism, Environmentalism, Animal Advocacy, and Social Justice. Martin has also been instrumental in helping other authors publish their groundbreaking books. 

Martin will join us at our Phoenix Zones Initiative Summit in November, which aims to accelerate progress for people and animals across the globe. Recently Martin was kind enough to answer some questions about his work. Our brief exchange is below.


HF: In 1994, you co-founded the monthly magazine Satya, and five years later, you co-founded Lantern Books. What motivated you to co-found a magazine and publishing house focused on vegetarianism, environmentalism, and social justice issues including advocacy on behalf of animals?

MR: In terms of subject matter, I’ve always thought there was more in common among the movements than that which separated them, so I wanted to showcase that with Satya, and have done the same with Lantern. Much of what we publish at Lantern has at its core a commitment to non-violence: either stopping violence from happening in the first place, or recovering from it, or living in its aftermath—whether that violence is to the Earth, other animals, or other human beings. My motivations were relatively straightforward. I love editing, publishing, facilitating, and communicating. I believe that ideas matter, and that stories can be transformative.  

HF: Through Lantern, you’ve published some considerably powerful books. Do you have any favorites? 

MR: We’ve published widely at Lantern, and I’ve learned a huge amount from our authors. So, I have no favorites. I’m pleased that we have been able to remain in business and to pay our authors their royalties, vendors their bills, and staff their salaries and healthcare insurance. That some people have been changed by our books I am also very grateful for.

HF: You’re also a writer, and you appear quite willing to examine the complexity of your own and others’ biases and privileges through the power of words and your own writing. What can publishers, editors, and authors do to encourage more serious analysis of and reflection on social justice issues? 

MR: For me, complexity and nuance are more interesting than simplistic narratives of unidirectional change. None of us has the answer, because there is no single answer. In fact, I think there are only more interesting questions. There are many publishers producing powerful books on social justice, so I don’t think I need to make any claims on being more serious than anyone else. What I would say is that I would welcome more stories, more narratives that delve more deeply into the issues than plain advocacy, litanies of facts, or declarations of right and wrong. The human condition is too interesting for simple declarations.

HF: I must also ask about your Trumpiad volumes, poetic satirical collections that draw on the current presidential administration and what brought Trump into office. Will there be a “Book the Third,” and has the process of writing the poems offered further perspective? Perhaps as importantly, tell me about the two charities that benefit from proceeds of the book sales.

MR: Book the Third is ongoing and will be published early next year. All the volumes are available online on my website. I started when 45 became president and won’t stop until he leaves office, one way or the other. The two charities that benefit from people actually buying the book are VINE, an LGBTQ-run farmed animal sanctuary in Vermont, and New Alternatives NYC, a support service for trans youth in NYC. I picked charities that felt as far removed from the concerns of the current president as possible. It seemed appropriate and proportional.

HF: As editor of The Way of Compassion, published in 1999, you presented an ethical yet accessible view of how we can each make a difference in the lives of others. Contributors to the volume presented generally optimistic views of the world. You also seem optimistic, while acknowledging an often-contradictory reality, as evidenced by the Vegan America Project. Can you talk a little about that venture and what you hope to accomplish?

MR: The Vegan America Project is an attempt to imagine the US as a vegan country by 2050. Veganism here is a heuristic to think about radical social change and how we might find a sustainable path to some kind of livable future in the face of mass extinction, social disruption, and climate change. I think veganism is good to think with: it’s radical enough to disturb settled notions about our “proper” relationship with other species, the environment, food, and social justice, but not inconceivable as a way of living. Of course, veganism could be dystopian (a function of scarcity and social breakdown) and not utopian. So, optimism is not quite correct in framing how I’m approaching it. Our future is more existential than that. 

HF: Well said, and thank you, Martin, for an enlightening interview and for all you do.

Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur.

Who Does—and Who Doesn’t—Qualify as a Refugee?

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Last week, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN Refugee Agency, released its annual Global Trends report on forced displacement. The bottom line: Every minute in 2018, 25 people were forced to flee their homes due to war, persecution, or conflict.

In total, more than 70 million people were forcibly displaced in 2018—the highest level of forced migration in 70 years. About 3.5 million people were listed as asylum seekers, 25.9 million people qualified as refugees, and 41.3 million people were internally displaced within their own national borders. 

Across the globe, the largest numbers of refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons live in places with the fewest public resources. In 2018, countries in developed regions of the globe hosted only 16 percent of refugees, whereas nations classified as the least developed hosted one-third of the global refugee population. Refugees and asylum seekers comprise one-half of one percent of the population throughout the continent of Africa, and it’s about half that in North America. In recent years, the United States has dramatically reduced rather than increased the number of refugees admitted into the country—even though many historical and modern wars waged by the United States have contributed to forced migration.

Recently I returned from the North American Refugee Health Conference in Toronto, where I spoke about issues including asylum medicine, physician advocacy, and how to integrate health and human rights into the medical education curriculum. Refugee resettlement is always a hot topic at the conference, and this year was no different. It’s also a subject that’s difficult for many people—even experts—to wrap their heads around.

Many of my patients are refugees who have resettled in the United States, and you might be surprised to learn how many people in your community are refugees or families of refugees. You might also be surprised to discover how many famous people came to the United States as refugees—for example, Albert Einstein, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, singer and songwriter Gloria Estefan, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, to name just a few. Most refugees who resettle in the United States contribute significantly to their communities, and, contrary to political rhetoric, the typical American is 29 times more likely to be killed by a regional asteroid strike than by a refugee (the chances of which are nearly nil).

As anyone who is familiar with the refugee resettlement process will tell you, it is long and difficult. In fact, the most demanding way to legally enter the United States is as a refugee.

Under U.S. law, the term “refugee” refers to someone who is located outside the United States, is of “special humanitarian concern to the United States,” and has demonstrated that they were persecuted or has a well-founded fear of persecution because of race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion in their nation of origin. Typically, in order to be considered as a refugee, an individual must be referred to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for Refugees by the UNHCR, a U.S. Embassy, a nongovernmental organization, or the U.S. Department of State. Some eligible family members living in the United States can also initiate a family reunification case— for example, for a spouse or children under the age of 21. Most people must first flee their country of origin to apply for refugee status—without firmly resettling in another nation.

If an individual is found to be eligible for consideration of refugee status, the vetting process can take years. It includes extensive background investigation, a face-to-face interview with a U.S. Department of Homeland Security Citizenship and Immigration Services Refugee Officer, health screening to identify any contagious diseases (some of which can be disqualifying), “sponsorship assurance” from an established community-based organization, and a course on cultural orientation before entering the United States. The process also includes numerous security checks through multiple federal and international databases. (Think Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Defense, and national intelligence agencies.) People who are rejected by the Department of Homeland Security cannot appeal the decision.

In all, less than one percent of all refugees are considered eligible for resettlement. Most live in limbo in refugee camps or shelters for years without steady access to education, employment, healthcare, or security. And more than half of all refugees are children—many of whom handle their legal cases on their own. Imagine, even as an adult, navigating such a complex system—for example: providing all necessary forms of identification after being forced to flee conflict; a composed, often intimidating interview with a professional immigration officer; a clean bill of health after living in unsafe, crowded conditions without clean water; and the fortitude to adapt to a new land after living through the unimaginable.

Self-sufficiency is a key principle promoted by the government and within refugee resettlement agencies in the United States, and it is a value commonly embraced by refugees. Refugees who are fortunate to resettle in the United States are expected to find a job within six months of arrival, and they must apply for a green card after one year, which triggers further security clearances. Many become active citizens who extoll the virtues and obligations of a free society. For example, one study found that refugees paid more in taxes than they ever received in benefits. Despite a history of trauma, language barriers, and discrimination, many refugees demonstrate remarkable resilience and independence. As I’ve written elsewhere, they are like spirited phoenixes that can rise from the ashes of adversity if given the chance.

At a time when there is a humanitarian crisis involving historic levels of forced migration, it is critical that we move beyond myths, misunderstandings, and divisive and discriminatory rhetoric. Volunteering, raising awareness, and supporting resettlement within local communities are all ways to get more involved. And—as for everyone—kindness and compassion can go a long way toward helping individuals rise from the ashes.

Photo by Rene Bernal on Unsplash.

 

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