Literature Review

With legal animal rights on the horizon, there is a need for a more systematic theorisation of animal rights as legal rights. This article addresses conceptual, doctrinal and normative issues relating to the nature and foundations of legal animal rights by examining three key questions: can, do and should animals have legal rights? It will show that animals are conceptually possible candidates for rights ascriptions. Moreover, certain ‘animal welfare rights’ could arguably be extracted from existing animal welfare laws, even though these are currently imperfect and weak legal rights at best. Finally, this article introduces the new conceptual vocabulary of simple and fundamental animal rights, in order to distinguish the weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law from the kind of strong legal rights that animals ought to have as a matter of future law.

Rattling the Cage explains how the failure to recognize the basic legal rights of chimpanzees and bonobos in light of modern scientific findings creates a glaring contradiction in our law. In this witty, moving, persuasive, and impeccably researched argument, Wise demonstrates that the cognitive, emotional, and social capacities of these apes entitle them to freedom from imprisonment and abuse.

Global health and environmental wellbeing are mutually reinforcing and interdependent. This mutuality invokes two major analytical orientations: it emphasizes a direct nexus between ecological strategies and global health outcomes. These in turn revitalize the essential quest for comprehensive policies and responsible strategies for enhancing both ecology and health within the discourse of sustainability. With orientation towards political conception of corporate responsibility, I problematize the root questions of the democratic embeddedness of the firm under conditions of weakened institutional structures. I highlight the inherent power relations in global health and ecological governance through literature mapping. I address the question: Why and how might ecological strategies be embedded in corporate day-to-day actions to produce optimal outcomes that have positive effects on global health and human dignity? Besides resource and ethical/political constraints, there are several micro-political, geopolitical, industrial, institutional and structural impediments to ecological and health sustainability. This grim diagnosis is clearly a description of a ‘disturbingly fascinating’ pathology of global capitalism whose industrial effects culminate in the accumulation of more profits for a few at the expense of the ecological sustainability of the majority. That notwithstanding, there are several grounds for optimism with a move from anthropocentrism to humanistic eco-centrism via deliberative democratic procedures. Here, the centrality of human dignity is emphasized. This study provides an interdisciplinary theoretical model that seeks to reorient strategies towards restoration, protection, mitigation, adaptation, harm avoidance and innovative sustainability of the whole economic gamut and biodiversity that supports global health. Thus, I rearticulate ecological sustainability in terms of its most fundamental means and end: sustainable global health and the tutelage of human dignity.

This paper explores the restructuring of America away from unsustainable practices such as massive fossil-fuels consumption and towards an ecodemocracy, which is defined as the restructuring of our society towards maximum conservation and equal rights for all species.

In an article published in 1995, Paul Shrivastava coined the notion of an ecocentric management paradigm. The ecocentric paradigm provided an integrated and holistic view of the organization at peace with the natural environment. This paper updates the idea of ecocentricity and enriches it with facts and fears that have emerged since then. We suggest that Shrivastava's original formulation was an improvement of the industrial paradigm, advance an alternative reconceptualization of ecocentricity and discuss some of the possible obstacles to the emergence and adoption of ecocentric management. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Activists advocating for a better treatment of animals have been using various platforms to promote the welfare or the rights of animals. In recent years, some have proposed to extend “legal personhood” to animals. This strategy would allow animals to get direct access to the special category of “persons” which legal systems associate with a plethora of the most robust kinds of protections and rights. By contrast, the sluggish incorporation of ethical concerns about animals within legal frameworks seems to have trouble moving past the recognition that animals are sentient beings that should not be treated cruelly and into a normatively more stringent set of entitlements that would grant proper consideration to animal needs. Legal personhood is, therefore, a much coveted golden ticket to our political community. In this article, I examine the arguments deployed to obtain it through judicial channels by an American animal rights group (the Nonhuman Rights Project). I focus on a 2015 judicial decision rejecting their petition for a writ of habeas corpus, as this case is the most detailed and representative of their assimilationist stance. This kind of animal rights activism aims at showing that animals are “like us” and should therefore be treated “like us”. I will explain the philosophical foundations implicit to the position defended by the animal rights group in order to test their internal coherence and reveal their inherent limitations. Most of my arguments will cast doubts on this assimilationist strategy. In doing so, I draw from the disciplines of law and moral philosophy in order to recognize both the importance of legal strategies for animal rights advocacy and the difficulties that arise from capitalizing on moral theories and values cherry-picked because of their rhetorical purchase within legal and political discourses.

This study aims to propose a framework to drive organizations, and particularly multinational enterprises, to understand and internalize a sustainable mindset for implementing efficient and effective corporate sustainability initiatives and helping them achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs).

While environmental and social research have generated a large amount of information and data on how values and environmental ethics relate to sustainable development, there are no studies that examine the missing links reflected in the terminology of the sustainable development definition that alienates it from its ecological ethos. This paper reviews the concept of sustainable development that continues to remain vague even two decades after the Brundtland Commission report. It then examines the limitations in the contemporary anthropocentric conceptualization of sustainable development with a utilitarian ethic and argues for a more ecocentric reinterpretation of its definition that is more inclusive and incorporates recognition of the socio-ecological values. The paper concludes with a call for a revised global resolution and a framework for sustainable development based on its reinterpretation that recognizes the interdependence of humans with the rest of the ecosphere.

Concepts such as ecosystem services and natural capital illustrate the benefits that people gain from preserving ecosystems, but they overlook wildlife’s ethical right to thrive independent of any benefit to humans. Many nature conservation bodies have changed their mission to give more emphasis to human benefits. The intrinsic value of non-human nature has all but disappeared from their arguments for conservation. This article examines the pitfalls of the shift to this anthropocentric mindset. It argues that non-human nature’s right to survive can be accounted for in decision-making, namely “ecodemocracy”.

Ecocentrism, or green ideology, offers a perspective on the relationships between human beings and nature that is radically different from the human-centred outlook within which democratic decision-making procedures have developed. Green ideology does not accept humans’ innate right to dominate other life-forms. Rather, human beings are considered part of nature and the various parts are seen as having value in their own right, irrespective of their perceived usefulness for human beings. In this study, I seek to formulate a ”green” democratic theory or, at least, identify the ”seeds” of one using ecocentrism as my point of departure. In so doing, I focus on three basic democratic values - liberty, equality and participation. Although these values are presumed essential to all democratic theories, I argue that the interpretations are somewhat ”elastic” in character. Thus, the boundary between democratic norms of process and content is placed somewhat differently in different versions of democratic theory. The green contribution to democratic thought introduces human environmental rights and rights of the non-human biota, which in turn call for democratic representation. Furthermore, eco-democracy proposes an ”environmental citizenship” that not only embraces environmental rights, but also citizen obligations towards the natural environment. I show that these eco-democratic norms have no exact equivalent within more traditional democratic theorising (which is represented in this study by a representative and a more participatory variant of democratic theory). This study also points to a rather propitious ”breeding-ground” for the ecodemocratic ideas among Swedish political actors at the beginning of the 1990s. Ecocentric interpretations of democratic core values have a position on the political parties’ agendas, there is an active environmental movement that propagates for these ideas, and there is relatively widespread recognition of eco-democratic norms within the Swedish public. Thus, I conclude that the elasticity of democratic core values is not ”only” a theoretical construction, but also an aspect of contemporary Swedish democratic culture.

What obligations do scholars of rhetoric and public address have to understand, address, and sustain the conditions of earthly coexistence? Only if the field of rhetoric embraces a genuinely ecological notion of rhetoric, the author argues, and only if we collectively commit to addressing the ecological dimensions of our various objects of study, can we truly give back to the earth in ways that honor all that it has given, and continues to give, to us. Toward that end, this essay outlines several dimensions of an “ecocentric rhetoric.“

Democracy is a matter of effective communication, not just preference aggregation. Normally it is only communication among humans about human interests that is at issue. But democracy can also exist or be denied in human dealings with the natural world. Ecological democratisation is therefore a matter of better integration of political and ecological communication. Principles of ecological democracy can be used both to criticise existing institutional arrangements, and to inspire a search for alternative institutions that would better integrate politics and ecology.