We propose researchers of environmental violence have much to gain by considering the relevance of degrowth critiques in characterizing and addressing environmental violence. We argue a more dynamic, intersectional, and less anthropocentric definition of environmental violence reveals how pervasive forms of violence against the biosphere are still embedded in many contemporary strategies for sustainability. Recognizing these limits as well as their overlaps with degrowth can help us better identify assumptions and practices that address environmental violence’s sources and far-reaching consequences.

This chapter argues that to practise social work in the Anthropocene it is crucial to decentre the human. This decentring does not involve devaluing the human but embedding their experience in the non-human world. We begin with a discussion of the Anthropocene along with the ecological crises and the growth in population, production and consumption as issues that underpin it. We highlight the importance of moving from anthropocentrism to Gaia in the way we understand the relationship between the human and the non-human world. This shift will enable social workers to rethink the social, the community and human rights in more ecocentric ways and will have implications in the ways social workers engage in activism and practice to affect social change.

The fields of critical animal studies and feminist new materialisms have important implications for anthropology. In attending to ethics in human-animal relations, these fields not only decenter but also destabilize the very category of the Human. In conversation with critical animal studies and feminist anthropology, multispecies ethnography thinks with nonhumans and honors their specificities as both individuals and species. Multispecies ethnography encourages analysis of humans’ entanglement with other species as well as thinking about seemingly inanimate matter such as rocks as animate entities. Recognizing the animacy of objects offers interesting and important insights for ethnography. In this chapter, the author provides an overview of the cross-pollination of the multispecies and new materialist turns to explore how feminist and queer studies of the non/human are important for anthropology. Multispecies and feminist new materialist interrogations of sexuality are discussed, focusing on their innovative and important ethical contributions to human understandings of sexuality. The author argues that anthropology is uniquely positioned to intervene further in this conversation and posits that queering multispecies ethnography, rather than simply using nonhuman animals to reify or resist human formations of sexuality, can offer an opening to interrogate sexuality as a multispecies entanglement.

This chapter examines the influence of William Bartram´s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida on the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790s and highlights the uniqueness of Bartram´s eco-centric approach to sublimity in early American thinking about the natural world. A practiced botanist and natural illustrator, Bartram delights in cataloguing plant and animal lives, but the Travels also offers a significant intervention into trans-Atlantic discourses of sublimity. Bartram´s sublime overwhelms the perceiver with plentitude rather than terror, and he narrates experiences of sublimity from amidst the rich life he delights to describe rather than at a distance. He emphasizes continuity between human and more-than-human lives. Bartram also resists the nationalistic orientation of his American contemporaries, attending to native and local epistemologies. The chapter concludes with comparisons between passages of the Travels, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and Wordsworth’s “Ruth.”

Making good decisions about sustainability requires explicit consideration about what criteria to use. Three grand traditions dominate most policy discussions: utilitarianism, deliberative ethics and anarchism/libertarianism. The chapter proposes seven criteria for good decisions. Three are criteria for the outcomes. A good decision should enhance the well-being of humans and other species while reducing stress on the environment; be efficient in allocating resources; and enhance individual freedoms. Four are criteria about process: take account of uncertainty in both facts and values, as well as value conflicts; promote fairness in both the decision process and its outcomes; rely on human cognitive strengths and compensate for weaknesses; and allow for social learning.

This chapter introduces the main theorists associated with ecological hermeneutics, their objectives and strategies. It demonstrates how an ecological approach can be applied using a specific story from the book of Judges as a case study.

This chapter examines the concept of speciesism by committing itself to an ameliorative inquiry. Accordingly, when engaging in antispeciesist theory, “speciesism” should be reserved for the unjustified instances of disadvantageous consideration or treatment of individuals, either by an appeal to species membership or by an appeal to other allegedly species-specific attributes. Next, it disputes the claim that anthropocentrism and speciesism are equivalent notions and that anthropocentrism, because it is inevitable, justifies speciesism. It then provides additional reasons for why anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric versions of speciesism are unjustified. Finally, it assesses a position that might be construed as a further instance of discrimination – modal personism. It concludes by suggesting that as an account of moral considerability, personism – modal or actual – is deeply flawed and should be rejected.

This chapter considers Virginia Woolf’s experiments in animal biography. It opens by presenting Woolf’s unpublished draft ‘Authorities’ note to Flush: A Biography (1933) as evidence of her knowing engagement with anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, before going on to read that text alongside her first experiment in the genre, Orlando: A Biography (1928). In doing so, the chapter draws on correspondence between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, as well as the latter’s rarely discussed book Faces: Profiles of Dogs (1961), to illustrate how canine companions take centre stage in their amorous discourse. It then turns to another overlooked intertext, Thomas Browne’s 1646 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, also known as Vulgar Errors, to show Woolf’s queering of his early modern belief that hares can change sex from female to male. Finally, the chapter places Flush in dialogue with a lesser-known dog biography the Woolfs considered for publication at the Hogarth Press (and which Woolf cleverly alludes to in her canine biography): Inordinate (?) Affection: A Story for Dog Lovers (1936) by composer, memoirist and suffragette Ethel Smyth.

At the heart of Charles Darwin’s place in environmental thought is a crucial tension: on the one hand, his work thoroughly dismantles the arguments for human exceptionalism, and dramatically minimizes the significance of the human species within the vast unfolding of geological and evolutionary history. On the other hand, his theorization of ecological interactivity laid the groundwork for conceptualizing the ways in which (some) human beings were having a massively outsized and growing impact upon the Earth’s ecosystems, including on the biosphere itself. As this chapter shows, questions about the proper scalar framework with which to understand the place of humanity and the scope of human agency within the natural order—questions which Darwin posed in profound and groundbreaking ways—continue to swirl around the Anthropocene concept and contemporary conversations about how to address the many interconnected ecological crises we face.

Wallace’s landscapes are haunted by capitalist interventions in the natural world, from the black sand of the Great Ohio Desert to the Great Convexity/Concavity that sits like a pustule between the United States and Canada. This chapter considers Wallace’s writing as an ecocritical gesture that connects human solipsism, hypercapitalism and the despoiling of the natural world. In tracing this connection, the chapter operates on the central theme of disgust, a recurrent and powerful motif throughout Wallace’s body of work. Working alongside the chapter on regional geographies, the chapter shows how Wallace troubled and complicated the regional archetypes that populate his writing by using images of the unheimlich and the grotesque, uniting the threatening, the decomposing and the simply absurd to highlight the depredations of the late capitalist system on the (American) landscape.

This first part explores the origins of the relationship between environmentalism and human rights and traces the evolution of this encounter through a historical lens. It analyses how concerns for environmental protection and human rights emerged as distinct aspirations that progressively evolved towards mutual integration into each other’s normative architecture, legal registers and institutional practices. By examining how the framing of the relationship between ‘Man and Nature’ changed over time and how these changes of perception were legally translated in international instruments, judicial decisions and doctrinal accounts, this part of the book thereby sheds light on a major paradigm shift that occurred in the 1960s, when environmental protection began to be framed as intrinsically intertwined with human rights concerns. This shift corresponds to the first explicit references to human rights in environmental instruments. The analysis unpacks how this radical turn in environmentalism was accommodated at three complementary levels: legislative, adjudicative and doctrinal. This produced a dominant account where environmental protection and human rights are viewed as synergistic and mutually reinforcing objectives, in disregard of the conflicts that also underpin this relation. This account thereby contributes to the literature that critically engages with liberal human rights-based approaches to environmental protection.

A vast literature on the legislative alignment between environmental and human rights concerns has flourished since the 1960s. This literature has mostly been occupied with the negative impacts that environmental harms and pollution have on human rights. The scholarly engagement with environmental and human rights protection gave rise to new fields of literature commonly referred to as ‘human rights approaches to environmental protection’ or ‘environmental human rights law’, thereby instantiating the normative quasi subsumption of environmental and human rights protection. This contributed to advancing both the agenda of environmental and human rights protection as well as their ever-closer intertwinement, and reinforced the mainstream anthropocentric and synergistic framing of their relationship. Yet, these two characteristics have also been contested. While much ink has been spilled on critiquing the lingering anthropocentrism that underpins a human rights law-based approach to environmental protection, less attention has been paid to the problematic emphasis on synergies that take the mutually beneficial linkages between environmental and human rights protection for granted. The analysis maps these different strands of inquiry and critique against human exceptionalism and the ideal of frictionless compatibility between environmental protection and human rights, and identifies how the book contributes to these debates.