How to Face Our Future Together
Alice Crary and Lori Gruen rethink animal ethics, James Carroll looks past the pro- and anti-war “parlor pundits,” and more
September 15, 2022
In this week’s issue of Public Seminar: animals in crisis, what we get wrong about women in power, displacement within Ukraine, and more.
Animal Rights
Mass extinctions, habitat destruction, and catastrophic climate change: our systems are failing animals, and failing us. In a conversation with Claire Potter, Alice Crary and Lori Gruen discuss their new book, Animal Crisis (Polity Books, 2022) and their call for humans to radically reimagine our relationships with other animals in order to confront our shared challenges. As Crary explains: “Animal Crisis’s opening case is about how orangutans on Borneo and Sumatra are threatened by the bulldozing and burning of their lush rainforest homes to make room for palm oil plantations. But orangutans and other non-human animal species aren’t alone in suffering from this massive destruction. Smoke and ash from the fires employed to clear the forests significantly reduce air quality, contributing to many thousands of premature human deaths. Vestiges of Indonesia’s violent colonial past abide in palm oil production today. There are material echoes of the enslavement of human beings that was part of colonial systems in the ongoing exploitation of palm oil plantation workers, whose circumstances today sometimes involve literal enslavement.” (September 14, 2022)
“By 2015, the Borneo rhinoceros was considered extinct in the wild. The orangutans on both Borneo and Sumatra may not be far behind.” Read an excerpt from Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory by Alice Crary and Lori Gruen, courtesy of Polity Books. (September 14, 2022)
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War and Peace
“In the blinding glare of Russia’s brutal assault against Ukraine, the entire history of America’s post–Cold War national security strategies and policies was brought into the light again, as if only now could its real character be understood. The revisiting was often polemical, with arguments falling along a divide between ‘realists’ who emphasized the validity of Putin’s complaints about sequential Western encroachments on Russia, and ‘neoconservatives’ who insisted that Putin’s antidemocratic imperialism alone was enough to explain his war. The visceral discomfort I felt in the face of this debate between and among what a Ukrainian American friend called ‘parlor pundits’ was a signal of the deeper question with which I was confronted.” In Part 2 of his series reckoning with Ukraine, James Carroll examines his longtime anti-war stance—and what it may have prevented him from seeing. (September 12, 2022)
How does it feel to be a displaced person in one’s own country? After fleeing war-ravaged Kharkiv, Andrei Krasniashchikh returns to Poltava, the city of his childhood. “I run into an ophthalmologist. A hairdresser. A teacher I once counseled. Acquaintances that I hadn’t seen in Kharkiv for years. Half of Kharkiv is in Poltava. The other half—all the destroyed buildings—have stayed behind.” (September 12, 2022)
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Gender Politics
Even as women attain positions of power, regressive perceptions of “femaleness” persist—and are sometimes weaponized. Joseph Matthews shares how the problem played out in the courtrooms of the 1970s and 1980s. “One classmate litigator closed up her practice, left a tape of bird songs on her office answering machine, and enrolled in art school.” (September 13, 2022)