Animals And The Environment

Contemporary Earth and animal activists rarely collaborate, perhaps because environmentalists focus on species and ecosystems, while animal advocates look to the individual, and neither seems to have much respect for the other. This diverse collection of essays highlights common ground between earth and animal advocates, most notably the protection of wildlife and personal dietary choice. If earth and animal advocates move beyond philosophical differences and resultant divergent priorities, turning attention to shared goals, both will be more effective – and both animals and the environment will benefit. Given the undeniable seriousness of the environmental problems that we face, including climate change and species extinction, it is essential that activists join forces. Drawing on a wide range of issues and disciplines, ranging from wildlife management, hunting, and the work of NGOs to ethics, ecofeminism, religion and animal welfare, this volume provides a stimulating collection of ideas and challenges for anyone else who cares about the environment or animals.

Food, Animals, and the Environment: An Ethical Approach examines some of the main impacts that agriculture has on humans, nonhumans, and the environment, as well as some of the main questions that these impacts raise for the ethics of food production, consumption, and activism. Agriculture is having a lasting effect on this planet. Some forms of agriculture are especially harmful. For example, industrial animal agriculture kills 100+ billion animals per year; consumes vast amounts of land, water, and energy; and produces vast amounts of waste, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. Other forms, such as local, organic, and plant-based food, have many benefits, but they also have many costs, especially at scale. These impacts raise difficult ethical questions. What do we owe animals, plants, species, and ecosystems? What do we owe people in other nations and future generations? What are the ethics of risk, uncertainty, and collective harm? What is the meaning and value of natural food in a world reshaped by human activity? What are the ethics of supporting harmful industries when less harmful alternatives are available? What are the ethics of resisting harmful industries through activism, advocacy, and philanthropy? The discussion ranges over cutting-edge topics such as effective altruism, abolition and regulation, revolution and reform, individual and structural change, single-issue and multi-issue activism, and legal and illegal activism. This unique and accessible text is ideal for teachers, students, and anyone else interested in serious examination of one of the most complex and important moral problems of our time.

Emerging infectious diseases are often due to environmental disruption, which exposes microbes to a different niche that selects for new virulence traits and facilitates transmission between animals and humans. Thus, health of humans also depends upon health of animals and the environment – a concept called One Health. This book presents core concepts, compelling evidence, successful applications, and remaining challenges of One Health approaches to thwarting the threat of emerging infectious disease. Written by scientists working in the field, this book will provide a series of "stories" about how disruption of the environment and transmission from animal hosts is responsible for emerging human and animal diseases. Explains the concept of One Health and the history of the One Health paradigm shift. Traces the emergence of devastating new diseases in both animals and humans. Presents case histories of notable, new zoonoses, including West Nile virus, hantavirus, Lyme disease, SARS, and salmonella. Links several epidemic zoonoses with the environmental factors that promote them. Offers insight into the mechanisms of microbial evolution toward pathogenicity. Discusses the many causes behind the emergence of antibiotic resistance. Presents new technologies and approaches for public health disease surveillance. Offers political and bureaucratic strategies for promoting the global acceptance of One Health.

This book explores interdisciplinary approaches to animal-focused curriculum and pedagogy in environmental education, with an emphasis on integrating methods from the arts, humanities, and natural and social sciences. Each chapter, whether addressing curriculum, pedagogy, or both, engages with the extant literature in environmental education and other relevant fields to consider how interdisciplinary curricular and pedagogical practices shed new light on our understandings of and ethical/moral obligations to animals. Embracing theories like intersectionality, posthumanism, Indigenous cosmologies, and significant life experiences, and considering topics such as equine training, meat consumption and production, urban human-animal relationships, and zoos and aquariums, the chapters collectively contribute to the field by foregrounding the lives of animals. The volume purposefully steps forward from the historical marginalization of animals in educational research and practice.

Ecology is characterized by a rapidly growing complexity and diversity of facts, aspects, examples, and observations. What is badly needed is the development of common patterns, of rules that, as in other sciences such as physics, can more generally explain the increasing complexity and variability we observe. Tom White, being one of the "seniors" in ecology, makes such an attempt in his book. the pattern he shows and explains with numerous examples from the entire animal kingdom is a universal hunger for nitrogen, a misery that drives the ecology of all organisms. He advocates that the awareness of this fundamental role that the limitation of nitrogen plays in the ecology of all organisms should be as a much part of each ecologis's intellectual equipment as is the awareness of the fact of evolution by means of natural selection. His claim is that not "enery" but "nitrogen" is the most limited "currency" in the animal world for the production and growth of their young.

Studying animals in the environment may be a realistic and highly beneficial approach to identifying unknown chemical contaminants before they cause human harm. Animals as Sentinels of Environmental Health Hazards presents an overview of animal-monitoring programs, including detailed case studies of how animal health problemsâ€"such as the effects of DDT on wild bird populationsâ€"have led researchers to the sources of human health hazards. The authors examine the components and characteristics required for an effective animal-monitoring program, and they evaluate numerous existing programs, including in situ research, where an animal is placed in a natural setting for monitoring purposes.