Who Will Speak For The Animals?

Wild animal populations are in free-fall, the average population size now nearly 75% smaller than just fifty years ago.

The heaviest hit are those who live in freshwater environments, where populations have crashed by 85%. Land animal populations (ex humans) have fallen 69%, while ocean-dwelling species have seen their numbers fall by 56%.

This implies billions of deaths, and billions of never born.

The planet we think we live on, the planet our parents did live on, no longer exists.

So much life has been extinguished and so many habitats strangled to the point where they support stingy life or no life at all.

Most politicians and capitalists won’t tell you what is to blame, because for them, nothing is to blame.

This is the cost, if they even admit it has been a cost, of progress. Specifically of course, human progress.

All the other animals, if they had a voice, would certainly think differently.

At the super-structural level, the blame for this annihilation of life lies with global capitalist industrial civilisation.

But that’s not sufficient to explain it. We have to look underneath this super-structure for the causal layers of blame.

The first layer of blame lies with the industrial food system and the economic and political incentives granted to the people and entities within it.

Since 1960 more than a billion acres of forest has been razed to breed cows for meat and to grow cereals, half of which are not grown for human consumption but to feed livestock and make fuel. And more than three-quarters of global agricultural land is used for livestock, despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of our protein and calories. In the tropics the destruction of forests is accelerating, with somewhere between 15 and 20 million acres burnt, chopped and cleared for agriculture every year.

If you combine global grazing land with the amount of cropland used for animal feed, livestock accounts for a full 80% of agricultural land use.

Meat and dairy have become luxuries we binge on, with global meat consumption increasing more than 130% since 1990.

The neo-colonial element of this, which transfers ecological damage to the periphery, shouldn’t be missed. US imports of beef from the Amazon, which is being devastated by new cattle farms, surged nearly 200% recently to record highs after a three-year ban was lifted.

And, absent structural changes such as rationing, bans or at-scale lab meat production, by 2050 the world will produce more than 550 million tonnes of meat, signalling even more destruction of forests, grasslands and the animals that live there.

But it’s not just farming hammering wild animals.

A formative piece of research that shaped my thinking about the brutality of modern civilisation came out in 2016.

It found that road building on a gigantic scale had shattered the Earth’s land into 600,000 fragments, most of which are too small to support significant wildlife. Researchers said that virtually all of western Europe, the eastern US and Japan have no areas at all with a boundary of more than 1km on either side of a road.

I didn’t and don’t like roads or cars particularly, but at that time I hadn’t really considered just how vast the infrastructure on Earth for vehicles was and how it had so thoroughly dissected the planet solely to serve human needs. Nature documentaries, which I enjoy and enjoyed, had focused on frolicking wild animals in untainted landscapes, reassuring us everything was fine.

This way of wiping out animals and their habitats has become invisible to many of us because we‘re forced to use the infrastructure of a car-dominated, urbanised landscape. We have no other reference point. As I have written about in the context of covid, this is not our fault: we must exist in the society that exists.

Into this already shattered landscape, the length of the world’s roads is projected to increase more than 60% by 2050.

Off land, things are arguably even worse.

In the world’s rivers and lakes, fish populations have plummeted 85%, with sixteen going extinct in 2020 alone. Extinction means forever. Sixteen entire species which survived for millions of years never to be seen again.

One of these was the magnificent Chinese paddlefish, which at 7 metres (23 feet) was a giant of the freshwater world. It likely existed for around 200 million years.

TWO HUNDRED MILLION YEARS.

Now gone forever.

Surviving numerous planet shattering events, it couldn’t survive industrial human society. It went extinct due to the construction of the Gezhouba and Three Gorges dams, which blocked its route to the sea where it needed to spawn.

I imagine shoals of paddlefish forlornly making the trip down river every year, hoping beyond hope to reach the ocean, dwindling in numbers until the very last survivor.

Dam construction, draining and building over floodplains, diverting and dredging rivers, using them as toilets to dump human shit and industrial waste, pumping from them to feed crops, as if they are nothing more than giants vats of water. All have decimated freshwater ecosystems and placed more than 18,000 species in danger.

At sea, fishing at unfathomably industrial scales using drag nets that scoop up everything in their path, has created a mortal danger to many marine species. There are now more than four million fishing vessels scouring the planet for fish. Pollution and changes in water temperature because of overheating oceans are also stressing out marine life and shrinking their numbers.

The animal world is in a state of great danger. And all of the projections say things will get worse.

Let’s put some numbers on the scale of non-human we’re talking about.

There are an estimated 7.8 million animal species on the planet, all of which have intrinsic value and deserve to exist safely in their own right (not just because of the value humans derive from them).

In many cases we’re talking about beings who have families, relationships and complex emotional lives.

It is a moral abomination to suggest that millions of species should be subjugated to the whims of a singular species exerting full-spectrum dominance over our one shared planet.

To my mind the most profoundly ethical question human society can ask itself is how billions of living beings who have no agency to physically alter their world can live safely alongside the one species that does.

Yet despite the species-ending consequence of human dominance of Earth, despite the acceleration of mass extinction, there isn’t one parliament on Earth that has a dedicated voice for animals and their rights.

Green politicians don’t count. Not really.

They are still answerable to human constituents living in human societies.

Where Green politicians have been elected they have been absorbed easily into the capitalist industrial complex.

Germany is the most infamous example. Germany’s Greens are in power as part of a coalition government, their leader is the foreign minister and one of the country’s most powerful politicians, yet they have rowed back on climate and nature pledges and reopened coal power plants. They also support Israel’s genocide of Gaza which is not only exacting a devastating human cost but is also calamitous for global and local ecology.

The second election of Trump, especially alongside a figure like Elon Musk, really, I think, puts all of this into focus. Because Trump and Musk are the peak expression of anthropocentrism.

Two urban apes that adore concrete, asphalt, steel and rockets. Their obsessions - going to Mars, big buildings and golf courses - are steeped in an anthropocentric view of life, the world and the universe.

Musk believes our glorious human future, our ultimate calling, is to be hermetically sealed in perpetuity on a literally barren rock no human could ever step a bare foot on.

If this is the peak, now must be the time for new thinking.

The animal world is undergoing huge suffering and pain.

Species with an inheritance claim to this planet that far outweighs our claims are being pushed to forever death.

This can’t go on.

We need to change the rules of the game.

We need to give animals an unwavering voice that doesn’t answer to human constituents.

The need for this voice will be true in a revolutionary future and can and should be argued for within existing electoral democracies.

How could we do this?

By creating a permanent, unelected animal rights voting bloc in national, regional and local parliaments and political decision making bodies.

A kind of affirmative action for animals.

The legal enshrinement of a percentage representation of MPs, Congress people and councillors who are not answerable or accountable to human constituents.

Maybe 10%, maybe 20%. Maybe 50%. Different countries and regions operating within different circumstances would have different percentages. In the bloated, over-industrialised western world it would be more. In poorer countries, less.

In an acknowledgment of the seriousness of the crisis, these people would sit outside of democratic structures and be empowered to push for and vote on policy strictly from an animal/nature rights point of view.

They could prioritise ecocide laws, laws which anthropocentric politicians will never adopt in meaningful ways.

It would create inevitable confrontations with the industrial capitalist majority, but these conflicts would have to be managed. In those confrontations would be the point, the essence of the action.

And it need not mean the permanent establishment of an anti-human, NIMBY bloc.

It would help force development plans away from building on green spaces because it’s cheaper, and towards the reuse, upgrade and refurbishment of existing buildings and structures (so-called brown field sites).

It would mean voting against every fossil fuel project, helping accelerate clean energy deployment.

It would mean voting against clean energy installations where they harmed animals, helping reduce and rationalise energy use.

It would mean voting against new roads, accelerating public transport construction and adoption.

It could and should mean closing existing roads and turning them into railway lines instead.

It would mean voting against new industrial animal farms, helping shift food systems towards plants and grains.

Most of all it would give millions of species whose future is being foreclosed because they can’t shape it a form of political representation on a planet they can’t live without.

It would begin to balance up a grotesquely imbalanced power dynamic between one species on the one hand and millions on the other.

Maybe it’s a silly, utopian idea.

But where would we be, who would be, without utopian dreams?