Through thick and thin: the romance of the species in the anthropocene

The emerging field of animal studies has a curious relationship with environmentalism. Instead of fitting comfortably in the latter’s capacious tent, animal studies has chafed at environmentalists’ commitment to holistic communitarianism best represented by Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic.” The land ethic approaches the biotic community as a pyramidal ecological system that turns on the relations between producers and consumers and between predators and prey rather than as an egalitarian moral community. Animal rights activists have thus repeatedly clashed with conservationists in an internecine fight poignantly dramatized in T.C. Boyle’s novel When the Killing’s Done (2011). In this paper, I argue that environmental justice cannot be secured solely from the third-person perspective of the deontological argument underlying animal rights or the utilitarian argument often used to justify the land ethic. Instead, we might draw on the pragmatist traditions East and West and view justice as a larger loyalty achieved as much by the moral imagination of the particular from the first- and second-person perspectives as by rational deliberation on the universal. Using a French novel (The Roots of Heaven, 1958), a Chinese novel (The Disappearance of Lao Hai, 2001), and a Chinese film (Monster Hunt, 2015) as my examples, I demonstrate how literature’s thick narratives can engender an ethics of care by bringing particular instances of non-human distress into aesthetic, affective, and moral proximity with us.