Art, nukes, & ethical energy

From ANIMAL PEOPLE
Morals & Society
EDITORIAL, April 2011

Is there no the ethical limit to what humans can do to helpless animals?

Evaristti and unwitting "partner" in art.

BY MERRITT CLIFTON, Animal People Magazine

CHILEAN SHOCK ARTIST Marco Evaristti won global notoriety in February 2000 with an exhibit at the Trapholt Art Museum in Kolding, Denmark,  consisting of 10 blenders containing live goldfish. Visitors were invited to puree a goldfish.

Evaristti,  however,  took the show on the road.  On April 20,  2006 the blenders and goldfish arrived in Dornbirn,  Austria. That night four animal advocates broke into the art gallery,  smashed the blenders,  and took the fish.

But from an animal rights point of view,  pulverizing a live fish would not be any less wrong if done for some socially acceptable pretext.

Stopping Evaristti is easy compared to stopping the practices of the poultry and fishing industries,  but stopping the poultry and fishing industries are longtime acknowledged goals of the animal rights movement.  Indeed,  some of the activists who publicized the break-in at the Austrian museum saw it as a symbolic gesture of opposition to the entire spectrum of cruelties inflicted on fish killed for food,  and hoped that the episode would help to promote public awareness about the capacity of fish to suffer.

Rocky alliance with enviros

Surveys of animal rights advocates have repeatedly demonstrated that upward of 90% also define themselves as environmentalists,  yet most acknowledge a wide gulf between animal rights perspectives and the prevailing views among mainstream environmentalists.

Mainstream environmentalism exempts much anti-animal activity from the ecological precepts it selectively advances,  and is especially self-contradictory in opposing pollution from factory farms without opposing the products of factory farms.

However,  despite the clear conflicts between the perspectives of animal advocacy and mainstream environmentalism, animal advocates mostly perceive parallel interests in protecting habitat and endangered species,  preventing pollution,  seeking to remedy effects of climate change,  and pursuing the safest,  least ecologically damaging forms of energy development.  Emerging at about the same time in the mid-1970s,  the contemporary animal advocacy and environmental movements have sometimes found themselves in awkward alliances despite often being at odds.  Animal advocates have generally regarded environmentalists as acceptable political partners,  despite the tendency of mainstream environmentalists to prefer to keep company with hunters.

Along the rocky way,  energy policy has been among the few areas of consistent agreement.  No major animal advocacy group has an independent energy policy,  but almost all of them frequently endorse energy-related legislation and policy statements originating with the major mainstream environmental organizations.

In all likelihood the alliance of animal advocates and environmentalists on energy policy will only strengthen in the radioactive aftermath of the apparent triple and possible quadruple meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear complex in northeastern Japan.  Few people in either camp appear to favor expanded nuclear energy development,  despite the acknowledged contribution of fossil fuels to global warming.  Both animal advocates and environmentalists have reservations about wind power,  as well,  since wind turbines have become recognized as major killers of bats and birds.

This is no more a new insight than the recognition that earthquakes and tsunamis can destroy nuclear reactors,  yet has been surprisingly little recognized.

Though the latter concern has not been completely ignored, it has rated low among environmental objections to nuclear energy development,  in part because similar occurs in cooling fossil fuel-burning generating stations,  while hardly anyone has paid attention to the differing magnitudes of harm done by the different types of plant.

At this writing,  publication of the new regulations has already been delayed once,  and may be delayed indefinitely,  or scrapped,  as result of the anti-EPA and anti-regulatory attitude of the Republican-dominated House of Representatives.

What if we talk about cruelty?

What if animal advocates were to decide that needlessly killing a trillion fish per year by methods every bit as grotesque as those of Marco Evaristti is an animal rights and welfare concern?

Emboldened by growing success in opposition to cruelty to factory farmed animals,  after decades of despairing that the public could be brought to care about species slaughtered for food by the multi-millions and billions,  the animal advocacy cause may be close to rediscovering cruelty to fish.

But despite the magnitude of fish suffering caused by energy plant cooling systems,  fish are scarcely the only animals who are harmed by energy production.  Though fish are by far the most numerous victims,  the case for raising animal suffering as an aspect of the energy debate does not rest on harm to fish alone.

Neither does raising concern about animal suffering as an aspect of the energy debate require politicians to become any more enlightened about fish suffering in specific and animal issues in general than they already are.  Politicans merely must be brought to recognize that the considerable numbers of voters who care about animals perceive cruelty as a dimension of energy issues.

Editor in Chief of ANIMAL PEOPLE, the world’s leading independent publication on animal issues.

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