Air pollution has been identified as the single largest environmental health risk by the World Health Organisation. Existing legal instruments are inadequate to respond to the scale of the challenge. The question of how to design more efficient, as well as more just, legal systems is becoming increasingly pressing. The essay identifies three sets of ethical conundrums that decision-makers must confront when regulating air pollution – related to why govern, how to govern, and where to govern. It uses the planetary boundary framework that identifies the processes that regulate the stability of the Earth system, as a conceptual lens, to explore the ethical implications behind the motivations driving air quality governance, the framing of a complex environmental problem and the global governance of localized impacts. In doing so, the essay reflects on how the design of more ethically oriented legal systems can enhance environmental law’s response to planetary problems.

This chapter introduces the field of econarratology, situating it at the intersection of ecocriticism and narratology to examine how stories shape environmental understanding. It defines econarratology as the analysis of material environments and their narrative representations, emphasising the cultural, ethical and political implications of storytelling. The chapter explores emerging econarratives that challenge anthropocentric traditions and promote ecological awareness through linguistic strategies, which reframe nature as an active agent, undermining dualistic human-versus-nature (subject-object) paradigms. A critical examination of narratives propagated by the meat industry illustrates how traditional storytelling sustains environmental injustice, gender hierarchies and colonial ideologies. Through examples ranging from literature and music to documentaries, the chapter demonstrates how econarratives can foster ethical reflection, mobilise resistance and catalyse social change. Highlighting interdisciplinary approaches, it calls for inclusive, sentience-aware narratives that recognise the agency of non-human beings. Ultimately, the chapter advocates for transformative storytelling as a powerful tool to counter environmental degradation, dismantle oppressive ideologies and inspire sustainable futures.

Queer ecology studies addresses the desires and attractions that characterize relations among and eco-politics of humans and other organic elements of their environment. Scholarship in the field has predominantly addressed how the natural environment creates a space for people’s transgressions of normative erotic and sexual practices. In a bionetwork formulation, however, no pure nature can exist out there for humans or any other organisms because one is always a constituent element of an ecological web. Many Victorians addressed the issue of animal rights, including Francis Power Cobbe, Ouida, and Henry Salt. Some authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and E. M. Forster evoked pastoral contexts for same-sex male intimacy while others such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad found adventure literature conducive to such considerations. This chapter, however, focuses on works by Walter Pater and William Sharp that address cross-species engagement as a form of aesthetic pleasure. Through philosophy and formal techniques, they engage biocentric notions of attraction and intimacy that destabilize anthropocentricism and the classificatory boundaries of the scientific and legal discourses that came to dominate the sexual and gendered landscapes.

The increasing intensity of industrialisation is taking its toll on nonhuman animals, leading to what is now described as the ‘the sixth mass extinction’ cause by Homo Sapiens. Since European settlement in 1788, the Australian continent has recorded the highest rate of mammal extinction in the world, currently a ten percent loss since pre-colonial times, with hundreds of other endangered species at high risk of disappearing. The Australian plays and performances considered in this chapter, which include Extinction by Hannie Rayson, Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster and Green Screen by Nicola Gunn and Whale by Fleur Kilpatrick, explore what it means for humans to practice an ethical obligation of care for individual species, their place within particular habitats and ecosystems as well as the entanglement of human-nonhuman well-being and survival.

One: I begin with an account of Stephen Gregory’s prizewinning horror novel The Cormorant, which synthesises much of the history of representing the cormorant as evil. I then trace this tradition across time, looking closely at the origins of the Satanic cormorant in medieval and early modern European theology, art and literature, notably in paintings by Bellini, Mantegna and Carpaccio, and I address Milton’s choice in Paradise Lost to bring Satan into Eden in the form of a cormorant. I describe the long-term impact of Milton’s Satanic cormorant in literary prose from Jane Eyre to Dracula and in scientific writing from Willughby to Bewick, and finally I provide a reading of a poem by Denise Levertov in which the cormorant is characterised as an avian Nazi. In the process, I reflect on the nature of metaphor and the apparent inevitability of anthropocentrism in writing about nonhuman animals.

This chapter reviews the reach of public trust principles across the globe and compares them to a competing model of environmental rights, the rights of nature movement. The former affirms public rights to the environment, while the latter confers rights on the environment itself. Both reflect dissatisfaction with the failure of existing laws to ensure environmental stewardship. The rise of such advocacy responds to the missing foundations for environmental law identified in the Introduction, including weak constitutional foundations in the United States. Exploration begins with a review of public trust principles around the world, followed by a whirlwind tour of global rights of nature initiatives. The rights of nature movement provides an unapologetically biocentric alternative to the inherent anthropocentrism of the public trust and more typical environmental laws, which also premise the value of natural resources on their human beneficiaries – yet they are evolving along similar legal pathways. The chapter concludes with comparative analysis of the two approaches, contrasting the underlying ethics that divide them while recognizing the practical characteristics that unite them.

The early proponents of the philosophical position identified as critical realism (CR) maintained that the natural and social sciences could be better understood through a recognition of both their similarities and their differences (e.g., Bhaskar, 1979). One of the differences asserted in CR concerns the specific properties of human beings – individually and collectively – as distinct from the properties of other kinds of entities. Some attempts have been made to explore the implications of CR for non-anthropocentric philosophy (e.g., Jakobsen, 2017), but these tend to remain on a quite abstract, theoretical plane. This chapter reviews some developments in the ways realist social theory has been discussed within applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, before presenting some contrasting claims about the relationship between language and reality. This leads to a broader discussion about the implications of conceptualising human language as just one among many semiotic modes. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of the potential contribution of biosemiotics and post-humanism, particularly the concepts associated with assemblage theory, to applied linguistics.

Austen’s Emma is read with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s challenge to imagine a humanistic study that overcomes anthropocentrism and looks at the world from non-human points of view. First a traditional reading of Austen’s vertical framing, based on the idea of the Great Chain of Being, is offered. Then, a practice called “reading horizontally” both opposes that framing and heeds the idea of humans as holobionts. As seen in the elision of insect action, the novel omits vital biological processes and agents in favor of a particular form of androcentrism where humans dominate and are separated from and impervious to the natural world. This construction of the human warrants reexamination in light of the biology of symbiosis, as well as the idea of the holobiont. The chapter proposes integrating new, biologically informed approaches into the reading and teaching of such texts. Much can be learned from considering newer biological definitions of what it means to be human.

Advocates for animal rights often position the killing of animals for food or clothing alongside discussions of state-sponsored killings of humans. This chapter argues that stories of widespread animal disease outbreaks – what veterinary scientists call “epizootics” – and the policies we adopt to contain them offer fruitful ways to strengthen these ethical and political discussions in human–animal studies. Because animal diseases can threaten economic systems, governments often implement “stamping out” policies to contain them that require the killing of large numbers of sickened animals. Because some diseases can cross over between nonhuman and human populations, epizootic outbreaks have also catalyzed “One Health” initiatives within the medical and veterinary sciences that view human and nonhuman sciences through a shared sense of pathogen vulnerability. By examining literary accounts of these developments, we gain a clearer sense of the limits of ethical, political, and medical models that frame the animal world as fundamentally separate from our human world.

Chapter 4 provides an environmental interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic and teleological theory as developed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. To put Kant’s insights in dialogue with new contributions in climate aesthetics, I begin with Kant’s theory of the sublime. I claim that Kant’s account of the dynamical sublime has important moral and political relevance for climate philosophy despite its human-centered focus. Next, I look into Kant’s account of natural beauty, which I suggest justifies duties against environmental degradation. I also touch on Kant’s duties to love nature’s harmony and purposes in light of ecological stewardship. The chapter concludes with a look into Kantian teleology from the Critique of Judgment. I propose that teleological judgment can be used to motivate protection of non-beautiful aspects of ecosystems, especially in light of climate-related biodiversity loss.

Chapter 1 motivates a Kantian analysis of climate change by examining early criticisms against Kant in the field of animal ethics. If Kant’s philosophy is ill-suited for justifying concern for nonhuman animals, its suitability for broader environmental issues remains unclear. After evaluating passages from Kant’s critical texts that motivate these criticisms, I assess a classic set of objections to the standard reading of Kant’s theory from Christina Hoff. After analyzing attempts by contemporary Kant scholars to respond to her challenge, I conclude with the merits of the standard reading of Kantian ethics for the sixth mass extinction debate.

This introductory chapter outlines the motivation behind the book, critically discusses anthropocentrism in economics, and introduces the distinction between the direct and indirect approaches. It also puts the book into perspective, highlighting its overall contribution.

The relationship between One Health and human rights is both symbiotic and antagonistic. The objectives of One Health align with human rights to the extent that they advance specific rights, particularly the rights to life and health. One Health also promotes human dignity, the foundation of human rights, by improving environmental conditions and addressing threats to health that impact people’s lives. Yet the inherent anthropocentrism of human rights sits uneasily with One Health’s commitment to human, animal, and environmental health. The growing field of environmental human rights may offer some way forward for resolving this tension and advancing the legal framework for One Health, while also highlighting some of the potential pitfalls along the way. Early environmental human rights positioned the environment as a precondition for the enjoyment of human rights. More recently the right to a healthy environment has been recognised more widely, expanding the potential for human rights objectives to include protection of environmental health, and perhaps also animal health. This chapter will explore the lessons that human rights law might offer and the potential for the right to a healthy environment to temper the anthropocentrism of human rights in a way that better promotes the triple objectives of One Health.

In this chapter we argue that One Health approaches indicate the need for a re-conceptualisation of public health law. From a regulatory perspective, to address public health effectively we need to attend to our interdependencies with each other, with other animals, and with the environment. This chapter argues that a failure to recognise the interdependence between humans and nature unnecessarily limits the scope of public health law, as it restricts the regulatory interventions and actors available to achieve desired public health outcomes. One Health offers an opportunity to broaden our understanding of what it means to regulate public health in a non-anthropocentric manner. It also allows us to acknowledge that non-state actors that advance animal and environmental health via standard-setting, gathering information, and influencing behaviour can mitigate risks to public health. A core function of public health is prevention and re-conceptualising the scope and actors involved in public health law to encompass the more holistic approach suggested by One Health that is critical to its continued evolution as the twenty-first century progresses.

This chapter takes three plant types – the shady tree, the happy crop, and the wayside flower – as starting points for an exploration of ancient attitudes towards plants as both in harmony with and divergent from human worldviews and goals. It demonstrates how the same or similar plants can represent very different moods in different settings, sometimes positively reinforcing a human view, sometimes obstructing it. The connection between the sense of a human lifespan and the longevity or brevity of plants’ lives is forged and reforged in different contexts, while very human concerns with morality and aesthetics are differently projected onto these three broad categories of plant. Ranging from the earliest Greek works to the mid-imperial period of Rome, the chapter highlights both some continuities and some differences emerging in the course of around 900 years of literary engagement with plants.