Book review: Arran Stibbe, Animals Erased: Discourse, Ecology, and Reconnection with the Natural World (original) (raw)

Critical Tools for the Animal Crisis. Review of Alice Crary and Lori Gruen, Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022

dePICTions, volume 3: Critical Ecologies, 2023

A basic assumption underlies the thesis put forward by the two authors of this at once alarming and inspiring book: our war against nature is inevitably a war against ourselves.The animal crisis they describe and analyze is a crisis of all animals, including—and, in a sense, above all—the human animal, whose attitudes and actions in the past few centuries, and with a frightening acceleration in the last hundred years or so, have brought the earth to a state of impending catastrophe. Defining our time as the age of environmental catastrophe does not mean succumbing to a defeatist and apathetic apocalypticism; it is instead a call to face our predicament beyond the false optimism and utter impotence of the philosophical, ethical, and political structures that are ultimately complicitous in and responsible for the catastrophe itself. The catastrophe has already happened, and we are out of time, but this means that new tools of resistance and action must be devised. https://parisinstitute.org/critical-tools-for-the-animal-crisis/