Prompt 11

Sagoff argues for why animal activists can’t be environmentalists and vice-versa. From an animal activist standpoint, animals have rights. In attempt at protecting these eights and interests of animals and to ensure that they do not suffer, animal activists are essentially committed to taking animals out of the wild and their natural habitat. An example of work that an animal activist would do would be to replace wilderness areas with more organized and manageable environments. This would mean putting animals on a farm or in a zoo. Activist should be trying to protect against predation in an attempt to preserve a specific species.

Views such as these are no of an environmentalist perspective. Putting animals in zos and protecting against predation is in direct contradiction of the organic and naturalness of nature if you will. It is a disruption to ecosystems and to biodiversity, which is something that has been discussed in so many of the other readings.

In looking a Thomas’s post, it seems that he took a more environmentalist approach in his discussion of prompt 10. Similar to my opinion in prompt 10, Thomas feels that humans have no respect for nature and the earth. We abuse it and do not think twice and as a result we do not co-exist. Humans take advantage of the earth and I feel that this is because we are a dominant species and we know that we can get away with it and there will not be any immediate consequences. If a person were to attack another person, the likelihood that they would fight back is high. Where as, if a person attacks the environment, a plant is not going to fight back in defense of itself. This is because we do not look at nature as being alive and we don’t put it on equal footing with equal rights as we do for humans.

My post was similar to his in respect to the fact that we both take an environmentalist standpoint on these issues. We both made mentions of the relationships that native Americans had with the earth and how they respected it and treated it as an equal. Essentially, native americans worshipped the earth and nature. They appreciated what they could get out of nature (food, raw materials, etc).

http://parenethical.com/phil149win12/prompt-11-resolving-the-conflict-between-individualistic-and-holistic-ethics/#prompt