Francis Gooding

Why​ should we try to understand the lives of animals? The English moral philosopher Mary Midgley’s Beast and Man (1978) ended with a succinct answer: humankind ‘can neither be understood nor saved alone’. No philosophy can hope to understand ‘human nature’, Midgley argued, without acknowledging our integration into incomparably larger and older natural...

‘As​ a land-user thinketh, so is he,’ the American conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote in his essay ‘The Land Ethic’ in 1948. People needed to ‘quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem’; he wanted to transform our vision of humankind’s place in the natural world from ‘conqueror of the land-community to plain member and...