Speaking of Forms of Life (eBook)

Humans pose an unprecedented threat to life in all its great diversity of forms. The human-induced extinction rate has been compared to 'mass extinctions' of the past. But this language masks the fact that the crisis is due to voluntary, and thus, avoidable choices and actions. 'Speaking of Forms of Life' shows that at the root of this crisis is the tragic inadequacy of the language predominantly used to represent and address what we are doing, including the language of 'sustainable development,' 'rights' for animals and the rest of nature, their 'intrinsic value,' and conservation of species as 'populations.' This talk alienates us from the other living things, from what they actually are, have and do, and it perpetuates the harm and loss. Campagna and Guevara compellingly argue, on rigorous but accessible grounds, that there is an alternative language to guide conservation, in confronting the radically urgent, ethical issues it faces. This is a language with which we are all familiar, mastered by naturalists, from Aristotle to Audubon. It articulates the primary value in life and the standard that must guide how human beings should live, as one form of life, among countless others. This book is a homecoming for those who practice conservation to, above all else, secure a creature's ability to satisfy the necessities of its form of life. 

Claudio Campagna has an M.D. from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He started his career as a scientist, working on the behavioral ecology of marine mammals. But the core of his career was spent as a conservation biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. He has published widely in the fields of animal behavior and conservation, including Ethology and Behavioral Ecology of the Otariids and the Odobenid (co-edited with Robert Harcourt; Springer, 2021). In the field of conservation and language, he has published Bailando en Tierra de Nadie: Hacia un Nuevo Discurso del Ambientalismo (Editorial del Nuevo Extremo, 2013).

Daniel Guevara is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He did graduate work in philosophy at Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles, taking his Ph.D. from the latter.  While at UC Santa Cruz he taught widely in ethics and the history of philosophy, including environmental ethics, moral psychology, Kant and Wittgenstein. He has published widely in these fields as well, including Kant's Theory of Moral Motivation (Westview Press, 2000) and Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford University Press, 2012), co-edited with Jonathan Ellis.