“I Just Care so Much About the Koalas”

Abstract

In this article, using the example of koalas in the 2019–20 bushfires, I argue that our embodied encounters with animals are conditioned by an ethical address that can be found in and outside of language, which demands a fostering of life which must be environmental as well as physical. I posit that animals do have a face in the sense that Levinas has given us, and that our ethical responses should move beyond a narrowly defined mourning into a broader acknowledgment of the manifold ways that human economies are fuelling the sixth mass extinction of all kinds of animals, not just koalas.

Keywords:

• ethics
• Emmanuel Levinas
• animals
• grief
• Judith Butler

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See Frames of War, where Butler critiques the idea that “individuals ought not to rely on the state but themselves” as a pernicious form of individualism that elides the basic relationality of the subject (35).

2 The difficulty for Australia’s normatively white population in seeing all non-human animals as worthy of mourning, and it raises the question of how, to borrow a phrase from the biologist Stuart Kauffman, species move from “matter to mattering” (14), not just in and for themselves, but in their relationship to human ethical responsibility. What we mourn and what we do not mourn is itself a hierarchically imbalanced proposition.

3 Falconer has noted the disappearance of the once-ubiquitous bogong moths over the past two decades from Australia’s east coast (15). Once common experiences like seeing moths in light at night have now largely vanished from our phenomenological experience of the world.

4 Derrida’s conflation of Levinas into a broader philosophical tradition that does not account for animal suffering is not entirely fair. Levinas does state that “the animal suffers” (Wright et al. 172). But he goes on to say that it is because of human suffering that we know that animals suffer, and to suggest that we don’t have the same ethical responsibility to animals that we have to humans because “the being of animals is a struggle for life” that does not have the same response to otherness. In other words, Levinas thinks that because animals can’t respond to otherness (a debatable proposition), it is not a fundamental commandment for us to respond to their otherness.

5 See Morton, Dark Ecology 38.

6 Marx notes the role of the imagination in creating the need for a commodity as much as any bodily requirement like food or shelter.

7 I take the evocative term “slow violence” from Rob Nixon (2), who makes the argument that the destruction of the environment can be seen as a violence against indigenous, postcolonial and other poor communities. Nixon’s point is a well-made one, and I use this term cautiously, not wanting to elide the very real impact of climate change on historically marginalised communities even as I focus on non-human animals.

8 Former Deputy Prime Minister and Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce too stated that “greens policy” gets in the way “of many of the practicalities of fighting a fire and managing it.” He told the right-wing news channel Sky News that “It’s [the bushfires] not burning because they burnt off, it’s burning because they didn’t burn off” (Readfearn, “Factcheck,” para. 5). That the Greens have little power outside of a few inner-city seats – and most definitely not in the country areas where this had allegedly occurred – was beside the point for the Australian right.