Eating Earth ─ Environmental Ethics and Dietary Choice

Contemporary environmental activists and the animal-rights community are more often than not considered separate movements, despite similar goals and attitudes toward desired change in the world. A fundamental distinction is seen in the environmentalist's broad focus on an entire species, whereas animal rights activists tend to think more about the behavior of select groups of people. Thus far, uniting these two movements has proven difficult, despite their sharing of many of the same ideological sentiments.
In Eating Earth, Lisa Kemmerer reveals a potential place of common ground for the environmental and animal-rights movements: human dietary choice. The book links environmentalism with animal-rights thinkers, by exploring the many ways that mass consumption of animal products by people is harmful to the environment. The book argues that rather than choosing to pursue separate agendas, a joint promotion of vegetarianism and veganism could lead to targeted results for both groups. Kemmerer discusses the harmful toll that the hunting and fishing industries take on ecosystems, and addresses how modern agriculture's treatment of animals is both unethical and environmentally unsustainable. Chapter topics also include movements and ideas like ecofeminism and human-population control, and their intersections with environmentalism. A brief but poignant examination of what human beings consume, Eating Earth shows that the issue of dietary choice deserves to be considered in a new environmental light.

Lisa Kemmerer is an Associate Professor of philosophy and religions at Montana State University. A graduate of Reed, Harvard, and Glasgow University (Scotland), she holds a PhD in philosophy and is the author of a handful of books, including Animals and World Religions and Sister Species: Women, Animals, and Social Justice.