Introduction
Suzanne Rice and A. G. Rud
The lives of animals and humans are deeply intertwined and mutually influencing. Neither animal nor human experience can be understood without reference to the other, a fact that has given rise to a field of study called anthrozoology (now often referred to as human–animal studies, or HAS).1 There has been an explosion of interest in the multifaceted and interdisciplinary field of HAS (e.g., Adams & Donovan, 1995; Bekoff, 2010; Cavalieri, 2001; DeMello, 2010; Freeman, Leane, & Watts, 2011; Flynn, 2008; Manning, Aubrey, & Serpell, 1994; Robisch, 2009; Serpell, 1996; Urbanik, 2012).
In recent years, there has been a growing appreciation of ways in which the interactions of human animals and non-human animals matter educationally (e.g., Andrzejewski, J., Baltodano, M, & Symcox, L., 2009; Bell & Russell, 2000; Bone, 2013; DeLeon, 2011; Humes, 2008; Kahn, 2010; Martin, 2011; Melson, 2001; Nocella II, Bentley, & Duncan, 2012; Pedersen, 2011; Rice, 2013; Rowe, 2012; Rud & Beck, 2003). This book seeks to contribute to this ongoing conversation. As the title indicates, the central claim advanced here is that these interactions are actually or potentially educationally significant. Because our subject is relatively new, a few clarifying comments are in order at the outset. First, while different authors will have their own specific conceptions of education, we are unified in viewing education as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. We all conceptualize education broadly and recognize that learning occurs not only in classrooms, but also in informal school spaces (such as the lunchroom and hallways), as well as in extra-academic contexts such as families, youth clubs, parks, and even prisons. Second, our claim about the significance of animal and human interactions is not meant to imply that all such interactions are “good” in any particular sense, let alone that they are mutually educational or otherwise beneficial to both humans and animals. Indeed, some interactions are significant in the negative sense of being anti-educational or harmful. To pick an obvious example, dissection
may help some biology students learn animal anatomy, but it may also be psychically damaging to them or to others, and it is certainly deadly for the animals involved (Oakley, 2009, 2013). Thus, when we claim that an interaction between animals and humans is educationally significant, our claim is that, educationally speaking, such an interaction bears on the ongoing development of one or more parties involved. As we shall see, there is practically limitless variety in the types of interactions and the ways in which they are s educationally significant. Third, we use the term “interaction” to refer not only to direct encounters between human animals and non-human animals, but also to interactions that are indirect. Some such indirect interactions are those involving readers and literary texts; others are more oblique, involving received ideas about particular animals, which count as food, pets, and vermin, for instance (Herzog, 2010). Interactions occurring in the present are shaped, sometimes quite powerfully, by past interactions and the meanings attached to them.
The subtitle of the book is both descriptive and normative. “Blurring the species line” describes what several authors actually do in their chapters by showing, for example, that humans and animals are more continuous than discrete and that non-human animals can teach humans as well as be taught by them. But the subtitle is also normative; we believe that blurring the species line opens up possibilities for repairing and enhancing life on our planet.
Our investigations into the educational significance of animal and human interactions are organized into three main sections. The first section addresses what its constitutive chapters variously refer to as anthropocentrism, human supremacy, and humanist conceptions of the subject. Each chapter provides not only a critique, but also an educational alternative. The book’s second section examines a range of actual educational practices, materials, and phenomena closely connected with some dimension of teaching and learning. Each chapter is theoretically informed—some quite explicitly and deeply so—but each also examines its central topic with an eye toward addressing practitioners’ interests and concerns. “Practitioners” in the context of this book include both K–12 and college classroom teachers and humans working in educational capacities outside formal school settings. Some of these chapters blur the species line by highlighting ways in which non-human animals serve as teachers to human animals; some blur the line by showing that animals have characteristics once thought to belong exclusively to human animals. The book’s third section is concerned explicitly and directly with moral aspects of human animal and non-human animal interactions. At least implicitly, all the book’s chapters are concerned with moral phenomena; it is the depth and focus of these concluding chapters that set them apart.
Section One: Anthropocentrism, Human Supremacy, and the Humanist Subject
In Chapter 1, John Lupinacci and Alison Happel-Parkins begin with a description of anthropocentrism, which they see as a worldview according to which humans are separate from and superior to all other life-forms and the environments upon which they depend. Lupinacci and Happel-Parkins stress that because anthropocentrism is cultural rather than given by nature, it is amenable to change. Such change is imperative, they argue, in light of environmental degradation and climate change and a multitude of related problems following in their wake. The stakes are high: According to these authors, “The capacity of the planet for sustaining life depends upon future generations learning to live in harmony and at peace with the diverse ecosystems within which they reside.”
Lupinacci and Happel-Parkins are not mere critics of anthropocentrism; they challenge and undermine this worldview and seek ways of helping teachers to do the same. They draw from the literature in ecojustice education (Martusewicz, Edmundson, & Lupinacci, 2015), critical animal studies (Nocella II, Sorenson, Socha, & Matuoka, 2014), and ecofeminist philosophy (Plumwood, 1993, 2002) to introduce a pedagogical process designed to help educators recognize an anthropocentric worldview, to examine how this worldview is implicated in maintaining human (and male and white) supremacy, and to rethink anthropocentrism in favor of an ecological alternative that is socially just and encompasses all living systems.
In Chapter 2, Bradley Rowe also challenges anthropocentrism, a manifestation of which he refers to as “human exceptionalism.” Like Lupinacci and Happel-Parkins, Rowe questions the widespread assumption that humans (and forms of human oppression) are distinct from or more important than animals (and forms of animal oppression), and his questioning includes not only humanist analyses, but those grounded in critical theory as well. When humans are positioned theoretically over and above non-humans, this serves to reproduce whole systems of injustice that encompass both.
Critical theory has given rise to various pedagogical undertakings that are usually categorized under the rubric of “transformative education.” But transformative educational projects, like the critical theory that informs them, have tended to assume human supremacy and, beyond that, have been (ironically) uncritical about that which is to be transformed. A result is that the most widespread varieties of transformative education leave untouched forms of non-human animal oppression. To the extent that human and non-human oppressions are interrelated, these varieties of transformative education also fall short where human liberation is concerned
In response to transformative education and its assumption of human supremacy and the basic goodness of transformation, Rowe develops what he calls “gastro-aesthetic pedagogy.” This pedagogy is concerned with the sense of taste and the body’s gastrointestinal system, and it seeks to make apparent the connection between the living body of the (human) eater and the dead (animal) body of the eaten. Developing ideas first articulated by Richard Shusterman, Rowe argues that eating animals is a somaesthetic practice and that bodily, corporeal transformation should be included in discussions about transformative education (Shusterman, 1999). On Rowe’s account, it becomes apparent that transformation per se is an unworthy educational goal if it comes at the cost of animals’ lives.
Education has long been seen as the antidote to the monstrous (Lewis & Kahn, 2010). Matthew T. Lewis’s challenge to “human exceptionalism” in Chapter 3 entails reversing the ban on the monstrous in schools. Our educational system advances a modernist, humanist understanding of the human subject as a unified, rational, and autonomous entity. This conception of the subject holds that human individuals are entirely contained in their “skin bags” (Hanson, 2014). Lewis observes that a consequence of this conception is that human subjects appear to be isolated from one another and from other non-human entities, especially animals and machines. In this view, the environment, animals, and other humans appear fair game for exploitation.
Drawing on Donna Haraway’s cyborg myth, Lewis argues for a conception of the self that challenges the boundaries between humans, animals, and machines (Haraway, 2008. The monster, appearing in the margins where our boundaries have begun to erode, may be used for the educational purpose of reconceptualizing relations between humans, animals, and machines. We fear monsters, Lewis argues, because they collapse our ontological specificity and singularity, but this fear only arises if we are attached to our modernist understanding of self. On Lewis’s account, the monster opens new human/animal/ machine possibilities. A pedagogy of the monster, Lewis believes, may promote more ethical connections between humans, animals, and machines.
Section Two: Educational Practices and Concerns
Using the concept of the “hidden curriculum” (Jackson, 1968), in Chapter 4, Nadine Dolby examines the professional socialization of veterinarians, focusing mainly on the range of attitudes toward animals and the perspectives on human–animal relations that are embedded in the curriculum of veterinary schools. She argues that historically veterinary schools have represented a narrow range of perspectives about animals that construe animals primarily in terms of their economic worth. She points out that, despite the strength of this
theme in the hidden curriculum of veterinary schools, this curriculum is not entirely static. She exemplifies her point with the debate over cat declawing. At one time, declawing was presented as a relatively minor cosmetic procedure, but in 2014 the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) reclassified it as amputation. With that change in classification, the AVMA has increased pressure on veterinarians either to stop declawing cats entirely or to educate owners about alternative options prior to performing the surgery. Beyond the importance of claws in the lives of cats, the debate over declawing has exposed the hidden curriculum of veterinary education, illuminating ways in which veterinarians value—or sometimes fail to value—animals.
Dolby argues persuasively that the hidden curriculum of veterinary education has significance beyond the walls of academia:
Given the central role of veterinarians in educating their clients, the public, and various branches and levels of government on animal health, and now animal welfare, the “hidden curriculum” of veterinary education requires sustained attention and scrutiny, including from educators located outside of veterinary schools and colleges. Knowing and understanding what your veterinarian learned in school today is a critical first step in re-educating both veterinarians— and the rest of us—about the multiple ways that we must relearn how to value non-human animals.
Dozens of greyhound adoption groups in the United States have developed prison-based programs in which inmates are taught how to prepare dogs for adoption and life outside the racing industry. In Chapter 5, Suzanne Rice draws on Jane Roland Martin’s theory of education as encounter and John Dewey’s theory of experience in her chapter discussing the educational significance of such programs (Dewey, 1938/1997; Martin, 2011). Rice illustrates parts of these theories by examining one of the first prison-based programs developed in the United States, TLC Greyhound Adoption at the Hutchinson Correctional Facility in Kansas. At the point that human inmates and greyhounds enter the prison system, they are separated from their familiar lives, the inmates from mainstream society and the dogs from the racing industry. In their interactions with one another and with volunteers who teach inmates how to care for and teach dogs, prisoners and greyhounds alike undergo educative transformations.
Participating inmates certainly gain skills as dog handlers and caretakers, but on their own accounts, even more importantly, they often gain new ways of being human. Despite differences in individual inmates’ experiences, nearly all mention becoming more responsible, socially engaged, compassionate, and loving. Such changes are a result of interactions not only with volunteers who help the inmates learn how to care for greyhounds, but also
with the dogs themselves, who are totally dependent on the inmates and even live in the men’s cells. The greyhounds are transformed by this experience as well. Nearly all enter the prison having little face-to-face experience with humans and the human-built environment. At the point they are adopted and leave the prison, the vast majority are highly affectionate, “house savvy,” and communicative creatures who, according to all indications, enjoy happy lives in the company of humans (Branigan, 2003/1992; Wolf, 2012).
Prison-based greyhound adoption programs have been an educative force in the lives of tens of thousands of individual prison inmates and dogs once connected with the racing industry. Rice argues that, according to Martin’s theory, these programs can be seen as effecting a society-wide educational transformation, one which might be judged by the extent to which we have taken up more humane and generous ways of thinking about and living with greyhounds.
In Chapter 6, Michael Bannen begins by providing a historical examination of alcoholism as conceptualized over two periods—first, in classical Athens, and second, in late-nineteenth–early-twentieth-century America and Britain—both locations and time periods that represent distinct orientations toward the human–animal–alcoholic relation. It was in the second of these periods that the “disease model” of alcoholism emerged, and with that model, animal-assisted therapy for alcoholics seeking recovery.
Much of Bannen’s chapter addresses the human–animal–alcoholic relation in terms of its educational implications, where “education” and “therapy” are viewed as related processes undertaken with the hope of cultivating a capacity for reflective insight. The mere presence of a dog or other animal can reduce stress and anxiety in therapeutic settings. But in addition to that, animals are companions, guides, and teachers who provide men and women seeking recovery from alcoholism with a sense of meaning, purpose, and responsibility. Bannen quotes Nancy Schenck (2009) who wrote that many addicts “embark on the journey back to self-awakening while holding a paw, hoof, claw, wing, fin, or whatever.” Bannen emphasizes the ways in which animals help human addicts, but he notes that the animal–alcoholic relation is more reciprocal than might be assumed. Animals can only help humans to recover when humans are responsible caregivers, meeting the physical and emotional needs of their animal companion(s). Thus, the animal–human relationship in which the animal serves as a therapeutic guide and teacher has, Bannen says, “a reciprocating force.”
In Chapter 7, Arlene Barry discusses the dual significance of animals in the work of Theodor Geisel (better known as Dr. Seuss). First, Geisel’s creativity was fueled by animals; a lifelong lover of actual animals, even his earliest sketches, made as a child, represent both real-life creatures and the caricatures
they inspired. Second, particularly in his mature work, fanciful animal-like beings enabled Geisel to “teach” moral lessons without preaching.
While Barry provides important insights into the significance of animals in Geisel’s early years, the main focus of her chapter is on Geisel’s mature work. As she points out, Geisel was a champion of progressive politics and moral causes, and her chapter includes discussions about how these are manifested in several of the most famous Dr. Seuss books. The main character in Horton Hears a Who, for example, is a humane elephant who champions the proverbial little guy and reminds the reader that real worth does not depend on status or privilege. (Given what science now tells us about the emotional lives of elephants, one wonders if Geisel’s observations of real elephants led him to represent a fanciful rendition of this particular animal as a paragon of empathy.)
Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose exemplifies the virtue of hospitality—and e illustrates the idea that virtue can be difficult and even dangerous for its practitioners. Not all Geisel’s books include characters resembling real-life animals, but Geisel’s choice between “realistic” and totally fanciful is not incidental. The Lorax, the main character in a book of the same name, has no clear corollary in real life and can be perceived as any number of creatures, depending on one’s point of view and experience. This “animal,” Barry points out, emerged from Geisel’s pen at the beginning of the environmental movement, and “his” species ambiguity is in keeping with Geisel’s point: We all have a responsibility for environmental well-being
These are but a few of the stories Barry discusses; others are concerned with such political and moral concerns as “racism, despotism, dedication, annihilation, dependability, hospitality, materialism, destruction, and kindness.” As Barry argues, in the great majority of these works, animals do the heavy lifting, creating imaginative moral universes that readers might aspire to create in the world they actually inhabit.
In Chapter 8, Aaron Moe also discusses literature in relation to human animals and non-human animals, but seeks to illuminate a rather different dimension of this relation. Moe discusses the literature classroom as a place where students can be encouraged to examine the lives of actual, biological animals. In this context, students may encounter literature that calls on them to rethink what are usually considered solely human attributes: “language, speech, culture, rhetoric, agency, poetics, intelligence.” The concept of zoopoetics (Moe, 2014) figures importantly in Moe’s analysis and illustrates ways in which animal gestures and vocalizations contribute to the formal, as well as substantial, content of literature ranging from Walt Whitman to W. S. Merwin. A turkey-hen for Whitman is not simply a bird as Other, Moe argues, but has a bodily poetics different from, but also related to, human poetics. The boundary between turkey poetics and human poetics is porous, and not simple
or static. Citing Kenneth Burke, Moe shows how these boundaries can function as “terministic screens,” where language selects a reality while deflecting other realities (1966, pp. 44–62). Animal studies today undermines the terministic screen of human-centric language and culture prevalent in the humanities. Moe invites us to read works that attend to other species, such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or the poetry of Walt Whitman or Gary k Snyder. Engaging students in such reading is one way in which we might help them to “cultivate a respectful attentiveness” to those among us with fins, feathers, or fur.
Section Three: Moral Aspects of Human Animal and Non-Human Animal Interactions
In Chapter 9, Susan Laird and Kristen Og ilvie Holzer challen g e what Jane Roland Martin has called “the deep structure of educational thou g ht” (2011, p. 36). This structure relegates critical animal studies to the periphery of learning and “treats nonhuman animals merely as objects of human animals’ intellectual study and consumption in schools and as less worthy of moral consideration than humanity.” Laird and Holzer seek to participate in bringing about a change in educational thought, particularly in regard to how human and non-human animal relations are construed and maintained. To this end, their chapter considers the possible educational value in not merely observing or studying non-human animals, but actually befriending animals, an ideal they believe has classic modern roots (Carson, 1956/ 1979/2011; Wollstonecraft, 1791/2001). They ask: “When different species meet, what can this concept of befriending animals mean to educators? What care-sensitive ethical learning might such befriending encounters foster? How might befriending animals differ in kind and degree from encounter to encounter, with multiple educational agents both non-human and human, and to what problematic or care-sensitive ethical ends?” They adapt the naturalists’ practice of taking “field notes” (Canfield, 2011) in order to illustrate the value of befriending animals in terms of moral education.
In Chapter 10, Jim Garrison draws on the work of noted primatologist Frans de Waal to show that what many consider to be a human invention, namely ethics, is substantively present in both human and non-human animals. “Veneer theory,” mentioned in the title of Garrison’s chapter, refers to the idea that morality in humans is merely a cultural construct that lies upon the surface of and partially covers “real” human nature, which is selfish and brutish. Garrison argues that “sympathy as found in all primates is the primordial origin of human ethics” and he connects de Waal’s research on sympathy in primates to philosophical writings by John Dewey and Nel Noddings. Morality for Dewey is not simply a human construction, although human language and
its power o f a b straction h ave s h ape d t h e mora l ity h umans conceive an d practice. We share sympathy and many other social traits with other animals an d t h us, as Garrison states succinct l y, “Our mora l ity emerges f rom a Darwinian matrix without breach of continuity, although it is hardly reducible to such a medium.” Garrison subscribes to de Waal’s view that morality is like a Russian doll, where there are elemental layers, such as emotional contagion and primate sympathy, which are encased by other layers involving cognition. He connects de Waal’s insight to care theorist Nel Noddings who sees ethical care emerging from natural care, where a moral “ought” is based upon a natural good, such as emotional contagion. In this way, Noddings too rejects veneer. Garrison concludes that the sympathy we may feel for a loved one enables us, because of the evolutionary connectedness of primordial feeling among human animals and non-human animals, as well as all creation, to feel sympathy.
When asked to consider the “human–animal bond,” what comes to mind for many are the cuddly creatures featured on greeting cards. In Chapter 11, Cris Mayo asks that we consider quite different creatures—vermin—for the challenges they pose to our ethical thought and practice. Having a relationship built on the ethics of trust, care, or compassion with a mewling kitten is one thing, and with a destructive rodent quite another. Thus vermin test our ethical outlooks and conceptions. We should widen our ethics to include vermin, Mayo argues, because we are responsible for their existence; without humans there are no vermin. “Animals become vermin in relation to us,” Mayo observes. We are unintentionally hospitable to animals, which we then call vermin, providing warm and easily accessible dwelling places and plentiful food cultivated by human hands.
In many cases, h umans ina d vertent l y invite vermin into previous l y human-only spaces, but we humans are often the invaders, encroaching on environments that have long been the homes of other species. Mayo reminds us that what we do on the land, whether it is clearing forests for building new structures or hydraulically fracturing the earth previously undisturbed by human animals, has consequences for all involved. She reminds us also that when we encounter a non-human animal, the best response may well be avoidance and a deepened awareness that human activity occasioned the encounter in the first place, raising deep questions about land-use policy. Such responses, however, do not figure easily into moral orientations based on face-to-face care. Some humans do not like rats or bats or wolves, let alone having to care for them, but that does not mean that we should feel ethically free to treat these creatures in whatever manner is most convenient to us, without regard for their lives and ways of being.
A dominant tendency in the modern, developed world has been for humans to think that they are above and outside nature, that human intelligence not
only allows us to manipulate nature, but also justifies our doing so. A. G. Rud questions these beliefs in Chapter 12. Rud presents a conceptual framework comprising three ideas that might inform our relationships with animals and with nature more broadly. He turns to the work of two thinkers from the last century, Albert Schweitzer and John Dewey, and connects their thoughts to a current movement in conservation biology. Schweitzer articulated a principle, Reverence for Life, as a guide to how we human animals should live as part of, rather than separate from, nature (Schweitzer & Joy, 1950). Schweitzer’s principle captures an attitude and orientation toward being responsible for the world and not harming it. Rud connects Schweitzer’s Reverence for Life principle to Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism. Dewey argued that we are not separate knowers, gazing upon a world outside our senses and yet deriving understanding through our senses and cognitive constructs, and called this the “spectator theory of knowledge.” In contrast, he posited that we are part of this world and defined by our relations within it. We always find ourselves in the middle of things, both a part of history and nature, and also conditioned by these phenomena. It makes no sense to talk of a separation, because nothing of the sort exists. Rud joins both Schweitzer and Dewey with the idea and movement in conservation biology called “rewilding,” where large carnivores are reintroduced to nature, and discusses the broader cultural connotations of “rewilding our hearts” as well as rewilding education (Bekoff, 2014). He argues that these three ideas together provide a powerful framework for guiding our relations with animals and with nature. Rud ends with a meditation upon the possibility of a reverent, rewilded, sustainable future where humans exist within nature rather than as dominant outsiders to nature, and with other animals rather than over them.
Note
1. There is ongoing debate over terms used to refer to the fauna of this world. This debate is reflected in the terms used by authors in this volume. The introduction tries to give a sense of this debate by sometimes spelling out the distinction between “human animals” and “non-human animals” and by sometimes referring, more conventionally, to “humans” and “animals.” We have intentionally changed the order in which one or the other of these terms, “human animal”/“human” or “nonhuman animal”/“animal,” appears in an effort to avoid implying species superiority.
References
Adams, C., & Donovan, J. (Eds.). (1995). Animals and women: Feminist theoretical explorations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Andrzejewski, J., Baltodano, M, & Symcox, L. (Eds.). (2009). Social justice, peace and environmental education. New York: Routledge.
Bekoff, M. (2010). The animal manifesto: Six reasons for expanding our compassion footprint. Novato, CA: New World Library
Bekoff, M. (2014). Rewilding our hearts: Building pathways of compassion and coexistence Novato, CA: New World Library
Bell, A., & Russell, C. (2000). Beyond human, beyond words: Anthropocentrism, critical pedagogy, and the poststructuralist turn. Canadian Journal of Education, 25(3), 188–203.
Bone, J. (2013). The animal as fourth educator: A literature review of animals and young children in pedagogical relationships. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood,d 38(2), 57–64.
Branigan, C. A. (2003). Adopting the racing greyhound (3rd ed.). New York: Howell d Books.
Burke, K. (1966). Language as symbolic action: Essays on life, literature, and method.d Berkeley: University of California Press.
Canfield, M. R. (Ed.). (2011). Field notes on science and nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Carson, R. (1956/1979/2011). The sense of wonder. New York: Open Road Integrated Media.
Cavalieri, P. (2001). The animal question: Why nonhuman animals deserve human rights. New York: Oxford University Press.
DeLeon, A. (2011). What’s that nonhuman doing on your lunch tray: Disciplinar y spaces, school cafeterias and possibilities for resistance. In Sarah Robert and Marcus Weaver-Hightower (Eds.), School food politics: The complex ecology of hunger and feeding in schools around the world (pp. 183–200). New York: Peter Lang. d
DeMello, M. (Ed.). (2010). Teaching the animal: Human-animal studies across the disciplines. Brooklyn, NY: Lantern Books.
Dewey, J. (1938/1997). Experience and education. New York: Touchstone.
Flynn, C. P. (Ed.). (2008). S ocial creatures: A human an d animal stu d ies rea d e r . Brooklyn, NY: Lantern Books.
Freeman, C., Leane, E., & Watts, Y. (Eds.). (2011). Considering animals: Contemporary studies in human-animal relations. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Hanson, F. A. (2014). Which came first, the doer or the deed? In P. Kroes & P. Verbeek (Eds.), The moral status of technical artifacts Netherlands: Springer. Haraway, D. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Herzog, H. (2010). Some we love, home we hate, some we eat: Why it’s so hard to think straight about animals. New York: HarperCollins Humes, B. (2008). Moving toward a liberatory pedagogy for all species: Mapping the need for dialogue between humane and anti-oppressive education. Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy, 4(1), 65–85
Jackson, P. (1968). Life in classrooms. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Kahn, R. (2010). Critical pedagogy, ecoliteracy and planetary crisis: The ecopedagogy movement. New York: Peter Lang.
Lewis, T., & Kahn, R. (2010). Education out of bounds: Reimagining cultural studies for a posthuman age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Manning, A., Serpell, A., & Serpell, J. (Eds.). (1994). In the company of animals: A study of human-animal relationships. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Martin, J. R. (2011). Education reconfigured: Culture, encounter, and change. New York: Routledge.
Martusewicz, R., Edmundson, J., & Lupinacci, J. (2015). EcoJustice education: Toward diverse, democratic, and sustainable communities (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. s
Melson, G. (2001). Where the wild things are: Animals in the lives of children. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.
Moe, A. (2014). Zoopoetics: Animals an d the making o f poetr y . Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Nocella II, A., Bentley, J., & Duncan, J. (2012). Earth, animals and disability liberation: The rise of the eco-ability movement. New York: Peter Lang.
Nocella II, A., Sorensen, J., Socha, K., & Matsuoka, A. (Eds.). (2014). Defining critical animal studies: An intersectional social justice approach for liberation. New York: Peter Lang.
Oakley, J. (2009). Under the knife: Animal dissection as a contested school science activity. Journal for Activist Science & Technology Education, 1(2), 59–67.
Oakley, J. (2013). ‘I didn’t feel right about animal dissection’: Student objectors share their science class experiences. Society and Animals, 21, 360–378.
Pedersen, H. (2011). Animals in schools: Processes and strategies in human/animal education. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press
Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature New York: Routledge. Plumwood, V. (2002). Environmental culture: The ecological crisis of reason New York: Routledge.
Rice, S. (2013). Three educational problems: The case of eating animals. Journal of Thought, 28(2), 112–127. t
Robisch, S. K. (2009) Wolves and the wolf myth in American literature Reno: University of Nevada Press
Rowe, B. (2012). Food, habit, and the consumption of animals as educational encounter. In C. Ruitenberg (Ed.), Philosophy of education 2012 (pp. 210–218). 2 Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society.
Rud, A., & Beck, A. (2003). Companion animals in Indiana elementary schools. Anthrozoös, 16(3), 241–251.
Schenck, N. A. (2009). Tails of recovery: Addicts and the pets that love them. Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press.
Schweitzer, A., & Joy, C. (1950). The animal world of Albert Schweitzer: Jungle insights into reverence for life. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Serpell, J. (1996). In the company of animals: A study of human-animal relationships. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Shusterman, R. (1999). Somaesthetics: A disciplinary proposal. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57(3), 299–313.
Urbanik, J. (2012). Placing animals: An introduction to the geography of human-animal relations. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Wolf, S. D. (2012). How the dog I rescued saved my life. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.
Wollstonecraft, M. (1791/2001). Original stories from real life, J. Wordsworth (Ed.). Washington, DC: Woodstock Books.
(Un)Learning Anthropocentrism: An EcoJustice Framework for Teaching to Resist Human-Supremacy in Schools
John Lupinacci and Alison Happel-Parkins
In the Living Planet Report 2014 by the WWF (formally known as the 4 World Wildlife Fund), researchers introduce a new index that considers “10,380 populations of 3,038 species of mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish from around the globe” (p. 136). This report indicates that since 1970 the planet has experienced a 52% loss in species (WWF, 2014). Further, this index states that the world’s freshwater species have dropped by 76% in that same time span. These statistics come to us amid an ongoing debate among scientists as to whether the designation of our current time period, the Holocene (meaning entirely recent), is outdated, and whether Anthropocene t (combining human with the new) might be a more accurate identifier. Despite the continued contestations, scientists agree that “human-kind has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species, polluted the oceans and altered the atmosphere, among other lasting impacts” (Stromberg, 2013, para. 3).
Confronted by this reality, it is important that critical educators, especially teacher educators, address how schools create, support, and sustain humancentered learning experiences that contribute to the development of anthropocentric thinking1—a belief system by, and through, which humans are understood as separate and superior to all other living and nonliving things. While some speculation exists in the scientific community as to the causes of environmental degradation, a considerable number of world leaders and scientists agree that citizens of the twenty-first century will be faced with the imperative of addressing increased levels of poverty, hunger, and access to healthy food and safe drinking water due to environmental degradation and
climate change (UNICEF, 2004, 2009; IPPC, 2007, 2013). Given the severity of this global issue, the need arises for educational pedagogies and practices that focus on the planet’s health. The capacity of the planet for sustaining life depends upon future generations learning to live in harmony and at peace with the diverse ecosystems within which they reside. Given that we are interconnected and dependent on diversity for survival, it is alarming that more resources in education are not allocated for teaching and learning that foster the capacity for socially just and sustainable decision-making.
A primary premise guiding this work is that the manifestation of a humansupremacist worldview is cultural. A foundational premise of the work introduced in this chapter is that cultural habits of mind based on a system of human-supremacy—referred to as anthropocentrism—are pervasive in how we as humans in Western industrial culture learn to interpret and assign value to differences. Nocella II, Sorensen, Socha, and Matsuoka (2014) explain that anthropocentrism is a belief system that “advocates privileging humans” and functions to “maintain the centrality and priority of human existence through marginalizing and subordinating non-human perspectives, interests, and beings” (p. 4). Further, EcoJustice scholars take the position that anthropocentrism is so pervasive in the metaphors we teach and learn in Western industrial schools that, in order to interrupt the dominant belief system, human-supremacy educators must first learn to name and recognize anthropocentrism as problematic in connection with what can be done to rethink, or (un)learn, anthropocentrism. From school lunches and dissections to the mechanistic metaphors of science classrooms that liken the members of complex living systems to simple parts of machines, non-human species are separated into culturally constructed categories, like resources, by which their existences are understood only through their relationship not only to humans but specifically to humans living in accordance with Western industrial culture. Given how dominant and foundational anthropocentrism is in schools and society, this chapter introduces a process for interrupting anthropocentrism; it considers what a nonanthropocentric education might look like.
Anthropocentrism in education is possible because we, as humans, specifically those of us within dominant Western industrial culture, have learned to think and behave according to a culturally constructed way of understanding that we use to interpret relationships and thus shape meaning. In most cases, educators in Western industrial cultural have learned to think and act in accord ance wit h maintaining h uman-supremacy. Since meaning is co nstructed culturally, it can be constructed differently. Thus, our foundational assumptions can be made explicit, interrupted, and shifted if we learn to think differently about our relationships to each other and to the natural world. By examining and exposing how human-supremacy underwrites
dominant cultural assumptions in Western industrial culture, this chapter introduces a framework for recognizing and reconstituting such assumptions in day-to-day educational practices. Anthropocentrism is imperative to address whether scholar-activist educators are serious about overcoming social inequalities and suffering across the world. Drawing from EcoJustice Education (Martusewicz, Edmundson, & Lupinacci, 2015), Critical Animal Studies (Nocella II et al., 2014), and ecofeminist philosophy (Plumwood, 1993, 2002), this chapter introduces a pedagogical process that engages educators in recognizing an anthropocentric worldview, examining how that worldview contributes to constituting and maintaining human–male–white supremacy, and rethinking anthropocentrism in favor of an ecological worldview supportive of socially just and inclusive living systems.
Critical Animal Studies and EcoJustice Education
Critical Animal Studies (CAS), as a scholar-activist project, focuses on the atrocities that stem from and perpetuate the rationalization of cruelty to animals in modern society—the systematic discrimination and domination by humans against other humans and all other species. Defining CAS, the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) explains:
Rooted in animal liberation, CAS is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to establishing a holistic total liberation movement for humans, nonhuman animals, and the Earth. CAS is engaged in an intersectional, theory-to-action politics, in solidarity with movements to abolish all systems of domination. (Retrieved from http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/about/)
While several critical, social justice projects and frameworks take a broad view of injustice and even focus on the cultural roots of forms of domination and violence, CAS offers a more extensive critique than these other perspectives. It pushes mainstream definitions of social justice by insisting that humans critique and deconstruct their foundational assumptions about their relationships with other species and the earth. CAS is a fast-growing field inspired by and supportive of direct action organizations such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) as well as the diverse networks of activist-scholarship conducted in direct response to the systems of oppression endemic in Western industrial culture (Nocella II, 2004; Nocella II & Best, 2012; Twine, 2012). CAS scholars interrogate the ideological manifestation of anthropocentrism in relationship to humanist cultural assumptions that emerge through an ontology rooted in Western philosophy and science (Nocella II et al., 2014).
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
"My order stands," said Weston, "I will be received."
"Yes sir. I'm sorry, sir." The aide turned and entered the office. He emerged, shortly afterwards and motioned for Al to enter. Weston cast a down-his-nose glance at the aide, then shut the door behind him. Against the wall beside the door was a scrawled legend.
"Jordan Green has been here, too!"
The style was unmistakable—as unmistakable as the wrath that greeted him.
"Explain, Senior Captain Weston!"
"I am on a roving commission, rank four-mark, I—"
"I'm aware of your rank, your mission and your commission. Come to the point. I want to know why you think you are more important than anybody else!"
"I—have not that opinion, sir."
"You must have it, or you'd not have behaved as you did! Come on, speak."
"Well, sir, I've uncovered a rather startling bit—"
"So what? So you demand my time to discuss a space gag with me? So they're all the same handwriting. Any idiot at Intelligence could have told you that. They covered that phase when Jordan Green first appeared. They were suspicious. Here!"
Admiral Callahan strode to a file cabinet and took out a thick file. He hurled it at Al Weston.
"Read it and learn some sense, young man. Now get out of here and don't bother coming back."
Weston took the file and left. His ears were burning and his mind was a tangle of cross-purposes and emotions. That was a rotten way to treat a man who'd been shot down on the first directive expedition.
He'd like to clip the so-and-so admiral's wings a bit. He'd—take it—he guessed, sourly, hearing a slight snicker behind him. He turned angrily but there was no one near.
That snicker? Was it real, or merely a breath of wind against the Venetian blind?
He entered the first bar he found. "Pulga and water," he said.
The bartender winced. "Does the Terran Captain forget that this is Mars?"
Weston had, but this was no time to admit a mistake.
"Not at all," he said.
"May I ask the Terran Captain to change his order?"
"I want it as I said it," snapped Weston.
"Does the Terran Captain understand that water is not plentiful? We on Mars have not the—the—plumbing as on Terra, where you cannot live without your water. We use but little personally and that mostly for washing. In washing, we absorb sufficient for our own metabolism."
"I'm aware of that."
"Then the Terran Captain may also be aware of the fact that our water is not—well—suited for internal consumption?"
"You have no bottled water?" demanded Weston angrily.
"That will be found only on the Terran Post. Please, be not angry. All newcomers forget."
"Forget it," snapped Weston and walked out.
Even the lowly bartenders of a conquered race made a fool of him. He entered another bar down the street and asked for pulga and vin, a completely native Martian potable. It was served without argument and went down right.
He had another and was halfway through it when he turned to see friends entering.
"Al!" they called. "How's it, man?"
With a weak smile he set down his drink and held out a welcoming hand.
"Hi, fellows. Haven't seen you in a year, Jack. Nor you, Bill. What's new?"
"Nothing much. Golly, we thought you were a real goner when they hit you that fatal day."
"I don't remember," said Weston.
"I'll bet you don't," said Bill with a smile. "You dropped back out of formation in a flaming instant and were gone. The rest of us were all right and won through. We hit Mars about o-three-hundred the next afternoon and, brother, did we hit 'em.
"We hurled the directive beam right down in the middle of Kanthanappois and laid the city flat! Then we headed North to Montharrin and singed 'em gently around the edges. You have no idea, Al boy, what a fierce thing you can toss out of a one-seater scooter when you've got directive power in it.
"They've never got the Fresno Beams down to a size practical for anything smaller than an eight-man job, you know. Well, directives make it possible to handle a four-turret from a one-man job. And a super-craft can carry enough stuff to move Mars."
"I missed it."
"We know, and we're sorry about that. Well, we can't all win."
"Don't be patronizing," snapped Al Weston.
"Sorry. We knew you'd have given most anything to have joined in the ruckus. Well—say, Al, I hear you've got a snap job now?"
"Well," said Al, disagreeing that it was a snap, and at the same time trying to justify its importance, "I'm trying to dig out the truth of this Jordan Green thing."
"You mean like over there?" grinned Jack, pointing to the legend on the wall.
"Uh—yeah, excuse me a moment," said Weston, going over and looking at it carefully.
"Getting to be an authority, hey, Al?" laughed Bill. "Gosh, that's a laugh of a job. Bet you have your fun."
"I think it is slightly stupid," said Weston harshly.
"Could be. It's no more stupid than a lot of jobs in this man's space navy, though. They sent a space admiral out once to measure the major diameter of all spacecraft to the maximum thousandth of an inch and didn't tell him for weeks that it had a deep purpose.
"He fumed and fretted until he discovered that it took a space admiral to hold enough rank to be permitted to measure that stuff under the security regulations. Later they made all external space gear universal so that replacement quantities could be reduced. It saved about seven billion bucks—enough to pay the admiral's salary for a couple of millennia."
Jack laughed. "It's usually some lucky bird that gets these cockeyed commissions and has a swell time loafing all over the solar system on the government's dough."
"I don't consider myself lucky."
"We do," chimed one of the men. "We're stuck here along with seven million other high-brass policemen who'd rather play marbles," said Bill. "So what does it matter what you're doing, actually, so long as you're paying your way?"
"Well, I'd prefer something a bit more in my line."
"Who wouldn't?" responded Jack. "But what the heck? Remember the lines from Gilbert & Sullivan—The Private Buffoon? 'They won't blame you so long as you're funny'!"
"Very amusing," said Weston.
"Well, shucks, anytime you want to swap jobs—"
"I wouldn't mind," said Weston wistfully.
"Look, chum, take it easy. You wouldn't like sitting on your unretractable landing gear eight hours a day listening to a bunch of
dirty Marties trying to talk you into slipping them a bit of a lush. Make you damned sick.
"But it's a job we've got to do and so long as we're hung with it, we're hung, and we'll give it our best. We know we can do most anything, so why should we worry?"
Bill grinned and nodded. "I'll bet even the bartender wouldn't like our job. Hey Soupy!"
"Would the Terran officers desire something?"
"Can you be honest?"
"Can anyone?" returned the barkeep. Like all barkeeps, he was about to start walking a fence between customers.
"How would you like to have my job?"
The barkeep looked at Bill. "You want an answer?" Bill nodded.
The barkeep shook his head. "Too much trouble. I am happy as I am. I, Terran officers, can mix the best veliqua on Mars, and no one on Terra can mix one at all. So I cannot drive a spacer, nor build a long range communicator. But I mix the best veliqua—observe?"
They observed as the barkeep made rapid motions with several bottles, whirled them overhead and came in on a tangent landing with three glasses, brimful to a bulging meniscus, without spilling a drop.
"Personally," grinned Bill, "I think we've just been hydraulic-pressured into buying a drink."
"Smart lad, he."
"I'd not put up with that. We didn't ask for it," objected Weston.
"No? Well, so what," grinned Bill, lifting the glass.
"It's okay," said Jack "But look, Al. You still sound as though you were enjoying life—or should be."
"I'm not."
"Well, Al, if you aren't, it's your fault."
"It wasn't my fault that I got clipped?"
"Hardly. No one is putting any blame on you for getting hung on the wrong end of a beam. Despite popular rumor, they don't hand out them things for cutting your hand on a can-opener," said Bill, nodding toward the purple ribbon on Weston's breast. It was beside another colored bit, awarded for his efforts in the initial directive attack.
"That one," said Weston, catching Bill's eye, "was a consolation prize. I didn't earn it."
"My friend, you must learn to tell the difference between humility and the job of fishing for compliments. Well, chum, you've had a rough time and we gotta go back and play traffic cop. Let us know if there's anything we can do."
Weston nodded. They left. They left him alone. Far back in his mind something mentioned the fact that they were on duty, but he thought they could have stayed around a bit longer.
He drank too much that long Martian afternoon and was definitely hung over most of the next day
Al Weston gave up at that point. Never again would he try to prove his sorry plight to any one of his former friends. They all insisted upon looking at the brighter side of his life and ignored his trouble as though it did not exist.
They were glad enough to see him alive, it seemed, when he'd have preferred death to this lack-luster existence. He wondered whether any of them would worry about him if he disappeared. Perhaps if they thought he were dead—
Well, he had a four-mark commission, which entitled him among other things to commandeer anything now in the experimental field. He'd make a show of commandeering a directive power drive and then drop out of sight.
They'd suspect both his untimely end, and suspect the advisability of the directive drive. Then he'd show up and prove both worthy. That
would give him his prestige again.
He'd do it at Pluto and, on the way, he'd stop at every way-station long enough to leave a wide trail. He'd enter a post, discuss Jordan Green at length. He'd take pictures, make tests and then head outward—to disappear for about a year. That would fix them all.
CHAPTER IV
Free For All
"Pluto," said Al Weston drily. He'd come through the entrance dome of one of the sealed cities and was standing atop the Corps Administration building, looking out over the sprawling city. Since Pluto was utterly cold, the sealed cities were the only habitable places on the planet and even they were too chilly for comfort.
He had no Pluto-garb, but he did have his spaceman's suit, which was internally heated. He, like most of the Corpsmen there, wore the spaceman's suit with the fishbowl swung back across his shoulderblades.
Some of them had had the helmets removed entirely, though this was troublesome around the entrance-locks because none of the men who were without their fishbowl headgear could work outside of the inner lock.
But—this was Pluto, and from here, as soon as he could leave, Al Weston was heading, just plain out!
In accordance with regulations he reported to the port commandant's office. This time he had no intention of forcing entry to the Inner Sanctum. His ears were still red from his last abortive effort. All he intended to do was to report to the office aide and, if the Big Brass wanted to see him, he'd eventually call.
Inside of the office was the usual scrawl—Yes, Jordan Green has been even here!
It was authentic and Weston said so aloud. The office aide looked up.
"You're Senior Captain Weston?"
"I'm known?" asked he, slightly surprised.
"By reputation," grinned the clerk. "It's said that you can tell an authentic Jordan Green by seeing it through a visiscope."
"Not quite," said Weston.
"Have you uncovered anything yet, sir?" asked the aide.
"Are you interested?"
"Everyone is interested," said the clerk. "It will make a darned amusing yarn when you get all done."
"Uh-huh," grunted Weston. Amusing, he thought. Was his value to the Space Corps only an amusement value?
"See here," he said to the clerk, "I'd like to try a directive power drive."
"You were on the first directive power expedition against Mars, weren't you?" mused the clerk. "According to custom and regulations, you are entitled to any experimental equipment that you used during the war. Seems to me, too, that you are probably using more power for space flight than about ninety-eight percent of the corps at the present time. We have a directive power unit here."
"Then I can have it immediately?"
The clerk nodded. "I'm merely ruminating," he said to Weston. "I'd prefer several good reasons why you took it other than your fancy to try it out. It'll make the Old Man less fratchy.
"It's slightly haywire, of course, since it came right from the Power Laboratory with a boatload of long-hairs on a test mission They left it here and we've been tinkering with it off and on. We can get a new one in a month or so, but you can have the haywire model if you'd prefer not to wait."
"I'll take it."
"Okay. I'll issue orders for the engine gang to swap power in your crate."
"Thanks," said Weston.
"Oh, and sir, I almost forgot. It's just an unfounded rumor and I've been unable to check the truth of it, but they claim there's a Jordan Green scrawl on Nergal, too."
"Nergal?" said Weston explosively. His mind envisioned a minute hunk of cosmic dust not much more than a hundred miles in diameter —Pluto's only claim to a satellite. It was better than thirteen million miles from Pluto and its rotation was necessarily slow due to its tiny mass and great distance.
It had been and would continue to be for some years, the solar object most distant from Sol.
It was uninhabited, airless, cold, forbidding, and completely useless.
There was not even a station on it. Science found the airless outer surface of Pluto more to their liking. On Pluto, at least, there was gravity to hold them down. The escape velocity of Nergal was not really known, but it must have been minute.
"Might be sheer fancy," said the clerk apologetically.
"Better check on it," said Weston. This was an opportunity. When he left it would be recorded that he went to Nergal. He even wished that he'd started to write his own name under the countless Jordan Green scrawls he'd visited. Then they could find one out there, and know he'd been there and from there...?
In relaxation uniform, Weston sat in a small, out of the way restaurant and finished his dinner. He was the only uniformed man in the place, and so when the unlovely pair behind him made mention of the Corps, he knew they were talking about him.
He did not know them by name, but after a glimpse of them immediately labeled one of them as 'Dirty' and the other one as 'Ratty'. It was Ratty's voice that caught his attention. He missed the statement, but caught Dirty's answer.
"By the time all the Fancy Brass gets them, maybe we can have a couple too."
"The war's over," Ratty snarled. "Why does the Corps need directive drives?"
"How should I know? Ask Pretty, up there."
"He wouldn't know," snapped Ratty. "He's just taking orders."
"Must be nice to roam all over space with your feed and power free."
"Yeah, but he'd go broke if he had to live on what he's worth."
"That's why most guys get in the Corps anyway."
"That guy is spending about thirty thousand bucks just to track down a myth."
"Maybe his myth has a sister for me?" guffawed Dirty. "Wonder where he was hiding when the shooting was going on."
"He wouldn't say," grunted Ratty "Mosta the dirty work was done by draftees."
"Well, now the schemozzle is over, he'll come out beating his chest and telling how he won the war I'll bet he piloted a office desk and got that wound ribbon from pinching his finger in a desk drawer."
"Yeah, the Corps is rotten with slinkers."
"He's tooken months to track down this myth. Bet he makes it another year. Then they'll hang a medal on him for it."
"Any good spaceman could run Jordan Green down in a week," grunted Ratty.
"But it wouldn't be profitable to do it quick," answered Dirty with a leer in his voice.
Weston got up and went to their table.
"Sit down!" he snarled. "You, too!" he snapped at Dirty, taking the man by the jacket front and ramming him back in his chair with a crash. Heads looked up, and men faded back out of the way, clearing the area.
"One," said Weston. "I was in the hospital for seven months, unconscious from a fracas off Mars with the first directive power attack. Remember? I was doing a job so that stinkers like you could roam space unbothered by Martie pirates. Where were you? Hiding in a mine somewhere?
"At the present time if I spend five years rambling all over space looking for Jordan Green, you'll still owe me plenty. I wasn't making money while I was fighting. How much did you make? If it hadn't been for the Corps you'd be dead."
Weston cuffed Dirty across the face with the back of his hand and spat into Ratty's face.
They rose with a roar and Ratty hurled table and chairs out of the way. They rushed Weston heavily.
Weston grinned.
He drove his fist into Ratty's stomach and sliced Dirty's throat with the edge of his hand.
Here was something tangible for Weston to fight! For almost a year, he had been railing at the wind, storming at an invisible hand of fate that had clipped him hard. The men before him were the embodiment of all his ill luck and he drove into them with a burning hatred to maim and destroy
It was a dirty fight. The space rats had no qualms about sportsmanship and Weston had been tumble-trained on Terra to accept battle only when it was inevitable, at which point nothing was barred.
Dirty came in, hammering at his abdomen, and got a knee in the face. Ratty pulled a knife and rushed in with a slicing swing. Weston faded back, hit the bar, felt its edge crease his back as the rats moved after him.
He lashed out with a foot and drove Ratty and his knife back, turned to roll with a roundhouse swing from Dirty and his right arm knocked over a beer bottle. His right hand closed on the neck of the bottle, and he rapped it sharply against the edge of the bar, knocking off the base.
He kneed Dirty and closed with Ratty. He caught the knife-wielder in the face with the jagged bottle and thrust him back with a twisting punch of the bottle. There was a wordless scream.
Weston caught Dirty in the ribs with a hard fist and then cracked the man's head with what was left of the bottle. It shattered completely as Dirty staggered back and Weston dropped the useless end. They closed again, and wrestled viciously across the floor, tripped over a table and went down with a crash in a tight lock.
Dirty swung his elbow free and Weston missed catching it in the throat by a mite. Weston let go of Dirty's wrist and grabbed Dirty by the collar. Up he lifted and down he slammed.
Dirty's head made a thudding crack against the floor.
"Rye," gasped Weston and swallowed it neat.
Then he walked out, paused at the door and said: "Call the cops and tell 'em to pick up—"
He left with a quizzical smile. He didn't even know their names.
He didn't stop to clean up, but entered his ship immediately. The directive power drive had been installed and he made radio contact with the control center that opened the locks in the sealed city.
He went out with a rush and hit the high trail for Nergal.
They'd give him a stupid job, would they? Well, he'd frittered enough on it. Now he was going to polish this off in a hurry and go back and hurl his commission in the teeth of Big Brass and stamp out snarling. A big strong man hunting a myth...!
Nergal appeared within minutes under the directive drive. He landed and slapped the magnets on to keep him down. If there were anything to this rumor Jordan Green would have needed a wall or something to write his name on.
In the scanner Weston searched every square yard of his horizon and then moved. Four times he moved, each time searching his very limited line of sight circle. The fifth time he came upon a sheet of metal, fixed to a metal post, emanating out of a box.
He looped the ship into the air, caught box and post with a tractor and pulled it into the airlock.
Drifting free, he inspected the slab of metal.
Jordan Green has been here, it said in bold letters.
And below, on the top of the box, there was a pointer in gimbals. A surveyor's telescope. Gyro-stabilized it was and it pointed off slightly below the plane of the ecliptic. Weston took it to the observation dome and applied his eye to it as it stood. In the narrow field he saw the stars, and the crosshairs centered on a small one. Around the circumference of the reticule, tiny letters shone:
Jordan Green has been there too!
The star was Proxima Centauri.
"Oh, yeah?" growled Weston angrily. "That I have to see!"
Feeling challenged and outraged, Al Weston shoved in the Directive Power Drive all the way and headed across interstellar space for Proxima Centauri.
"Jordan Green!" he growled as the ship passed above the velocity of light. "That Jordan Green!"
He forgot the incongruity of Al Weston, the first man to penetrate interstellar space—seeking a phantom that claimed to have been on Alpha Centauri or, more practically, on one of the star's planets. All that Weston knew was that Jordan Green had been having fun at the expense of the Space Corps, just as Ratty and Dirty had in riding him.
It was a private fight. He might hate the High Command's brass but let no craven civilian criticize so much as the polish on the buttons of the third-assistant lubrication technician's uniform!
Jordan Green indeed! Well, Senior Captain Alfred Weston would bring this Jordan Green in by the ears.
And then they'd let Jordan Green explain his pranks.
CHAPTER V
Trail's End
The humiliation of his project died. He began to feel a hearty dislike for Jordan Green. Not only had the joker caused waste of time and money and kilowatts during the war, he was now instrumental in the expenditure of time and money—and was keeping a qualified ranking officer from performing a task compatible with his training.
Weston growled and swore to finish up this job in quick time. He could then return to his rightful position and do a job that would set him up in his friends' eyes once more.
He considered Tony Larkin—a good enough fellow. Jeanne Tarbell— well, after all, he'd been ill and no girl could sit around all the time. Larkin was a nice enough egg and could be trusted. But Larkin would have to take a seat far to the rear when Weston returned!
He'd really show 'em!
The experimental spacecraft, driven by the experimental directive power unit, bored deeper and deeper into interstellar space and its velocity mounted high, running up an exponential scale that was calculated in terms of multiples of the speed of light.
He calculated turnover from sheer theory and a grasp of higher mathematics, since the heavens were an angry gray-blue outside of his ports. Then he decelerated and began to wait for the long long hours to pass before he could see how close his calculations were.
His clocks and chronometers went haywire and he lost track of time. He slept at odd moments, as he had done on the acceleration-half of this first interstellar trip.
The idea of interstellar travel came home to him. He, Al Weston, was making the first interstellar trip. The incongruity was not considered. He knew that he would find Jordan Green on some planet of Proxima Centauri. He began to enjoy the idea. His friends, Tom, Bill, Jack, all of them had considered him lucky Well, confound Jordan Green, he was lucky!
And, regardless of what Jordan Green meant, he'd go down in history, not as a conquerer that went out with the Solar System's most destructive invention, but as the first peacetime user of directive power for interstellar flight. He'd comb the Centaurian system, and then return home with proof. He'd be his own hero!
His ship's velocity dropped below light and he set course for Proxima IV as a guess. He checked the panoramic receiver, located one very heavy signal coming from that planet and knew that he was right.
Not only would he be a Terran celebrity, he would also be an ambassador—first interstellar user of directive power and first discoverer of an extra-solar race of intelligences!
The planet was unpopulated!
Thick jungle covered it and it was full of wild life. On no hand could he see any sign of culture. There was no evidence but the single heavy signal, which he tracked halfway around the jungle-laden planet to land in a clearing beside a huge, white-marble building.
Weston tracked halfway around the jungle-laden planet to land in a clearing beside a huge, white-marble building.
On the lintel above the door were the words, in letters of shimmering jewel-like substance.
Here lives Jordan Green!
Weston smiled cynically. This—was it! He polished the knuckles of his right hand in the palm of his left hand, flexed both hands, loosed the needler in his holster and strode forward, hands at his sides, alert. He hit the door with a hard straight-arm and sent it crashing open.
He faced four people, three men and a woman.
"Well, well!" he said, one portion of his mind wondering what to do about the woman when the shooting started. He disliked harming women but he knew that women had no compunctions against doing a man as best they could.
"Which of you—or how many of you—is or are Jordan Green?"
"Why?" asked the elder man mildly.
"Because I want to strangle him—or even her—slowly and painfully! Then I'm taking him—he, she or it—back to Terra to answer some questions!"
"Why?" asked the man. "Has he harmed you?"
Weston stopped short. To be honest with himself, Jordan Green had harmed no one, but he had been a plagued nuisance at least to Weston personally. Jordan Green was a sort of a symbol of something that caused him trouble.
"See here," he said. "They hung the job of locating Jordan Green on me, thinking I needed some sort of cockeyed feather nest of a job because I couldn't handle anything real. I didn't want it, but they've tossed time and money into the job.
"Me—I want to take the joker back by the ears and show them that at least I'm worth their time and money and let them figure out whether my efforts were worth it. At least I've paid my way and done what they wanted me to do! Now—which?"
"What do you intend to do then?" asked the man. The younger man headed for a huge machine that stood inert, its pilot lights glimmering to show that it was ready to perform. The older called something in a strange tongue and the other one stopped and turned with puzzlement written in every line of his body.
"Who are you?" gritted Weston.
"I am called Dalenger. He is Valentor, she, his sister, Jasentor. The fourth is Desentin."
"I'm stupefied," gritted Weston. "A fine bunch of nom de plumes. Who are you? Or do I take you all back?"
"Tell me. Why are you angry?" asked Dalenger.
Al Weston told them. He told them of his ambition and his hopes and his own personal defeats—and though he did not know it he was extending himself to convince a total stranger that he, Weston, was a very unhappy man.
"And now, which of you is responsible for all the scribbling that's been going on?" he concluded.
Dalenger smiled. "Please sit down, Senior Captain Weston. Jasey! Get him a dollop of refreshments. I think we're about a have a talk!"
"Get to the point," snapped Weston.
"Patience, my friend. Look. Look well and see this room. We are official observers for the Galactic Union. We—"
"The what?" exploded Weston.
"In the galaxy are seventy-four suns, all peopled with humanoid races, entire stellar systems of us. We all possess what you call directive power. Not only is directive power the key to interstellar flight, but it is also the key to supremacy. That machine back there is an example. If the button behind the safety door is pressed your star will become a supernova because of our development of directive power.
"With such a means of wiping out an entire star-system, we must be certain that any newcomers who develop directive power will not be of a culture that is basically warlike, or filled with manifest destiny to rule the galaxy.
"This is harsh judgment, Senior Captain Weston, but it is a matter of being harsh or losing our lives. We are not cruel, but we are not soft where our future is at stake.
"Ergo, our detectors cover the galaxy, a job that would be impossible to do manually. At the first release of directive power we set up an observation post, such as you have found here, and we provide means to ensure a quick decision.
"When the first flight arrives we can judge the culture from the men who come with it. If the culture is favorable to the Galactic Union it is joined. If it is inimical or undesirable in any way, their sun becomes a supernova, wiping out the undesirable civilization immediately."
Weston looked at Dalenger with a hard, cynical glance.
"Like to play at being God?" he asked sharply.
"We do not. But we like to live!"
"You, I gather, are responsible for that Jordan Green gag?"
Dalenger smiled. "Yes. Your people have no doubt wondered how the fellow could get around as he did. Actually, it was a controlled-writing, using directive power from here. We have come no closer to your sun than this. Our grasp of your language was obtained by reading books, by listening to your radio and by other means—all available across the light-years by directive power.
"You see," said Dalenger, "if we came as emissaries we would be shown only that which your leaders wanted us to see. If we came as spies there would always be suspicion in your minds. Our spying is restricted to learning your language and setting up the means by which you will seek us out."
"But this Jordan Green business?"
"There are a number of reasons why a race will seek the origin of such a joke. A well-developed sense of humor and the willingness to spend money on such is desirable. Suspicion is not bad, depending upon whether it is sheer hatred of the alien or a desire to maintain integrity."
Weston thought for a moment. They were going to judge his race by him. He considered and came to the conclusion that he was a sorry specimen to grade an entire culture on.
"How can you grade a race on one specimen?" he said.
"Since the specimen is usually a competent man, highly trained, a scientist, we normally discount him a bit. A hand-picked sample is never representative, but represents the peak of the race."
Weston swallowed. "But look," he said. "That is not fair. I'm—"
"Senior Captain Weston, you strode in here angry. You displayed no sense of humor. You snarled and promised us all bodily harm and accused us of having interfered with your plans. Right?"
"Yes—but—"
"Yet," said Dalenger, "you were changing. You see, Weston, you were a sick man. There is one characteristic that is quite desirable. It is a sense of social responsibility to the individual by the collective government. Most undesirable is the type that claims the individual must be immersed in the good of the state.
"In one extension this sense is called pity. In the other extension it is called pride. You were hurt and you became ill mentally. And, instead of casting you out, your fellow men gave you a job that would result in your convalescence regardless of success or failure, providing that you yourself managed to follow through—in any manner. You did, by desperation and anger.
"We don't always judge by the mental calibre of the man who comes. We must consider the reason why he was selected. We don't value personal feelings in judgment of a race—we'd be inevitably wrong if we valued the opinion of a psychoneurotic.
"The judging was finished when I called Desentin to stop. He is young and impetuous and was about to press the button. So, Senior Captain Alfred Weston, we welcome you and your race to the Galactic Union!"
Weston blinked. He'd fought against it. He'd been angry at something every instant of the time between his awakening after the disaster to the present moment—angry because there was nothing he could do to gain real recognition. So they hung a joke-job on him to cure him!
And, by the grace of the gods and a long-handled spoon, he had walked into a situation that might have caused the destruction of the
