Introduction

A hallmark of a social harm approach is that it locates harm fundamentally within social structures. To put it succinctly, harm is the product of harmful societies (Pemberton, forthcoming). Not only is much harm embedded in normal everyday practices, rarely questioned at a conscious level, but it is preventable – alternative courses of action are possible. While the object of analysis is different, the study of nonhuman interests and needs (in contradistinction to the usual social harm approach) nonetheless shares these key propositions. As with the social harm approach, action to prevent and remedy harm ultimately must be directed at dominant power arrangements and toward fundamental social change.

Humans are responsible for much of the destruction of ecological systems and animal cruelty in the world today, not to mention the terrible things we do to each other. It is what humans do en masse that reshapes landscapes, pollutes air, water and soil, leads to species decline among plants and animals, and changes the contours of the atmosphere and the level of the seas. The moral responsibility for this rests with we humans (White, 2007).

The idea of blaming the human species, however, can be subjected to counter-factual analysis that questions whether in fact all humans are equally to blame (White, 2011). That is, if all humans are implicated in the harm, then all humans must by their own ‘human’ nature be destructive. Yet we know from accounts of indigenous relationships with nature that, to take one example, some humans have lived countless years in harmonious relationship with their local ecosystems (see Robyn, 2002). We also know that some contemporary communities in places such as India are actively reconfiguring their relationship with nature in ways that are ecologically sustainable and that promote biodiversity (see Shiva, 2008). It is only at a very high level of abstraction, then, that we can place blame on humans. The more grounded the analysis becomes – the more reflective it is of specific groups and communities – the more tenuous the sweep of the generalisation.

Just as the responsibility for bad or wrong behaviour is not equally shared, so too the effects are experienced differently, including among human communities. This is reflected, for example, in the ways in which various environmental issues present in different parts of the world.