Abstract
As conservationists confront an accelerating extinction crisis, zoos are emerging as potentially significant players in the effort to protect global biodiversity, a role that will likely intensify in the coming decades. It’s an agenda, however, that raises a number of ethical and practical questions as zoological parks seek to balance a growing conservation mission alongside their traditional recreation and entertainment pursuits. Many of these questions were first addressed in Bryan Norton’s anthology, Ethics on the Ark, a milestone in applied ethics and zoo conservation published in 1995. In the decades since Norton’s book appeared, the function of zoos as conservation educators and as centers of public transformation has come into sharper focus, with new fields such as conservation psychology measuring the impact of the zoo visit on public perceptions, attitudes, and conservation behaviors. In this chapter, we explore some of this recent empirical work examining zoo visitors’ experiences and argue that Norton’s early writing in environmental ethics and conservation, particularly his notion of “transformative value,” offers a philosophical grounding for understanding the ethical potential of encounters with zoo animals. We close the chapter by discussing some of the challenges and tensions that emerge when Norton’s argument, which was originally presented as a justification for protecting wild biodiversity due to its ability to “transform” consumer preferences to more ecologically enlightened attitudes, is adapted to the zoo setting.
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Notes
- 1.
Norton’s embrace of a more expansive pluralistic understanding of environmental values beyond the confines of the dualistic intrinsic-instrumental framework perhaps explains why he didn’t continue to develop his earlier arguments for transformative value within the instrumentalist tradition, an evolution he discusses in his 2005 book Sustainability. But his growing emphasis on the linguistic dimensions of environmental deliberation is likely also implicated in this move away from traditional environmental value theory. In his 2015 book, Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change, Norton talks about “transformatives” in public debate as those “linguistic and cognitive tropes (e.g., metaphors, analogies, etc.) that can cause changes in perception and perspective regarding a situation or problem” (Norton 2015: 196). In other words, the dynamic use of language, rather than discrete encounters with wild species and ecosystems, now appears to serve as the key transformative agent in Norton’s evaluative system.
- 2.
There is a potential further problem with the extension of transformative value in the zoo context, at least for achieving conservation goals. The personal identification with zoo animals and emotional affinity described in social scientific studies of visitor responses, in addition to (or rather than) catalyzing concern for the plight of wild populations and species, could reinforce anthropomorphic tendencies at the level of the individual animal that end up making population management (in both zoos and the wild) more contentious, as was the case with the controversial killing of Marius the Giraffe in the Copenhagen Zoo in 2014. Marius was deemed a “surplus animal” in the parlance of zookeeping and euthanized for zoo population control purposes (Minteer 2014). At the very least, such cases suggest that the emotional and ethical connection to animals in the zoo setting is a complex affair, and that more individualistic ethical responses are possible alongside the population- and species-level attitudes and outcomes described in the conservation psychology literature and surveyed in this chapter.
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We thank Sahotra Sarkar for his helpful comments on and suggestions for an earlier version of this chapter.
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Minteer, B.A., Rojas, C. (2018). The Transformative Ark. In: Sarkar, S., Minteer, B. (eds) A Sustainable Philosophy—The Work of Bryan Norton. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92597-4_15
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