Darwin’s Nightmare and Animal Welfare: Ecology meets Human Rights

 

Although Darwin’s Nightmare advocates for human rights rather than animal rights, because the film connects these human rights with ecology, it demonstrates that, as J. Baird Callicott asserts, “Animal welfare ethicists and environmental ethicists have overlapping concerns” (249); in this case, the disruption of an aquatic community has had devastating effects on both aquatic and human life. Darwin’s Nightmare limits its argument to one species, as does The Cove, and highlights the need for “rights,” but because it focuses on a non-native species that has become an unwanted predator, it does not extend its human rights argument to animal rights. In fact, the film merely exposes a manmade problem rather than proposing a solution: humanity’s intervention in the biosphere of Lake Victoria disrupts the evolutionary cycle and destroys what was once a thriving aquatic biotic community. 

In Darwin’s Nightmare, the ecological message is clear, but because there is no call to action, the film’s ability to connect human and nonhuman nature falls flat. Callicott explains how an animal welfare ethic aligns well with organismic ecology. Callicott’s work draws on Mary Midgley’s argument that “Since we and the animals who belong to our mixed human-animal community are coevolved social beings participating in a single society, we and they share certain feelings that attend upon and enable sociability—sympathy, compassion, trust, love, and so on” (252). 

According to Callicott, Mary Midgley’s suggested animal welfare ethic and Aldo Leopold’s seminal environmental ethic thus share a common, fundamentally Humean understanding of ethics as grounded in altruistic feelings. And they share a common ethical bridge between the human and nonhuman domains in the concept of community—Midgley’s “mixed community” and Leopold’s “biotic community.” [By] [c]ombining these two conceptions of a metahuman moral community we have the basis of a unified animal-environmental ethical theory. (152) This unified animal-environmental ethical theory acknowledges preferences for specific examples of human or nonhuman nature but places more value on community, working from a holistic perspective that rests on the notion that the mixed and biotic community matters. 

Films that illustrate an animal welfare ethic like Midgley’s provide a way to connect animal liberation and environmentalism and thus work toward interdependence between human and nonhuman nature instead of the valorization of the individual no matter how it disrupts the biotic community. Darwin’s Nightmare offers an individualized portrait of the need for such interdependent connections.