Humanity Even For Non-Humans

Happy Earth Day from Club 108!

We pray and hope that we are inspiring you to bring practical, responsible, soul-stirring ecological action into your spiritual lives. Please let us know any way we can improve our service to you and yours (and that also includes your soon-to-be sprouting seedlings in your garden)

Today we offer you a recent piece from our hometown New York Times by Nicholas Kristoff titled "Humanity Even For Non-Humans", detailing the emergence of a genuine animal-rights movement inspired by the work of Princeton scholar Peter Singer.

Here's an excerpt:

Professor Singer wrote a landmark article in 1973 for The New York Review of Books and later expanded it into a 1975 book, “Animal Liberation.” That book helped yank academic philosophy back from a dreary foray into linguistics and pushed it to confront such fascinating questions of applied ethics as: What are our moral obligations to pigs?

John Maynard Keynes wrote that ideas, “both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.” This idea popularized by Professor Singer — that we have ethical obligations that transcend our species — is one whose time appears to have come.

“There’s some growth in numbers of vegetarians, but the bigger thing is a broad acceptance of the idea that animals count,” Mr. Singer reflected the other day.

Click here to read the article.