The second chapter touches more firmly on the philosophical debate and the arguments for human exceptionalism put forward over its course. The chapter puts Xanthus (the prophetic horse from Homer’s Iliad) as the first and prototypical speaking animal in the Western tradition in conversation with other famous speaking animals, including Plutarch’s speaking pig Grunter (Gryllus), a speaking rooster who claims to be a re-incarnation of the philosopher Pythagoras, and Kafka’s Red Peter. The chapter shows that the figure of the speaking animal is central to Western conceptions of the human. In classical antiquity, it features in stories that confirm the vertical relationship between humans (at the top) and animals (below). And yet, at the same time, right from the start of the conversation in the ancient world, the apparent anthropomorphism of the speaking animal was also used to critique the very idea of human exceptionalism. There is a direct line between how some modern animal fables point to man’s animal nature and the concept of the human explored in parts of the ancient evidence.

At the heart of Charles Darwin’s place in environmental thought is a crucial tension: on the one hand, his work thoroughly dismantles the arguments for human exceptionalism, and dramatically minimizes the significance of the human species within the vast unfolding of geological and evolutionary history. On the other hand, his theorization of ecological interactivity laid the groundwork for conceptualizing the ways in which (some) human beings were having a massively outsized and growing impact upon the Earth’s ecosystems, including on the biosphere itself. As this chapter shows, questions about the proper scalar framework with which to understand the place of humanity and the scope of human agency within the natural order—questions which Darwin posed in profound and groundbreaking ways—continue to swirl around the Anthropocene concept and contemporary conversations about how to address the many interconnected ecological crises we face.

A vast literature on the legislative alignment between environmental and human rights concerns has flourished since the 1960s. This literature has mostly been occupied with the negative impacts that environmental harms and pollution have on human rights. The scholarly engagement with environmental and human rights protection gave rise to new fields of literature commonly referred to as ‘human rights approaches to environmental protection’ or ‘environmental human rights law’, thereby instantiating the normative quasi subsumption of environmental and human rights protection. This contributed to advancing both the agenda of environmental and human rights protection as well as their ever-closer intertwinement, and reinforced the mainstream anthropocentric and synergistic framing of their relationship. Yet, these two characteristics have also been contested. While much ink has been spilled on critiquing the lingering anthropocentrism that underpins a human rights law-based approach to environmental protection, less attention has been paid to the problematic emphasis on synergies that take the mutually beneficial linkages between environmental and human rights protection for granted. The analysis maps these different strands of inquiry and critique against human exceptionalism and the ideal of frictionless compatibility between environmental protection and human rights, and identifies how the book contributes to these debates.

This chapter introduces human exceptionalism, explores various attempts to distinguish humans from other animals, and reviews a variety of ethical positions about human relations with other animals.

This chapter deploys the concept of national parks in the analysis of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Its point of departure is that the relationship between national parks and colonialism can be fully grasped by paying attention to national parks as a product of the colonial enterprise and the ways in which these protected areas also institutionalised colonialism. It draws attention to the idea of national parks and how it impacted on nature and on the relationships between people and their biophysical environment, especially in the former colonies. Two processes resulting from this idea are the colonization of nature – meaning human domination over nature and the consequent exploitative practices – and the colonization of indigenous and local people through genocide, land alienation, and the imposition of cultural values. In settler societies, the creation of national parks reinforced the division between subjects and citizens. The chapter concludes that the colonization of nature and people has been sustained up to the twenty-first century mainly because the new concepts (such as peace parks and biospheres) used in nature conservation are trapped in the colonial idea of a national park. Conservation practices and management styles reproduce colonial-era social relations.