One species – humans – is ultimately responsible for devastating much of the only planet in the cosmos that is known to support life – Earth. Our population has expanded exponentially since the Industrial Revolution and this, along with the resources required to sustain us, is ultimately driving the decline in the condition of the world’s ecosystems. Examples of species threatened by development (residential/commercial), agriculture, energy production and mining, transportation, biological resource use, natural system modification, invasive species, pollution and climate change are provided. Yet there are solutions to these problems and many species and ecosystems have bounced back from the brink of extinction. Provided the general public and politicians have the will to invest sufficiently in conservation, it can be highly successful. This chapter ends by exploring the variety of ways that humanity can use to improve the status of the world’s ecosystems.

This chapter explores how human children soften the abusive edge of carceral spaces. Prisons, immigration detention centres, and zoos and aquaria are institutions that attract sustained public scrutiny from prisoner rights, migrant rights, anti-racist, and animal rights movements. Among other things, critics contest the messaging that these institutions and their proponents use to assure the public of the need for confinement and the ethical acceptability of the conditions captive animals and humans experience. These discourses, depending on the specific institution, highlight the larger public “law and order” interests of safety and border control, but also “progressive” interests of rehabilitation, conservation, and education. In highlighting these latter “progressive” interests, carceral institutions seek to humanize themselves and their work to bolster their social credibility. This “humane-washing” occurs through long-standing rationales about rehabilitation for offenders in the prison context, and more recent rationales about the conservation of nature and conservation education in the zoo and aquarium context. It also, I will argue, occurs through a specific type of marshaling of the human child. I apply a multispecies lens to consider how the real and imagined human child in the zoo and aquaria context, and narratives about what is in the best interests of human children in the immigration and prison context, figure into characterizing such carceral institutions as legally and socially legitimate spaces.