The Climate Crisis and Other Animals

Book Review by Maggie Hall

The Climate Crisis and Other Animals (2024) by Richard Twine is published by Sydney University Press.

In this detailed analysis of the significance of non-human animals, with reference to the climate crisis, Richard Twine pulls together a substantial body of social science research. At first, I found the tone rather dry and academic, with a dizzying number of references compared with the more folksy style of writers such as George Monbiot. But perhaps Twine can be forgiven, seeing as he is an academic sociologist. He is Reader in Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Human-Animal Studies at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, UK.

His main thesis is that non-human animals have been largely overlooked in both the public debate and academic research on the climate crisis. He believes that critical thinking skills are essential for any meaningful study of the crisis and the significance of non-human animals within it. Humanists may be irritated by his use of the word “humanist” to mean anthropocentric, and “post-humanist” to indicate a move away from what he calls “human exceptionalism” (valuing the human species over and above the rest of nature). However, it appears that these are accepted terms in his field of Critical Animal Studies (CAS). He advocates an interdisciplinary approach between CAS and other theoretical fields such as eco-feminism, race theory and climate justice.

He contests the use of the term “Anthropocene” to describe the current era, beginning roughly around the time of the Industrial Revolution, favouring instead the somewhat tongue-twisting term “Capitalocene”. Whilst “Anthropocene” emphasises the effects of humans on the environment, it neglects the ways in which capitalism has transformed the natural world through the exploitation of resources, labour, and the creation of markets.

He quotes a substantial number of well-referenced and startling statistics such as this one: “According to 2019 data, of the habitable land on Earth (104 million square kilometres), almost 50% (51 million square kilometres) was used for agriculture. Of this, 78% (40 million square kilometres) was used to farm non-human animals, including land used for feed production, despite the fact that this land only contributes 18% to the global human calorie supply and 37% to the global human protein supply”. And there’s much more like that.

He points out that if non-human animals are included in climate crisis studies at all, it is usually with reference to their emissions rather than the effects of the crisis upon them, a point graphically illustrated by the cover image. It's a photograph of a wandering animal, probably a sheep but difficult to tell in the smoky atmosphere, during the notorious Australian bush fires in the “black summer” of 2019/20. The impact on the environment of the animal–industrial complex, including CO2 equivalent emissions from transport, feed production, slaughtering, marketing, etc., is not even considered in current research. Twine argues that human-animal relations are key to achieving any kind of meaningful action or transformative change in response to the climate crisis.

At 407 pages it's not a light read and there is much more to the arguments contained within it than can be covered in this review, but I would recommend it to anyone who wishes to educate themselves about the climate crisis and the criticality of human-animal relations in tackling it.