Probing our rich entanglementsWe Loved It All: A Memory of Life Lydia Millet Norton, 2024. 272 pp.

A novelist's venture into nonfiction is filled with deep insights about life on Earth but may leave some wanting more.

Research needs for a food system transition.

The global food system, and animal agriculture in particular, is a major and growing contributor to climate change, land system change, biodiversity loss, water consumption and contamination, and environmental pollution. The copious production and consumption of animal products are also contributing to increasingly negative public health outcomes, particularly in wealthy and rapidly industrializing countries, and result in the slaughter of trillions of animals each year. These impacts are motivating calls for reduced reliance on animal-based products and increased use of replacement plant-based products. However, our understanding of how the production and consumption of animal products, as well as plant-based alternatives, interact with important dimensions of human and environment systems is incomplete across space and time. This inhibits comprehensively envisioning global and regional food system transitions and planning to manage the costs and synergies thereof. We therefore propose a cross-disciplinary research agenda on future target-based scenarios for food system transformation that has at its core three main activities: (1) data collection and analysis at the intersection of animal agriculture, the environment, and societal well-being, (2) the construction of target-based scenarios for animal products informed by these new data and empirical understandings, and (3) the evaluation of impacts, unintended consequences, co-benefits, and trade-offs of these target-based scenarios to help inform decision-making.

Blind spots in biodefense.

In October, the Biden administration released its National Biodefense Strategy (NBS-22), the first update since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Although the document notes that one of the lessons of the pandemic is that threats originating anywhere are threats everywhere, it frames threats as largely external to the United States. NBS-22 focuses primarily on bioterrorism and laboratory accidents, neglecting threats posed by routine practices of animal use and production inside the United States. NBS-22 references zoonotic disease but assures readers that no new legal authorities or institutional innovations are needed. Although the US is not alone in failing to confront these risks, its failure to comprehensively address them echoes across the globe.

The right to strive in a changing worldJustice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility Martha C. Nussbaum Simon & Schuster, 2023. 400 pp.

A philosopher prioritizes agency and Anthropocene concerns in a theory of animal justice.

The US Response to COVID-19 and Climate Change Endangers the Country and the World.

Climate change and pandemics require cooperative, integrated responses that in turn require planning, coordination, and the mobilization of expertise. US failures in these domains have compromised the world's ability to cope with both problems. At a minimum, the US needs to re-engage with the Paris Agreement and support the World Health Organization.

Climate change, responsibility, and justice.

In this paper I make the following claims. In order to see anthropogenic climate change as clearly involving moral wrongs and global injustices, we will have to revise some central concepts in these domains. Moreover, climate change threatens another value ("respect for nature") that cannot easily be taken up by concerns of global justice or moral responsibility.

Rights, justice, and duties to provide assistance: a critique of Regan's theory of rights.

KIE: In his monograph, The Case for Animal Rights (University of California Press; 1983), Tom Regan seeks to develop an alternative moral theory to utilitarianism, and to apply it to the question of animal rights, including animal experimentation. Here Jamieson presents an overview of Regan's theory and critically examines areas in which he, Jamieson, believes it to be most problematic. He argues that Regan's theory encounters difficulties in its account of our duties to render assistance and its principles for overriding rights. Jamieson concludes that Regan has failed to develop a "compelling and dramatic alternative to utilitarian theories" and that most plausible revisions of his theory lead back in the direction of utilitarianism.^ieng