Wednesday, 27 May 2009

NEWS FROM THE DIRECTOR

Our Centre’s Education for World Futures initiative was launched on May 26.This initiative grew from our attendance at the World Universities Forum in Mumbai in January, where our papers on integrated human studies courses and delivery attracted great interest. Essentially the initiative proposes the online delivery of our courses in conjunction with other universities worldwide. Each partner university would include custom designed local content focusing on relevant issues. We are very excited about the chance to deliver our course potentially to thousands of students worldwide, and to create a truly global educational enterprise with human wellbeing at its heart. Steve and I were pleased by the spirited response from the audience. One of the great things about the university system is the process of peer review, and the comments and questions of our colleagues will inform our course development. Both content and pedagogy will be rigorously scrutinised at every stage so the final product will be one that UWA will be proud to see wearing its badge. Our second semester seminars begin on July 29. Preliminary details are below, and updated program information will appear on our web site at https://www.ihs.uwa.edu.au/seminars/ihs-series I hope you get a chance to attend and enjoy some of the very interesting talks on the program. If you didn’t take note of the lecture series on Global Health beginning on Monday July 27, the details are below again.

Professor Neville Bruce
Director, Centre for Integrated Human Studies

NEXT SEMINAR SERIES: HUMAN RELATIONS BEGINS JULY 29

Our second semester seminars are broadly on the theme Human relations, and investigate what we know of ourselves as individuals, as families, and as Australians. Topics include our national character, our relationship with our history, our multicultural community, how our families are faring this century, and the challenges of caring for our ageing population. The series begins on July 29 with a look at humans’ creativity, focusing on music, an artistic endeavour now recognised as contributing to human wellbeing. You’ll receive an e-bulletin reminder before the first seminar, and can see the full program at https://www.ihs.uwa.edu.au/seminars/ihs-series

NOTES FROM THE LAST SEMINAR, ANIMALS

Professor Dennis Haskell, chairing the session, noted that animal ethics is a hot topic at UWA and the chair of the animal ethics committee is considered one of the hardest positions due to the nature of the research carried out here.

Dr Dominique Blache (who sits on the committee) said there was no easy answer to the question about whether animals were slaves or equals to humans, but, whether our use of animals was for production, food, research, art or as companions, the question was simple: is it ethical? Concern for animals is a relatively recent thing. Jeremy Bentham in 1789 said, “…the question is not, Can they reason ?, nor Can they talk ? but, Can they suffer ?” We can approach the issue of animal ethics by using a number of ethical frameworks. The utilitarian approach suggested concerns of utility and equality. Costs – that is, the amount of suffering that animals experienced – should be balanced against benefit. Sometimes it was difficult for people to assess this. For example, food may be produced far away and consumers might not be able to judge whether it was produced humanely. Another approach is deontological, where the main concern is performing the right action, regardless of the outcome or benefit. In the case of whale strandings, from a deontological point of view, it is right to try to save whales. But from a utilitarian standpoint, it is questionable, because there is much effort, and often poor results. Virtue ethics decreed that we would do the right thing by being of virtuous character, but sometimes even when we want to do the best thing, we do the worst. Here Dr Blache showed a graph of figures for dog obesity in the US. The ethical debate could be driven by custom, law, religion and science, and critical thinking was essential.

Beekeeper Peter Detchon began with an image of a beekeeper that he said was idealised and romantic, and inaccurate. He said we were never far away from a bee hive, and they existed in urban areas, even on top of skyscrapers. Hobby beekeepers outnumbered commercial beekeepers by about 1000:1, and the installation of a beehive in the White House alongside the new vegetable patch could attract even more hobbyists. Peter said that commercial beekeepers kept bees in units that could be carried by truck – for him, that meant about 100 hives – and shifted at night to new acreages for 4 – 6 weeks (the duration of a flowering event). Each hive would produce about 200 litres of honey (approximately 44 gallons) per season. A recent threat to the industry was colony collapse disorder, which originated in the US and has caused up to 60% of hives to die there. While researchers initially looked for a single cause for this, it is now thought that it is due to a combination of factors, including Varroa destructor and Nosema ceranae parasite infection, poor nutrition, bad weather, and long truck migrations. Beekeeping was important to future food security because their main benefit to humans, apart from the production of honey, was as a pollinator of crops. Overseas colony deaths had opened up opportunities for Australian beekeepers to export bees. Peter said that while prospects for bees are threatened, they are even harder for beekeepers, who typically operated at a loss. He also raised the fascinating issue of whether a hive, as well as an individual bee animal, has a living quality that demands ethical consideration.

Professor Dennis Haskell said our attitudes to animals are complex and variable, and the representation of animals in the arts reflected this. Some parts of the Bible prescribed our superiority over animals (e.g. Genesis 1:28) while Buddhism, for example, held a different ethic. Peter Singer in his book Animal Liberation (1975) argued for equal weight to be given to the suffering of animals. In the arts and culture, not all animals were viewed or represented equally. Asses, for example, were well down the scale in terms of the respect they got from humans, so Bottom’s turning into an ass in A Midsummer Night’s Dream was meant to be comical. But some animals could be used in representations of deities, for example the cat and the jackal in Egyptian gods Bast and Anubis. While the animal nature of humans was celebrated in sexuality, it seemed that animals, or animal/human combinations like the Sphinx and the satyr, or animal-like figures may be used to represent what is not known and cannot be controlled, mystical or mysterious. Examples were Ganesh the elephant god from Indian culture, also present in Indonesia; the alien in the film ET ; the dragon speared by St George; and the story of Leda and the swan, in which Zeus assumed the form of a swan and raped Leda, after which she gave birth to eggs. Shaun Tan’s representation of the inhabitants of a foreign country in his book Arrival as bird-like beings was another example. Blake’s poem “The Tyger” presents the tiger as a fearsome beast which must have had an even more awesome creator. Yet Blake had never seen a real tiger. Most modern humans don’t live in close proximity to animals so our attitudes now are not necessarily shaped by intimate knowledge. In popular culture animals are often anthropomorphised (made to look and behave like humans) and children’s literature and modern cartoons had many examples like Winnie the Pooh and Toad of Toad Hall and Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse. In other literature animals were used for allegorical purposes, such as in Orwell’s Animal Farm .

Questions and comments included :

  • The worldview that has humans as the pinnacle of creation is giving way to a view of humans as being equal to all other creatures. Even books about evolution may now have diagrams like a star exploding, showing humans in one area, rather than a tree with humans at the top.
  • Killing animals for food is done with respect in tribal cultures. American Indians would “apologise” to their food prey.
  • In Egyptian representations the cat-human has powers beyond both cats and humans. With genetic technology might this be possible for humans in the future?
  • Why is the line drawn at insects in ethical considerations? No-one had any qualms about killing insect parasites.
  • The continuum regarding what governs our relationships with and attitudes to animals may be based on gestation length and rates of reproduction of various animals.
  • How can we countenance the imprisonment of animals in zoos?
  • What would happen to the millions of food animals if people stopped eating them?
  • There are 500 species of native bees, all solitary (not hive) animals. They are useful pollinators.

GLOBAL HEALTH

The Global Health Short Course is an exciting new initiative designed to provide the West Australian public with an avenue to learn and engage in issues of international health. It is an opportunity to broaden your consciousness and explore the many facets of global health, near and far from home. The topics are:

  • July 27: The way things are (statistics and global health)
  • August 3: Making poverty history (the causes and cures of global inequality)
  • August 10: Getting shot is bad for your health + No place to call home (Conflict and health + The health of displaced persons)
  • August 17: Access to essential medicines (Patent law and how this affects patients)
  • August 24: It’s getting hot in here + When disaster strikes (Climate change and health + Emergency humanitarian relief)
  • August 31: Closing the gap (Aboriginal health)
  • September 7: Mums and Bubs (Women’s and children’s health)
  • September 14: AIDS (The AIDS epidemic)

The course runs every Monday at 5:30pm for eight weeks at Tattersall Lecture Theatre , UWA.  Register your interest online at www.interhealth.org.au , see what it's all about, and GET TO KNOW YOUR WORLD.

HAVE YOU JUST JOINED OUR MAIL LIST?

If you have missed previous newsletters containing summaries of the seminar presentations, you can see them on the UWA News page https://www.news.uwa.edu.au/category/business-unit/integrated-human-studies

ABOUT THE CENTRE FOR INTEGRATED HUMAN STUDIES

You can find out more about the Centre and about IHS at our web site www.ihs.uwa.edu.au . If you are interested in enrolling in postgraduate courses in IHS, please contact the Director, Prof Neville Bruce on 6488 3292 or email [email protected] .

TELL US WHAT YOU THINK

Please feel free to give us your comments, thoughts or suggestions for future seminar topics by emailing Karen on [email protected] .

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