Environmental ethics and sustainable territorial development. an analysis from the speciesism category

Abstract

The article proposes ways to relate discussions held at the field of Environmental Ethics with analysis about the Sustainable Territorial Development. For this, a summary discussion of this field is presented, emphasizing the category of Speciesism and the problem of moral consideration of animals. This approach aims to show the heuristic potential that this category have to analyse patterns of territorial development supported by livestock. From an empirical point of view, the article analyses data from the meat industry in Santa Catarina, from which the notion of Intensive Speciesism Regions (ISR) is outlined. They constitute territories that show Speciesism disproportionately intense in their development patterns, result of a socio-political, economic and symbolic process that combines radical moral disregard of animals with unrighteousness among humans.