The Next Social Contract: Animals, the Anthropocene, and Biopolitics

In his provocative book The Next Social Contract, Wayne Gabardi rigorously considers the fate of animals in the twenty-first century. He claims that if we are to address the challenges raised by the Anthropocene-the period where nonhuman beings tend to be mere extras, often subsumed under the umbrella notion of "nature"-we need to radically rethink our basic ethical outlook and develop a new, "more-than-human" social contract. Gabardi's wide-ranging and multidisciplinary analysis focuses on four principal battlegrounds of animal biopolitics in the twenty first century: the extinction of wild animals, the crisis of oceanic animals, industrialized farm animals and the future of industrial agribusiness, and the situation of contact-zone animals moving into human-occupied habitats. In his recasting of the social contract, Gabardi envisions a culture shift in human-animal relations toward posthumanism that features the ethical and political prioritization of animal life so it is on par with that of human well-being.