Panel discussion chaired at Animal Ethics Conference 2025 on animals´ death

Today I have attended Norway´s Animal Ethics Conference (Dyreetikkonferansen) 2025, which had the theme "Når dyr dør. Perspektiver på livets slutt" (When animals die. Perspectives on the end of life) and was held at Litteraturhuset in Oslo. I chaired the panel discussion which took place at the end of the day. The panel included all the presenters, namely Espen Gamlund (UIB), Elisiv Tolo (Animalia), Helen Øvregaard (Vet-Talk), Steffen Tretvoll (Norsk Vegansamfunn), Jon M. Arnemo (Universitetet i Innlandet), Åsa Maria O. Espmark. More than 150 people were registered for the conference, which is organised by Norway´s Council for animal ethics.

Interview on animal awareness of death to appear on NRK P2's Verdibørsen

Yesterday I met with NRK P2s Aase Cathrine Myrtveit to be interviewed for this week's "Verdibørsen". The topic of the 15 minute long radio interview was animal awareness of death. I was interviewed in my capacity as Chair of Minding Animals Norway and Associate professor in philosophy at University of Stavanger.

The program will be sent this Saturday, and then again on Sunday.

Eco-existentialist talk on animal death scheduled for presentation September 5th in Oslo

My paper "Øko-eksistensialisme og dyrs dødelighet: Et forsvar for et mer inkluderende begrep om dødelighet" [Eco-existentialism and the mortality of animals: A defence of a more inclusive notion of mortality] (see full abstract in Norwegian) has been scheduled for presentation at the 4th research seminar of Minding Animals Norway, which will take place on the Blindern campus of University of Oslo on Friday September 5th. My presentation will take place at 10.00-10.45.

The theme of the research seminar, which also features an hour of open discussion, is "Dyrene og døden" (Animals and death).

Letter to the editor on wolf mortality in Dagbladet

Friday August 23rd, the day after the Norwegian Animal Ethics Conference took place in Oslo, I had a letter to the editor published in the Norwegian national daily Dagbladet, entitled "Et ulveliv" [A wolf's life]. The article presents excerpts from my wolf chapter in the recently published anthology Hvem er villest i landet her? [Who's the wildest one in the country here?], and raises the question of whether wild wolves have a right to die of natural causes, rather than by the human hand. A modest management goal is proposed, namely that at least every second wolf should die of natural causes (versus only one out of five today, in Scandinavia).

The complete text has been posted in my Norwegian language blog Utopisk Realisme. The letter to the editor was written with reference to my chairmanship of Minding Animals Norway and as a University of Stavanger scholar.

"An ageing giant" - Arne Næss in memory

I have just come across the newsletter wherein my brief text "An ageing giant" appears (p13).

INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS
NEWSLETTER
_____________________________________________________
Volume 20, No. 2 Spring/Summer 2009

Morten Tønnessen, Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia:
An Ageing Giant

It is hard to summarize what Arne Næss has meant to me—first of all because he has been so decisive in forming me as a practicing philosopher. For years I had difficulties seeing where, at all, I would disagree with him (a problem I have now to some extent overcome). I was early on inspired by his interpretation of Gandhi’s political ethics—that’s how I made the leap from activist to student of philosophy. As is the case for so many Norwegians, it was his work that introduced me to philosophy. A course in deep ecology at Åkerøya in Norway in the late 1990s was central in giving me a more solid basis for eco-philosophical reasoning (a couple years later Knut Olav Fossestøl, another course participant, and I founded the “Eco-philosophical colloquium” at the University of Oslo). By then Arne was already a familiar face for me as a philosophy student—30 years after he retired as professor, he was still around offering public lectures. In 2001 and 2003, I arranged public events with him myself. By 2003, however, it was clear that this brilliant mind struggled to remain intellectually alert and coherent. A request to partake in a proposal (concerning the Norwegian Petro-fund) from the Green Party of Norway, for which I was the national secretary at the time, was therefore revoked.

I interviewed him a couple of times. After the Åkerøya seminar I sent him my first booklong philosophical manuscript, Dialog. He had agreed to comment it, but now I got it returned, with an exact explanation: “372 pages!” I never knew whether to call him Arne or Næss. Despite having met him around a dozen times, he never appeared—with certainty—to recognize me (I wish he had). Today I have the fortune of being in contact with some of his closest colleagues at the eco-scene. The last time I was in contact with him (through Kit-Fai) was in 2006, when I was conducting a survey of attitudes in the Norwegian environmentalist establishment—partly inspired by his own little survey on attitudes to nature among Norwegian bureaucrats and others carried out a generation or so earlier. As I heard the news of his death, I pondered home to our house in Magé, Brazil, where we were at the time, and stepped into our outdoor swimming pool, as the day darkened. A couple of bats joined me. I retreated to a corner, offering the two nocturnal creatures (ecological!) space enough to rejoice undisturbed in their playful bath.