‘Beasts of Burden’: An Ethical Vegan Perspective on ‘BioDiesel’

The increasing global demand for sustainable energy sources has led to growing interest in biofuels as alternatives to fossil fuels. Such fuels are sought as a major address of anthropogenic climate change. Biodiesel, the subject of this chapter, can be produced from a variety of vegetable oil sources. This chapter focuses on the utilisation of nonhuman animals’ body fats as another source for biodiesel production, which, it has been claimed, reduces human reliance on fossil fuels while simultaneously addressing waste management issues in the food industries. This paper argues that this use of nonhuman animal bodies is anthropocentric and speciesist. Through the lenses of ecocentrism and ethical veganism this chapter offers a critical approach that contests the commodity status of nonhuman animals and seeks to eliminate not escalate the human (ab)use of nonhuman animals. By proposing a broadening of the notion of environmental justice to include ethical veganism, this chapter argues for a non-anthropocentric and non-speciesist address of the human devastation of the planet. The chapter concludes with a plea for humans to give attention to nonhuman animals and seek an address of climate change by means of alleviating the human exploitation of nonhuman animals.