Working at the intersection of language and environmental justice: with Ethos & Empathy
Our Greek team has been busy lately - and one of the partners we owe that to is Ethos & Empathy! We are very excited to announce our partnership with Ethos & Empathy since the beginning of May. We have been supporting it non-stop ever since and have learned a lot through our collaboration.
Ethos & Empathy is an online educational platform and its mission is to promote antispeciesism and ecology in Greece based on the idea that in order for our world to become a better place, people need to adopt a holistic approach in their life.
It is a non-profit initiative supporting that our society needs to adopt an ecocentric way of thinking and leave back the egocentric one by showing compassion to all individuals of all sentient beings, human and non human animals while showing respect to mother Earth as well.
Antispeciesism, one of the main interests of Ethos & Empathy, is a movement which fights speciesism. It fights, in other words, for the end of the discrimination of species. As an analogy with racism and sexism, this concept refers to the ideology considering that the lives and interests of some animals can be overlooked simply because of their species. Thinkers conclude that speciesism is irrational and unfair, because humans are not the only ones to feel emotions and that we should also respect the lives and interests of other sentient beings who share this planet with us. Speciesism is a widespread form of discrimination that billions of animals suffer from today.
All this started from Elisabeth Dimitras, the founder of Ethos & Empathy and a passionate activist, who has been very involved in the refugee crisis in an individual level and has volunteered in refugee camps in Lesvos, where she has also organised beach clean-ups, has taught Greek to French-speaking immigrants in Za’tar’s Orange House in Athens, and has assisted with preparing meals for homeless people with Steps. She has also spoke on The Guardian about the problem of overpopulation and its destructive effects on the environment. Elisabeth struggles to spread awareness towards a zero-waste lifestyle and antispeciesism - she is a freelance researcher conducting bibliographic research for organisations fighting against speciesism.
We translated articles about Why Beekeeping is unethical, Human trafficking victims working in Slaughterhouses (English version), the Consumption of Aquatic Animals (English version), the Slavery in the Fishing Industry (English Version), Animal Testing etc. Our translators were more than happy to contribute to this cause and multiple translations have been published already to the Ethos & Empathy website.