Yoga, Animal Ethics, and “Open Access”

First, an apology to all readers for my extended silence on this website. Perhaps my sin of omission calls for penance, but for now I’ll just share a bit of news and a thought or two more or less related to the news.

The first news amounts to a number, namely, 30,000. This is the number of “accesses” to the book Yoga and Animal Ethics according to the publisher’s website, the number of downloads of the book, or of one or more chapters of the book, since it was published in July, 2025. While I’m happy to know that the book is reaching a much wider audience than it would without its open access status, the digital technology involved in making this possible gives me pause to reflect. There is much to ponder about the relationship between knowledge conveyed in print and the technical means of producing mass-produced print; further, the complexity and strangeness of this relationship multiplies when digital media is added. In his article “Technologies of Memory and Imagination” (Parrhesia 29, 25–76), Bernard Stiegler explores how “’new technologies of communication’ are characterized by the artificial preservation of memory, which is also the production of memory as such and the exposure of the rules of its functioning.” I won’t try to unpack this statement beyond saying this: regarding the “artificial preservation of memory,” for me, in the context of my book being digitally accessible, this means that a sort of “expansion of memory” takes place that allows potentially unlimited people to partake in the “memory” that constitutes the meanings that I have articulated in the book. Put simply, memory can be cultivated by yoga practice, and one sort of memory is to draw on the collective wisdom of sages regarding how we humans can related positively with nonhuman animals.

Also, what this means in practical terms is that what I wrote in this book can be thought of not only as causing readers to think about the issues I raise regarding yoga theory and practices in relation to how we relate with animals. More than that, it suggests that the technology of open access can serve to evoke memory of a better way to relate with animals—perhaps a primordial collective memory. Stiegler adds that new technologies of communication have the capacity to produce memory. We can hear or read or see a speech or book or film about animals, and these can produce a memory in a few people. But add to this the layer of digital accessibility, and it has the potential effect of creating a much wider collective memory—a memory that can have wider influence such that a cultural “wave” is produced.

Of course, the reality is that digital technology pervades our culture, saturating our minds with ideas that effectively cover whatever collective memory of harmonious co-existence with nonhuman animals might have existed in earlier times (even in recent decades, but I’m thinking more of “deep time” or “primordial time”). Collective amnesia is the order of today’s world, and digital technology consumes us, keeping humanity benighted about the plight of nonhuman animals, as it does the plight of “spaceship earth” as a whole. All of this said, Maria Popova (in her Marginalia newsletter) reminds us, we should not only resist cynicism, but actively fight it. “[I]t it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive.” And so, I indulge for a moment in wishful—no, rather, hopeful—thinking about the possible positive effect of writing a book with the aim of highlighting a potentially liberating intersection between yoga and animal ethics, and having it published open access.