ANIMALS: An animal welfare bill was discussed in the British Parliament. Can vertebrates be recognized as sentient beings, and does this mean that animals have the same – or similar – rights as humans?
THE CLIMATE CRISIS: This book makes all other climate literature seem dangerously anthropocentric. We obviously haven't been very good at monitoring the earthly paradise.
ECOLOGY: A tangle of interconnected life. Developments in ecology and technology herald a new Copernican revolution: Language, the bastion of supposed human superiority, also belongs to nature and machines. Can an expanded definition of intelligence improve our relationship with other beings?
ANIMALS: Ethically speaking, we are way overtime with our treatment of the non-human animals. Many of these have emotions such as fear, pity and sadness. We shouldn't eat animals, but what if we get sick from not doing so?
NATURE:How the world has looked from the animals' point of view – how mammals, reptiles, insects, birds and fish have reacted to us – has been absent from our imaginary world. When nature seemed threatening, it had to be fought.
ETHICS: 'Secondary experiences' train us to empathize with people who are in situations we ourselves have no experience with. Martha Nussbaum believes that fiction such as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky can do this.
AESTHETICS: In Kiøsterud's eco-philosophical text, 'beauty' becomes a riddle as much as a solution, a question as much as an answer. Is it possible to find beauty on nature's own terms – a beauty you cannot own?
PLAY: The exhibition by Francis Alÿs at Copenhagen Contemporary neither explains nor defines what play means. Rather, it is an archive of toys and forms lines of connection between people across the places we come from.
NATURE: The attempt to control nature's wildness locally has created uncontrolled effects globally. Do we have to freeze and sweat more in the future, or is civilization far wilder?
Two of the films featured at this year's Belgian DocVille Festival remind us of the constant violations of laws and regulations, and the injustice that affects both animals and humans.