LaMothe’s central analytical tool is the concept of the apparatus, borrowed from the philosopher Giorgi Agamben. In Agamben’s formulation, an apparatus is a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient human behaviors, gestures, and thoughts in ways that purport to be useful. Drawing on Michel Foucault, Agamben notes that in a disciplinary society, apparatuses create docile yet free bodies that assume their identity and their freedom as subjects. LaMothe applies this lens to the theological and philosophical traditions of the Abrahamic West, arguing that their theologies, narratives, and rituals have functioned as apparatuses shaping masculine identity around sovereignty, mastery, and dominion. The result, he argues, is a masculinity that treats other species and the Earth itself as objects to be used, reified, and destroyed rather than as fellow creatures deserving of care.

The paper is careful about definitions. By Western, LaMothe means people who have internalized the narratives and practices of dominant European anthropologies, theological and philosophical, that create a seemingly unbridgeable divide between humans and other species. He explicitly notes that many people and groups within the West, including Indigenous peoples, hold anthropologies that do not produce such a chasm between the human and the other-than-human, citing the work of anthropologists such as Eduardo Kohn and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Masculinity, meanwhile, is treated as biologically rooted but socially constructed, taking varied forms across time and cultures, with a fluidity of gender expression depending on culture and era. This definitional care matters, because the argument is not that men are inherently destructive but that particular historically contingent formations of manhood have been recruited into an ecological project of domination.

One of the paper’s most striking claims concerns the very concept of nature. LaMothe places the word in quotation marks because he regards it as a construct that is itself a feature of the ontological divide between Western human beings and the rest of the living world, a point he grounds in the work of Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Bruno Latour. Many Indigenous religions and philosophies, he observes, do not have a concept like nature at all, mainly because they do not view themselves as distinct from the world around them. The implication is unsettling: the modern Western mind, in carving the world into human and natural domains, may have manufactured the very alienation that licenses ecological destruction. Once the Earth is deemed dead or inert, practices such as mountaintop removal, fracking, and oil drilling become thinkable, even legitimate, because there is no living community to injure.

LaMothe traces the genealogy of sovereign masculinity through political and psychoanalytic mythology alike. He points to the origin myths of Scripture and their counterparts in the origin myths of philosophers and psychoanalysts such as Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud. Freud’s imaginative recreation of the origins of society in Totem and Taboo, in which the father of the clan dominates others only to be killed and overthrown by his progeny, essentializes and leaves unquestioned male sovereignty. Hobbesian political thought, meanwhile, implies that communal life depends on civilization, and therefore that ruling epistemologies are necessary for social order, a view that renders those deemed uncivilized subject to the whims and cruelties of nature and helps justify the colonization of other human beings and everything falling under the construct of nature. Even Aristotle, who believed animals have souls, placed them within a hierarchy crowned by human beings, diminishing the significance of other-than-human animals and othered humans alike.

The paper does not pretend that concern for animals is absent from Western history. LaMothe catalogues a counter-tradition stretching back to antiquity: Plutarch argued for the rights of animals, and the third-century Neoplatonist Porphyry maintained that it was our moral duty to extend justice to other animals. Centuries later, Jeremy Bentham argued for animal welfare, and in the nineteenth century Arthur Schopenhauer raised concerns about animal rights. In recent decades, philosophers such as Peter Singer, Andrew Linzey, and Martha Nussbaum have explored the thorny ethical issues surrounding humanity’s treatment of other species. Yet LaMothe’s point is that these ethical currents have largely failed to reshape dominant masculinity, which remains tethered to apparatuses of sovereignty and mastery. Care ethics, developed by thinkers including Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Joan Tronto, Virginia Held, and Maurice Hamington, offers resources, but they must be deliberately extended beyond human relationships to the more-than-human world.

What would becoming eco-cooperative and caring men and boys actually involve? LaMothe argues that forms of eco-masculinity sustain caring relations toward other species, and that such relations depend on capacities for vulnerability, empathy, and compassion vis-à-vis the other species that share this one habitable Earth. Vulnerability here is technical rather than sentimental: it means relinquishing the fantasy of invulnerability and control that sovereign masculinity demands, and accepting exposure to the needs, sufferings, and singularities of other creatures. Empathy and compassion, in this framework, are not merely feelings but practiced capacities that orient action toward the flourishing of particular animals, plants, and places. The affirmation of the singularities of other human beings and other species accompanies what LaMothe describes as a categorical ethical command to care for and cooperate with other species and the Earth, a formulation that deliberately echoes the unconditional structure of Kantian ethics while relocating its scope beyond humanity.

The paper finds exemplars of this stance in unexpected places, including male researchers whose scientific work manifests caring and ethical concern in relating to and cooperating with other species, such as Peter Godfrey-Smith, whose study of octopus minds models a form of engagement that neither dominates nor reduces the other. LaMothe also draws on Dana Lloyd’s account of Yurok earth-based theology, in which the Land itself is a living being: the Yurok believe the Earth is alive and has a spirit, motivating care for mountains, rivers, wildlife, and ocean in which each part is entangled with every other part. Because trees are considered living beings and members of the community, their removal is an attack on the community itself, which Lloyd argues should be understood as a continuation of genocidal policy rooted in epistemologies of ruling and deficiency. Such relational stances, LaMothe suggests, expose the poverty of the sovereign model.

He is equally candid about the limits of fashionable solutions. Chandler and Reid have objected to the tendency of anthropologists and others to argue that dealing with the climate crisis requires becoming Indigenous, citing Indigenous peoples’ history of resilience and ways of relating to the land. Yet even those critics conclude their book by calling for a recovery of the hubris on which modernity was built, and from which other worlds are yet to come. LaMothe’s verdict is blunt: the hubris of Western subjects is exactly what we do not need, because hubris, especially with regard to masculinities, has been a significant factor in the current climate crisis. The paper thus refuses both romantic primitivism and technological triumphalism, insisting instead on the harder work of transforming the emotional and ethical formation of men within Western societies themselves.

The significance of the argument extends well beyond pastoral theology. If LaMothe is right, then climate communication, environmental policy, and sustainability education may all be addressing symptoms while leaving intact the gendered apparatuses that reproduce domination across generations. Raising boys to equate manhood with control, invulnerability, and mastery does not merely constrain individual lives; it recruits them into an economy and politics that treat the living Earth as inert material. An eco-masculinity of care and cooperation, by contrast, would reframe strength as the capacity to remain vulnerable, to empathize across species lines, and to act on a categorical obligation to protect the singular creatures with whom humans share a single habitable planet. Whether such a transformation can occur at the scale and speed the climate crisis demands remains an open question, but LaMothe’s paper makes a compelling case that the answer will depend, in part, on what it means to become a man in the West.

Subject of Research: The relationship between Western masculinity, anthropocentric thought, and the climate crisis, and the development of an eco-cooperative, caring eco-masculinity

Article Title: (Western) Men and the Climate Crisis: Toward an Eco-Cooperative and Caring Masculinity

Article References: (Western) Men and the Climate Crisis: Toward an Eco-Cooperative and Caring Masculinity. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01381-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01381-0

Keywords: eco-masculinity, climate crisis, care ethics, Western philosophy, anthropocentrism, pastoral theology, sovereignty, animal ethics, Indigenous worldviews, Giorgi Agamben, vulnerability, environmental ethics

The original article, which appeared online on 31 January 2026, described laboratory and animal experiments linking buparlisib, an investigational drug that targets the PI3K signaling pathway, to an unexpected mechanism of treatment resistance. According to the paper, exposure to the compound appeared to drive up levels of eukaryotic elongation factor-2, a molecular machine central to protein synthesis in cells. The authors argued that this upregulation contributed to treatment failure in lung cancer cells, a finding that, if confirmed, would have carried implications for how clinicians combine targeted therapies with other anticancer agents.

That conclusion is now formally withdrawn. In the retraction note, the Editor-in-Chief of the journal stated that the article has been retracted because the tumors presented in Figure 5 of the paper exceed the accepted limits for tumor burden. In animal cancer studies, tumor burden refers to the total volume or mass of tumor tissue carried by an experimental animal. Research ethics frameworks impose upper limits on how large tumors may be allowed to grow, both to protect animal welfare and to ensure that experiments remain within humane boundaries. When tumors surpass those limits, the study is considered to have breached the ethical standards under which animal research is permitted.

The editor’s decision was anchored explicitly in the ARRIVE 2.0 reporting guidelines, a widely adopted framework for the design, conduct and publication of animal research. ARRIVE, which stands for Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments, was developed to improve the reproducibility and ethical rigor of studies involving animals. The updated 2.0 version, published in 2020 by Percie du Sert and colleagues in the journal PLoS Biology, sets out detailed expectations for how animal studies should be planned, reported and reviewed, including humane endpoints, welfare monitoring and limits on tumor growth. The retraction note states that, as a result of the excessive tumor burden shown in the paper, the study does not appear to meet the animal ethics standards described in those guidelines.

The retraction is notable for the response of the author team. According to the notice, Xu Li, speaking on behalf of all the authors, stated that they disagree with the retraction. Disagreement between authors and journals is not uncommon in retraction cases, and journals typically publish the authors’ position alongside the retraction notice to make the record transparent. In this instance, the journal has recorded the authors’ objection while still removing the article from the body of credible scientific literature, leaving readers to weigh the dispute for themselves.

The research behind the paper originated from a collaboration spanning several Chinese institutions. The author group included DanPing Wang, ChenLi Su, Xiao Zhang, Wei Mao, XiaoQiang Dai, Li Xu and XiaoMin Si. Affiliations listed for the team include the Department of Oncology at Xianyang Central Hospital in Shaanxi Province, the Clinical Medicine College at Shaanxi University of Chinese Medicine, and a key laboratory at Yangzhou University dedicated to integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine in the control of senile diseases. DanPing Wang and ChenLi Su were identified as having contributed equally to the work, with correspondence directed to Li Xu and XiaoMin Si.

The scientific premise of the retracted study touched on a question of real clinical importance. Buparlisib is one of a family of PI3K inhibitors developed to disrupt signaling pathways that drive tumor growth and survival. Resistance to such targeted agents remains a major obstacle in oncology, and proposed mechanisms of resistance attract intense interest because they can suggest combination strategies to overcome treatment failure. Eukaryotic elongation factor-2, the molecule implicated in the paper, is an essential component of the translational apparatus that converts messenger RNA into protein, and its regulation has previously been linked to stress responses in cancer cells. A credible demonstration that a PI3K inhibitor induces this factor and thereby contributes to treatment failure would have been a meaningful addition to the resistance literature.

That potential contribution is now in doubt. Retractions serve a specific function in the scientific record: they alert readers that a published article’s findings can no longer be trusted as reliable, whether because of errors, ethical violations or misconduct. In this case, the stated reason is not fraud or data fabrication but a failure of animal ethics compliance, specifically tumor burden beyond accepted limits in the animal experiments underpinning Figure 5. The distinction matters, because it underscores that scientific publishing increasingly treats ethical compliance as inseparable from scientific validity. A result obtained outside accepted welfare boundaries is regarded not merely as ethically problematic but as unfit for the literature.

The case also illustrates the practical reach of the ARRIVE 2.0 guidelines, which have become a benchmark that editors and reviewers consult when evaluating animal studies. By citing the framework directly in the retraction notice, the journal signaled that deviations from those standards are grounds for withdrawal even after publication. For researchers working with tumor-bearing animals, the message is that monitoring tumor size against predefined humane limits is not an administrative formality but a condition of publication. Journals and their editors are prepared to retract work, years of effort and all, when the welfare thresholds written into those guidelines are crossed.

For the field of lung cancer research, the retraction removes one proposed mechanism of resistance to a PI3K-targeted therapy from the pool of evidence that other scientists might build upon. The original article remains accessible as a retracted document, clearly flagged, so that readers who encounter it can understand its status. The episode serves as a reminder that the credibility of cancer biology depends not only on the ingenuity of its hypotheses but on the rigor and ethics of the experiments that support them, and that the machinery of scientific self-correction, though sometimes contested by authors, continues to operate when standards are not met.

Subject of Research: Retraction of a lung cancer study on buparlisib-induced eukaryotic elongation factor-2 expression due to animal ethics violations

Article Title: Retraction Note: Buparlisib induces eukaryotic elongation factor-2 expression to cause treatment failure for lung cancer cells

Article References: Wang, D., Su, C., Zhang, X., Mao, W., Dai, X., Xu, L., & Si, X. (2026). Retraction Note: Buparlisib induces eukaryotic elongation factor-2 expression to cause treatment failure for lung cancer cells. Molecular Genetics and Genomics, 301(1), Article 195. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-026-02522-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00438-026-02522-z

Keywords: retraction, buparlisib, eukaryotic elongation factor-2, lung cancer, treatment failure, animal ethics, tumor burden, ARRIVE 2.0, PI3K inhibitor, Molecular Genetics and Genomics, research integrity, targeted therapy