Topics in Environmental Ethics

A rhetoric of refuge and escape is a consistent feature of the world’s great garden traditions. The connections between a desire for escape, need for refuge and disquieting sense that life is no longer what it ought to be gestures to a complex conception of garden appreciation. I explore these connections using Christian, Islamic, and Chinese garden traditions. In them one finds a conception of certain gardens as places of moral refuge from the corruption and failings of the mainstream world.

Theories of energy justice are standardly used to evaluate decision-making and policy-design related to energy infrastructure. All too rarely attention is paid to the need for a method of justifying principles of justice as well as justice-based judgments that are appealed to in this context. This article responds to this need by offering an engaged ethics approach to normative justification useful for energy justice theory. More specifically, it presents a method of public reflective equilibrium and shows its potential as systematic (...) method for both anchoring analyses of justice in practically relevant judgments and for critically examining perceived injustices. The method is developed and demonstrated through the case of injustices related to a hypothetical but realistic case of wind power development. Participants were invited to a process of justifying justice-claims, using a version of the method of public reflective equilibrium. They reflected on a preliminary normative framework created by the research team and visually depicted by a graphic artist. The analysis of the workshop identifies the following three themes as particularly important for just wind power development: (1) establishing trust among the stakeholders; (2) questioning energy demand; and (3) identifying the right site and scale for energy decisions. All three themes have to do with fair procedures. The latter part of the paper explores what this means for theorising energy justice and outlines a theory of imperfect procedural energy justice. (shrink)

This article develops the philosophical work of Joanna Macy. It argues that ecological grief is a fitting response to our ecological predicament and that much of the ‘mental ill health’ that we are now seeing is, in fact, a perfectly sane response to our ecological reality. This paper claims that all ecological emotions are grounded in love/compassion. Acceptance of these emotions reveals that everything is fine in the world as it is, providing that we accept our ecological emotions as part (...) of what is ‘in the world’. This is non-dualistic acceptance or ‘fierce’ acceptance. This paper focuses primarily on the revolutionary qualities of ecological grief: a paradoxical revolution, coming as it does from a profound process of acceptance. (shrink)

This note critiques the concept of “wicked problems” and its usefulness in crises such as Covid-19. There are two problems with the concept as defined by Rittel, Webber, and those who draw from them, which undermine its value in the analysis of social policy. First, their characterisation of wicked problems is founded on a crude and false picture of science (cf. Turnbull and Hoppe 2019). Second, it is so vague that on an expansive reading all social problems are wicked problems (...) while on a restrictive reading almost none are. Having discussed these, we close with a reflection on managing complexity and uncertainty in complex policy problems like the pandemic. (shrink)

Every day, wild animals suffer and die from myriad natural causes. For those committed to non-speciesism, what wild animal suffering entails for us morally is a question of the utmost importance, and yet there remains significant disagreement at the level of normative theory. In this paper I argue that in situations of moral urgency environmental managers and policy makers should refer to widely-agreeable moral principles for guidance. I claim that the principles of beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy and justice do well to (...) capture our widely-held values, and that the first three principles all support large-scale interventions in nature. I then argue that balancing these against non-maleficence will still allow for the careful consideration of interventions, although is unlikely to support lethal methods. This argument is intended to provide a reasonable starting point for theory-agnostic decision makers, and places the burden of proof on those who oppose intervention. -/- . (shrink)

The time of vegetal life itself—denoted as plant-time in this article, following the work of Michael Marder—is essential to human-plant relations. Conceptualized as a multi-dimensional plexity, vegetal temporality embodies the endemic land-based seasons, rhythms, cycles, and timescales of flora in conjunction with human patterns. The contemporary poet Judith Wright invoked a time-space continuum throughout her writing as a means to convey the primordial character of Australian plants while resisting the imposition of a colonialist schema of time. Wright’s bold textualization of (...) vegetal temporality embodies her commitment to fostering botanical ethics and locally-grounded activism on behalf of Aboriginal people and the Australian environment. (shrink)

This article examines the visualization strategies informing public understandings of planetary scale ecological crisis. Working with scientific visualizations as well as the Suicide Narcissus art exhibition, it interrogates the inherent problems in conveying extinction as a process and future potential. This essay ultimately considers the psychosocial tensions inherent in contemplating collective death.

In April 1996, two men working at a convalescent center wrote a letter to the journal Nature proposing that a new word be adopted to designate a person who is the last in the lineage: endling. This had come up because of patients who were dying and thought of themselves as the last of their family line. The word was not picked up in medical circles. But, in 2001, when the National Museum of Australia (NMA) opened its doors, it featured (...) a gallery called Tangled Destinies and endling reappeared. On the wall facing a case with a thylacine specimen was written: Endling (n.) The last surviving individual of a species of animal or plant. Since that appearance, the word endling has slowly seeped into popular culture, appearing in symphonic music, performance art, science fiction stories, comics, and other art works. This paper examines the cultural power of the concept of endling as the last of a species and the history of its mobilization in a world facing extinction around every corner. (shrink)

Questions of individuality are traditionally predicated upon recognizing discrete entities whose behavior can be measured and whose value and agency can be meaningfully ascribed. We consider a series of challenges to the metaphysical concept of individuality as the ground of the self. We argue that an ecological conception of individuality renders ascriptions of autonomy to selves highly improbable. We find conceptual resources in the work of environmental philosopher Arne Naess, whose distinction between shallow and deep responses helps us rethink the (...) notion of individuality and, thus, assess whether the conceptual and normative coherence of human autonomy could, at least partially, be salvaged. (shrink)

In this paper, we reflect on the concept of nature that is presupposed in biomimetic approaches to technology and innovation. Because current practices of biomimicry presuppose a technological model of nature, it is questionable whether its claim of being a more ecosystem friendly approach to technology and innovation is justified. In order to maintain the potentiality of biomimicry as ecological innovation, we explore an alternative to this technological model of nature. To this end, we reflect on the materiality of natural (...) systems and explore a natural model of nature, which is found in the responsive conativity of matter. This natural model of nature enables us to conceptualize biomimicry as conative responsiveness to the conativity of the biosphere. (shrink)

In the Anthropocene, humanity has been forced to a self-critical reflection on its place in the natural order. A neglected tool for understanding this is the sublime. Sublime experience opens us up to encounters with ‘formless’ nature at the same time as we recognize the inevitability of imprinting our purposes on nature. In other words, it is constituted by just the sort of self-critical stance towards our place in nature that I identify as the hallmark of the Anthropocene ‘collision’ between (...) human and earth histories. (shrink)

Environmental philosophy has been burdened with perspectives that have failed to afford access to the actual experience of living in a landscape, and dualist and nondualist inquiries alike are plagued by anthropocentrisms that seem impossible to escape. This contribution explores how we can investigate the relation of humans and landscapes in ways that preserve what occurs there, and begin to open such experience to rigorous scrutiny. To this end, resources are drawn and synthesized from the thinking of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Georg (...) Simmel, Heidegger, and the author’s anthropological field research about nature, scientific praxis, human identity, and anonymity. (shrink)

Nature conservation in the Anthropocene predominantly supposes that human-caused changes have worsened nature’s condition, which warrants undertaking conservation projects that actively manage or manipulate nature to improve it in quality or quantity. This essay surveys, by category, reasons and arguments for pursuing these projects. It finds key reasons to be normatively unimportant and key arguments incomplete or invalid. Conservation on this basis does not take nature seriously because it acts “for no good reason.” Finally, by attending to underlying sources of (...) this general failure, the essay suggests how a different view of the value of nature and its conservation may achieve a sounder footing. (shrink)

Important marine mammal areas (IMMAs)—‘discrete habitat areas, important for one or more marine mammal species, that have the potential to be delineated and managed for conservation’ (IUCN Marine Mammal Protected Areas Task Force 2018, p. 3)—were introduced in 2014 by the IUCN Marine Mammal Protected Areas Task Force to support marine mammal and wider ocean conservation. IMMAs provide decision-makers with a user-friendly, actionable tool to inform them of the whereabouts of habitat important for marine mammal survival. However, in view of (...) their non-prescriptive, evidence-based and biocentric nature, the conservation effectiveness of IMMAs is strictly dependent on politicians’ willingness to make use of them. It has been the customary task of advocacy non-governmental organisations to lobby decision-makers to stimulate respect for environmental law, but the scientific community is increasingly joining this effort. Scientists can effectively strengthen a healthy relationship between scientific objectivity and political advocacy without damaging the credibility of conservation science. Thus, those undertaking the identification of IMMAs can be among those responsible for strongly advocating the implementation of IMMAs and other conservation initiatives. (shrink)

Human-wildlife interactions frequently lead to conflicts – about the fair use of natural resources, for example. Various principled accounts have been proposed to resolve such interspecies conflicts. However, the existing frameworks are often inadequate to the complexities of real-life scenarios. In particular, they frequently fail because they do not adequately take account of the qualitative importance of individual interests, their relative importance, and the number of individuals affected. This article presents a limited aggregation account designed to overcome these shortcomings and (...) thus to facilitate decision-making in real-world human-wildlife conflicts. (shrink)

Modernity is founded on the belief that the world we build is a human invention, not a part of nature. The ecological consequences of this idea have been catastrophic. We have laid waste to natural ecosystems, replacing them with fundamentally unsustainable human designs. With time running out to address the environmental crises we have caused, our best path forward is to turn to nature for guidance. In this book, Henry Dicks explores the philosophical significance of a revolutionary approach to sustainable (...) innovation: biomimicry. The term describes the application and adaptation of strategies found in nature to the development of artificial products and systems, such as passive cooling techniques modeled on termite mounds or solar cells modeled on leaves. Dicks argues that biomimicry, typically seen as just a design strategy, can also serve as the basis for a new environmental philosophy that radically alters how we understand and relate to the natural world. By showing how we can imitate, emulate, and learn from nature, biomimicry points us toward a genuinely sustainable way of inhabiting the earth. Rooted in philosophy, The Biomimicry Revolution has profound implications spanning the natural sciences, design, architecture, sustainability studies, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities. It presents a sweeping reconception of what philosophy can be and offers a powerful new vision of terrestrial existence. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Stefansson (forthcoming) argues that by emitting and offsetting, we fail to fulfil our justice-based duty to avoid harm owed to specific individuals. In this paper, I explore a case where offsetting fails to prevent some but not all risks of harms that our emissions impose on them. By drawing on a distinction between general and specific duties not to (risk) harm, I argue that if by emitting and offsetting, we satisfy some (if not all) of our specific duties we (...) owe others, then this gives us stronger moral reasons to offset than give to charities that do good more effectively. (shrink)

Although this book is about the newly emerging academic field of environmental communication, it is also about voice and practical activism. I contend that a deeply pragmatic form of environmental communication has the potential to transform the way environmental activists speak about their methods and goals – moving them toward a rhetoric of eco-justice. Sometimes looking forward requires stepping back – in this case back to two progressive era thinkers who revolutionised our outlook on social and environmental justice: John Dewey (...) and Aldo Leopard. I argue that the impoverished state of present day studies in environmental communication can be traced to a shallow conception of the pragmatic – a conception that can be made deeper through recourse to Dewey’s and Leopold’s ideas. Originating from their philosophies are twin rhetorics — control and restraint — that when balanced constitute a rhetoric of eco-justice. This new approach to speaking about environmental matters proves helpful for contemporary environmental activists – particularly when working in the areas of wilderness preservation, gardening politics, global climate change and environmental justice. (shrink)

This paper seeks to examine the thought of philosophers about the influence of the environment on humans' physical, mental and moral habits, as well as how these philosophers used this influence to categorise individuals according to their habitat. As such this research begins with Herodotus and Hippocrates, and briefly discusses Plato, Aristotle, and seven medieval philosophers belonging to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions (Al-Kindi, Eriugena, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Tufail, Averroes, and Moses Maimonides). Also, this study investigates Montesquieu from the (...) seventh century, eight modern thinkers from the 19th through the 21st centuries, determinism (Carl Ritter, Ellen Churchill Semple, and Ellsworth Huntington), geography of possibilism (Vidal de Blacche, Lucian Febwer, and Cari Sauer), bioregionalism (Richard Evanoff), and meteorology (Frederik Nebeker). Lastly, this study concludes that all aforementioned 19th philosophers agreed that the environment influences human behaviour and physical condition. -/- . (shrink)

Creating and caring for a garden is a long-term project whose success requires commitment and devotion and love and proper performance of a range of activities that involve virtues and sensibilities like attentiveness, carefulness, humility, imaginativeness, and sensitivity to the natures and needs of plants and animals. In this chapter, I elaborate this conception of gardens and explore its relationship to artistic activities, like composing poetry or performing music. My focus are Confucianism and Daosim and their accounts of the relationships (...) between cultured practices, ethics and the arts, and garden-practices. (shrink)

This paper examines the evidence concerning the frequent accusation that technology, capitalism, and Christianity—three bases of modern Western society—are root causes of environmental degradation. A critical assessment indicates that, although these aspects of the present-day world are associated with failures to protect the environment, labeling them as causal factors contradicts known facts. A major theme of the paper is the combined application of scientific and folk wisdom in addressing environmental issues. An attempt is made to synthesize different positions, and the (...) implications for environmental psychology are discussed. (shrink)

In the framework of ethical social choice theory, sustainability is justified by efficiency and equity as ethical axioms. These axioms correspond to the Suppes–Sen grading principle. In technologies that are productive in a certain sense, the set of Suppes–Sen maximal utility paths is shown to equal the set of non-decreasing and efficient paths. Since any such path is sustainable, efficiency and equity can thus be used to deem any unsustainable path as ethically unacceptable. This finding is contrasted with results that (...) seem to indicate that an infinite number of generations cannot be treated equally. (shrink)

In this article it is argued that existing studies of Black environmentalism do not appropriately measure the environmental concerns and activities most relevant to Blacks and hence do not accurately reflect the extent to which African Americans are responsive on environmental issues. Using data that measure Black environmental concern and activity in communities threatened by hazardous industries to various degrees, the authors evaluate 2 competing sets of expectations regarding the manner in which these concerns and activities are affected by differential (...) environmental threats to the community. They find that specific local concerns and activities depend, to some extent, on the nature of the threat from nearby industry, but that more general attitudes toward the regulation of industry and concern about the environment do not Reasons as to why this might be the case are discussed. (shrink)

Land use regulation is one of the most poorly understood areas of law and public policy in the United States. At the same time, the land use regulatory system is expected to solve complex issues. The structure of the land use regulatory system can tell us quite a bit about the role that land use regulation, especially local land use regulation, can play in addressing specific public policy problems. This article illuminates common misunderstandings associated with the land use regulatory system, (...) identifies its proper functions, location, scope, components and processes, and analyzes whether the land use regulatory structure can value and conserve ecosystem services. Additionally, this article posits that the land use regulatory system has great potential for incorporating concepts and considerations of ecosystem services into land use actions and decisions. (shrink)

Can environmental law actually achieve environmental conservation or implement an environmental ethic in practice? The environmental movement has been captured by a legal centralist perspective, which asserts that legal institutions and processes are integral to achieving environmental conservation and environmentally ethical behavior.

Learn to incorporate the principles of environmental justice into your planning processes. This PAS Report outlines the law and regulatory tools.

The metaphor of property as a "bundle of sticks: or "bundle of rights" leads to the "disintegration of property": a concept of property that is too incoherent, ill-defined, and malleable to be meaningful. This article identifies several theoretical problems with the bundle of rights metaphor, and proposes a new metaphor of property as a web of interests.

Landscape or nature quality has become a key concept in relation to nature policy and landscape planning. In the first part of the article it is argued, that these qualities should not be conceived as mere expressions of private or subjective preferences. Even though there may not be any `objective' or `scientific' method dealing with them, they are still values which can be shared, reflected on, and discussed in a reasonable way. The connoisseurs are introduced as experienced persons, who are (...) particularly capable of identifying different kinds of qualities, bridge builders between cognition and evaluation. The second part of the article deals with four central sets of landscape or nature qualities: qualities related to species diversity, qualities related to the `atmospheres' and characters of places, pictorial qualities, and qualities related to narrativity. It is argued that experience of these and similar qualities are an important part of human flourishing, and that they should therefore all have a prominent place in landscape planning. (shrink)

Environmental philosophy has brought two topics to the forefront of philosophical discussion. One is the anthropocentrism/non-anthropocentrism debate in ethics, and the other is the question of obligations towards future generations. The deeper motives for focusing on these issues are, of course, intimately tied to the fact that the present generation may well be on its way to introducing practically irreversible and catastrophic damage to the global ecosystem. For the first time, one has to acknowledge that the global system does not (...) have an infinite capacity to repair itself and provide humans with limitless new opportunities for a fresh start. (shrink)

Concepts of Value in the natural environment are examined and the concept of constitutive value is introduced and discussed.

There is a widely held belief that there are moral limits to what we can do to non-human living beings. This has inspired various varieties of non-anthropocentric ethics. Whether rights- or welfare-oriented, the focus has been on the organisms’ interests. The ability of these theories to explain the moral significance of interests and, more generally, to identify the source of obligation in ethics, is questioned. The metaphor of a game is provided, with the rules of a game, as a model (...) for what can give obligational significance. A Kantian-oriented view of ethics is developed from the model, providing a source for inter-human liberty-rights. Concerning such rights, animals are clearly neither agents nor patients. It is argued that inter-human moral relationships also involve welfare issues. In fact the meaning of ethics is dependent on the welfare aspect. Pre-moral compassion provides direction for the principal task of ethics: to bring compassion out of a particular realm of kindness and under the equity requirements of ethics. This effort demands respect for the welfare of all others, including non-humans. It further condemns acts of wanton destruction, even when no sentient being is the victim. Animals, plants and the environment are therefore the prima facie beneficiaries of an inter-human morality. The moral belief that morality is an issue in human–nature relationships is thereby integrated into an anthropocentric ethic. (shrink)

The widespread concern about the declining state of our physical environment is often accompanied by frustration about what to do to prevent or even reverse such deterioration. In the past, policy makers, legislators, and the general public have usually turned to scientists and scientific knowledge for answers. But recently, theorists and others have reemphasized the importance of culture in understanding the environment. In this article, this culturalist critique of scientific knowledge is discussed and is then related to the decision by (...) Ontario Hydro to lay up seven of its nuclear reactors. This situation is used to illustrate the continuing relevance of scientific knowledge for addressing environmental concerns. (shrink)

Transgenic animals—animals with genes added to their deoxyribonucleic acid —will no longer be limited by the gene pool of their parents. Such animals are slated to be created expressly to provide vital and novel benefits for human beings. These animals can have desirable characteristics or traits from virtually any gene pool and may also possess properties not present in nature or available through conventional breeding. They will be created for the production of new medical and pharmaceutical products and to enhance (...) meat, dairy, and fiber production efficiency. (shrink)

To contribute significantly to environmental policy of the next century, conservationists will need to reach a consensus on their fundamental values and goals and to persuade society to adopt them. Resolution of the debate over the continued role of naturalness as a guiding concept has important implications for how conservation is practiced and the future of the discipline. I examine five aspects of naturalness in the context of biological conservation: its utility, its assessment, its relation to values and ethics, alternative (...) imperatives, and implications of adopting it as a guiding concept. Naturalness can be viewed as a continuous gradient with completely natural and completely artificial extremes. Human actions are unnatural to the extent that they rely on technology to transform natural ecosystems. The ecological consequences of technological transformation often overwhelm the capacity of other biota to adapt and are a root cause of biodiversity loss. The naturalness of most ecosystems or ecosystem alterations can be assessed objectively despite imperfect knowledge if evolutionary limits and natural ranges of variability are carefully considered. Most conservationists value naturally evolved biotic elements such as genomes and communities over artificial elements. This judgment, which is not shared by society at large, is based on intrinsic and instrumental values, including respect for nature and recognition that many ecosystem amenities stem from natural processes. Given the wide accessibility of ecologically destructive technology, fundamental shifts in societal values and approaches to ecosystem alteration are needed to achieve conservation. Respect for nature must supplant the prevailing world view of human superiority. Although sometimes difficult to assess, naturalness is a more reasonable guide for conservation than are other ecosystem features such as diversity, productivity, or evolution, and naturalness is the foundation for several current conservation concepts such as ecological integrity and ecological restoration. Conservation biologists can help develop conservation practices and ethics that emphasize the importance of natural ecosystems. Key roles include refining distinctions between natural and anthropogenic conditions, devising ways to use ecosystems without losing biotic diversity, and facilitating shifts in societal values toward more respect for nature. (shrink)

Two phrases — biological integrity and biological diversity—have joined the lexicon of biologists and natural resource managers during the past two decades. The importance of these phrases is demonstrated by their influence on environmental research, regulatory, and policy agendas. The concepts behind the phrases are central to strategies being developed to sustain global resources. Unfortunately, the phrases are widely used by the media, citizens, policy makers, and some biologists without adequate attention to the concepts they embody. Precise use of the (...) terms integrity and diversity can help set and achieve societal goals for sustaining global resources; imprecise or inappropriate use may exacerbate biotic impoverishment—the systematic decline in biological resources. (shrink)