Light pollution is a topic gaining importance and acceptance in environmental discourse. This concept provides a framework for categorizing the adverse effects of nighttime lighting, which advocacy...

This paper proposes that autonomous vehicles should be designed to reduce light pollution. In support of this specific proposal, a moral assessment of autonomous vehicles more comprehensive than the dilemmatic life-and-death questions of trolley problem-style situations is presented. The paper therefore consists of two interrelated arguments. The first is that autonomous vehicles are currently still a technology in development, and not one that has acquired its definitive shape, meaning the design of both the vehicles and the surrounding infrastructure (...) is open-ended. Design for values is utilized to articulate a path forward, by which engineering ethics should strive to incorporate values into a technology during its development phase. Second, it is argued that nighttime lighting—a critical supporting infrastructure—should be a prima facie consideration for autonomous vehicles during their development phase. It is shown that a reduction in light pollution, and more boldly a better balance of lighting and darkness, can be achieved via the design of future autonomous vehicles. Two case studies are examined through which autonomous vehicles may be designed for “driving in the dark.” Nighttime lighting issues are thus inserted into a broader ethics of autonomous vehicles, while simultaneously introducing questions of autonomous vehicles into debates about light pollution. (shrink)

It is an old wag among environmentalists that humans have become disconnected from nature. The culprits for this conundrum are various. If it is not our addiction to technological enticements then it is our life in big cities which alienate us from our “earthen elements.” The presumed result of this disconnection is that we do not respect the land anymore and turn a blind eye to the environmental consequences of our collective acts of consumption and pollution. Various bits of (...) evidence are produced to prove this point – mostly anecdotal – such as the claim that many city-dwellers, when asked where their food comes from, will respond blankly, “from a grocery store.” What is the curative for this ailment? Surprisingly, it is not that we should send urbanites out to the factory farms, county-sized feed lots, or flavor factories in New Jersey, which actually put most of the food on the shelves of neighborhood markets. It is instead usually suggested that we should send people to wilderness areas, that we should become more connected with nature in the raw, as it were. E. O. Wilson’s “biophilia” hypothesis is a good case in point. Defending a sociobiological account of why humans are innately attracted to living things, Wilson suggests that this connection is best realized in the residual attachment of humans to wild nature. This grounds a claim that the most important task at hand is to focus on “the central questions of human origins in the wild environment” (Wilson 1992, 351). It is probably unfair to suggest that Wilson thinks that we should all go to the wilderness in order to be better connected with nature, and implicitly, to then.. (shrink)

A new field of biomedical ethics is opening up, concerning what should be done to reduce the direct and indirect impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on human health. Some of these impacts could be described as ‘direct’, in the form of fatalities and illnesses due to the increasingly frequent heatwaves in many countries of recent years, ascribable to anthropogenic climate change. Other impacts are mediated through the air pollution that results from emissions from vehicles in the form of a (...) cocktail of carbon oxides including carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulates. Most of the world’s cities have streets with unsafe pollution levels, and one child’s death in Britain has been officially ascribed to air pollution (BBC 2020). This presentation aims to validate the above claims about the impacts of emissions on health, and to suggest remedies. The early phasing out of vehicles powered by internal combustion engines is the ultimate remedy for the latter set of impacts, while the urgent replacement of energy generated from fossil-fuel sources with renewable energy is the best way to remediate the former set. More immediate remedies for air pollution include restricting the use of roads and streets in urbanised areas by vehicles to bicycles and light vehicles with small engines. Medical and nursing education should include the diagnosis and treatment of pulmonary conditions resulting from increased levels of carbon oxides, nitrogen oxides and particulates. Medical and nursing practice should focus on the early identification of vulnerable adults and children at risk from air pollution, and warnings against walking, running or cycling along the most polluted thoroughfares. (shrink)

The air pollution generated by motor vehicles and by static sources is, in certain geographic areas, a very serious problem, a problem that exists because of a failure of the marketplace. To address this marketplace failure, the State of California has mandated that by 2003, 10% of the Light-Duty Vehicle Fleet (LDV) be composed of Zero-Emission Vehicles (ZEVs). However, the policy-making process that was utilized to generate the ZEV mandate was problematic and the resulting ZEV mandate is economically (...) unsound. Moreover, an ethical analysis, based primarily upon the work of John Rawls, suggests that implementation of the California ZEV mandate is—in spite of the wide latitude that ought to be given to policy decision makers—unethical. A more ethical and economically efficient approach to the pollution caused by marketplace failure is one that relies on market incentives and thereby achieves the desired improvement in air quality by appealing both to the self-interest of motorists and to those businesses that are directly or indirectly involved with the automobile industry. Such an approach would take better advantage of the creative forces of the market and improvements in technology over time and avoid the infringements on individual liberty and fairness embodied in the ZEV mandate. (shrink)

The adverse effects of artificial nighttime lighting, known as light pollution, are emerging as an important environmental issue. To address these effects, current scientific research focuses mainly on identifying what is bad or undesirable about certain types and uses of lighting at night. This paper adopts a value-sensitive approach, focusing instead on what is good about darkness at night. In doing so, it offers a first comprehensive analysis of the environmental value of darkness at night from within applied (...) ethics. A design for values orientation is utilized to conceptualize, define, and categorize the ways in which value is derived from darkness. Nine values are identified and categorized via their type of good, temporal outlook, and spatial characteristics. Furthermore, these nine values are translated into prima facie moral obligations that should be incorporated into future design choices, policy-making, and innovations to nighttime lighting. Thus, the value of darkness is analyzed with the practical goal of informing future decision-making about urban nighttime lighting. (shrink)

Grounded in the practical problem of light pollution, this paper examines the aesthetic dimensions of urban and natural darkness, and its impact on how we perceive and evaluate nighttime lighting. It is argued that competing notions of the sublime, manifested through artificial illumination and the natural night sky respectively, reinforce a geographical dualism between cities and wilderness. To challenge this spatial differentiation, recent work in urban-focused environmental ethics, as well as environmental aesthetics, are utilized to envision the moral (...) and aesthetic possibilities of a new urban nocturnal sublime. Through articulating the aspirations and constraints of a new urban nocturnal experience, this paper elucidates the axiological dimensions of light pollution, draws attention to nightscapes as a site of importance for urban-focused philosophy, and examines the enduring relevance of the sublime for both the design of nighttime illumination and the appreciation of the night sky. (shrink)

In this piece, I extend a transformative power account to the conservation of dark (and starry) night skies. More specifically, I argue that the transformative power that dark nights bear warrants their conservation and is best understood in terms of the important intellectual, cultural, aesthetic, and (psycho-physiologically) restorative effects that they afford. This gives us a pressing set of reasons to combat the growing, global phenomenon of light pollution. To do so, I argue, we ought to preserve the (...) few remaining dark refuges that we have left (what I term wildness regions) and synergistically re-wild (i.e. re-darken) urban and suburban environments. Synergistic re-darkening, I propose, can be achieved by (i) establishing interpretive (educational) ‘dark zones’, (ii) implementing bioluminescent lighting technologies, and (iii) strategically employing lighting design. Finally, and in order to enact a degree of epistemic justice, I argue that we ought to implement multi-cultural ‘co-learning’ initiatives, which promote education pertaining to both Western, scientific and indigenous, North American astronomies. (shrink)

At a time when it is critically important to preserve natural resources and reduce the amount of man-made pollution, this article explores other potentials for materialism in today’s market economies. Based on a two-year ethnography in Poland, we learn from simplifiers who denounce current materialism—while remaining inside the market—about what materialism could potentially become. Our study shows that materialism can take on other less studied but more eco-friendly expressions. In particular, we highlight an alternate expression of materialism, which we (...) call “appreciative materialism”. Appreciative materialism still ascribes a great deal of importance to objects in the lives of consumers but does so through the voluntary non-possession and/or non-accumulation of these objects, as well as a caring ethics that extends to non-humans. These findings call not only for the refinement of scales to measure materialism but also for a revision of the role of materialism in our lives. They suggest that, in order to trigger more sustainable practices, policymakers and managers should put greater emphasis on appreciative materialism. (shrink)

Every civilization has its own worldview that determines its approaches towards subjects such as human beings, nature and God. Most modern humans have tried to control all nature as property. Nature, therefore, was considered as the booty, which should have been used entirely. Now, the modern perspective has revealed problems including emerging and dangerous diseases, resistant bacteria, and extinction of many animals, global warming, climate change; air, sound and light pollution, and so on. The problem is that human (...) beings cannot continue these attitudes as a viable survival strategy. In this paper, using conceptual analysis, we try to explain the epistemic gap regarding the positions of humankind and nature which happened after modernism and then present the image which Ibn ‘Arabī, a traditional sage and philosopher depicted for the integrated world. He developed a comprehensive perspective of the world, considering it as a manifestation of an Existence. He considered humans as the God’s vice-regent who must manage the earth and keep the creatures as God's representative. (shrink)

The night sky has been radically altered by light pollution, artificially produced light that obscures the stars. The effects and costs of this are diverse and poorly appreciated. A survey of the economically quantifiable aspects of this problem demonstrates that the value of the starry sky is immense, and yet it remains stubbornly beyond the ken of the market. The attempts to quantify this value and the ultimate impossibility of the task give lie to the economic pretense (...) that the dollar can commensurate all value. The case of light pollution exemplifies the importance of regulation to the protection of environmental value. (shrink)

The night sky has been radically altered by light pollution, artificially produced light that obscures the stars. The effects and costs of this are diverse and poorly appreciated. A survey of the economically quantifiable aspects of this problem demonstrates that the value of the starry sky is immense, and yet it remains stubbornly beyond the ken of the market. The attempts to quantify this value and the ultimate impossibility of the task give lie to the economic pretense (...) that the dollar can commensurate all value. The case of light pollution exemplifies the importance of regulation to the protection of environmental value. (shrink)

In their role as political actors and lobbyists, corporations have responsibilities to help determine the existence and content of global regulations of pollutants. The ethical nature of those responsibilities is highly sensitive to the assumed normative framework. This paper compares several frameworks by modeling them as differently weighted versions of utilitarianism. Under a strict neoclassical approach, corporations have a narrow obligation to maximize profits, which generally entails opposing emission regulations. In contrast, a stakeholder approach as well as Marxian and common (...) ethics approaches suggest that firms have an obligation to actively support sustainable emission regulations with the following properties • major restrictions would be global rather than local• global restrictions would apply in all cases of persistent emissions• global restrictions would apply to non-persistent emissions as well, unless they have been affirmatively shown to be safe using reasonably persuasive scientific evidence• safety thresholds would be set fairly restrictively, based on administrative models and rules of thumb, in light of existing scientific knowledge but without requiring full scientific justification• long-run goals would include zero emission of persistent unsafe substances.However, the stakeholder approach supports phase-in rules to mitigate short-run compliance costs. (shrink)

Using Chinese listed companies as research setting, this paper constructs a measure of corporate competing culture through textual analysis on firms’ management discussion and analysis disclosures, and examines the impact of corporate competing culture on environmental investment. The results show that competing culture has a significant and positive impact on firms’ environmental investment, and the results remain robust to a battery of robustness tests. Moreover, the mediating analysis indicates that competing culture promotes corporate environmental investment through enhancing firms’ internal control (...) quality. Furthermore, the heterogeneity results show that the positive impact of corporate competing culture on environmental investment is more pronounced in firms with larger size, stronger corporate governance, in high-polluting industry, and located in less developed regions. Our findings shed light on the importance of corporate competing culture and provide practical implications for corporate sustainable development. (shrink)

The emergence of environmental governance practices raises a fundamental question as to whether they are substantive or symbolic. Toward that end, we analyze the relationship between a firm’s environmental governance and its environmental management as reflected in its ultimate outcome, environmental performance. We posit that substantive practices would bring changes in organizations, most notably in terms of improved environmental performance, whereas symbolic practices would portray organizations as environmentally committed without making meaningful changes to their operations. Focusing on a sample of (...) environmentally sensitive firms, results are consistent with environmental governance mechanisms being predominantly part of a symbolic approach to manage stakeholder perceptions on environmental management, having little substantial impact on organizations. Statistical analyses show mostly that there is no relation between environmental governance mechanisms and environmental performance, measured in terms of regulatory compliance, pollution prevention, and environmental capital expenditures. However, there is some indication that environmental incentives are associated with pollution prevention. Interviews with corporate directors shed further light on these results by underlining that environmental governance mechanisms are employed at the board level to protect the organization from reputational and/or regulatory harm, but are not necessarily intended to proactively improve environmental performance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Imagination in Inquiry by A. Pablo IannoneAmy KindIANNONE, A. Pablo. Imagination in Inquiry. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2022. xxvi + 254 pp. Cloth, $110.00; eBook $45.00Though imagination is often associated with the fanciful and the fictional, over the course of the last decade philosophers have begun to devote considerable attention to more practical uses of imagination. Philosophers of imagination have increasingly focused on ways in which imagination can (...) play an important epistemic role in activities such as decision-making, planning, and scientific discovery; more generally, there has been attention to a variety of ways in which imagination can teach us about the world in which we live. Iannone’s discussion in Imagination in Inquiry can be seen as part of this general trend—even if his discussion is not itself situated directly within contemporary philosophy of imagination but, rather, in a broader interdisciplinary approach.Iannone works with an expansive conception of what imagination is. In his view, we should not limit our understanding of imagination simply to the ability to generate images. Rather, imagination is a diverse set of different abilities that aim “at figuring out cognitively, emotively, or practically, alternatives for dealing with actual, probable, plausible, foreseeable, or merely possible challenges or problems, abstract or concrete, theoretical or practical being faced, or notions being considered, and determining or deciding which is (are) preferable in the circumstances, and acting accordingly.” Moreover, this set of abilities should not be seen as operating in isolation; rather, imagination functions as part of an ecology of human abilities. Iannone refers to his view of imagination as the “homeostatic model,” so called because he sees imaginative processes as maintaining stability by way of a system of self-correcting feedback and methods for incorporating and adjusting to any new information received.Iannone also operates with an expansive conception of what counts as practical use of imagination. In his view, imagination is put to practical use in a wide range of circumstances, for example, when a dancer imagines the next steps of a dance in the process of spontaneous improvising, when a combatant imagines how to block an expected blow from an opponent, and when an environmental activist imagines a new set of corrective policies to address pollution. All these uses fall under the activity of what Iannone calls “inquiry,” that is, the activity of finding a solution to a problem or challenge. The problems and challenges that might prompt the use of imagination can be both personal and interpersonal, and the imaginative processes used will involve strategies such as discovery, creation, and anticipation.In the first part of the book, Iannone develops his basic conceptual apparatus. In the next part of the book, he puts this apparatus to work in the context of philosophy, that is, he shows how imagination plays a role in philosophical inquiry. In the third part of the book, he looks at the role of imagination in other disciplines such as sociology and psychology. Here, the interdisciplinary nature of his discussion is especially on display. In the fourth part of the book, he applies his model of imagination to a number of different contexts; in particular, he discusses the role of [End Page 354] imagination in language, in humor, in vision (both at the personal and the societal level), and in morality. Finally, the last part of the book offers a variety of case studies involving dance, technology, and artificial intelligence. Of the four chapters in this part of the book, three are written by other authors: two by Alejandra Iannone, a scholar and practitioner of dance and theater (and the author’s daughter), and one by Rocci Luppicini, an expert in technology studies. In light of the explosive pace with which new AI technologies are being developed, the book’s discussion of whether and how such technologies present challenges for our capacity for imagination is especially timely and important.In addition to affirming the practical importance of imagination, Iannone also affirms the practical importance of nurturing imagination—something he repeats at several points throughout the book. But how do we do this? One natural way that imagination is nurtured is simply by its regular use... (shrink)

In his book Bad Beliefs, Neil Levy defends the engineering of our epistemic environment by removing epistemic pollutions and by nudging people through second-order evidence. Although we agree with his core ideas, in this commentary, we aim at supplementing his approach in light of the participation of the general public in science. In the first part, we argue that the issue of participatory epistemic injustice in the scientific community remains unaddressed in Levy’s discussion and that addressing the issue is (...) equal to removing an epistemic pollution. In the second part, we address the issue of transparency in nudging. Here, we discuss the significance of public engagement in controlling the system of nudges to respect our rational and autonomous choices. (shrink)

Kant advertises his Critique of Pure Reason as fulfilling reason's "most difficult" task: self-knowledge. As it is carried out in the Critique, this investigation is meant to be "scientific and fully illuminating"; for Kant, this means that it must follow a proper method. Commentators writing in English have tended to dismiss Kant's claim that the Critique is the scientific expression of reason's self-knowledge---either taking it to be sheer rhetoric, or worrying that it pollutes the Critique with an unfortunate residue of (...) rationalism. As a result, there is little sustained treatment of the method of the Critique in the secondary literature. Since Kant holds that the substantive insights of critical philosophy are not separable from the methodological context in which they come to light, this is a serious mistake. My dissertation corrects for this, by approaching the Critique through an examination of its method. In doing so, it yields a reading of the Transcendental Deduction that not only promises to resolve current debates about its "proof structure", but also fully accounts for the Deduction's pivotal role in the work as a whole. (shrink)

The context of accelerated climate change, environmental pollution, ecosystems depletion, loss of biodiversity and growing undernutrition has led human societies to a crossroads where food systems require transformation. New agricultural practices are being advocated in order to achieve food security and face environmental challenges. Cultivated meat has recently been considered one of the most desired alternatives by animal rights advocates because it promises to ensure nutrition for all people while dramatically reducing ecological impacts and animal suffering. It is therefore (...) presented as one of the fairest means of food production for the coming decades, according to utilitarian arguments. However, food security, environmental concerns and animal welfarism guided by a short-term utilitarianism could have techno-optimism bias and could result in some forms of oppression such as anthropocentrism. I argue that there are still deep-rooted moral issues in food systems that are not addressed primarily by lab-grown meat, mainly derived from a loss of sovereignty. Food practices developed in high-tech labs with artificial interventionism constrain the ability of living entities (that are used as food) to flourish on their own terms. This paper aims to explore how sovereignty entitlements for humans and nonhumans are often overlooked by advocates of cultivated meat and the moral challenges it may pose. Accordingly, a more than utilitarian approach framed by ecological and republican justice is proposed here to shed light on some pitfalls of food chains based on cellular agriculture. (shrink)

Genome editing in livestock could potentially be used in ways that help resolve some of the most urgent and serious global problems pertaining to livestock, including animal suffering, pollution, antimicrobial resistance, and the spread of infectious disease. But despite this potential, some may object to pursuing it, not because genome editing is wrong in and of itself, but because it is the wrong kind of solution to the problems it addresses: it is merely a ‘technological fix’ to a complex (...) societal problem. Yet though this objection might have wide intuitive appeal, it is often not clear what, exactly, the moral problem is supposed to be. The aim of this paper is to formulate and shed some light on the ‘technological fix objection’ to genome editing in livestock. I suggest that three concerns may underlie it, make implicit assumptions underlying the concerns explicit, and cast some doubt on several of these assumptions, at least as they apply to the use of genome editing to produce pigs resistant to the Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome and hornless dairy cattle. I then suggest that the third, and most important, concern could be framed as a concern about complicity in factory farming. I suggest ways to evaluate this concern, and to reduce or offset any complicity in factory farming. Thinking of genome editing’s contribution to factory farming in terms of complicity, may, I suggest, tie it more explicitly and strongly to the wider obligations that come with pursuing it, including the cessation of factory farming, thereby addressing the concern that technological fixes focus only on a narrow problem. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Divine Grace and the Play of OppositesTrent PomplunIn Prisoners of Shangri-la: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, Donald Lopez treats his readers to a provocative but entertaining history of Western fantasies about Tibet. Lopez discovers at the root of these fantasies a "play of opposites" between "the pristine and the polluted, the authentic and the derivative, the holy and the demonic, the good and the bad."1 Not surprisingly, Catholic missionaries (...) to Tibet play an important role in Lopez's history, and he depicts them as prisoners to the play of opposites par excellence. Truth be told, it is difficult to deny his charges; in a passage quoted by Lopez, the seventeenth-century Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher describes Tibetans' veneration of the Dalai Lama in these words:Strangers at their approach fall prostrate with their heads to the ground, and kiss him with incredible Veneration, which is no other than that which is performed upon the Pope of Rome; so that hence the fraud and deceit of the Devil may easily and plainly appear, who by his innate malignity and hatred, in way of abuse hath transferred, as he hath done all the other Mysteries of the Christian Religion, the Veneration which is due unto the Pope of Rome, the only Vicar of Christ on Earth, unto the superstitious Worship of barbarous people.Whence as the Christians call the Roman High-Priest Father of Fathers, so these Barbarians term their false Deity the Great Lama, that is, the Great High-Priest, the Lama of Lamas, that is, the High-Priest of High-Priests, because that from him, as from a certain Fountain, floweth the whole form and mode of their religion, or rather mad and brain-sick idolatry, whence also they call him the Eternal Father.2Lopez explains this passage in light of what he calls the "doctrine" of demonic plagiarism, a relatively common belief among Christian theologians that resemblances between Christianity and other religions could be explained as parodies of the true faith authored by the Devil. Athanasius Kircher undoubtedly believed in such parodies; in point of fact, he had much stronger views about them than many of his contemporaries. But Lopez continues,Why must this appearance be demonic? The answer derives in part from the Christian Church's claim to historical and ontological particularity. It is the [End Page 159] task of the missionary to transmit the word of particularity to those realms where it has not spread, to diffuse it from its unique point of origin. To carry its accoutrements from Rome in a time and to a place they could not possibly have been taken before, and to find them already there, suggests the workings of a power beyond history, which could only be seen as demonic.3I would like to take issue with this unfortunately misleading presentation of Christian theology. No orthodox Catholic theologian believed that such appearances were necessarily demonic, nor did any think that demonic influences ruled out other, more positive, ones. A cursory reading of the writings of Ippolito Desideri, the Jesuit adventurer and missionary who lived in Tibet from 1716 to 1721, should demonstrate that Roman Catholic theologians developed several complex theories about the resemblances between Christians and non-Christians in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. If we situate the Jesuit missionary squarely in the theological currents of the seventeenth century, especially in debates about the salvation of non-Christians, I think we can come to see that the views of Roman Catholic missionaries about Tibetans, and non-Christians in general, were considerably more complex than Lopez imagines.Ippolito Desideri on the Salvation of Tibetan BuddhistsIppolito Desideri arrived in Lhasa on March 18, 1716. As a result of his acquaintance with Khang chen nas and Don grub tshe ring, Desideri quickly gained access to the court of the Qōśot Mongol chieftain Lha bzang Khan.4 Much to the missionary's delight, the Khan granted his request to preach the Gospel in Tibet with great enthusiasm and—if we are to believe Desideri's account—no small amount of paternal sentimentality. In order to facilitate his preaching, Desideri composed a small book explaining the errors... (shrink)

By way of a thought experiment, make the following pessimistic assumptions about the near and far future. Assume that within the next century we will gradually lose the struggle to sustain the environment and that moderately scarce natural resources will become extremely scarce, due both to increased levels of expectations by the privileged and to increased population. Assume that within the next fifty years the world’s population will double but begin to level off. The best scientific assessment of our prospects (...) for saving the environment in a way that will sustain even a quarter of that population over time (say, several centuries) turns out to be that it cannot be done. The damage to the environment by industry and other sources of pollution will have taken us past the threshold of possible recovery on the most optimistic projections of voluntary population control. The decline will be slow, but it is clear to everyone that the course is irreversible. Assume also that we will gradually lose the battle with disease and that it will be clear to everyone that medical research cannot compete with the deteriorating conditions of scarcity and the mutation rates among the viral and bacterial sources of disease. Gradually, what cannot be accomplished through voluntary population control can and will be accomplished through disease, regardless of the best scientific efforts to prevent it. Scientists reliably tell us that the earth will slowly begin to recover at a rate that will sustain the remaining population, and that in the far distant future there will in all likelihood be centuries with patterns of human flourishing and suffering that resemble our past. Finally, it becomes clear that hopes of finding other intelligent life in the universe and other habitable environments are futile. Scientists confirm that the speed of light and the distance between here and other possible sources of life preempt any rational hope in extra-terrestrial solutions. What we can be sure of is that after a number cycles of human flourishing and suffering, there will be a cataclysmic end to the earth and all its history.. (shrink)

Drawing from the testimony of two landmark hearings on the controversial pesticide DDT held between 1967 and 1972, this article explores how environmentalists and US chemical interests understood and articulated the risks and benefits of DDT use within the United States and beyond its borders. It examines the critical role the international use of DDT played in shaping the domestic regulation of the pesticide and sheds light on the ethical arguments made against and in defense of DDT. By exploring (...) the role of the international use of DDT as it relates of US environmental regulation, this article draws attention to the historical roots of a conflict that situates environmental ethics squarely at odds with the ethics of saving lives with a known environmental pollutant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Portraits of Buddhist WomenLucinda PeachPortraits of Buddhist Women. By Ranjini Obeyesekere. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 231 pp.This book is a translation of part of the Saddharmaratnavaliya (Jewel Garland of the True Doctrine; hereafter SR ), a thirteenth-century Sinhala translation of the Dhammapada (hereafter DA ), a fifth-century Buddhist text. Out of the entire collection of 360 stories contained in the SR, this book includes (...) twenty-six that have women as central characters.The author succeeds in part with her stated purpose to "illuminate the position of women in the early-medieval Buddhist worlds of India and Sri Lanka" as well as to "provide insights into shifting stances over time on issues of sexuality and gender" (p. 1), despite the lack of any necessary correlation between gender images and the actual status of women in a particular social location. As Obeyesekere points out, although the stories themselves are not focused on gender, their contexts in the "everyday world" of their fifth- and thirteenth-century authors do shed light on women's lives and social status. The stories she has selected for the volume portray women in a wide range of roles, including not only the ideal normative ones of wives and mothers, but also those of daughters, courtesans, servants, queens, nuns, and wandering ascetics.Obeyesekere claims that the particularities in these narratives "reflect the status, intelligence, management, and organizational skills of women that were permitted full play in the social worlds to which they belonged" (p. 11). This claim is borne out by several passages in the text, such as the narrative of Kundalakesi, which has a deity state that "it is not men who always have the best stratagems.... [In] certain situations women too know what to do" (p. 120).Furthermore, women's capabilities and talents are sometimes recognized by the men in the narratives. Visakha's grandfather chooses her to escort the Buddha and arrange accommodations for the enormous entourage that accompanied her betrothed. Samavati's adopted father, Ghosaka, unquestioningly accepts her advice on how to organize an alms-hall (to prevent quarreling) and how to deal with the King's (unreasonable) demands. After she has "shed the three evils of belief in self, doubts, and erroneous beliefs and practices," Khujjuttara preaches a sermon "exactly as the Buddha has done" (p. 63) and becomes the teacher of Samavati and her five hundred attendants.However, Obeyesekere also notes the antifeminist elements that are sprinkled throughout the text. The statements in the narrative of Visakha that "women who run are most unattractive" and will meet with criticism and ridicule for having no feminine grace and acting in a manner not befitting for a woman (pp. 84-85) reveals how restrictive gender-role norms were in thirteenth-century Sri Lanka. A woman's body is described as a polluted lump of flesh in the Udeni cycle (a collection [End Page 289] of five related narratives); here the Buddha is said to describe woman's body as a "container with its nine orifices filled with feces and urine" that "I would be disgusted even to wipe my feet on... as I would on a door mat" (p. 12; see also p. 54). Comparisons to women are used to criticize men, as when King Udeni tells King Candapajjota's guards (after the latter king has locked up the former seemingly indefinitely after capturing him) that "Your kind does what even women would not do..." (p. 48). This comparison indicates that women are not honorable and trustworthy, but willing to impose extended and unnecessary suffering on their victims.Other antifeminist elements in the SR include the backhanded compliment to Visakha that "though born a woman (and women are of limited vision), and though forced to associate with people who were of the right caste but held wrong beliefs, yet she herself did not lack vision" (pp. 14, 79). This sentiment about women in general is consistent with the widespread belief in popular Buddhism that men are more highly evolved on the cosmic chain than are women.This view is illustrated in the narrative of Soreyya, who transforms from a male to a female form when he... (shrink)

This article traces the different classifications of diesel emissions either as “safe” or as “hazardous” in the US and in West Germany between 1977 and 1995. It argues that the environmental regulation of diesel emissions was a political threshold. It contributes to our general understanding of how politicians, environmental lobbyists, scientists, and engineers constructed the standards and norms that defined the “safe” limit of environmental pollutants. After discussing how diesel emissions came under review as a potential carcinogen, I will show (...) that the coding as “safe” or as “hazardous” resulted from negotiations that were entirely dependent on the temporal, geographical, and intellectual contexts in which diesel technology, scientific research on their emissions, and political regulation were embedded. In particular, I trace the differences in German and US regulatory policy. While US regulation relied more on epidemiology that provided only weak data on the carcinogenicity of diesel particulates in the early 1980s, German government agencies tended to base their policy around the mid-1980s more on the results of animal tests and shortly afterwards also on epidemiology. Furthermore, the article reveals how US and German automakers tried to foster doubt on the carcinogenicity of diesel emissions and how their approaches differed and shifted. Thereby, it sheds light on the triangular relationship between technology, science, and politics in regulatory processes by analyzing the different roles of the state, automakers, scientists, and environmental agencies in Germany and in the United States. (shrink)

The national new area Xiong’an has been established to take over the noncapital functions of Beijing in China. In light of local resources and environmental constraints, it is important to clarify the mode of industrial transfer for Xiong’an new area to achieve the developmental goals. This study simulates and analyzes the speed of industrial transfer and the capacities of XNA in light of resource and environmental constraints. The results show that, to just realize modernization in 2035, the transfer (...) rate of the secondary industry and tertiary industry is annually 3.7 billion yuan and 6.4 billion yuan, respectively. But at this speed, the atmospheric environment will be overloaded by 2028. The minimum and maximum transfer rate to realize modernization in 2035 without overloading resources and environment are also specified as well as the total size of economy and population. The results indicate that land for the construction of XNA is rich, but local water is not sufficient to support industrial growth. The atmospheric environment of XNA is also an important limiting factor. It is thus necessary to reduce air pollution and increase the population and industrial scale of the area by increasing the transfer rate of the tertiary industry. (shrink)

Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research-and process-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser), seeks to develop interactions between artists, theorists and audiences. Eight, maybe, nine or ten 40 litre bags of potting compost lie strewn about the floor of a high-ceilinged white washed hall. Dumped, split (...) open, the soil mixed with iridescent specks of green, blue and red glitter. On the walls hang large black and white photographic images—negative and positive prints barely clean, hardly sharp, scavenged from the world and presented half processed. On a third wall, hangs a framed golden and charcoal surface. Finally, a huge stain of black dye runs down a wall that descends into a sunken quarter of the Kaskadenkondensator gallery space. The results of a collaboration between Oliver Minder and Walter Derungs reflect on themes addressed in the recent Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference held by the department of English, University of Basel. In particular, the joint show questions how an aesthetic experience may be other than a human-world interaction, hinting at the withdrawal and veiling that objects perform, while demanding that different works engage with each other and play out this game under the non-supervisory eyes of a human audience. Things here are becoming—sometimes it’s a movement towards a more complete ontic whole in a projection of finality, other times it’s a dispersal, an atrophy to rather disarrayed entities. Yet, in the moment and place in which the objects are, we take them as here and now. Let’s get to the material of the stuff that Minder and Derungs have assembled. Oliver Minder employs organic materials—potting earth, cuttlefish ink secretion, rice, and insects; yet his works hardly seem natural in the sense of a harmonic relation between material and the form they are constrained into, the objects they are compelled to occupy. For the substrates on, through, or within which these natural materials are mediated are harshly inorganic substances—Plexiglas, safety glass, acrylic resin, boat varnish, spray paint. Minder, thus, generates a conflict within the materiality of his work between two polar opposites—from the human perspective—in the contiguity of materials engaging with each other in a thrown together formation that nonetheless appears to keep the materials and the objects they make in happy accidental relation to each other. Let me expand a little: on the one hand, the things Minder makes query our belief in substance as belonging in a particular domain, an environment suited to precisely that stuff. We are focused on thinking categorically where things belong, both in terms of natural place and natural relations they might extend to each other. Hence, we are driven to think of environment and order. On the other hand, while extracting things from their conventional place and arranging them within awkward constellations that we as observers feel isn’t quite right, Minder manages to persuade the viewer that the materials are nonetheless “doing alright.” So, simultaneous to our awareness of the appropriateness of the world according to our global notions of accord and uniformity, we are forced to accept the local discrepancies of disassociation, inappropriateness and misplacement. The tension between these two vectors generates a vacillation that intensifies Minder’s work. In the Kaskadenkondensator works, then, it is vital to first consider the material of Minder’s works: potting compost—what is it doing here in the first place?—seems to enjoy being “polluted” by sparkly glitter. Glitter has a long history, used in cosmetics by the Egyptians, and in cave paintings, too, earlier made of beetle shells and mica, nowadays glitter is made of plastic cut to minute sizes down to 50 microns. So what’s the point here? Well shiny bits of dust-like material are actually generated from ultra-thin plastic sheets and are normally cut into shapes that fit contiguously on a two-dimensional surface: squares, triangles, hexagons etc. What then appears to be totally random, chaotic decoration, is actually an array of extremely regular identifiable objects. 1 Of course scale has a role to play here. The minuteness of the dimensions means the regularity is beyond our recognition—all we see are the twinkling surfaces of the multi-coloured grains of plastic. In contrast, potting compost, which appears to be unary in its dull unresponsive lumpen disposition, is in fact an amalgam of a variety of organic and inorganic materials: peat, bark, mushroom compost, and sand and perlite, and should perhaps be more proactively exciting to the viewer because of this complexity. Yes; we can (if we care to) identify different textures, different sizes in the mixture of the medium, but I claim that we tend to treat this organic/inorganic assemblage as just a simple substance. Further and crucially important to our consideration here is that the medium is partially contained, but also partially spilling from the split plastic bags in which it is sold in garden centres. That the compost spills out gives it a movement suggesting life; that the bags are cast here and there in a random fashion by Oliver Minder, lying like discarded carcasses, hacked torsos, dismembered bodies, suggests a horrific murder scene, a Tatort. 2 The glitter flourishes in the medium, lies happy and decorative; that is simply what it does, how it is—always already broken, made-for-scattering, designed to be incomplete; the taken-to-be-natural compost, in contrast, cannot rest content but is forced to speak to us metaphorically in its abject overflowing of violence and rupture. While Oliver Minder’s elements in the installation direct our attention to material, Walter Derungs’ works raise questions around seeing and making in photography. There is a simultaneous flicker between the materials and their use in the production of a sense making representation, on the one hand, and on the other the very notion of what is worthy of picturing, framing, representing on the other. Derungs' images are of non-places. Ranging from archaic decaying monster buildings, buildings that have gone far beyond the ravages of a time that we can safely associate with the genteel preservation of a Bernd and Hill Belcher post-industrial decline, to the background “noise” of an urban world that is falling apart, and to which we most of the time seem to pay little attention, and habitually just pass by. In this respect, their non-ness differs somewhat from the conventional association of the term with Marc Augé 3 , where emphasis is on the specifics (if we do care to examine them for their non-placedness) of the spatial or place containment in which movement between multimodal coordinates occurs in supermodern late capitalist post-urban spaces. In other words, we might be in an Augéian non-place and (not) experience—be impervious to—that environment, or we might in Derungs’ manner look out from such a position at the “scenery” around us. I claim scenery, as this is what Derungs seems to do with his partial photography—construct a very purposefully articulated, symmetric, flat world of image. Mostly depopulated, his images construct a space in which the direction of time is uncertain: are these partial structures falling apart, or perhaps terminated in a never-to-be-completed state, or are they a few steps from final completion? Temporal and spatial dimensions figure large in Derungs’ image-making: his world, and perhaps this is in fact the only way for it to be registered photographically, is already image before it is photographed. A key combination of images in this show is a matrix of six black and white negative prints measuring 300 x 215 cm that form the image of a semi-derelict (or is it yet incomplete) church, and adjacent on a perpendicular wall, a single black and white positive print 150 x 250 cm of two bricked-up windows of a late-Victorian industrial building. What are we led to believe that we see here? In the negative print, the conditions of perception 4 are sufficiently reproduced for us to recognise the structure of the building, to distinguish ground and form, to relate some partial elements of narrative, and to recognize symbols such as the alter cross and figure of Christ, a looming crane, a traffic cone, and banks of tiered seating. We piece the image together both from the individual forms which we recognize despite the tonal reversal, and we piece the six prints together as a whole, the matrix of lines between them emphasizing our purview onto the world. While we recognise the forms at work in the image and might possibly relate the negative reversals to other figurations such as Vera Lutter’s camera obscura exposures, we cannot but avoid seeing the partialness of the image in the sponge marks of the developer that was spread by hand across the prints. 5 Derungs’ thus intervenes with our usual conception of photography as the mimetic realist vehicle sine qua non , by exposing the viewer to tonal reversal and incomplete or over developed areas of the print. We thus confront both the idiom of such image making and its raw (chemical) materiality at once in the simultaneity of the recognition of what the image pictures and the recognition that it is in the act of picturing. The church image, taken from the series “BW Negativs 2011,” thus orients us towards how we see things in the world via photographs. The single image of the bricked-up wall presents us with a completely different visuality that relates to a faciality 6 which we cannot easily escape from. We look, or rather try to look with no success, through the face of the windows, through the classic Albertian screen 7 which has already been given to us in the church matrix beside. Yet although we should be able to make more of these concealed windows because they are a positive print, because they are complete, because they approach us on a more realistic scale, reproduced at life size, we cannot. The objects pictured here withdraw from us; furthermore, they merely mock our blindness at not seeing how we look. Blocked up with quite a hint of paned glass behind, one window is blanked out with a white blind, the other simply blankly dark. The apertures look like eyes with teeth in them, or a Dogon mask, or even Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926) if we want to get really perverse. The height of elegant modernist chauvinist beauty thrown against the vacuity of post-industrial decline. Derungs thus catapults us consciously into a world enfolded with and through images, but in such a way that the images themselves become objects that stand resistant to us, impervious to our gaze, indifferent. We—and indeed they—do not attempt to reach out to a real that is beyond, rather the images play in a world that is just theirs, and we can only enter that world if we too submit to their regime: tonal reversal, segmented, partial, inadequate, still, wrenched out of time. In contemplation, in the flood of the image “falling” off the wall, we too become image-object. Perhaps enough has now been said about the works, yet enough can never really be said, we know the image will always exceed the word—let’s accelerate the critique: Derungs’ work continues in a second space partially partitioned from this first room. Opposing three more “BW Negativs” which figure yet more quotidian aspects of the world is Minder’s gold spray paint and cuttlefish secretion mix: things that just shouldn’t work together do in the dialogue between stuff that Derungs and Minder have constructed. Minder makes things; Derungs makes images; together they make objects which inhabit their own world which we can approach and sensually engage with and come to grips with only on those objects’ own terms. This is best summarised by a final work made by Oliver Minder which on a third wall faces these two semi-partitioned spaces. A deep black stain about 100 X 200 cm with streak marks running down a further 2 metres hovers positioned to observe the whole work, and also to be part of this installation, too. This liminal flat suzerain lies in/out of the whole work. The stain of cuttlefish secretion resonates with Derungs’ sponge strokes on the church image; it mirrors the iris of an all-seeing eye; it combines material in situ with the situation itself. Where Minder’s other works have material and medium or substrate upon which the material is exercised, this single black hole is image which sucks everything up into itself. It draws the viewer, who must otherwise look away attentively at the floor work, and imagine horror, or smile at the ironic play of glitter. Look away at the image constructions that suggest how it is we too look to our world. See the play of thing and image in a third area. Or, finally return to the base of the pyramid that triangulates, to realise the stuff-image that unlocks it all for us. Black on white, organic on inorganic, material to substrate, that which in the falling out of one on the other, in its running down the wall simply gives form to both content and expression in one direction, and content and expression to form in another. NOTES In fact, glitter is used as associative forensic evidence: the 20,000 or so varieties are all uniquely identifiable. Joel Sternfeld, Tatorte: Bilder gegen das Vergessen (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1996). Marc Augé, Non­places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2006). An echo of the uneven paint strokes of light­sensitive chemicals in the paper preparations made by Henry Talbot some 170 years ago in the first sun drawings that also often pictured architectural forms. It was Talbot’s surprising discovery that where a weaker chemical solution was more thinly spread, greater light sensitivity was actualized, yet this virtual image had then to be chemically developed in a second step. Thus, Derungs unevenly finished spongings suggestively trace back to this originary technology (although his sweeps are the stains of uneven development and not those of the initial preparation of light–sensitive material). Umberto Eco, “Critique of the Image” in “Articulations of Cinematic Code” Cinematics 1, 1970. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: the Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999). (shrink)

The concern people are now expressing about the human environment, ecology, pollution, and overpopulation, though admittedly legitimate from a moral point of view, has not attracted much attention from philosophers. This is notable particularly inasmuch as the United States civil rights struggle, the Vietnam War, and various responses of civil disobedience and violence to social problems have all aroused philosophers to careful thought on rights and obligations. I do not want to suggest that a social problem is interesting only (...) if it is philosophically interesting; nor do I want to make light of the way in which the problems of waste, noise, and overcrowding have captured the popular imagination. Yes, we must protect and use wisely the human environment and natural resources. But still, saying it seems banal, and philosophers do not feed on banalities. Here we have a modern moral commandment which speaks to an urgent and serious matter but which, like “Do not steal,” seems so obvious as to be trite. Yes, we must plan the world’s population in a rational way. Even that commandment, though disputed by some, seems trite. (shrink)

The paper introduces a proof-theoretic semantics for adjectival modification as an alternative to the traditional model-theoretic semantics basing meaning on truth-conditions. The paper considers the proof-theoretic meaning of modification by means of the three traditional adjective classes: intersective, subsective and privative. It does so by introducing a meaning-conferring natural-deduction proof system for such modification. The PTS theory of meaning is not polluted by ontological commitments, for example, a scale for beauty and a yardstick for being beautiful. It only uses syntactic (...) artefacts of the proof language. The paper also defines, by suitable rules, iterated modification, shedding light on the relationship between iteration and adjectival classes. Modification via coordinated adjectives is covered too. An appendix delineates briefly the main ingredients of PTS. (shrink)

This study investigates how abnormally hot temperatures affect firms’ environmental behaviors in China. We find that firms exposed to abnormally hot temperatures participate in more environmental engagement. We also find that this improvement effect is driven mainly by environmental concerns, including public concerns, CEOs, and governments. Our results remain intact after an array of robustness tests. Further analysis shows that the effect of abnormally hot temperatures on corporate environmental engagement is more pronounced in SOEs, heavily polluting firms, and firms located (...) closer to local environmental protection agencies. Based on the political pressure channel, our results indicate that the improvement effect is more prominent in politically connected firms, cities where local officials can wield more influence, local governments have larger financial slack, and local governments disclose their environmental targets. Moreover, the positive impact of environmental engagement on firm value is stronger when firms are exposed to abnormally hot temperatures. Overall, this study sheds light on the potential stimulation of firms’ environmental actions by global warming, which is yet to be fully understood. (shrink)

Environmentality teases out the multilayered human-environment contacts and connections in terms of human agency and governmentality, ecological objects and their (in)dependence, power/knowledge and environmental (in)justice. “Sustainable Development Goals” recognize that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth – all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our environment. This paper outlines the scopes, scales, and methods of Chinese storytelling and multimedia exhibitions on deforestation and afforestation, (...) pollution and purification, and wastelands and eco-systems in industrial, de-industrial, and post-industrial times. The author considers short stories, novellas, novels, reportages, nonfiction writings, and visual artworks, with specific focus on trees, forests, and plant writing. By reading Kong Jiesheng’s “Forest Primeval,” Ah Cheng’s “King of Trees,” Xu Gang’s Loggers, Wake Up!, Yan Lianke’s Garden No. 711: The Ultimate Last Memo of Beijing, and Chen Yingsong’s The Forest Is Silent, the author aims to bring to light the awakening and formation of Chinese ecological consciousness, the token of marred humanity and ecocritical reflection, the manifestation of biophilia-biophobia experiences, as well as the structural transformation of private feelings and public emotions in modern and contemporary China. (shrink)

The present study aimed at investigating the heavy metals concentrations in the soils around “Larga de Sus” abandoned mine (Zlatna, Romania), evaluating the potential ecological risk of heavy metal pollution and highlighting ethical aspects related to risk assessment, ecological restoration, and soil remediation. The results of the chemical analysis showed that the soil in the study area is highly polluted with heavy metals since the average concentrations of Pb (32.4–2318.1 mg/kg), and Ni (321.6–562.8 mg/kg) in soil exceed their corresponding (...) threshold established by the Romanian legislation. The potential ecological risk index method developed by Hakanson was used to assess the potential risk of heavy-metal pollution. The results indicated that Pb and Ni showed severe and considerable potential ecological risk, while Cr had lightly ecological risk. In this case, remediation should be focused only on Pb or on all heavy metals even if they have lightly ecological risk? A scientific management technique cannot logically prescribe which choices should be selected. The interaction between human activity and the environment is complicated and difficult to quantify and risk management cannot and should not be based simply on risk assessment results. What is needed to make the right choice of the most appropriate alternative that fits our personality, culture, religion, and desires? The moral and ethical implications of ecological restoration and soil remediation (e.g. tolerance of uncertainty, responsibility, moral duty, etc.) have to be incorporated within the decision-making process in order to make optimum sustainable decisions and to achieve real environmental protection. (shrink)

The present study aimed at investigating the heavy metals concentrations in the soils around “Larga de Sus” abandoned mine, evaluating the potential ecological risk of heavy metal pollution and highlighting ethical aspects related to risk assessment, ecological restoration, and soil remediation. The results of the chemical analysis showed that the soil in the study area is highly polluted with heavy metals since the average concentrations of Pb, and Ni in soil exceed their corresponding threshold established by the Romanian legislation. (...) The potential ecological risk index method developed by Hakanson was used to assess the potential risk of heavy-metal pollution. The results indicated that Pb and Ni showed severe and considerable potential ecological risk, while Cr had lightly ecological risk. In this case, remediation should be focused only on Pb or on all heavy metals even if they have lightly ecological risk? A scientific management technique cannot logically prescribe which choices should be selected. The interaction between human activity and the environment is complicated and difficult to quantify and risk management cannot and should not be based simply on risk assessment results. What is needed to make the right choice of the most appropriate alternative that fits our personality, culture, religion, and desires? The moral and ethical implications of ecological restoration and soil remediation have to be incorporated within the decision-making process in order to make optimum sustainable decisions and to achieve real environmental protection. (shrink)

Ecocriticism is a theory that studies the relationship between humans and non-humans critically. The perception becomes the need of the hour as it stresses the interconnectedness between humans and Nature in the era of environmental sabotage. As Barbara Ward says, ‘We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do’ rather, humans pollute and erode the Natural elements. The interdependency between the environment and humans should be understood to lead to (...) a better quality of life. Ecocriticism amidst the global crisis strives to reattach humans to their natural world. This article, stressing the significance of entwined movements like ecofeminism, eco-theology, ecosophy, and so on, shows realistic evidence to bring out the emergency to discuss, understand and practice the idea of Ecocriticism out in the practical world. (shrink)

The settlements surrounding the Exxon Valdez oil spill prove to be an interesting case of retributive and corrective justice in regard to damage to the ecology of the commons, particularly in light of the recent Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. After reviewing the harm done to the ecology of Prince William Sound by the spill, and an account of Exxon Corporation’s responsibility, I examine the details of the litigation, particularly the Supreme Court decision in this matter. (...) In the early settlement, there is a clear disproportion between damage awards to plaintiffs representing the current economic users of Prince William Sound versus the trustees for the Sound’s commons. I argue that the disproportion reveals not only a thoroughly economic understanding of ecological commons, but bias in the treatment of its current economic users, as opposed to an understanding of such ecologies as true commons shared over generations. I argue that such biases fail reasonable moral tests and do not stand up to common principles of retributive justice. I end by suggesting a legal maneuver to correct such tendencies. (shrink)

Devoted to the late Paul Virilio (1932–2018) and in the advent of debates surrounding the Anthropocene and in light of corresponding changes to conceptions of scale and image, this paper attempts to extrapolate a Virilian pedagogy of the image. It is Virilio’s work which remains timely and singularly fecund in this area and it is for this reason that it may help to shape a new pedagogy of scale and image. This may allow us to better grasp the decentring (...) of human conceptions of time and space as we come to better understand the vastness of cosmological space and time. To demonstrate this, his work is read in tandem with Félix Guattari’s work on ecosophy and Bernard Stiegler’s work on negentropy to show how Virilio’s critique of the diminishment of perspective diverges from their respective approaches to forge an arresting pedagogy of the image vis-à-vis geographical and ecological conceptions of Earthly spatial and temporal scale. The perceived poverty of Earthly perspective is read in the light of a scalar perspectivism which understands the enormity of the universe and humanity’s microscopic place within it. As Virilio is concerned with the changes in scale which manifest with the onset of globalization, the question arises as to how an applied dromology (that is the philosophy of speed) may work alongside both Guattari’s schizoanalytic and ecosophical research and Stiegler's pharmacology of the image in a way that mounts a robust and unique critique of the mental pollution of the image as such. Here the pedagogical implications are significant as the diminishment of world perspective for Virilio – a consequence of the singular global time of capital – devastates our understanding of the cosmos. This understanding of the poverty of scale and perspective is contrasted with a multiscalar approach to the world, which is itself searching for a philosophical and pedagogical response to the reduction of the world to nothing. (shrink)

Progress cannot be reversed; what it has killed, we cannot restore to life. Professionalism, like pollution, is here to stay. However, the fact that professionalism and pollution are facts does not force us to welcome and implement them. Indeed, there are those who would accelerate "progress," their effective definition of which is what is going to happen willwe nillwe. I wonder why progressive thinkers do not, since it is inevitable we shall all die one day, advocate present universal (...) suicide. Preferring to cling to the remains of life rather than renounce it, preferring to strive for light so long as I can see a glimmer, I first recall the qualities ideal in one who is to search and trace the development of science.1 The workshop of the scholar in the history of science is the periods in which his authors lived. He should know those periods' ways of life and belief and education, both the common and the eccentric; their political histories; their variety in aspects; their social and economic structures; their architectures, literatures, and arts. He should feel at home in the houses of those times, sit easily in their chairs, both figurative and wooden, and discern what was then mostly admired or rejected in painting and sculpture and decoration. He should have read not only the books that carried the intellectual products of his period but also those that were then the fare of young minds as they were taught, such books having been commonly of an earlier time. The student who does not command, as a minimum, the main episodes of Holy Scripture, classic mythology, and the corpus of golden Latin is glaucomatose in the modes of thought of Western men educated before 1900. · 1. The text printed here is based on an address delivered at the banquet of the History of Science Society and the Society for the History of Technology, Washington, D.C., December 29, 1972. So as to retain definiteness and immediacy, I have not blurred the original focus upon the history of science and technology, trusting that any reader who can understand me at all will be able to turn the same lens upon his own field of learning or pseudolearning. Clifford Ambrose Truesdell, III, Professor of Rational Mechanics at John Hopkins University, is the author of, among others, Rational Thermodynamics, Six Lectures on Modern Natural Philosophy, and Essays in the History of Mechanics. He has edited or coedited six volumes of the Encyclopedia of Physics; he has founded three international journals of scientific and historical research and continues to edit two of them. Among his many honors, Professor Truesdell is a Foreign Member of seven European National Academies of Science. (shrink)

Contemporary humanity—especially urban‐industrial civilization with its domination of nature—is disturbing complex, integrated, self‐regulating systems that have evolved over long periods of time. We are threatening not only biological ecosystems but also human self‐regulating capabilities at both the biological and the social‐systems levels. This paper presents examples of such disturbance both in the organism—respiratory‐cardiovascular problems related to environmental pollution‐and at the population level—rates of infant mortality and relations between fertility and mortality in light of economic and emotional factors. Prospects (...) for our future survival and flourishing are thus linked less to technical know‐how than to ecological understanding. (shrink)

Nowadays, some of the things that are ḥarāmto be consumed, such as lard, its derivatives and alcohol are used as additives or additional nutrients in products, namely food and cosmetics that people use widely in daily life. The provision of these products, which are accepted as najis(impure), stands in front of us as one of the actual fiqh problems. In order to produce an accurate solution in this regard, the reaction condition and the level of dissolution in the product must (...) be determined. In this article, the level of mutanajjis (contamination) of the products that najisthings transforms through istihlāk(physical change) and the provision (hukm) of benefits from such things are examined. The research covers the discussions in the classical period regarding the provision of things, which included najāsah(impurity) and underwent physical change as well as the evaluations of contemporary Islamic jurists. The aim of this study is to contribute to the researches, which will be carried out to determine the provision of products containing ḥarāmelements. As the production is carried out on an industrial scale, such studies are important today in terms of the establishment of “ḥalāl” sensitivity and meeting the needs of people who have this sensitivity to learn the provision of such products.SummaryNowadays, in various sectors, especially food, feed, cosmetics, health and clothing industries, for the purposes of reducing the cost of the product, extending the shelf life, making the product more attractive in terms of color, consistency and aroma, many substances are added to the main material. The fact that some of the substances added are ḥarām(forbidden) such as blood, lard, pest, and ethyl alcohol require the subject to be considered in terms of fiqh. It is important to clarify two issues in order to reach a healthy result in the studies aiming to determine the provision (ḥukm) of the products that are mixed with najis(impure) substance. One of them is the determination of the level of istihlāk(physical change) in the mutanajjis(contamination) things. The second is the determination of the basic principles to be used in determining the provision of the things which najāsahhas undergone the physical change in. In this study conducted within the scope of this purpose and method, the hadīthsrelated to two different issues that are directly related to the subject have been evaluated as the basic textual basis. These are narrations about the cleanliness and pollution status of the contaminated water, and about the availability of fats and oils, which the dead mouse is seen in. It is stated in the narrations about the condition of the water that najāsah involved in, the water will not be najisunless its smell, taste or color changes because of the falling najāsahin it. According to this hadith, which shows the change of description as a measure, the fuqahāʾ(jurists) came to a consensus on the fact that water, which one of its characteristics changed because of najāsahwould be considered mutanajjis. When thishadithis evaluated together with the narrations that indicate the small amount of water is contaminated because of najāsah, in fact, it is seen that while the water is considered to be clean-najis, the situation of the water being affected from najāsahis taken as the basis and aimed to protect human health against the dirty water. At the time when there were not any one of today's microbiological analysis laboratories, the way to understand the pollution status of water was to see if the smell, color and taste of the water changed while taking the amount of the water into account. Since the rate of foreign matter in the water, the level of pollution and the health status of the water can be determined correctly in the laboratory today, operating the modern techniques as well as the measure of qualification change will be appropriate for the purpose of the hadīthsmentioned.In the narrations about the state of the fat, which the dead mouse is found in, it is seen that different operations are requested depending on the fat being solid or liquid. If the fat is liquid, different instructions have been made such as its being poured or used in lighting. Mālikīs, Shāfiʿīs, and Ḥanbalīfaqīhs (jurists) of the first period have ruled that liquids such as vinegar, milk and honey are mutanajjis, whether they are in little quantity or not, and whether their descriptions are changed or not, claiming that the amount of oil and the degree of impact on the dirt is not declared in the hadīths. The Ḥanafīs adopted the provision in the narrations mentioned pointing to a small amount of liquid oil and considered the measure of description change for a large amount of liquid valid. Ẓāhirīs, Ibn Taymiyyah and some of the faqīhsargued that the liquids which one cannot feel the color, taste or smell of the najāsahin are clean, regardless of the amount.These three approaches are open to criticism because the first is limited only to the literal meaning in the narrations and neglects the aims, and the second ignored the non-water fluids’ ability to hide the descriptions of the substance added to them, and the third evaluates the mustahlak substance (that has undergone a physical change) as if it had been istiḥālah(chemically changed). When the narrations related to the subject are examined, it is understood that while the usage of the liquid fat which the dead mouse was seen in as the food was prohibited, in fact, it was based on the foresight that all of the fat is affected by the mouse. It appears to have been ruled out that only the part polluted is the part affected by thenajāsahfor the fact that after the removal of the mouse and the environment from the solid oil exposed to the same contamination, the rest is allowed to be eaten. According to this, it is possible to say that the measure of mutanajjisin the things that affected by najāsahis in the degree of spreading of najāsah.Nowadays it is possible to determine the presence of najisthings in the main material, which is used as additive or addition, by the level of effect of these substances in the product, as well as by the assays. If the najissubstances used for purposes such as brightness, taste, consistency and extending shelf life, perform the expected functions, it means that they protect their presence in the product effectively. In fact, it should be acknowledged that these substances continue to exist effectively in the product, if they perform the targeted function without any chemical change, even the ratio in the product is low or the color, taste and odor are eliminated during the mixture.The faqīhswhile differed in opinion about the mutanajjisof things that the najāsahhad undergone physical changes in, they, in concert, considered the substances, which were not cleaned or could not be cleansed from which that they accept as mutanajjisby their own measurements, khabīs(disgusting), and have accepted the people’s eating of them as ḥarām. Likewise, they did not allow such things to be used in any way touching the body, clothing and containers. They have evaluated the narrations, which requires the spilth the fat that the dead mouse was seen in, as the main basis in this issue. On the other hand, about the use of the mutanajjisthings outside the human consumption area and in such a way that the clothes and body would not be contaminated; the majority of thefaqīhs preferred the mubāḥ provision. They have put forth the narrations as the basis that recommends the usage of the liquid oil in which the mouse was fallen in lighting. These approaches of the fuqahāʾabout the effect of the istihlākon the provision of making use of the things that affected by najāsahare of worth as the basic principles on the subject. It is possible to say that it is not permissible to consume food products containing lard or pork gelatin, and the chicken that has been torn apart while being left in hot water in order to pluck its feathers, and the egg which becomes mutanajjisfor it is boiled up with thenajāsahon, and the using of cosmetic products containing lard when today’s industrial products are evaluated in accordance with these principles. If taken the general opinion that defends that the ethyl alcohol is najis as the basis, the carbonated soft drinks, which are added to alcohol, can also be evaluated in this context. (shrink)

Bad philosophy is responsible for the climate and nature crises, and other global problems too that threaten our future. That sounds mad, but it is true. A philosophy of science, or of theatre or life is a view about what are, or ought to be, the aims and methods of science, theatre or life. It is in this entirely legitimate sense of “philosophy” that bad philosophy is responsible for the crises we face. First, and in a blatantly obvious way, those (...) institutions, organizations, corporations, businesses, endeavours, and activities of humanity that cause the crises and global problems we face, do so because of the aims they pursue (profit perhaps, or power, or heat and light for homes), and the methods adopted in pursuit of those aims – the philosophy in other words, built into the institution, organization, business, human activities, or whatever it may be. It is the philosophy of these institutions, organizations and activities that we need to change to put a stop to, or at least lessen the severity of, the crises we face, the global problems that confront us, above all the climate and nature crises. One institution has an especially crucial role in this respect: our universities. They are dominated in a multitude of ways by a particularly disastrous philosophy, a philosophy of inquiry which may be called knowledge-inquiry. This holds that the basic aim of the university is to acquire and apply knowledge. First, knowledge is to be acquired; once acquired, it can be applied to help solve social problems. But this philosophy of knowledge-inquiry is an intellectual disaster. As a result, universities are, in devastating and almost entirely unrecognized ways, humanitarian disasters too. Judged from the standpoint of helping to promote human welfare, the university shaped by the philosophy of knowledge-inquiry violates THREE of the four most elementary rules of rational problem solving conceivable in a wholesale, structural fashion, and it is this gross, wholesale, structural irrationality of the university, unnoticed by all but a few scientists and scholars, that is in part responsible for the creation of our grave global problems, and our current incapacity to learn how to solve them. The pursuit of knowledge, conducted in universities, within the framework of knowledge-inquiry over the decades and centuries, has produced much of great benefit to humanity. It has made the modern world possible. It has led to modern power production, modern industry and armaments, modern agriculture, modern hygiene and medicine, modern travel and communications, and the internet. But these very successes have also created many of our most serious current global problems: the climate crisis; the destruction of natural habitats, the catastrophic loss of wild life, and impending mass extinction of species (the nature crisis); the lethal character of modern war; the impact on the natural world of the rapid growth of the human population; the menace posed by nuclear weapons; pollution of earth, sea and air; threats to democracy caused in part by the internet and social media. All these grave global problems have been made possible by modern science and technology, pursued largely in universities within the framework of knowledge-inquiry. Nevertheless, it is not science and technology as such that are the problem, but science pursued in a way that is dissociated from a more fundamental task of the university to help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, so that progress may be made to a better world. Science and technology, pursued within the framework of knowledge-inquiry, create for some of us the power to act, but not the power to act wisely – not the power to learn how to resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways. For that, we need our institutions of learning, above all our universities, to take as their primary task to help humanity learn how to do it. In order to do that, the philosophy of inquiry put into practice by universities needs to be dramatically transformed. We urgently need to bring about a revolution in the overall aims and methods of academic inquiry – a revolution in the philosophy of the university, all around the world, wherever possible, so that the basic aim becomes to seek and promote wisdom, construed to be the capacity, active endeavour, and perhaps desire, to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom in this sense including knowledge, understanding and technological know-how, but much else besides, methods being dramatically modified too so as to help achieve the new academic aim. The basic task of the university would be, not to solve problems of knowledge, but rather to help people in the social world beyond the university to resolve conflicts and problems of living so that what is of value in life may be realized by everyone, insofar as that is possible. The pursuit of knowledge would be vital, but not intellectually fundamental. The intellectual and institutional revolution we so urgently need in our universities would affect every discipline and aspect of the university; it would dramatically affect both research and education, and the whole way the university is related to the rest of the social world. The revolution, from knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry would dramatically enhance the intellectual integrity and rationality of natural science, social inquiry, the humanities and technology, the character of these disciplines and the relationships they have with one another. University education throughout the university would be dramatically improved. And academic inquiry as a whole would do what, on the whole, it fails to do at present: it would help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational and, as a result, increasingly successful ways, progress at last being made to a genuinely good, civilized world – a world in which there is peace, justice, liberal democracy, individual freedom, education, reasonable equality, sustainable prosperity and worthwhile opportunities in life, all of these for everyone, insofar as this is possible. Why, it may be asked, has academic philosophy not noticed that we urgently need to transform the current bad philosophy of inquiry of knowledge-inquiry into the far more intellectually rigorous and humanly valuable philosophy of wisdom-inquiry, so that we can begin to do what so far we have failed to do so lamentably: learn how to avoid impending disasters, and even make progress to a better world, something that seems at present almost unthinkable given the horrors of war, poverty, political enslavement of the 20th century, and the horrors of this century so far too? The answer is that academic philosophy is in a particularly pitiful state, as philosophers themselves, are just beginning to realize and lament. That is why academic philosophers are blind to the intellectual and humanitarian disaster of the bad philosophy that dominates universities today, and inconceivable to them to them that they might have, as a disciplinary task, to ensure academic inquiry implements a good philosophy of inquiry, and advocate and argue for change if it does not. Once upon a time, in Europe at least, philosophy was an intellectual power in the world. In the 17th century it created modern science which massively increased and improved our knowledge and understanding of the world, which in turn led to the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and the modern world. Philosophy was once so intellectually powerful and influential that it changed the course of history. But philosophy also made in the past three disastrous intellectual blunders: the post-Cartesian blunder, the post-Newtonian blunder, and the Enlightenment blunder. Never acknowledged and corrected by subsequent philosophy right down to the present, these unrecognized intellectual blunders rendered academic philosophy the esoteric, pathetic, and powerless discipline it is today, so that throughout the last century and, so far, throughout this one, academic philosophy has remained blind to the intellectual disaster of knowledge-inquiry, and thus failed entirely to take up its proper disciplinary task of warning fellow academics of the structural irrationality of the philosophy that prevails in the university, and of proposing what steps need to be taken to put things right. Instead of performing such an urgently needed philosophical task, so-called analytic philosophy was reduced to analysing the meaning of words. Since then, there has been hardly any discernible improvement, even if analysis of concepts no longer dominates the scene. Bad academic philosophy is indeed responsible for intellectual and humanitarian failures of the university. What the three past intellectual blunders of philosophy are, why their persistence so dramatically reduces academic philosophy to a triviality, and why, furthermore, this results in the failure of scientists and scholars to see what is so blatantly bad about the philosophy prevailing in universities around the world – the failure to see what so urgently needs to be done to put right what has been wrong for so long: all this is made clear in this book. A new kind of philosophy emerges during the course of the argument, critical fundamentalism, which has as its task to keep alive imaginative and critical – that is rational – thinking about our fundamental problem: How can our human world, the world we experience and live in – the world of living things, people, consciousness, free will, meaning and value – how can all of this exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? That problem encompasses all others of life, science and thought. Critical fundamentalism tries to improve answers to aspects of this problem; but it also seeks to encourage everyone to think about the problem, from time to time, and think about how it interacts, in both directions, with more urgent particular and specialized problems of life and thought. Critical fundamentalism sets out to help improve bad philosophy wherever it is to be found: in social, political, commercial, legal, financial, and international life; and especially in academia, in institutions of learning, so that they become devoted to enhancing the capacity of people to learn how to achieve what is of genuine value in this brief life of a few decades if we are fortunate. Critical fundamentalism does everything it can to bring about the revolution in our universities we so urgently need. If taken up by mainstream philosophy, it might really have an impact, and begin to transform universities for the better, in both intellectual and humanitarian terms, and thus, enable humanity to learn how, after the grim failures and horrors of the last century and this one, to make progress to a better world. -/- . (shrink)

As an economic pillar, major resource consumer, and polluter of cities, the chemical industry determines many cities’ transformation, prosperity, and decay. It is thus a major concern for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In China, which is at the stage of accelerated industrialization that is varied across regions, the chemical industry has gradually retreated from developed cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, in the eastern region, and has become the inevitable choice for industrialization of less-developed cities, such as Xi’an, (...) Chengdu, and Chongqing, in the western region. This study took the perspectives of chemical industrial sectors and their spatial differences to understand the changing patterns of the chemical industry and its dominant cities. It identified chemical industrial cities, examined their spatial-temporal patterns with respect to their industry scale and structure, and accounted for factors influencing the spatial evolution from coastal areas to inland regions. The results show that large CICs were mainly located in coastal port regions with balanced industrial sectors, while small CICs were mainly distributed in inland areas with abundant oil and coal resources and a single dominant industrial sector. The location factors of ports, markets, and technology play important roles in the eastern region, while resource conditions and foreign direct investment promote the chemical industry’s development in the central, western, and northeastern cities. These findings improve the understanding of CICs’ spatial transformation and shed light on the policy-making of chemical industrial development in China and other developing countries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Truth Shall Make You FreireRobert CanterTeaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates, edited by Dianne F. Sadoff and William E. Cain; 271 pp. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994; $19.75, paper.IThe newest title in the MLA’s Options for Teaching series, this publication is well-timed. Concerns about “classroom advocacy” and “politicized teaching” have recycled into near-critical mass, even in the mass media. The book is well-arranged, too, with a (...) solid sample of deconstructionist, New Historicist, Marxist, feminist, and cultural studies, and more mix-and-match theorists describing their classroom aims and means in twenty-one essays grouped into four sections. Sadoff and Cain offer elegantly evasive introductions—not only to these essays per se, but to the issues these essays purport to address. In “Surveying Theory,” David B. Downing, John Kucich, Susan S. Lanser, Lynette Felber, Donald G. Marshall, and Gary Waller lay broadly “anti-foundational” groundwork. In “Focusing,” Diana Fuss, Sandra A. Grayson, Beverly Lyon Clark, Evan Carton, Laurie A. Finke, Jonathan Arac, and Cary Nelson deconstruct things in more detail. In “Theory and Culture,” Huston Diehl, Cannon Schmitt and Donald Ulin, Lindon Barrett, Simon Gikandi, D. N. Rodowick, and Jan Gorak again widen the scope of “theorized teaching,” aiming regulation anticanonical shrapnel at every bastion of coded convention. And while readers may pause over [End Page 336] its backcover promise of “lively and accessible prose,” on the whole, the book is unusually readable for an MLA publication about theory.Since Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates is a how-to directed at true-believers, it might seem like critical blindsiding to address its fundamental assumptions rather than its tactical suggestions, to focus on its “theory” rather than on its pedagogy. Yet such a focus is not only fair but necessary. The pedagogy is in this book a pawn of the theory. And the theory is, at best, a lesson in how not to teach students how to learn. For despite all its noisy celebrations of methodological, cultural, ontological, and occasionally even human “difference,” the anthology is really a chorus of self-defeating dogma. 1 Like the virtue of variety, even the relative absence of jargon here works as much against as for the book, revealing self-contradictions so perfectly unwitting that they are twice as funny. It is a good thing, then, that the authors eventually contradict these claims, too—even if they know not that they do.The canon? In accordance with postmodern tradition, “the canon” can be calibrated to be whatever best attacks whatever other tradition a particular theorist is aiming at. It is a very modular “monolith.” And theorists never try to “overdetermine” definitions, anyway. The classroom? As an “overdetermined” site of class-struggle, “the classroom (and the academy at large) is... a social institution designed to reproduce the interests, values, and politics of the dominant social classes” (p. 104). Convention? Anything “mainstream” is so polluted with “the notion of mastery, of total and complete knowledge” that even assigning “mainstream” theorists in a theory class “reproduces that hegemony, no matter how critically we read them” (pp. 105, 61). The runoff of mainstream theorists quoted here—conventional MLA Style—makes the same point. Culture? As always already—and only—“a struggle between power and its disenfranchised shadow,” culture “systematically excludes and marginalizes disenfranchised social members” (pp. 263–64, 20–21).Education? As Paulo Freire has revealed, 2 on the one, bad, goatish, wrong Right-wing hand of God, there is the repressive “banking” model of education; on the other, good-shepherdish, right Left-wing side, there is the liberating “problem-posing” model. You are either a droning clerk bent on subduing students into serfdom, or you are a resistance fighter lighting fuses of freedom. “Instrumental activity” does “pedagogical violence,” making the teacher a tyrant and the student a victim, a “submissive imitator” in a “system” that’s “abidingly committed [End Page 337] to the vision of a white-supremacist oligarchy.” Even asking students what level of “guidance” they feel they need is imposing “rhetorical control” (pp. 32, 23, 222, 135).Facts? The fact is, they are “the discursive gestures of the dominant groups” (p. 222). Unless they are... (shrink)

Ecofeminism is a term coined by Françoise D’Eubonne in her book Feminism or Death to show the affinities between ecology and feminism. Both women and nature are perceived as passive elements and like women who complain about patriarchal constraints, ecologists shed light on the impacts of human exploitation over nature which is affected by pollution. Some dimensions of ecofeminism are present in Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Yellow Woman. The postmodern novel contains a female character who forges a link (...) with the natural surroundings and is in a direct contact with some natural elements like plants and animals. What is specific about the heroine is that she escapes her matriarchal society and goes back to nature in order to reconstruct her identity. At the end of the narrative, the female narrator leaves the natural setting and goes back to her family to replay social roles. The present article sets out to study the importance of Mother Nature for the female narrator and to examine the affinities between Earth Mother and the female protagonist. The first part will offer a theoretical background about the basic principles of ecofeminism. Then, my analysis will touch upon the aspects of ecofeminism in the novel. However, the last part will focus on the way the narrator goes beyond her matriarchal culture and reshapes female identity. (shrink)

On March 27, 1784, Goethe writes to Johann Gottfried Herder: -/- I have found–neither gold nor silver, but what makes me unspeakably happy–the os intermaxillare in the human! With Loder I compared human and animal skulls, came upon its trace, and look, there it is. Only, I beg of you not to mention it, since it must be handled confidentially. (WA 4.6:258). -/- The bone whose discovery so elated Goethe, then called the "intermaxillary bone" but now the "premaxilla," is a (...) pair of cranial bones that are located at the front of the upper jaw and bear the incisors in animals that have these teeth. Goethe expresses happiness in finding this bone specifically in humans, a discovery that opposed the prevailing anatomical opinion at the time. Goethe in the Roman Campagna (1787) – Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein -/- In his essay that was finished by the end of October 1784 and later given the title, "An Intermaxillary Bone of the Maxilla Is to Be Ascribed to the Human as well as to Animals." Goethe claims, citing the work of J. F. Blumenbach and Petrus Camper, that the bone has recently garnered attention as a "distinguishing mark" between humans and apes (LA 1.9:154). -/- Yet, upon reexamination of these anatomists' works, I argue that Goethe misrepresents their positions and overstates the significance of his discovery, at least in a certain sense: while Camper and Blumenbach do deny the intermaxillary bone to humans, they do not construe its absence as an important distinguishing mark between humans and animals. Not only did Goethe's discovery not have the significance he attributed to it, but also historians of science claim that he did not discover it all: the intermaxillary bone had already been described in the human by several anatomists before him. It would thus seem that Goethe misinterpreted the significance of what he had not found, and that his unspeakable happiness was unwarranted. -/- However, Goethe's discovery holds another, heretofore-unrecognized significance. I argue that it signals a change in his vision of nature to one that criticizes and departs from the anthropocentric ontology that grounded the natural sciences of his time. If this anthropocentricism is not overturned and the foundation of natural science not reconceived, Goethe maintains, then the study of nature will be indefinitely frustrated, always floundering, and never able to progress. In light of this threat, Goethe reconceives the foundation of natural science by developing anonathropocentric concept of nature that attempts to escape the pitfalls of the human-centered perspective. His concept of nature's harmony, which I argue reflects a nonathropocentric visions of nature, requires the revaluation of the terms in which historians have disputed his discovery of the intermaxillary bone; the originality of his discovery cannot be limited to establishing the bone's presence in humans but must be extended to the concept of nature's harmony complementary to it. -/- Goethe's discovery, I conclude, remains valuable and worthy of the excitement it initially incites in him. I show how it responds to a paradox of contemporary natural science in which the objective methods intended to eliminate anthropocentrism from the investigation of nature surreptitiously reintroduced it to that investigation. Furthermore, I argue that Goethe's nonanthropocentric vision of nature and his criticism of anthopocentricism are applicable to current questions in environmental ethics. By undermining the foundation of anthropocentric ethics, Goethe also challenges the present anthropocentric modus operandi that continues to condone the environmentally destructive anthropogenic activities responsible for species extinction, chemical pollution, and the loss of natural habitats and biodiversity, in addition to other signs of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Green product innovation has been recognized as one of the key factors to achieve growth, environmental sustainability, and a better quality of life. Understanding green product innovation as a result of interaction between innovation and sustainability has become a strategic priority for theory and practice. This article investigates green product innovation by means of a multiple case study analysis of 12 small to medium size manufacturing companies based in Italy and Canada. First, we propose a conceptual framework that presents three (...) key environmental dimensions of green product innovation such as energy minimization, materials reduction, and pollution prevention as identified in the life cycle phases of products. Based on insights gained from in-depth interviews, we discuss firms' motivations to develop green products, environmental policies and targets for products, different dimensions of green product innovation, and challenges faced during developing and marketing of green products. Results from the study are then synthesized and integrated in a toolbox that sheds light on various aspects of green product innovation and provides solutions to challenges and risks that are faced by firms. Finally, implications for managers, academia and public policy makers are discussed. (shrink)

This article challenges the common tendency in modern research to treat impurity as a religious phenomenon divorced from mundane concerns. Employing the cross-cultural psychological notion of “contagion,” this investigation examines the usage of terms for pollution and purity in Hittite and Akkadian as they relate to distinct domains of human experience, specifically uncleanness, infection, and transgression. Special attention is given to the use of these terms in reference to infectious disease. This analysis demonstrates the real-world experiential basis for notions (...) of impurity and also provides a new perspective to shed light on the peculiarities of each culture. The article concludes with a detailed excursus on the etymology of Akkadian musukku and its relation to Sumerian uzug. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kyklikoi Logoi BENJAMIN HALLER i. palinode I really think Steisichorus had it all wrong, This rank and futile puttering in palinodes. And Simonides: did Ceos boast no beauties on its shores? Skopas would have laughed. The flute girls’ tatter, On and on and on and on—who would have thought Of recantations for a promise posed while perched Amidst... pornography of pillows, feastingSick symposiasts fed beasts dragged down with spear. (...) Wise, redundant Ocean. Wine, topped with a sleek Red-figured trireme would have bobbed its Watchful eye, and soon grown turgid. Louder, Now, the waves which rock the mountains, Waves of earth which crash across the mountains, Turn the blank limestone entablature of crags and ridges to a cyma cornice—rigid, cold. Steisichorus to Helen. Stop. Regrets. Misunderstanding. Stop. Your chastity unblemished. Stop. Grant voice to worship, praise you. Stop. Some will leave with tripods, some with gold. And Simonides? Will know these wilted sacks of flesh, Like flowers touched by some insensate plowshare, Sudden, dumb within the space of heavy seconds, Will know them for himself, and trace the path his errant Feet trod in egress, inscribe a witless placard on their graves. arion 27.2 fall 2019 ii. phaiakis 1. Appleton Wisconsin, Autumn Through the reddening maples and the birch where once a sluggish puddle moped round rocks a sudden surge, a rising tide, a convex tumescence building up for years, released. The sluice is open on the Fox, and all the hidden rocks that snooped like hounds about the pillars of the derelict railroad bridge are made a carcharodontous maul for hipboot fishers, waiting patiently beneath the lock’s expostulating lip. We flock, the shrieking gulls and I, to see what fish may drift by stunned beneath the bridge, what fishers might need fished from their upended sport, what crimson leaves have chosen at the very last, a final act of will, when all prevarication and all staring at the frothed abyss and all coy curling round their pendant stems like blonde Wisconsin girls twining locks and bounding O’s round fingers in the sunny stillness of a main street morning coffee shop, will choose this moment to precipitate themselves into the stream, inexplicably abandoning their elevated perch, and drift down toward the chilly Northern wood, meet muddy dissolution in the sediment, mingle in the bloated belly of that Ice Age Belua, Leviathan of Lakes. 120 KYKLIKOI LOGOI 2. Virginia Autumn, Five Years Later The light was yellow as a Martha Jones Postmodern; It was a bar, and it was late. I plaudered on about some... something? It was the wrong thing, and the music Capered on. And then the next day, It was like the year I spent in Appleton, Balmy cidermill frost in the morning, Mists on the polluted Fox, and bounding Rounded O’s on the red lips of buxom Girls. I lay upon the floor and watched The motes of dust in light no longer Cancerous from summer’s balmy claws. It was the wrong thing. And today Despite Virginia, it is autumn, where Yesterday was summer, and another year Has bobbed along beyond the sluice; It has weathered the railroad truss, Observed, with passing interest, thinking Every shore would be as polychrome As this, the evanescent burnt orange Oakleaves, without sighing. Worlds Of wanwood flap like navy wives In some old vintage film of VE day, All eager to embrace us from a distance, But soon past and little matter whether Waves or stern caresses were the fruit Of battles fought. And now the sluice Approaches, and the ominous broad Back of Winnebago, with its plesiosaurs And ex wives on its banks. There is little To regret. The sun upon the shores of Winnebago is yellow, honest yellow, Like some faded photo from an old Vacation that your parents took; such Benjamin Haller 121 Colors don’t exist (you thought) the Atmosphere has changed, attenuated, Global climate shifts have taken those Cold days,... Or yellow like the wan bar Lightbulb, chuckling at my hubris, pulsing In the silent starts, warning, as I pay my slinking tab and head for home. 122 KYKLIKOI LOGOI iii. kairos (christina) Ibycus on Spring this year, But... (shrink)

BackgroundRich in different kind of potent cells, embryos are used in modern regenerative medicine and research. Neurobiologists today are pushing the boundaries for what can be done with embryos existing in the transitory margins of medicine. Therefore, there is a growing need to develop conceptual frameworks for interpreting the transformative cultural, biological and technical processes involving these aborted, donated and marginal embryos. This article is a contribution to this development of frameworks.MethodsThis article examines different emotional, cognitive and discursive strategies used (...) by neurobiologists in a foetal cell transplantation trial in Parkinson’s disease research, using cells harvested from aborted embryos. Two interviews were analysed in the light of former observations in the processing laboratories, using the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s concept of pollution behaviour and the linguist, philosopher, psychoanalyst and feminist Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abjective to explain and make sense of the findings.ResultsThe findings indicate that the labour performed by the researchers in the trial work involves transforming the foetal material practically, as well as culturally, from trash to treasure. The transformation process contains different phases, and in the interview material we observed that the foetal material or cells were considered objects, subjects or rejected as abject by the researchers handling them, depending on what phase of process or practice they referred to or had experience of. As demonstrated in the analysis, it is the human origin of the cell that makes it abjective and activates pollution discourse, when the researchers talk of their practice.ConclusionsThe marginal and ambiguous status of the embryo that emerges in the accounts turns the scientists handling foetal cells into liminal characters in modern medicine. Focusing on how practical as well as emotional and cultural strategies and rationalizations of the researchers emerge in interview accounts, this study adds insights on the rationale of practically procuring, transforming and utilizing the foetal material to the already existing studies focused on the donations. We also discuss why the use and refinement of a tissue, around which there is practical consensus but cultural ambiguity, deserves further investigation. (shrink)

Organizational citizenship behaviors have been the topic of much research attempting to understand the motivations, manifestations, and impacts of these behaviors on organizational development. However, studies have been based essentially on an anthropocentric and intra-organizational perspective that tends to ignore broader environmental issues. Due to the complexity of environmental issues and their human, informal, and preventive aspects, consideration of these issues requires voluntary and decentralized initiatives that draw on organizational citizenship behaviors. The role of these behaviors has been neglected, or (...) even ignored, in studies of environmental management, which have focused mainly on the explicit, formal, and prescriptive aspects of organizations. The aim of this article is to shed light on the pertinence of organizational citizenship behaviors in improving the efficacy and efficiency of environmental management. The article discusses how the principal dimensions of these behaviors can be applied to the environmental practices of organizations and underlines their importance in responding to essential challenges of environmental management, including the complexity of environmental issues, limitations of formal management systems, the need to consider tacit knowledge, the importance of helping relationships, and the promotion of␣social legitimacy among organizations. Measures to encourage eco-efficiency and establish a favorable context for the emergence of citizenship behaviors are also proposed. (shrink)

It is shown by means of general principles and specific examples that, contrary to a long-standing misconception, the modern mathematical physics of compressible fluid dynamics provides a generally consistent and efficient language for describing many seemingly fundamental physical phenomena. It is shown to be appropriate for describing electric and gravitational force fields, the quantized structure of charged elementary particles, the speed of light propagation, relativistic phenomena, the inertia of matter, the expansion of the universe, and the physical nature of (...) time. New avenues and opportunities for fundamental theoretical research are thereby illuminated. (shrink)