Reinterpreting And Retaining Tradition
In keeping with White's critique, many ecotheologians reinterpret the Christian tradition in ways that implicitly or explicitly generate parallels with less dualistic traditions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism. But to what extent is White's account of the Christian tradition a crude or unfair caricature Have ecotheologians conceded too much to White It is doubtful that any strand within Christianity consistently holds to a radically transcendent deity and wholly devalued earthly realm. That...
Australia And New Zealand
Environmental philosophy EP made a vigorous debut in Australasia in the early 1970s, when it began to emerge as environmental ethics in Europe and the United States. Initially the debates turned on value theory and on what came to be known as the deep shallow divide Does ethical concern pertain to nonhumans or humans These alternatives have often been assumed mistakenly to be mutually exclusive rather than intersecting. ATTRACTION AND EMERGENCE Australian environmental philosophers have...
Energy From Biomass
Energy from biomass not including fossil fuels can be environmentally friendly because it is carbon-neutral The carbon released by burning biomass is equal to that absorbed by plant growth to produce the biomass. However, biomass can never entirely replace other sources of energy, because the world's annual energy consumption already equals 22 percent of worldwide annual plant growth. Still, biomass can contribute to meeting the world's energy needs and currently supplies 3 percent of U.S....
Reactions And Criticisms
Proponents of holistic environmental ethics generally support culling to defend endangered ecosystems and species whether the threatened species' members are sentient or not. Insofar as an ecocentric ethic would give ecosystem integrity or health top priority and a holistic ethic would give this and or species' continued existence top priority, consideration of the conscious experiences of members of culled species must take a back seat to preserving the threatened species and or ecosystem....
Hetch Hetchy
In the late nineteenth century two strains of thought about nature prevailed in the United States. The first was that careful management of natural resources was essential to the long-term expansion of the American economy and to the welfare of society. This conservation movement was led by the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot 1865-1946 , who was appointed to that post in 1905 by President Theodore Roosevelt 1858-1919 . The approach established by Pinchot and Roosevelt...
Controversy
Some stakeholders, citizen groups, and organizations, citing negative past experiences with other emerging technologies, such as biotechnology, are skeptical of the promise of nanotechnology. Although there has not been massive public outrage about nanotechnology, several interest groups have objected to the voluntary approaches to overseeing nanotechnology in place in 2008. The Erosion, Technology, and Concentration Group called for a moratorium on nanotechnology products in the marketplace...
Convergence Hypothesis
Bryan Norton's convergence hypothesis, a controversial argument about the predicted policy implications of alternative environmental ethical theories, is best understood against the backdrop of the rise and dominance of non-anthropocentric approaches in environmental ethics in the 1980s and early 1990s. The human-centeredness of the conventional Western ethical system was singled out by the first wave of environmental philosophers for its failure to extend the boundaries of moral...
Schweitzers Ethical Mysticism
More recent scholarship has revealed greater sophistication in Schweitzer's thought. Schweitzer intended his concept of ethical mysticism to serve as a balance between his argument for the respect due to all living beings and the need to set this against the reality to take other life to survive. This tension is also at the heart of the conflict between animal rights activism and holistic environmental concerns. Resource managers, for example, often must destroy individuals within a managed...
Ethical Issues And Green Business
The primary ethical question surrounding green business is how much discretion private entities should have in making environmental-protection choices. The self-imposed standards of green businesses supplement those already mandated by government regulations. For nations with a mature capacity to regulate industry, the green-business sector need not aspire to supplant official regulations that protect human health and the environment. But for nations that lack regulatory capacity, the...
The History Of Maritime Management
The ancient Greeks were the first western philosophers to consider the oceans, and Aristotle 384-322 BCE wrote treatises on the biology and diversity of marine organisms. Before the twentieth century, however, philosophical ethicists usually did not treat the oceans as a separate topic and thus wrote little that specifically concerns marine issues. Much of the intellectual tradition concerning the oceans is the product of legal thinkers such as Hugo Grotius, who in 1625 published Mare Librum,...
Contemporary Muslim Environmentalist Movements
It should be noted that while increasing numbers of Muslims worldwide are engaging in environmental activism, their activism is more often motivated first by environmental concern than by religious belief. Thus much of this activism seems more Western than Islamic, and many Muslim activists are only marginally religious or not at all. In the case of activists who are also believers, in most cases it would appear that the individuals involved first become committed to the environmental cause,...
Ecological Feminism And Queer Environmentalism
There also are areas of overlap between ecological feminism and queer environmentalism. For example, both are critical of gender and nature essentialism and value dualisms. Essentialism is the view that all the members of a group e.g., women share unchanging characteristics, an essence that is necessary for membership in that group. Queer environmentalists and ecological feminists contend that essentialist definitions do not portray gendered reality or the relationship between humans and nature...
An Ethical Future For Development
The mainstreaming of environmental concerns in development thought and practice remains a work in progress, and among the most significant challenges raised by this effort are the ethical issues surrounding intergenerational and intragenerational equity. In debates about tradeoffs between the present and future, work in sustainable development has provided new openings for thinking about the ethical dimensions of environmental protection and development, and the value systems that allow...
British Ecological Society
The origins of the British Ecological Society BES lie in an ad hoc group of botanists that in 1904 formed a ''Committee for the Survey and Study of British Vegetation,'' to explore the factors determining the distribution and associations of the British flora. The members of this Vegetation Committee became in 1913 the Council of BES, the first ecological society in the world. One of the benefits of membership was to be a quarterly journal, the Journal of Ecology, the first number of which was...
Property Rights As Rights To Exclude
In 1913 Wesley Hohfeld distinguished between rights and liberties. One is at liberty to use something just in case one's using that thing is not prohibited. One has a right to a thing just in case one's using it is not prohibited, plus one has the additional liberty of being able to prohibit others from using that thing. That is, the difference between a mere liberty and a full-blooded property right is that with a property right there is an owner who holds a right to exclude other would-be...
Green Chemistry
Whereas conventional industrial chemistry sometimes has been used to create highly persistent toxic compounds with little regard for their effects on living organisms, green chemists attempt to develop chemicals that are inherently safe benign by design. Chemical design thus involves the ethical choice of whether to make nontoxicity a fundamental requirement. The term green chemistry was introduced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency EPA in the early 1990s as part of a broader effort at...
Solar Energy
Wind is an indirect form of solar energy because, as the sun heats the atmosphere more at the earth's equator and less at the poles, convection currents are created in the air. Direct solar energy also has much potential. Every forty-five minutes, the energy reaching the earth from the sun equals humanity's total annual use of power. Solar energy has long been used in warm climates to heat water in residential homes about 40 million homes are thus served worldwide. Solar energy can also be used...
Prospects And Promises
Chinese environmental ethics has made much progress after two decades of development, and new trends are emerging. 1. First, more and more scholars focus on the practical policy application of environmental ethics. They try to make environmental ethics more policy- and problem-oriented, and focus on helping the environmental community to make better ethical arguments in support of environmental-protection policies. Ethical issues concerned with poverty, sustainable development, corporate...
The Pesticide Use Debate
Public debate about pesticide use began with publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring 1962 , which was followed by The Pesticide Conspiracy Van den Bosch 1978 , which was less widely read but had notable effects. There have been many books and papers published since that time, but none has had Carson's influence. The debate about pesticides is similar to other debates about agricultural technologies e.g., biotechnology . Thomas DeGregori expresses the enduring scientific perception of the...
Exotic Species
The fire ant Solenopsis invicta Buren in the southern United States, the zebra mussel Dreissena polymorpha in lakes and waterways of the midwestern United States, and the seaweed Caulerpa taxifolia in Mediterranean waters are commonly cited examples of exotic species. What makes them exotic is a shared property Each species inhabits but is not considered native within the region listed. In the United States, for instance, Solenopsis was first discovered in the late 1920s in Mobile, Alabama,...
Sterbas Biocentrism
James Sterba has defended a different kind of biocentrism that involves a commitment to equality of individual creatures of whatever species as it does for Taylor . Sterba recognizes that such a stance generates a dilemma, for our practical principles will apparently either be consistent but intolerable through forbidding human self-defense, or will allow human self-defense but will conflict with consistent biocentrism. He advances fundamental species-neutral principles that allow any species...
Animal Ethics And The Romantic Period
Although Coleridge would give up both poetry and his idealization of nature to become a philosophical idealist by the early 1800s, the extraordinary popularity of his Rime of the Ancient Mariner has earned him a perhaps outsized influence on environmental thought. This selfconsciously mysterious and symbolic poem tells the story of the mariner's apparently random killing of a beautiful and companionable animal and the revenge enacted upon him by both the natural and supernatural worlds. The...
Greenpeace
Greenpeace is an international nongovernmental organization NGO that is committed to protecting the global environment and promoting peace. It originated in Vancouver, Canada, and has established national and regional offices in forty-one countries and a central headquarters in the Netherlands. It has close to three million members worldwide. It is known for its confrontational nonviolent, direct-action, and media-savvy strategies for exposing and promoting solutions to global environmental...
Geologic Extinction Episodes
Extinction is part of the natural process of species evolution. It is as much a part of the natural life cycle as speciation and has been occurring continually since life first began to diversify from simple organisms. It is not, however, an evenly paced phenomenon Speciation and extinction may proceed gradually, in tandem, for millennia, but at various times there have been episodes of rapid, mass extinction that far outstrip the pace of species divergence. These past episodes of mass...
Major Environmental Events In China
Ethics, values, and major events contribute to the public's awareness of the environment and environmental ethics. The 1998 flood of the Yangzi River Valley made many people think seriously about the relations between humans and nature. The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome SARS in 2002 led the public to reflect on its relationship with animals. In May 2004 the announcement by the Beijing Municipal Legal Affairs Office that it had drafted legislation on animal welfare spurred a...
The Continuing Earth Charter Initiative
The Earth Charter was formally launched at the Peace Palace in The Hague in June 2000. It has been translated into forty languages and endorsed by more than 2,500 organizations representing the interests of hundreds of millions of people. Among the endorsing organizations are UNESCO, IUCN, the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives ICLEI , and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. A number of international lawyers recognize the Earth Charter as an increasingly influential soft-law...
Selfidentified Pagans
As documented by Ronald Hutton in Triumph of the Moon 1999 , Paganism was created as a new religion in the early to middle twentieth century by people who blended a number of elements together. In addition to stressing the positive value of natural nonurban places, Pagans popularized forms of European esotericism, such as the practice of magic, claimed to be reviving various forms of pre-Christian Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic polytheism, and integrated these with folklore....
Paganism
Phenomena labeled Pagan vary considerably but have, or allegedly have, in common a stress on physical being and belonging. In the mid-twentieth century, Paganism was chosen as the name of a religious movement that claimed to be reviving ancient nature veneration and polytheism. In North America, it is common to call this religion Neo-Paganism to distinguish it from pre-Christian religions such as those of classical Rome . Pagan is also used in a derogatory sense to allege that some people,...
Conflicting Ideas About Nature
Some idealists, such as Schelling, argue that nature is autonomous and therefore should not be dominated. But because for idealists it is autonomy that confers value on natural things, idealists readily reassert the superior worth of human beings, whose autonomy is more apparent or highly developed. In contrast, more naturalistic philosophers such as Mill and Nietzsche place humanity back within nature, as an animal species, and thus tend to reject or at least qualify assertions of human...
Criticisms 1
Critics of ethical extensionism contend that piecemeal extensions of the dominant individualistic approaches to ethics cannot give rise to an adequate environmental ethic because individualistic ethics, which privilege individuals over ecological wholes, fail to address people's actual environmental concerns. Many environmentalists are not concerned about the welfare or well-being of individual shrubs, bugs, and grubs rather, they are concerned about species preservation, ecological integrity,...
Takings
The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that no person ''shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.'' This last clause, the ''takings clause,'' prohibits the U.S. government from seizing property without just compensation. In the United States it is this amendment that authorizes the federal government to seize properties for common use, a legal concept known as eminent...
Hunting Ethics
Most recreational hunters observe legal requirements designed to maintain both ecological balance and stocks of game. They also follow hunting ethics, known as fair chase or walk and stalk designed to even the odds, to give the animal a fair chance. Fair chase requires the hunter to forgo pursuing game in a vehicle or on horseback, shooting over a bait such as a tethered goat or carcass or at waterholes, using spotlights to dazzle nocturnal animals, and the like. Only unconfined animals may be...
Anthropocentric And Nonanthropocentric Perspectives
This mandate to combat unbridled anthropocentrism in environmental ethics always has harbored a serious policy ambition. By raising the flag of nonanthropocentrism, philosophers were hoping to advance a persuasive moral justification for a robust environmental policy agenda and a general rationalization of proenvironmental practices. If an ethical defense could be mounted successfully, public policies directing the protection of endangered species, wetlands, wilderness, natural areas, and so...
Israel And The Middle East
Respect for individual human life and the protection and promotion of health for all are among the core ethical values of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These core values imply the prevention of the environmental destruction, depletion, and contamination that jeopardize life, fertility, and reproduction for future generations. World Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace 2008 Hessel 1998, Izzi Dien 1990 . In all three a concern for equity in particular requires protection of the weak a...
Critiques
Descartes's views have met with strong objections in recent times. Gilbert Ryle famously described Descartes's dualist position as the Dogma of the Ghost in the Machine'' 1949, pp.15-16 . In Descartes's view, the human body, like the animal, is a clockwork machine. Unlike animal machines, however, it is driven by a ghost that is ''invisible, inaudible and has no size and weight'' p. 20 . Ryle argues that it is hard to conceive of causal transactions between the clockwork machine and the...
Coda
All secular environmental ethics so far devised have built on one or another of the historical moral philosophies reviewed here. Religiously specific environmental ethics have been based on the tenets of various religious traditions not only of Judaism and Christianity, but also of Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Islam. The articles in this encyclopedia focused on religiously specific environmental ethics provide the background necessary to understand them. We thought...
A Blind Spot
From its inception environmental ethics has focused mainly on the normative status of wilderness and wildlife. The many arguments about moral standing and intrinsic value have been aimed at finding a more appropriate balance between the domestic and the wild, mainly by valorizing the wild. One example is Paul W. Taylor's theory of respect for nature, which purports to be bio-centric but provides inherent worth intrinsic value only for wild organisms, expressly excluding domestic ones....
The Scope Of Environmental Psychology
Environmental psychology encompasses theory, research, and practice aimed at making buildings more humane and improving people's relationship with their surroundings, natural and built. Society invests enormous efforts in the construction and maintenance of key features of the physical environment such as cities, buildings, parks, and streets. Designing these features to maximize the well-being of both humans and nature is a major objective of environmental psychology. Environmental psychology...
Passmore John Arthur
John Passmore, an Australian philosopher, was the author of the first philosophical monograph on environmental ethics, Man's Responsibility for Nature 1980 first edition, 1974 . Although Passmore's anthropocentric approach was widely rejected in favor of nonanthropo-centric alternatives in the decades immediately following the appearance of his book, Passmore was enormously influential in persuading philosophers that environmental issues merited serious attention. Unlike his professional...
German Idealism And Nature Fichte And Schelling
German idealism developed out of Immanuel Kant's philosophy. The German idealists endorsed Kant's view that human beings are autonomous, capable of breaking from causal determination to set their own values and thoughts. However, Kant thought that human beings not only are autonomous but also appear empirically in everyday experience to be part of nature, which he understood as the fully determined causal order of Newtonian science. On the basis of these Kantian views, Fichte held that the...
Time Preference
The most controversial reason for discounting is pure time preference, which most economists endorse but some have rejected. Pure time preference states that things that happen in the future are less valuable than things that happen now simply because they happen in the future. The main argument for basing a discount rate on time preference appeals to democracy or citizens' sovereignty. When most people think about their own lives or about government spending, they prefer to get benefits sooner...
Aristotle And The Peripatetics
Aristotle 384-322 BCE insisted that nature, and all its parts, living and nonliving, are directed by the principle of telos purpose . As he maintained Politics 1256b20 , ''Nature does nothing in vain.'' He investigated questions about the natural world in a way that was more systematic and inductive than that of the natural philosophers. He gathered that the living and nonliving merged with one another in gradual stages, but his scheme was hierarchical. Although he thought making sharp...
Resource Extraction Ethics And Social Justice
There is a second problem with the ethics of cost-benefit analysis. The mere quantity of benefits versus costs does not provide a sound basis for judging issues of social justice. For example, even if the overall benefits exceed costs in a given case, there should be scrutiny of the kinds of costs and who must endure them. Pareto-basedprinci-ples justify a distribution of benefits to some if it does not worsen the condition of others. Modified versions may permit those harms if they are...
Bacon Francis
Francis Bacon was born in London on January 22, 1561, and died of bronchitis on April 9, 1626. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge University, from 1573 to 1575 only two years, because of poor health. He was a lawyer, philosopher, statesman, essayist, and above all, master of the English language. Bacon was unquestionably the most eloquent voice of Western modernity at the birth of the age of science, technology, and a quantitative economy. Galileo Galilei 1564-1642 asserted that the ''book...
Deep Green Theory
Sylvan's research program was much broader than the ambit of environmental philosophy it was systematically linked with his and others' work in metaphysics, semantics, logic, epistemology, and value theory. He also connected it with work outside mainstream Australasian and Anglo-American philosophical inquiry as well as with work in other disciplines, including Taoism, Buddhism, nihilism, cosmology, demography, politics, and economics. Sylvan also addressed environmental policy issues in his...
Conflicts Between Vegetarians And Environmentalists
These facts suggest the possible importance of vegetarianism and animal rights for the environmental movement and the urgency of finding common ground for a triangular alliance. Yet rather than uniting in the war to prevent massive species extinction, catastrophic ecological breakdown, and irreversible climate change, vegetarian and environmental camps remain divided by deep differences in philosophy and lifestyle Motavalli 2002, Sap-ontzis 2004 . Both camps break with anthropocentrism the...
Alternative Interpretations
The interpretation presented above is a standard reading of Descartes's views. Although there is considerable textual basis for this reading, some recent writers have argued that Descartes's views may have been more nuanced and perhaps more ambiguous than this reading allows. For example, philosophers such as John Cotting-ham 1978 have argued that although Descartes denies that animals have reason, he accepts the idea that animals experience passions and sensations. It also has been claimed...
Environmental Challenges Since The Nineteenth Century
After the colonization of India by the British, a philosophy that viewed nature largely in terms of its economic value for industry tended to marginalize the views of communities that expressed their dependence upon the environment in religious terms and that supported its protection. From the middle of the nineteenth century, British interests exploited India's forests for a burgeoning shipbuilding industry at home and an expanding railway network in India. Timber was in demand for railway...
Sarowiwa Ken
Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa, best known as Ken Saro-Wiwa, was born in Bori, an Ogoni village, on October 10, 1941. The Ogoni are an indigenous community of about 500,000 in the oil-rich Niger Delta of southeast Nigeria. He attended Government College, Umuahia, and later the University of Ibadan in western Nigeria. Saro-Wiwa became the community's spokesman in its battle against the environmental devastation caused by the long-time oil exploration and extraction activities of foreign oil companies,...
Bookchin Murray
Murray Bookchin was born on January 14, 1921, in New York City to Russian immigrant parents. A founder and ardent defender of the school of thought known as Social Ecology, he was a leading advocate of left-libertarian and anarchist ideas. Early in life he was involved with Marxist, Communist, and Trotskyist movements but broke from these associations as he embraced more antiauthor-itarian, ecological, decentralized, and democratic orientations in philosophy, politics, and community...