thesis on environmental ethics

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The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics

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1 Introducing Contemporary Environmental Ethics

Stephen M. Gardiner is Professor of Philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of the Human Dimensions of the Environment at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of A Perfect Moral Storm (Oxford, 2011), co-author of Debating Climate Ethics (Oxford, 2016), editor of Virtue Ethics, Old and New (Cornell, 2005), and co-editor of Climate Ethics: Essential Readings (Oxford, 2010). His research focuses on global environmental problems, future generations and virtue ethics.

Allen Thompson, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Oregon State University

Published: 07 April 2016
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Today humanity faces radical global climate change, mass species extinctions, and unprecedented transformations to both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems across the globe. Environmental ethics is an academic subfield of philosophy concerned with normative and evaluative propositions about the world of nature and, perhaps more generally, the moral fabric of relations between human beings and the world we occupy. This Handbook contains 45 newly commissioned essays written by leading experts and emerging voices and represent some of the best and most contemporary thinking in environmental ethics. The chapters range over a broad variety of issues, concepts, and perspectives that are both central to and characteristic of the field, thus providing an authoritative but accessible account of the history, analysis, and prospect of ideas that are essential to contemporary environmental ethics.

1 Perspective on the Anthropocene

Humans are relative newcomers. The Earth is around 4.6 billion years old, and multicellular life evolved 2.1 billion years ago, yet the oldest fossil remains of anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens date back a mere 195,000 years, or 0.004% of the planet’s history. For the vast majority of humanity’s existence so far, its influence on the terrestrial environment and biotic communities was the result of activities of small bands of hunter-gatherers. Consequently, human impacts were likely to have been relatively limited, being local in scope and modest in magnitude, or at least comparable to many other species.

At some point, humans began to have much more exceptional effects. One plausible example occurs about 12,000 years ago, on the cusp between the Pleistocene and Holocene geological epochs. The Late Pleistocene Extinction Event was a worldwide phenomenon of megafauna extinctions, especially pronounced in North America. Paleontologists have hypothesized three possible causal drivers: natural climate change (as the ice sheets retreated), human predation (the “prehistoric overkill hypothesis”), and significant trophic cascades following the (anthropogenic) demise of woolly mammoths ( Sandom et al., 2014 ). Here, for the first time, human activity is put forward as potentially a major cause of global and systematic environmental change .

A more familiar example is associated with the First Agricultural (or Neolithic) Revolution, which originated around 10,000 bc in Mesopotamia and then spread across the Middle East into Europe, Asia, parts of Africa and eventually into the Americas. With new techniques of food cultivation, including agriculture and the domestication of animals, human beings engaged in the wholesale alteration of landscapes and ecosystems to suit human purposes (see Lyons et al., 2015 ). Similar increases in human impact are associated with the Age of Enlightenment and “scientific revolution” of the 17th and 18th centuries (see Merchant, 1980 ) and the shift from agrarian to industrial societies in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Still, perhaps the most striking shift is much more recent. In the “Great Acceleration” after World War II, the human “population doubled in just 50 years, to over 6 billion by the end of the 20th century [and] the global economy increased by more than 15-fold” ( Steffen et al., 2007 : 617. See also Steffen et al., 2004 ). This radical human expansion has had dramatic effects, from the emerging threat of dangerous climate change (see Section 7 ) to the onset of the Earth’s sixth great extinction event. 1

Consider, for example, the “Planetary Boundaries” analysis, which sets out the limits of a “safe operating space for humanity” and suggests that several of the planet’s major bio-systems are currently at risk or in decline ( Rockström et al. (2009) . Rockström and his colleagues identify nine sectors of Earth system operation relevant to human well-being and propose quantification for seven: climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone, biochemical nitrogen cycle and phosphorus cycle, global freshwater use, land system use, and biodiversity loss. Within the quantified sectors, they claim that we have already crossed boundaries pertaining to climate change, the rate of interference with the nitrogen cycle, and the rate of biodiversity loss. 2 The remaining four quantified boundaries (global freshwater use, land system change, ocean acidification, and stratospheric ozone depletion) remain areas of great uncertainty, largely because we lack scientific knowledge about the nature of biophysical thresholds at the planetary scale. This, of course, is hardly comforting, since we may already be outside the “safe operating space.”

The sheer scale of human impact has become so great that some have proposed defining a new unit within the geological time scale: the Anthropocene, the age of “human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth” ( Crutzen & Schwägerl, 2011 ). The idea and the language of the Anthropocene are now widely employed. Indeed, this term is currently being taken so seriously that an official decision on its usage from the geologists is expected from the International Commission on Stratigraphy in 2016. Still, the proposal continues to generate significant controversy. Some consider it grossly hubristic to name a geologic period after one’s own kind and morally repugnant, if not dangerous ( Vucetich et al., 2015 ; Hamilton, 2014 ). By contrast, some seem to enthusiastically embrace an open future of “new nature” designed by us and for us, exhibiting our human ingenuity ( Ellis, 2011 ; Seielstad, 2012 ; Pearce, 2015 ). Others still have taken the idea of the Anthropocene to be purely descriptive but representing something morally significant—human responsibility for the state of the planet—thus they find the idea heuristically useful for advancing a more traditional environmental ethos of Earth stewardship ( Purdy, 2015 ; Marris, 2011 ). 3

As editors, we do not need to take a stance on controversies surrounding “the Anthropocene.” Nevertheless, we do believe that the proposal that we are entering, or have recently entered, a new geological period is no accident. Today human activity effects environmental change globally, systematically, and at a fundamental level. Moreover, its scale has increased dramatically in just a few generations, a very small portion of human history. Human activities now threaten basic planetary systems, yet we continue to accelerate rapidly into an uncertain environmental future.

2 Organization of the Volume

In such a context, the field of environmental ethics provides much needed analysis of values, norms, and concepts relevant to responding well to the radical anthropogenic environmental change that the 21st century promises. Established as a professional subfield of academic philosophy only in the early 1970s, the field is changing to confront new environmental, social, technical, and political realities.

In this collection, we hope to provide guidance for those interested in exploring this relatively new territory. Our strategy is as follows. Each chapter reviews the role of a key topic, idea, concept, problem, or approach in the field and briefly reflects on its future. It provides an informed entry-point into the area that helps situate the reader in the relevant literature. Although the chapters do not aspire to represent consensus opinion, the authors do aim to provide a solid grounding in the relevant concepts and basic positions, as well as an informed opinion about possible future developments in the subject area. Consequently, each chapter can be seen as an authoritative “first step” on some topic to get you started, rather than the “last word.” Think of the collection as a set of maps, compasses, and other tools that one might take along when setting out on an evolving journey whose destination is yet to be decided.

Our selection has been influenced by our own sense of where the field stands, what is exciting about it, and what is needed. 4 One decision we made was to emphasize an increasing politicization of environmental ethics, in the positive sense of the increasing attention being paid to justice and other political values. A related decision was to expand the range of authors represented to include not just traditional, theoretical moral philosophers, but also philosophers of science, political philosophers, applied ethicists, political theorists, and philosophers of law.

A third choice was to set aside areas already well-covered elsewhere. For example, we did not commission a section on traditional, cultural attitudes, such as those of classical China, India, or Greece. Nor are there chapters representing diverse religious perspectives on the environment, such as Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, or Islam (see Jamieson, 2001 ). 5 Similarly, we did not commission chapters on the history of the environment in political thought (see Gabrielson et al., 2016 ), nor those representing the global plurality of diverse worldviews, such as Polynesian paganism, South American eco-eroticism, African biocommunitarianism, and Australian Dreamtime (see Callicott, 1997 ).

In general, we have tried to be guided in our commissions by an emphasis on the importance of confronting radical environmental change and the special challenges facing humanity in this vital period of its history. In our view, if this volume plays even a small part in preparing the next generation of scholars to contribute to this work, then it will have achieved something of real importance.

3 Description of Chapters

The Handbook is organized into eight sections. In the remainder of this introduction, we explain the theme unifying each section and provide a very brief description of each chapter. 6

Section 1 sets out a variety of social contexts for contemporary environmental ethics. In chapter 2 , Jason Kawall provides a clear and detailed history of the field of environmental ethics, providing an account of key movements and theories shaping the field, including anthropocentrism, biocentrism, eco-holism, deep ecology, ecofeminism, pragmatism, and virtue theory. In chapter 3 , Wendy Parker illuminates the practice of environmental science through contemporary philosophy of science, covering issues such as the nature of scientific evidence, the use and evaluation of scientific models, and questions of values and objectivity in scientific practice. In chapter 4 , John O’Neill examines the role of economic values by considering two alternative and competing sets of answers to the question: Is there a relation between the increasing extension of markets and market norms to previously non-market goods and the growth of environmental problems? His exploration sheds light on the role of cost-benefit analysis in environmental policy formation and the development of new markets for goods such as emission rights and biodiversity offsets. In chapter 5 , Daniel Butt’s focus is on the limitations of command-and-control and market-based legal mechanisms in the pursuit of environmental justice. He argues for a need to supplement existing instruments of environmental governance with an “ecological ethos” shared among a wide range of cooperative non-state actors. Holmes Rolston wraps up the opening section in chapter 6 by reflecting on the controversial proposal that we have entered the Anthropocene, the age of human domination, by considering three distinct sets of responses to the provocative idea that we are now moving “beyond the natural.”

Against these background social conditions, the chapters in Section 2 present a version of the influential “expanding circle of moral considerability” framework for setting out distinct accounts of who or what direct moral duties are owed to my moral agents In chapter 7 , Allen Thompson considers the widely accepted thesis that anthropocentrism—the view that all and only human beings have an intrinsic moral value—is the ideological root of our “environmental crisis.” Thompson distinguishes three types of anthropocentrism and, following others, suggests how one form may be simply unavoidable. He argues that, nonetheless, an appropriate focus on our very humanity remains a promising way forward in environmental ethics. In chapter 8 , Lori Gruen set outs one form of non-anthropocentrism, sometimes called sentiocentrism, the view that locates human beings in a wider class of animals capable of conscious experience who thus have morally relevant interests in the content of their experiences. She argues that empathy and respect leads us to focus on what counts as the well-being of conscious others from their own perspective. In chapter 9 , Clare Palmer considers ideas associated with biocentrism, the perspective that life itself is deserving of moral respect and perhaps bears an intrinsic value or inherent worth. Palmer distinguishes among egalitarian, inegalitarian, monistic, and pluralistic versions of biocentrism and whether they are grounded in a virtue, consequentialist, or deontological ethical theory. In chapter 10 , J. Baird Callicott considers the view that collections of entities, such as species, ecosystems, landscapes, and biomes, may be the loci of intrinsic moral value, the objects of direct moral duties, and deserving of due moral consideration. Callicott describes how developments in the study of the human microbiome support a surprising conclusion that even “individual” human beings are themselves actually ecological collectives. In chapter 11 , Philip Cafaro moves one step beyond customary accounts of who or what counts as a subject of value in nature to offer a spirited defense of wildness as a value-conferring property. Cafaro argues that although preserving the wild has long been a central value in “new world” conservation and preservation philosophies, we are quickly losing wild nature, due primarily to human overpopulation and overconsumption.

Section 3 considers diverse theoretical accounts of the nature of environmental value (rather than the subjects or bearers of that value, as in Section 2 ). In chapter 12 Katie McShane argues against the popular claim that metaethics is irrelevant for environmental ethics. Instead, she claims that contemporary views in analytical metaethics are able to address concerns in environmental ethics from several different theoretical perspectives. In chapter 13 , Alan Holland discusses how reasons for doing something vis-à-vis the environment are connected with our motivational repertoire and quest for meaning. He distinguishes three types of practical reasons and concludes that a Leopoldian position of having regard for the land community is superior to other perspectives well represented in the field, including traditional appeals to intrinsic value, relational accounts of caring, or perfectionist views about the well-lived human life. In chapter 14 , Martin Drenthen develops a hermeneutic account of how we find meaning in nature through normatively potent acts of interpretation, directed at landscapes and other environments, and the connection of such meaning with the development of an environmental identity. In chapter 15 , Ted Toadvine explores how the tradition of phenomenology contributes to environmental thought by emphasizing the primacy of experience and providing a critique of the metaphysical naturalism and instrumentalist framing characteristic of technocratic, economic, and managerial approaches to nature. Finally, in chapter 16 Emily Brady explores key issues about aesthetic experience and valuing natural objects, processes, and phenomenon. She parses the debate as being between two central views, “scientific cognitivism” and “non-cognitivism”; stresses the values of a pluralistic approach; and closes with concern for developing further accounts of interactions between aesthetic and ethical values.

As the last section with an explicit focus in ethical theory, Section 4 contains chapters canvasing different theoretical perspectives on how we ought to think about the normative basis of environmentalism, including consequentialist, deontic, virtue, care, and spiritual grounds. In chapter 17 , Avram Hiller discusses consequentialist environmental ethics; distinguishes classical utilitarian, biocentric, and ecocentric forms; and contrasts the consequentialist approach to environmentalism with deontological, virtue theoretic, and pragmatic approaches. The deontological approach is taken up and defended in chapter 18 by Ben Hale, who develops a theory of right action based on Habermasian discourse ethics and an account of interpersonal justifications. In chapter 19 , Ronald Sandler sets out an alternative non-consequentialist normative theory, based in the virtues of personal character. He describes virtue ethics as a distinctive approach to normative theory, attempting to demonstrate how virtue ethics can accommodate whatever the correct account of value in nature is, how its pluralism is indispensable to environmental ethics, and how it offers a plausible principle of right action for use in decision making. In chapter 20 , Kyle Powys Whyte and Chris Cuomo relate two alternatives to mainstream normative ethics, each based in the notion of care. Indigenous approaches to environmental ethics highlight caring relations within interdependent human and non-human communities, whereas feminist environmental care ethics bring out the importance of empowering communities to care for themselves, along with the social and ecological communities with which they are integrated. Bron Taylor in chapter 21 closes this section with a historical tour of the important role that perceptions of environmental systems and places as sacred have in grounding environmental ethics—both in the past and the present. Taylor contrasts this perception of the sacred in nature with the transcendent focus more characteristic of the major world religions, on one hand, and the scientific materialist worldview that underlies most contemporary environmental ethics, on the other.

Section 5 tackles a variety of key concepts that are useful for framing and addressing problems in environmental ethics. The topic of chapter 22 is moral responsibility. Ken Shockley investigates the difficulties encountered when trying to give an account of our individual contributions to collective harms, emphasizing the influence individuals can have through connections with institutions and practices. Justice is taken up in chapter 23 by Derek Bell, who presents three kinds of challenges to traditional liberal conceptions of justice and argues that an ecologically aware theory of justice is likely to exhibit some striking differences. In chapter 24 , Chris Cuomo details the significance that norms of gender, sexual inequalities, and the often-overlooked perspective of women have for environmental ethics. Gender norms and roles, she explains, are often promoted as “natural” rather than socially constructed and connect the oppression of women with the domination of nature. Steve Vanderheiden, in chapter 25 , evaluates human rights as an ethical construct and a political mechanism for developing protections against environmental harms that threaten human well-being. In chapter 26 , Tim Hayward develops the concept of “ecological space” and its connection to a minimally decent human life. Hayward then distinguishes between using, occupying , and commanding ecological space, which enables him to address distributional inequities though a variety of distinct deontic categories. Chapter 27 presents Jonathan Aldred’s treatment of risk and precaution, in which the appropriate place of cost-benefit analysis and its relation to a precautionary principle in decision making are carefully examined. Chapter 28 , by John Barry, proposes an account of “green republican citizenship” after exploring connections between the decline in active citizenship with the development of consumer identities and a transactional mode of democratic politics. Chapter 29 concerns intergenerational ethics. John Nolt argues that responsibilities owed to future individuals—human or not—demand that we reduce the human population and must keep most fossil fuels in the ground. In chapter 30 , Bryan Norton presents a communitarian, public-interest conception of sustainability as offering a path to favor protecting ecophysical features of the environment, rather than a mere transfer of wealth or utility, across generations.

Section 6 focuses on specific areas of concern for the application of environmental ethics. Classic issues of environmental pollution are explored in chapter 31 by Kevin Elliott, who identifies pollution as a significant threat to disadvantaged, low-income countries and non-human organisms, calling for greater attention to be given to ethical issues in the scientific research needed to identify harmful pollutants and policy issues concerning their regulation. Chapter 32 concerns human population growth, identified as morally urgent by Elizabeth Cripps, who urges us to approach policy formation with both environmental ethics and global justice in mind. In chapter 33 , Kristin Schrader-Frechette describes the environmental harms caused by energy produced from fossil fuels and nuclear power and critically analyzes excuses for society not switching to clean, renewable energy. David Kaplan’s work in chapter 34 examines the role of narratives in a practical approach to understanding the relationships among food, agriculture, and environmental ethics. Angela Kalloff’s contribution, chapter 35 , sets out four distinct normative approaches to an ethics of water: human rights, ecocentric non-instrumentalism, water justice, and water cooperation. She concludes that a co-operative approach is the most promising, in part because it already incorporates dimensions of the rights-based and ecocentric perspectives. In chapter 36 , Jeremy Bendik-Keymer and Chris Haufe begin the development of an ethical position on anthropogenic mass extinction, opening with insights about the banality of evil and built with appeals to environmental justice, loss of value, and the failure of autonomy. Paul Thompson examines the fascinating place of technology in chapter 37 , discussing not only its role mediating human environmental impacts but also its place in shaping our perceptions of and orientation toward the world. Much of the work in philosophy of technology crosses interdisciplinary boundaries as it bears on the connections between science and technology. Section 6 closes with chapter 38 , in which Marion Hourdequin confronts the practices of ecosystem management and identifies both conceptual and ethical challenges for the practice introduced as an improved alternative to other strategies aimed simply at maximizing yields of single-species resources.

There is little argument that anthropogenic global climate change is the defining environmental problem of our time. Whereas many chapters in the collection consider it as illustrating their respective subjects, the chapters in Section 7 focus exclusively on key dimensions the problem. In chapter 39 , Henry Shue offers a compelling case for climate mitigation based on elimination of carbon dioxide emissions by the rapid global transition to an energy regime based on clean sources of affordable power. Cooperation in this transition, he argues, cannot be expected from poorer countries without needed assistance with adaptation. In chapter 40 , Clare Heyward contends that justice in adaptation should register not only protection of the basic material interest of individuals but also include efforts directed at securing the conditions necessary to maintain one’s cultural identity. In chapter 41 , Andrew Light discusses important issues of international climate diplomacy, drawing on his experience working to direct strategies for the US State Department at international meetings under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Finally in chapter 42 , Steve Gardiner addresses geoengineering (roughly, “grand technological interventions into basic planetary systems at a global scale”). Focusing on climate engineering, he argues that early policy framings often marginalize salient ethical concerns, avoiding both important questions of justification and vital contextual issues.

The concluding Section 8 contains essays dedicated to issues raised in our attempts to realize the requisite social change. David Schmidtz explains how principles of justice are complemented and importantly matched by principles of conflict resolution in chapter 43 . Then, in chapter 44 , Ben Minteer presents a pragmatic conception of environmental ethics for the purpose of integrating it with the rapidly growing normative enterprise of sustainability science and its goal of moving society toward a durable socio-ecological relationship. In chapter 45 , John Meyer offers a strategy for circumventing the barrier to protective environmental policy, most pronounced in wealthy societies, affected by a perceived dichotomy between self-interest and sacrifice. He draws attention to the ubiquity of notions of sacrifice in everyday life and attempts to reduce its ability to short-circuit ambitious calls to action. In chapter 46 , Avner de Shalit encourages the move from articulating an environmental ethic to undertaking environmental action by distinguishing two ways a particular problem may be framed, either as a problem of environmental awareness or a problem of political consciousness. He closes by arguing how democracy remains a viable avenue for achieving radical changes.

4 Conclusion

As at the beginning of the Holocene, today humanity faces radical global climate change, mass species extinctions, and unprecedented transformations to both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems across the globe. Yet this time there is no doubt that human activity is the primary driver, the scale of human affect is much greater, and the rate of global ecological change is unprecedented. The future of the basic conditions for all life on the planet—indeed all known life in the universe—is in our hands. So, what shall we do? The forty-six chapters assembled here represent some of the best and most contemporary thinking in environmental ethics, the field expressly concerned with understanding normative and evaluative dimensions of the many and diverse environmental problems that confront us. Hopefully, taking the issues and concerns they highlight seriously is a good first step.

On climate change, see Section 7 of the Oxford Hanbook of Environmental Ethics ; on mass extinction, see Bendik-Keymer and Haufe, chapter 36 (all subsequent chapter references herein are to chapters in the Handbook).

The proposed “boundaries” are human-set values keeping us a safe distance from systemic thresholds, which are defined “non-linear transitions in the functioning of coupled human-environmental systems.” Thus, crossing the boundaries puts humanity at significant risk of radical and unpredictable changes to the global environmental conditions.

On the idea that we have entered the Anthropocene, see Holmes Rolston, chapter 6 .

For various reasons we were unable to include chapters on all the subjects that are important and merit attention.

See, however, Bron Taylor’s contribution on reverence for the sacred, in chapter 21 .

The method employed in the table of contents is meant to quickly reveal the structure of the collection. Each section title is followed by a short description, and each chapter is labeled with a descriptive subject term, followed by the proper title given by author.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Environmental Ethics

Introduction.

Western Perspectives
Global Perspectives
Anthropocentrism
Moral Extensionism
Eco/Biocentrism/Environmental Holism/Deep Ecology
Ecophenomenology
Environmental Marxism/Ecosocialism
Late-20th-Century Ecofeminism
21st-Century Ecofeminism
Late-20th-Century Environmental Justice
21st-Century Environmental Justice
The Moral Status of Nonhuman Animals
Environmental Ethics and Extinction
Environmental Ethics and Militarism
Environmental Ethics and the Climate Crisis

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Environmental Ethics by Wendy Lynne Lee LAST MODIFIED: 30 October 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0085

While many disciplines have begun to take the environment, its inhabitants, ecosystems, biotic diversity, and future stability more seriously, it falls to philosophy to flesh out the organizing concepts and principles of a viable environmental ethic. An ethic is a defensible way of life grounded in the wherewithal to address the anthropogenic causes of environmental crises like climate change. However true is Socrates’ claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, what counts as “worth living” must now recalibrate in light of a future characterized by catastrophic weather events, dwindling resources, accelerated disease vectors, human and nonhuman migration, and the geopolitical upheaval either caused or accelerated by a warming atmosphere. Can the appeal to traditional moral theories intended to adjudicate human conflicts be retooled to address contemporary environmental crises? This is not obvious. Moral principles made to solve human moral dilemmas have not prevented the pollution and exhaustion of limited planetary and atmospheric resources, and we no longer take it for granted that human welfare is the sole focus of moral concern. Notions like inherent worth, biotic integrity, and sustainability have become integral to environmental ethics discourse along with serious exploration of the moral considerability of nonhuman animals. Can a human-centered— anthropocentric —environmental ethic provide sufficient incentive to address environmental crises? Does sentience have moral weight beyond human consciousness? Whose suffering matters? Do we have any moral duty to care about the future? Some argue that the fact of climate change reveals our traditional moral principles to be inadequate. They argue we need an ethic that aims to reach beyond human beings. Others argue that, suitably modified, long-standing moral ideals aimed at maximizing happiness or minimizing suffering can help us draft a more sustainable ethical charter, or that rights can be extended to the protection of nonhuman entities. Still others argue for an ecological version of the precautionary principle : wherever an action, practice, policy, law, or (de)regulation poses a well-supported likelihood of causing harm to the planet’s regenerative capacities or to its atmosphere, the burden to demonstrate that harm will not occur as a consequence of that action falls on the actor(s) or agencies responsible for it. The precautionary principle is anthropocentric, but it includes the active recognition of interdependency as prerequisite for survival. A number of feminist, antiracist, and social justice theorists show how the intersection of ecology, economics, ethnicity, gender, and species status informs the ways in which we conceive environmental issues as matters of justice.

General Overviews

Environmental ethics is an enormous field of inquiry that can be subdivided in a number of ways, many of which will overlap historically, thematically, or with respect to specific issues. It is also worth noting that some anthologies that would at an earlier time have been included under the broad header of Western Perspectives now more appropriately belong to Global Perspectives in virtue of a revised selection of essays that aim at a more diverse inclusion of non-Western voices in an environmental conversation that has become more and more international and intercultural in scope. This is partly due to the greater recognition that environmental issues and crises are immune to the conflicts of economies and nation states, partly because of the revolutionary capacity of the Internet to connect thinkers and ideas, and partly due to a growing appreciation of the fact that Western philosophy does not command a monopoly on argument and theory. Hence, while this section is divided into “Western” and “Global,” what is reflected in the distinction is that growing appreciation as well as an understanding that the history of environmental ethics has many cultural and theoretical roots. Indeed, the tremendous growth in environmental theory looks more like the production of a rhizome than single seed.

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Environmental Ethics

Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its nonhuman contents. This entry covers: (1) the challenge of environmental ethics to the anthropocentrism (i.e., human-centeredness) embedded in traditional western ethical thinking; (2) the early development of the discipline in the 1960s and 1970s; (3) the connection of deep ecology, feminist environmental ethics, and social ecology to politics; (4) the attempt to apply traditional ethical theories, including consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, to support contemporary environmental concerns; and (5) the focus of environmental literature on wilderness, and possible future developments of the discipline.

1. Introduction: The Challenge of Environmental Ethics

2. the early development of environmental ethics, 3.1 deep ecology, 3.2 feminism and the environment, 3.3 disenchantment and the new animism, 3.4 social ecology and bioregionalism, 4. traditional ethical theories and contemporary environment ethics, 5. wilderness, the built environment, poverty and politics, 6. pathologies of environmental crisis: theories and empirical research, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries.

Suppose that putting out natural fires, culling feral animals or destroying some individual members of overpopulated indigenous species is necessary for the protection of the integrity of a certain ecosystem. Will these actions be morally permissible or even required? Is it morally acceptable for farmers in non-industrial countries to practise slash and burn techniques to clear areas for agriculture? Consider a mining company which has performed open pit mining in some previously unspoiled area. Does the company have a moral obligation to restore the landform and surface ecology? And what is the value of a humanly restored environment compared with the originally natural environment? It is often said to be morally wrong for human beings to pollute and destroy parts of the natural environment and to consume a huge proportion of the planet's natural resources. If that is wrong, is it simply because a sustainable environment is essential to (present and future) human well-being? Or is such behaviour also wrong because the natural environment and/or its various contents have certain values in their own right so that these values ought to be respected and protected in any case? These are among the questions investigated by environmental ethics. Some of them are specific questions faced by individuals in particular circumstances, while others are more global questions faced by groups and communities. Yet others are more abstract questions concerning the value and moral standing of the natural environment and its nonhuman components.

In the literature on environmental ethics the distinction between instrumental value and intrinsic value (meaning “non-instrumental value”) has been of considerable importance. The former is the value of things as means to further some other ends, whereas the latter is the value of things as ends in themselves regardless of whether they are also useful as means to other ends. For instance, certain fruits have instrumental value for bats who feed on them, since feeding on the fruits is a means to survival for the bats. However, it is not widely agreed that fruits have value as ends in themselves. We can likewise think of a person who teaches others as having instrumental value for those who want to acquire knowledge. Yet, in addition to any such value, it is normally said that a person, as a person, has intrinsic value, i.e., value in his or her own right independently of his or her prospects for serving the ends of others. For another example, a certain wild plant may have instrumental value because it provides the ingredients for some medicine or as an aesthetic object for human observers. But if the plant also has some value in itself independently of its prospects for furthering some other ends such as human health, or the pleasure from aesthetic experience, then the plant also has intrinsic value. Because the intrinsically valuable is that which is good as an end in itself, it is commonly agreed that something's possession of intrinsic value generates a prima facie direct moral duty on the part of moral agents to protect it or at least refrain from damaging it (see O'Neil 1992 and Jameson 2002 for detailed accounts of intrinsic value).

Many traditional western ethical perspectives, however, are anthropocentric or human-centered in that either they assign intrinsic value to human beings alone (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a strong sense) or they assign a significantly greater amount of intrinsic value to human beings than to any nonhuman things such that the protection or promotion of human interests or well-being at the expense of nonhuman things turns out to be nearly always justified (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a weak sense). For example, Aristotle ( Politics , Bk. 1, Ch. 8) maintains that “nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man” and that the value of nonhuman things in nature is merely instrumental. Generally, anthropocentric positions find it problematic to articulate what is wrong with the cruel treatment of nonhuman animals, except to the extent that such treatment may lead to bad consequences for human beings. Immanuel Kant (“Duties to Animals and Spirits”, in Lectures on Ethics ), for instance, suggests that cruelty towards a dog might encourage a person to develop a character which would be desensitized to cruelty towards humans. From this standpoint, cruelty towards nonhuman animals would be instrumentally, rather than intrinsically, wrong. Likewise, anthropocentrism often recognizes some non-intrinsic wrongness of anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) environmental devastation. Such destruction might damage the well-being of human beings now and in the future, since our well-being is essentially dependent on a sustainable environment (see Passmore 1974, Bookchin 1990, Norton, Hutchins, Stevens, and Maple (eds.) 1995).

When environmental ethics emerged as a new sub-discipline of philosophy in the early 1970s, it did so by posing a challenge to traditional anthropocentrism. In the first place, it questioned the assumed moral superiority of human beings to members of other species on earth. In the second place, it investigated the possibility of rational arguments for assigning intrinsic value to the natural environment and its nonhuman contents.

It should be noted, however, that some theorists working in the field see no need to develop new, non-anthropocentric theories. Instead, they advocate what may be called enlightened anthropocentrism (or, perhaps more appropriately called, prudential anthropocentrism). Briefly, this is the view that all the moral duties we have towards the environment are derived from our direct duties to its human inhabitants. The practical purpose of environmental ethics, they maintain, is to provide moral grounds for social policies aimed at protecting the earth's environment and remedying environmental degradation. Enlightened anthropocentrism, they argue, is sufficient for that practical purpose, and perhaps even more effective in delivering pragmatic outcomes, in terms of policy-making, than non-anthropocentric theories given the theoretical burden on the latter to provide sound arguments for its more radical view that the nonhuman environment has intrinsic value (cf. Norton 1991, de Shalit 1994, Light and Katz 1996). Furthermore, some prudential anthropocentrists may hold what might be called cynical anthropocentrism, which says that we have a higher-level anthropocentric reason to be non-anthropocentric in our day-to-day thinking. Suppose that a day-to-day non-anthropocentrist tends to act more benignly towards the nonhuman environment on which human well-being depends. This would provide reason for encouraging non-anthropocentric thinking, even to those who find the idea of non-anthropocentric intrinsic value hard to swallow. In order for such a strategy to be effective one may need to hide one's cynical anthropocentrism from others and even from oneself.

Although nature was the focus of much nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, contemporary environmental ethics only emerged as an academic discipline in the 1970s. The questioning and rethinking of the relationship of human beings with the natural environment over the last thirty years reflected an already widespread perception in the 1960s that the late twentieth century faced a “population time bomb” and a serious environmental crisis. Among the accessible work that drew attention to a sense of crisis was Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1963), which consisted of a number of essays earlier published in the New Yorker magazine detailing how pesticides such as DDT, aldrin and deildrin concentrated through the food web. Commercial farming practices aimed at maximizing crop yields and profits, Carson speculates, are capable of impacting simultaneously on environmental and public health.

On the other hand, historian Lynn White jr., in a much-cited essay published in 1967 (White 1967) on the historical roots of the environmental crisis, argues that the main strands of Judeo-Christian thinking had encouraged the overexploitation of nature by maintaining the superiority of humans over all other forms of life on earth, and by depicting all of nature as created for the use of humans. White's thesis is widely discussed in theology, history, and has been subject to some sociological testing as well as being regularly discussed by philosophers (see Whitney 1993, Attfield 2001). Central to the rationale for his thesis were the works of the Church Fathers and The Bible itself, supporting the anthropocentric perspective that humans are the only things that matter on Earth. Consequently, they may utilize and consume everything else to their advantage without any injustice. For example, Genesis 1:27-8 states: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over fish of the sea, and over fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Likewise, Thomas Aquinas ( Summa Contra Gentiles , Bk. 3, Pt 2, Ch 112) argued that nonhuman animals are “ordered to man's use”. According to White, the Judeo-Christian idea that humans are created in the image of the transcendent supernatural God, who is radically separate from nature, also by extension radically separates humans themselves from nature. This ideology further opened the way for untrammelled exploitation of nature. Modern Western science itself, White argues, was “cast in the matrix of Christian theology” so that it too inherited the “orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature” (White jr. 1967, 1207). Clearly, without technology and science, the environmental extremes to which we are now exposed would probably not be realized. White's thesis, however, is that given the modern form of science and technology, Judeo-Christianity itself provides the original deep-seated drive to unlimited exploitation of nature. Nevertheless, White argued that some minority traditions within Christianity (e.g., the views of St. Francis) might provide an antidote to the “arrogance” of a mainstream tradition steeped in anthropocentrism.

Around the same time, the Stanford ecologist, Paul Ehrlich, published The Population Bomb (1968), warning that the growth of human population threatened the viability of planetary life-support systems. The sense of environmental crisis stimulated by those and other popular works was intensified by NASA's production and wide dissemination of a particularly potent image of earth from space taken at Christmas 1968 and featured in the Scientific American in September 1970. Here, plain to see, was a living, shining planet voyaging through space and shared by all of humanity, a precious vessel vulnerable to pollution and to the overuse of its limited capacities. In 1972 a team of researchers at MIT led by Dennis Meadows published the Limits to Growth study, a work that summed up in many ways the emerging concerns of the previous decade and the sense of vulnerability triggered by the view of the earth from space. In §10 of the commentary to the study, the researchers wrote:

We affirm finally that any deliberate attempt to reach a rational and enduring state of equilibrium by planned measures, rather than by chance or catastrophe, must ultimately be founded on a basic change of values and goals at individual, national and world levels.

The call for a “basic change of values” in connection to the environment (a call that could be interpreted in terms of either instrumental or intrinsic values) reflected a need for the development of environmental ethics as a new sub-discipline of philosophy.

The new field emerged almost simultaneously in three countries -- the United States, Australia, and Norway. In the first two of these countries, direction and inspiration largely came from the earlier twentieth century American literature of the environment. For instance, the Scottish emigrant John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club and “father of American conservation”) and subsequently the forester Aldo Leopold had advocated an appreciation and conservation of things “natural, wild and free”. Their concerns were motivated by a combination of ethical and aesthetic responses to nature as well as a rejection of crudely economic approaches to the value of natural objects (a historical survey of the confrontation between Muir's reverentialism and the human-centred conservationism of Gifford Pinchot (one of the major influences on the development of the US Forest Service) is provided in Norton 1991; also see Cohen 1984 and Nash (ed) 1990). Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (1949), in particular, advocated the adoption of a “land ethic”:

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. (vii-ix) A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. (224-5)

However, Leopold himself provided no systematic ethical theory or framework to support these ethical ideas concerning the environment. His views therefore presented a challenge and opportunity for moral theorists: could some ethical theory be devised to justify the injunction to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biosphere?

The land ethic sketched by Leopold, attempting to extend our moral concern to cover the natural environment and its nonhuman contents, was drawn on explicitly by the Australian philosopher Richard Routley (later Sylvan). According to Routley (1973 (cf. Routley and Routley 1980)), the anthropocentrism imbedded in what he called the “dominant western view”, or “the western superethic”, is in effect “human chauvinism”. This view, he argued, is just another form of class chauvinism, which is simply based on blind class “loyalty” or prejudice, and unjustifiably discriminates against those outside the privileged class. Furthermore, in his “last man” (and “last people”) arguments, Routley asked us to imagine the hypothetical situation in which the last person, surviving a world catastrophe, acted to ensure the elimination of all other living things and the destruction of all the landscapes after his demise. From the human-chauvinistic (or absolutely anthropocentric) perspective, the last person would do nothing morally wrong, since his or her destructive act in question would not cause any damage to the interest and well-being of humans, who would by then have disappeared. Nevertheless, Routley points out that there is a moral intuition that the imagined last act would be morally wrong. An explanation for this judgment, he argued, is that those nonhuman objects in the environment, whose destruction is ensured by the last person, have intrinsic value, a kind of value independent of their usefulness for humans. From his critique, Routley concluded that the main approaches in traditional western moral thinking were unable to allow the recognition that natural things have intrinsic value, and that the tradition required overhaul of a significant kind.

Leopold's idea that the “land” as a whole is an object of our moral concern also stimulated writers to argue for certain moral obligations toward ecological wholes, such as species, communities, and ecosystems, not just their individual constituents. The U.S.-based theologian and environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III, for instance, argued that species protection was a moral duty (Rolston 1975). It would be wrong, he maintained, to eliminate a rare butterfly species simply to increase the monetary value of specimens already held by collectors. Like Routley's “last man” arguments, Rolston's example is meant to draw attention to a kind of action that seems morally dubious and yet is not clearly ruled out or condemned by traditional anthropocentric ethical views. Species, Rolston went on to argue, are intrinsically valuable and are usually more valuable than individual specimens, since the loss of a species is a loss of genetic possibilities and the deliberate destruction of a species would show disrespect for the very biological processes which make possible the emergence of individual living things (also see Rolston 1989, Ch 10). Natural processes deserve respect, according to Rolston's quasi-religious perspective, because they constitute a nature (or God) which is itself intrinsically valuable (or sacred).

Meanwhile, the work of Christopher Stone (a professor of law at the University of Southern California) had become widely discussed. Stone (1972) proposed that trees and other natural objects should have at least the same standing in law as corporations. This suggestion was inspired by a particular case in which the Sierra Club had mounted a challenge against the permit granted by the U.S. Forest Service to Walt Disney Enterprises for surveys preparatory to the development of the Mineral King Valley, which was at the time a relatively remote game refuge, but not designated as a national park or protected wilderness area. The Disney proposal was to develop a major resort complex serving 14000 visitors daily to be accessed by a purpose-built highway through Sequoia National Park. The Sierra Club, as a body with a general concern for wilderness conservation, challenged the development on the grounds that the valley should be kept in its original state for its own sake.

Stone reasoned that if trees, forests and mountains could be given standing in law then they could be represented in their own right in the courts by groups such as the Sierra Club. Moreover, like any other legal person , these natural things could become beneficiaries of compensation if it could be shown that they had suffered compensatable injury through human activity. When the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, it was determined by a narrow majority that the Sierra Club did not meet the condition for bringing a case to court, for the Club was unable and unwilling to prove the likelihood of injury to the interest of the Club or its members. In a dissenting minority judgment, however, justices Douglas, Blackmun and Brennan mentioned Stone's argument: his proposal to give legal standing to natural things, they said, would allow conservation interests, community needs and business interests to be represented, debated and settled in court.

Reacting to Stone's proposal, Joel Feinberg (1974) raised a serious problem. Only items that have interests, Feinberg argued, can be regarded as having legal standing and, likewise, moral standing. For it is interests which are capable of being represented in legal proceedings and moral debates. This same point would also seem to apply to political debates. For instance, the movement for “animal liberation”, which also emerged strongly in the 1970s, can be thought of as a political movement aimed at representing the previously neglected interests of some animals (see Regan and Singer (eds.) 1976, Clark 1977, and also the entry on the moral status of animals ). Granted that some animals have interests that can be represented in this way, would it also make sense to speak of trees, forests, rivers, barnacles, or termites as having interests of a morally relevant kind? This issue was hotly contested in the years that followed. Meanwhile, John Passmore (1974) argued, like White, that the Judeo-Christian tradition of thought about nature, despite being predominantly “despotic”, contained resources for regarding humans as “stewards” or “perfectors” of God's creation. Skeptical of the prospects for any radically new ethic, Passmore cautioned that traditions of thought could not be abruptly overhauled. Any change in attitudes to our natural surroundings which stood the chance of widespread acceptance, he argued, would have to resonate and have some continuities with the very tradition which had legitimized our destructive practices. In sum, then, Leopold's land ethic, the historical analyses of White and Passmore, the pioneering work of Routley, Stone and Rolston, and the warnings of scientists, had by the late 1970s focused the attention of philosophers and political theorists firmly on the environment.

The confluence of ethical, political and legal debates about the environment, the emergence of philosophies to underpin animal rights activism and the puzzles over whether an environmental ethic would be something new rather than a modification or extension of existing ethical theories were reflected in wider social and political movements. The rise of environmental or “green” parties in Europe in the 1980s was accompanied by almost immediate schisms between groups known as “realists” versus “fundamentalists” (see Dobson 1992). The “realists” stood for reform environmentalism, working with business and government to soften the impact of pollution and resource depletion especially on fragile ecosystems or endangered species. The “fundies” argued for radical change, the setting of stringent new priorities, and even the overthrow of capitalism and liberal individualism, which were taken as the major ideological causes of anthropogenic environmental devastation. (Not that collectivist or communist countries do better in terms of their environmental record (see Dominick 1998).)

Underlying these political disagreements was the distinction between “shallow” and “deep” environmental movements, a distinction introduced in the early 1970s by another major influence on contemporary environmental ethics, the Norwegian philosopher and climber Arne Næss. Since the work of Næss has been significant in environmental politics, the discussion of his position is given in a separate section below.

3. Environmental Ethics and Politics

“Deep ecology” was born in Scandinavia, the result of discussions between Næss and his colleagues Sigmund Kvaløy and Nils Faarlund (see Næss 1973 and 1989; also see Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999 for a historical survey and commentary on the development of deep ecology). All three shared a passion for the great mountains. On a visit to the Himalayas, they became impressed with aspects of “Sherpa culture” particularly when they found that their Sherpa guides regarded certain mountains as sacred and accordingly would not venture onto them. Subsequently, Næss formulated a position which extended the reverence the three Norwegians and the Sherpas felt for mountains to other natural things in general.

The “shallow ecology movement”, as Næss (1973) calls it, is the “fight against pollution and resource depletion”, the central objective of which is “the health and affluence of people in the developed countries.” The “deep ecology movement”, in contrast, endorses “biospheric egalitarianism”, the view that all living things are alike in having value in their own right, independent of their usefulness to others. The deep ecologist respects this intrinsic value, taking care, for example, when walking on the mountainside not to cause unnecessary damage to the plants.

Inspired by Spinoza's metaphysics, another key feature of Næss's deep ecology is the rejection of atomistic individualism. The idea that a human being is such an individual possessing a separate essence, Næss argues, radically separates the human self from the rest of the world. To make such a separation not only leads to selfishness towards other people, but also induces human selfishness towards nature. As a counter to egoism at both the individual and species level, Næss proposes the adoption of an alternative relational “total-field image” of the world. According to this relationalism, organisms (human or otherwise) are best understood as “knots” in the biospherical net. The identity of a living thing is essentially constituted by its relations to other things in the world, especially its ecological relations to other living things. If people conceptualise themselves and the world in relational terms, the deep ecologists argue, then people will take better care of nature and the world in general.

As developed by Næss and others, the position also came to focus on the possibility of the identification of the human ego with nature. The idea is, briefly, that by identifying with nature I can enlarge the boundaries of the self beyond my skin. My larger -- ecological -- Self (the capital “S” emphasizes that I am something larger than my body and consciousness), deserves respect as well. To respect and to care for my Self is also to respect and to care for the natural environment, which is actually part of me and with which I should identify. “Self-realization”, in other words, is the reconnection of the shriveled human individual with the wider natural environment. Næss maintains that the deep satisfaction that we receive from identification with nature and close partnership with other forms of life in nature contributes significantly to our life quality. (One clear historical antecedent to this kind of nature spiritualism is the romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as expressed in his last work, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker )

When Næss's view crossed the Atlantic, it was sometimes merged with ideas emerging from Leopold's land ethic (see Devall and Sessions 1985; also see Sessions (ed) 1995). But Næss -- wary of the apparent totalitarian political implications of Leopold's position that individual interests and well-being should be subordinated to the holistic good of the earth's biotic community (see section 4 below) -- has always taken care to distance himself from advocating any sort of “land ethic”. (See Anker 1999 for cautions on interpreting Næss's relationalism as an endorsement of the kind of holism displayed in the land ethic, cf, Grey 1993). Some critics have argued that Næss's deep ecology is no more than an extended social-democratic version of utilitarianism, which counts human interests in the same calculation alongside the interests of all natural things (e.g., trees, wolves, bears, rivers, forests and mountains) in the natural environment (see Witoszek 1997). However, Næss failed to explain in any detail how to make sense of the idea that oysters or barnacles, termites or bacteria could have interests of any morally relevant sort at all. Without an account of this, Næss's early “biospheric egalitarianism” -- that all living things whatsoever had a similar right to live and flourish -- was an indeterminate principle in practical terms. It also remains unclear in what sense rivers, mountains and forests can be regarded as possessors of any kind of interests. This is an issue on which Næss has always remained elusive.

Biospheric egalitarianism was modified in the 1980s to the weaker claim that the flourishing of both human and non-human life have value in themselves. At the same time, Næss declared that his own favoured ecological philosophy -- “Ecosophy T”, as he called it after his Tvergastein mountain cabin -- was only one of several possible foundations for an environmental ethic. Deep ecology ceased to be a specific doctrine, but instead became a “platform”, of eight simple points, on which Næss hoped all deep green thinkers could agree. The platform was conceived as establishing a middle ground, between underlying philosophical orientations, whether Christian, Buddhist, Daoist, process philosophy, or whatever, and the practical principles for action in specific situations, principles generated from the underlying philosophies. Thus the deep ecological movement became explicitly pluralist (see Brennan 1999; c.f. Light 1996).

While Næss's Ecosophy T sees human Self-realization as a solution to the environmental crises resulting from human selfishness and exploitation of nature, some of the followers of the deep ecology platform in the United States and Australia further argue that the expansion of the human self to include nonhuman nature is supported by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, which is said to have dissolved the boundaries between the observer and the observed (see Fox 1984, 1990, and Devall and Sessions 1985; cf. Callicott 1985). These "relationalist" developments of deep ecology are, however, criticized by some feminist theorists. The idea of nature as part of oneself, one might argue, could justify the continued exploitation of nature instead. For one is presumably more entitled to treat oneself in whatever ways one likes than to treat another independent agent in whatever ways one likes. According to some feminist critics, the deep ecological theory of the “expanded self” is in effect a disguised form of human colonialism, unable to give nature its due as a genuine “other” independent of human interest and purposes (see Plumwood 1993, Ch. 7, 1999, and Warren 1999).

Meanwhile, some third-world critics have accused deep ecology of being elitist in its attempts to preserve wilderness experiences for only a select group of economically and socio-politically well-off people. The Indian writer Ramachandra Guha (1989, 1999) for instance, depicts the activities of many western-based conservation groups as a new form of cultural imperialism, aimed at securing converts to conservationism (cf. Bookchin 1987 and Brennan 1998a). “Green missionaries”, as Guha calls them, represent a movement aimed at further dispossessing the world's poor and indigenous people. “Putting deep ecology in its place,” he writes, “is to recognize that the trends it derides as “shallow” ecology might in fact be varieties of environmentalism that are more apposite, more representative and more popular in the countries of the South.” Although Næss himself repudiates suggestions that deep ecology is committed to any imperialism (see Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999, Ch. 36-7 and 41), Guha's criticism raises important questions about the application of deep ecological principles in different social, economic and cultural contexts. Finally, in other critiques, deep ecology is portrayed as having an inconsistent utopian vision (see Anker and Witoszek 1998).

Broadly speaking, a feminist issue is any that contributes in some way to understanding the oppression of women. Feminist theories attempt to analyze women's oppression, its causes and consequences, and suggest strategies and directions for women's liberation. By the mid 1970s, feminist writers had raised the issue of whether patriarchal modes of thinking encouraged not only widespread inferiorizing and colonizing of women, but also of people of colour, animals and nature. Sheila Collins (1974), for instance, argued that male-dominated culture or patriarchy is supported by four interlocking pillars: sexism, racism, class exploitation, and ecological destruction.

Emphasizing the importance of feminism to the environmental movement and various other liberation movements, some writers, such as Ynestra King (1989a and 1989b), argue that the domination of women by men is historically the original form of domination in human society, from which all other hierarchies -- of rank, class, and political power -- flow. For instance, human exploitation of nature may be seen as a manifestation and extension of the oppression of women, in that it is the result of associating nature with the female, which had been already inferiorized and oppressed by the male-dominating culture. But within the plurality of feminist positions, other writers, such as Val Plumwood (1993), understand the oppression of women as only one of the many parallel forms of oppression sharing and supported by a common ideological structure, in which one party (the colonizer, whether male, white or human) uses a number of conceptual and rhetorical devices to privilege its interests over that of the other party (the colonized: whether female, people of colour, or animals). Facilitated by a common structure, seemingly diverse forms of oppression can mutually reinforce each other (Warren 1987, 1990, 1994, Cheney 1989, and Plumwood 1993).

Not all feminist theorists would call that common underlying oppressive structure “androcentric” or “patriarchal”. But it is generally agreed that core features of the structure include “dualism”, hierarchical thinking, and the “logic of domination”, which are typical of, if not essential to, male-chauvinism. These patterns of thinking and conceptualizing the world, many feminist theorists argue, also nourish and sustain other forms of chauvinism, including, human-chauvinism (i.e., anthropocentrism), which is responsible for much human exploitation of, and destructiveness towards, nature. The dualistic way of thinking, for instance, sees the world in polar opposite terms, such as male/female, masculinity/femininity, reason/emotion, freedom/necessity, active/passive, mind/body, pure/soiled, white/coloured, civilized/primitive, transcendent/immanent, human/animal, culture/nature. Furthermore, under dualism all the first items in these contrasting pairs are assimilated with each other, and all the second items are likewise linked with each other. For example, the male is seen to be associated with the rational, active, creative, Cartesian human mind, and civilized, orderly, transcendent culture; whereas the female is regarded as tied to the emotional, passive, determined animal body, and primitive, disorderly, immanent nature. These interlocking dualisms are not just descriptive dichotomies, according to the feminists, but involve a prescriptive privileging of one side of the opposed items over the other. Dualism confers superiority to everything on the male side, but inferiority to everything on the female side. The “logic of domination” then dictates that those on the superior side (e.g., men, rational beings, humans) are morally entitled to dominate and utilize those on the inferior side (e.g., women, beings lacking in rationality, nonhumans) as mere means.

The problem with dualistic and hierarchical modes of thinking, however, is not just that that they are epistemically unreliable. It is not just that the dominating party often falsely sees the dominated party as lacking (or possessing) the allegedly superior (or inferior) qualities, or that the dominated party often internalizes false stereotypes of itself given by its oppressors, or that stereotypical thinking often overlooks salient and important differences among individuals. More important, according to feminist analyses, the very premise of prescriptive dualism -- the valuing of attributes of one polarized side and the devaluing of those of the other, the idea that domination and oppression can be justified by appealing to attributes like masculinity, rationality, being civilized or developed, etc. -- is itself problematic.

Feminism represents a radical challenge for environmental thinking, politics, and traditional social ethical perspectives. It promises to link environmental questions with wider social problems concerning various kinds of discrimination and exploitation, and fundamental investigations of human psychology. However, whether there are conceptual, causal or merely contingent connections among the different forms of oppression and liberation remains a contested issue (see Green 1994). The term “ecofeminism” (first coined by Françoise d'Eaubonne in 1974) or “ecological feminism” was for a time generally applied to any view that combines environmental advocacy with feminist analysis. However, because of the varieties of, and disagreements among, feminist theories, the label may be too wide to be informative and has generally fallen from use.

An often overlooked source of ecological ideas is the work of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School of critical theory founded by Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969). While classical Marxists regard nature as a resource to be transformed by human labour and utilized for human purposes, Horkheimer and Adorno saw Marx himself as representative of the problem of “human alienation”. At the root of this alienation, they argue, is a narrow positivist conception of rationality -- which sees rationality as an instrument for pursuing progress, power and technological control, and takes observation, measurement and the application of purely quantitative methods to be capable of solving all problems. Such a positivistic view of science combines determinism with optimism. Natural processes as well as human activities are seen to be predictable and manipulable. Nature (and, likewise, human nature) is no longer mysterious, uncontrollable, or fearsome. Instead, it is reduced to an object strictly governed by natural laws, which therefore can be studied, known, and employed to our benefit. By promising limitless knowledge and power, the positivism of science and technology not only removes our fear of nature, the critical theorists argue, but also destroys our sense of awe and wonder towards it. That is to say, positivism “disenchants” nature -- along with everything that can be studied by the sciences, whether natural, social or human.

The progress in knowledge and material well-being may not be a bad thing in itself, where the consumption and control of nature is a necessary part of human life. However, the critical theorists argue that the positivistic disenchantment of natural things (and, likewise, of human beings -- because they too can be studied and manipulated by science) disrupts our relationship with them, encouraging the undesirable attitude that they are nothing more than things to be probed, consumed and dominated. According to the critical theorists, the oppression of “outer nature” (i.e., the natural environment) through science and technology is bought at a very high price: the project of domination requires the suppression of our own “inner nature” (i.e., human nature) – e.g., human creativity, autonomy, and the manifold needs, vulnerabilities and longings at the centre of human life. To remedy such an alienation, the project of Horkheimer and Adorno is to replace the narrow positivistic and instrumentalist model of rationality with a more humanistic one, in which the values of the aesthetic, moral, sensuous and expressive aspects of human life play a central part. Thus, their aim is not to give up our rational faculties or powers of analysis and logic. Rather, the ambition is to arrive at a dialectical synthesis between Romanticism and Enlightenment, to return to anti-deterministic values of freedom, spontaneity and creativity.

In his later work, Adorno advocates a re-enchanting aesthetic attitude of “sensuous immediacy” towards nature. Not only do we stop seeing nature as primarily, or simply, an object of consumption, we are also able to be directly and spontaneously acquainted with nature without interventions from our rational faculties. According to Adorno, works of art, like natural things, always involve an “excess”, something more than their mere materiality and exchange value (see Vogel 1996, ch. 4.4 for a detailed discussion of Adorno's views on art, labour and domination). The re-enchantment of the world through aesthetic experience, he argues, is also at the same time a re-enchantment of human lives and purposes. Adorno's work remains largely unexplored in mainstream environmental philosophy, although the idea of applying critical theory (embracing techniques of deconstruction, psychoanalysis and radical social criticism) to both environmental issues and the writings of various ethical and political theorists has spawned an emerging field of "ecocritique" or "eco-criticism" (Vogel 1996, Luke 1997, van Wyk 1997, Dryzek 1997).

Some students of Adorno's work have recently argued that his account of the role of “sensuous immediacy” can be understood as an attempt to defend a “legitimate anthropomorphism” that comes close to a weak form of animism (Bernstein 2001, 196). Others, more radical, have claimed to take inspiration from his notion of “non-identity”, which, they argue, can be used as the basis for a deconstruction of the notion of nature and perhaps even its elimination from eco-critical writing. For example, Timothy Morton argues that “putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration” (Morton 2007, 5), and that “in the name of all that we value in the idea of ‘nature’, [ecocritique] thoroughly examines how nature is set up as a transcendental, unified, independent category. Ecocritique does not think that it is paradoxical to say, in the name of ecology itself: ‘down with nature!’ ” (ibid., 13).

It remains to be seen, however, whether the radical attempt to purge the concept of nature from eco-critical work meets with success. Likewise, it is unclear whether the dialectic project on which Horkheimer and Adorno embarked is coherent, and whether Adorno, in particular, has a consistent understanding of “nature” and “rationality” (see Eckersley 1992 and Vogel 1996, for a review of the Frankfurt School's thinking about nature).

On the other hand, the new animists have been much inspired by the serious way in which some indigenous peoples placate and interact with animals, plants and inanimate things through ritual, ceremony and other practices. According to the new animists, the replacement of traditional animism (the view that personalized souls are found in animals, plants, and other material objects) by a form of disenchanting positivism directly leads to an anthropocentric perspective, which is accountable for much human destructiveness towards nature. In a disenchanted world, there is no meaningful order of things or events outside the human domain, and there is no source of sacredness or dread of the sort felt by those who regard the natural world as peopled by divinities or demons (Stone 2006). When a forest is no longer sacred, there are no spirits to be placated and no mysterious risks associated with clear-felling it. A disenchanted nature is no longer alive. It commands no respect, reverence or love. It is nothing but a giant machine, to be mastered to serve human purposes. The new animists argue for reconceptualizing the boundary between persons and non-persons. For them, “living nature” comprises not only humans, animals and plants, but also mountains, forests, rivers, deserts, and even planets.

Whether the notion that a mountain or a tree is to be regarded as a person is taken literally or not, the attempt to engage with the surrounding world as if it consists of other persons might possibly provide the basis for a respectful attitude to nature (see Harvey 2005 for a popular account of the new animism). If disenchantment is a source of environmental problems and destruction, then the new animism can be regarded as attempting to re-enchant, and help to save, nature. More poetically, David Abram has argued that a phenomenological approach of the kind taken by Merleau-Ponty can reveal to us that we are part of the “common flesh” of the world, that we are in a sense the world thinking itself (Abram 1995).

In her recent work, Freya Mathews has tried to articulate a version of animism or panpsychism that captures ways in which the world (not just nature) contains many kinds of consciousness and sentience. For her, there is an underlying unity of mind and matter in that the world is a “self-realizing” system containing a multiplicity of other such systems (cf. Næss). According to Mathews, we are meshed in communication, and potential communication, with the “One” (the greater cosmic self) and its many lesser selves (Mathews 2003, 45 - 60). Materialism (the monistic theory that the world consists purely of matter), she argues, is self-defeating by encouraging a form of “collective solipsism” that treats the world either as unknowable or as a social-construction (Mathews 2005, 12). Mathews also takes inspiration from her interpretation of the core Daoist idea of wuwei as “letting be” and bringing about change through “effortless action”. The focus in environmental management, development and commerce should be on “synergy” with what is already in place rather than on demolition, replacement and disruption. Instead of bulldozing away old suburbs and derelict factories, the synergistic panpsychist sees these artefacts as themselves part of the living cosmos, hence part of what is to be respected. Likewise, instead of trying to eliminate feral or exotic plants and animals, and restore environments to some imagined pristine state, ways should be found—wherever possible—to promote synergies between the newcomers and the older native populations in ways that maintain ecological flows and promote the further unfolding and developing of ecological processes (Mathews 2004). Panpsychism, Mathews argues, frees us from the “ideological grid of capitalism”, can reduce our desire for consumer novelties, and can allow us and the world to grow old together with grace and dignity.

In summary, if disenchantment is a source of environmentally destructive or uncaring attitudes, then both the aesthetic and the animist/panpsychist re-enchantment of the world are intended to offer an antidote to such attitudes, and perhaps also inspirations for new forms of managing and designing for sustainability.

Apart from feminist-environmentalist theories and Næss's deep ecology, Murray Bookchin's “social ecology” has also claimed to be radical, subversive, or countercultural (see Bookchin 1980, 1987, 1990). Bookchin's version of critical theory takes the “outer” physical world as constituting what he calls “first nature”, from which culture or “second nature” has evolved. Environmentalism, on his view, is a social movement, and the problems it confronts are social problems. While Bookchin is prepared, like Horkheimer and Adorno, to regard (first) nature as an aesthetic and sensuous marvel, he regards our intervention in it as necessary. He suggests that we can choose to put ourselves at the service of natural evolution, to help maintain complexity and diversity, diminish suffering and reduce pollution. Bookchin's social ecology recommends that we use our gifts of sociability, communication and intelligence as if we were “nature rendered conscious”, instead of turning them against the very source and origin from which such gifts derive. Exploitation of nature should be replaced by a richer form of life devoted to nature's preservation.

John Clark has argued that social ecology is heir to a historical, communitarian tradition of thought that includes not only the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, but also the nineteenth century socialist geographer Elisée Reclus, the eccentric Scottish thinker Patrick Geddes and the latter's disciple, Lewis Mumford (Clark 1998). Ramachandra Guha has described Mumford as “the pioneer American social ecologist” (Guha 1996, 210). Mumford adopted a regionalist perspective, arguing that strong regional centres of culture are the basis of “active and securely grounded local life” (Mumford 1944, 403). Like the pessimists in critical theory, Mumford was worried about the emergence under industrialised capitalism of a “megamachine”, one that would oppress and dominate human creativity and freedom, and one that -- despite being a human product -- operates in a way that is out of our control. While Bookchin is more of a technological optimist than Mumford, both writers have inspired a regional turn in environmental thinking. Bioregionalism gives regionalism an environmental twist. This is the view that natural features should provide the defining conditions for places of community, and that secure and satisfying local lives are led by those who know a place, have learned its lore and who adapt their lifestyle to its affordances by developing its potential within ecological limits. Such a life, the bioregionalists argue, will enable people to enjoy the fruits of self-liberation and self-development (see the essays in List 1993, and the book-length treatment in Thayer 2003, for an introduction to bioregional thought).

However, critics have asked why natural features should significant in defining the places in which communities are to be built, and have puzzled over exactly which natural features these should be -- geological, ecological, climatic, hydrological, and so on (see Brennan 1998b). If relatively small, bioregional communities are to be home to flourishing human societies, then a question also arises over the nature of the laws and punishments that will prevail in them, and also of their integration into larger regional and global political and economic groupings. For anarchists and other critics of the predominant social order, a return to self-governing and self-sufficient regional communities is often depicted as liberating and refreshing. But for the skeptics, the worry remains that the bioregional vision is politically over-optimistic and is open to the establishment of illiberal, stifling and undemocratic communities. Further, given its emphasis on local self-sufficiency and the virtue of life in small communities, a question arises over whether bioregionalism is workable in an overcrowded planet.

Deep ecology, feminism, and social ecology have had a considerable impact on the development of political positions in regard to the environment. Feminist analyses have often been welcomed for the psychological insight they bring to several social, moral and political problems. There is, however, considerable unease about the implications of critical theory, social ecology and some varieties of deep ecology and animism. Some recent writers have argued, for example, that critical theory is bound to be ethically anthropocentric, with nature as no more than a “social construction” whose value ultimately depends on human determinations (see Vogel 1996). Others have argued that the demands of “deep” green theorists and activists cannot be accommodated within contemporary theories of liberal politics and social justice (see Ferry 1998). A further suggestion is that there is a need to reassess traditional theories such as virtue ethics, which has its origins in ancient Greek philosophy (see the following section) within the context of a form of stewardship similar to that earlier endorsed by Passmore (see Barry 1999). If this last claim is correct, then the radical activist need not, after all, look for philosophical support in radical, or countercultural, theories of the sort deep ecology, feminism, bioregionalism and social ecology claim to be.

Although environmental ethicists often try to distance themselves from the anthropocentrism embedded in traditional ethical views (Passmore 1974, Norton 1991 are exceptions), they also quite often draw their theoretical resources from traditional ethical systems and theories. Consider the following two basic moral questions: (1) What kinds of thing are intrinsically valuable, good or bad? (2) What makes an action right or wrong?

Consequentialist ethical theories consider intrinsic “value” / “disvalue” or “goodness” / “badness” to be more fundamental moral notions than “rightness” / “wrongness”, and maintain that whether an action is right/wrong is determined by whether its consequences are good/bad. From this perspective, answers to question (2) are informed by answers to question (1). For instance, utilitarianism, a paradigm case of consequentialism, regards pleasure (or, more broadly construed, the satisfaction of interest, desire, and/or preference) as the only intrinsic value in the world, whereas pain (or the frustration of desire, interest, and/or preference) the only intrinsic disvalue, and maintains that right actions are those that would produce the greatest balance of pleasure over pain.

As the utilitarian focus is the balance of pleasure and pain as such, the question of to whom a pleasure or pain belongs is irrelevant to the calculation and assessment of the rightness or wrongness of actions. Hence, the eighteenth century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (1789), and now Peter Singer (1993), have argued that the interests of all the sentient beings (i.e., beings who are capable of experiencing pleasure or pain) -- including nonhuman ones -- affected by an action should be taken equally into consideration in assessing the action. Furthermore, rather like Routley (see section 2 above), Singer argues that the anthropocentric privileging of members of the species Homo sapiens is arbitrary, and that it is a kind of “speciesism” as unjustifiable as sexism and racism. Singer regards the animal liberation movement as comparable to the liberation movements of women and people of colour. Unlike the environmental philosophers who attribute intrinsic value to the natural environment and its inhabitants, Singer and utilitarians in general attribute intrinsic value to the experience of pleasure or interest satisfaction as such, not to the beings who have the experience. Similarly, for the utilitarian, non-sentient objects in the environment such as plant species, rivers, mountains, and landscapes, all of which are the objects of moral concern for environmentalists, are of no intrinsic but at most instrumental value to the satisfaction of sentient beings (see Singer 1993, Ch. 10). Furthermore, because right actions, for the utilitarian, are those that maximize the overall balance of interest satisfaction over frustration, practices such as whale-hunting and the killing of an elephant for ivory, which cause suffering to nonhuman animals, might turn out to be right after all: such practices might produce considerable amounts of interest-satisfaction for human beings, which, on the utilitarian calculation, outweigh the nonhuman interest-frustration involved. As the result of all the above considerations, it is unclear to what extent a utilitarian ethic can also be an environmental ethic. This point may not so readily apply to a wider consequentialist approach, which attributes intrinsic value not only to pleasure or satisfaction, but also to various objects and processes in the natural environment.

Deontological ethical theories, in contrast, maintain that whether an action is right or wrong is for the most part independent of whether its consequences are good or bad. From the deontologist perspective, there are several distinct moral rules or duties (e.g., “not to kill or otherwise harm the innocent”, “not to lie”, “to respect the rights of others”, “to keep promises”), the observance/violation of which is intrinsically right/wrong; i.e., right/wrong in itself regardless of consequences. When asked to justify an alleged moral rule, duty or its corresponding right, deontologists may appeal to the intrinsic value of those beings to whom it applies. For instance, “animal rights” advocate Tom Regan (1983) argues that those animals with intrinsic value (or what he calls “inherent value”) have the moral right to respectful treatment, which then generates a general moral duty on our part not to treat them as mere means to other ends. We have, in particular, a prima facie moral duty not to harm them. Regan maintains that certain practices (such as sport or commercial hunting, and experimentation on animals) violate the moral right of intrinsically valuable animals to respectful treatment. Such practices, he argues, are intrinsically wrong regardless of whether or not some better consequences ever flow from them. Exactly which animals have intrinsic value and therefore the moral right to respectful treatment? Regan's answer is: those that meet the criterion of being the “subject-of-a-life”. To be such a subject is a sufficient (though not necessary) condition for having intrinsic value, and to be a subject-of-a-life involves, among other things, having sense-perceptions, beliefs, desires, motives, memory, a sense of the future, and a psychological identity over time.

Some authors have extended concern for individual well-being further, arguing for the intrinsic value of organisms achieving their own good, whether those organisms are capable of consciousness or not. Paul Taylor's version of this view (1981 and 1986), which we might call biocentrism , is a deontological example. He argues that each individual living thing in nature -- whether it is an animal, a plant, or a micro-organism -- is a “teleological-center-of-life” having a good or well-being of its own which can be enhanced or damaged, and that all individuals who are teleological-centers-of life have equal intrinsic value (or what he calls “inherent worth”) which entitles them to moral respect. Furthermore, Taylor maintains that the intrinsic value of wild living things generates a prima facie moral duty on our part to preserve or promote their goods as ends in themselves, and that any practices which treat those beings as mere means and thus display a lack of respect for them are intrinsically wrong. A more recent and biologically detailed defence of the idea that living things have representations and goals and hence have moral worth is found in Agar 2001. Unlike Taylor's egalitarian and deontological biocentrism, Robin Attfield (1987) argues for a hierarchical view that while all beings having a good of their own have intrinsic value, some of them (e.g., persons) have intrinsic value to a greater extent. Attfield also endorses a form of consequentialism which takes into consideration, and attempts to balance, the many and possibly conflicting goods of different living things (also see Varner 1998 for a more recent defense of biocentric individualism with affinities to both consequentialist and deontological approaches). However, some critics have pointed out that the notion of biological good or well-being is only descriptive not prescriptive (see Williams 1992 and O'Neill 1993, Ch. 2). For instance, the fact that HIV has a good of its own does not mean that we ought to assign any positive moral weight to the realization of that good.

Note that the ethics of animal liberation or animal rights and biocentrism are both individualistic in that their various moral concerns are directed towards individuals only -- not ecological wholes such as species, populations, biotic communities, and ecosystems. None of these is sentient, a subject-of-a-life, or a teleological-center-of-life, but the preservation of these collective entities is a major concern for many environmentalists. Moreover, the goals of animal liberationists, such as the reduction of animal suffering and death, may conflict with the goals of environmentalists. For example, the preservation of the integrity of an ecosystem may require the culling of feral animals or of some indigenous populations that threaten to destroy fragile habitats. So there are disputes about whether the ethics of animal liberation is a proper branch of environmental ethics (see Callicott 1980, 1988, Sagoff 1984, Jamieson 1998, Crisp 1998 and Varner 2000).

Criticizing the individualistic approach in general for failing to accommodate conservation concerns for ecological wholes, J. Baird Callicott (1980) has advocated a version of land-ethical holism which takes Leopold's statement “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” to be the supreme deontological principle. In this theory, the earth's biotic community per se is the sole locus of intrinsic value, whereas the value of its individual members is merely instrumental and dependent on their contribution to the “integrity, stability, and beauty” of the larger community. A straightforward implication of this version of the land ethic is that an individual member of the biotic community ought to be sacrificed whenever that is needed for the protection of the holistic good of the community. For instance, Callicott maintains that if culling a white-tailed deer is necessary for the protection of the holistic biotic good, then it is a land-ethical requirement to do so. But, to be consistent, the same point also applies to human individuals because they are also members of the biotic community. Not surprisingly, the misanthropy implied by Callicott's land-ethical holism has been widely criticized and regarded as a reductio of the position (see Aiken (1984), Kheel (1985), Ferré (1996), and Shrader-Frechette (1996)). Tom Regan (1983, p.362), for example, has condemned the holistic land ethic's disregard of the rights of the individual as “environmental fascism”. Under the pressure from the charge of ecofascism and misanthropy, Callicott (1989 Ch. 5, and 1999, Ch. 4) has later revised his position and now maintains that the biotic community (indeed, any community to which we belong) as well as its individual members (indeed, any individual who shares with us membership in some common community) all have intrinsic value. The controversy surrounding Callicott's original position, however, has inspired efforts in environment ethics to investigate possibilities of attributing intrinsic value to ecological wholes, not just their individual constituent parts (see Lo 2001 for an overview and critique of Callicott's changing position over the last two decades; also see Ouderkirk and Hill (eds.) 2002 for debates between Callicott and others concerning the metaethical and metaphysical foundations for the land ethic and also its historical antecedents). Following in Callicott's footsteps, and inspired by Næss's relational account of value, Warwick Fox in his most recent work has championed a theory of “responsive cohesion” which apparently gives supreme moral priority to the maintenance of ecosystems and the biophysical world (Fox 2007). It remains to be seen if this position will escape the charges of misanthropy and totalitarianism laid against earlier holistic and relational theories of value.

Individual natural entities (whether sentient or not, living or not), Andrew Brennan (1984) argues, are not designed by anyone to fulfill any purpose and therefore lack “intrinsic function” (i.e., the function of a thing that constitutes part of its essence or identity conditions). This, he proposes, is a reason for thinking that individual natural entities should not be treated as mere instruments, and thus a reason for assigning them intrinsic value. Furthermore, he argues that the same moral point applies to the case of natural ecosystems, to the extent that they lack intrinsic function. In the light of Brennan's proposal, Eric Katz (1991 and 1997) argues that all natural entities, whether individuals or wholes, have intrinsic value in virtue of their ontological independence from human purpose, activity, and interest, and maintains the deontological principle that nature as a whole is an “autonomous subject” which deserves moral respect and must not be treated as a mere means to human ends. Carrying the project of attributing intrinsic value to nature to its ultimate form, Robert Elliot (1997) argues that naturalness itself is a property in virtue of possessing which all natural things, events, and states of affairs, attain intrinsic value. Furthermore, Elliot argues that even a consequentialist, who in principle allows the possibility of trading off intrinsic value from naturalness for intrinsic value from other sources, could no longer justify such kind of trade-off in reality. This is because the reduction of intrinsic value due to the depletion of naturalness on earth, according to him, has reached such a level that any further reduction of it could not be compensated by any amount of intrinsic value generated in other ways, no matter how great it is.

As the notion of “natural” is understood in terms of the lack of human contrivance and is often opposed to the notion of “artifactual”, one much contested issue is about the value of those parts of nature that have been interfered with by human artifice -- for instance, previously degraded natural environments which have been humanly restored. Based on the premise that the properties of being naturally evolved and having a natural continuity with the remote past are “value adding” (i.e., adding intrinsic value to those things which possess those two properties), Elliot argues that even a perfectly restored environment would necessarily lack those two value-adding properties and therefore be less valuable than the originally undegraded natural environment. Katz, on the other hand, argues that a restored nature is really just an artifact designed and created for the satisfaction of human ends, and that the value of restored environments is merely instrumental. However, some critics have pointed out that advocates of moral dualism between the natural and the artifactual run the risk of diminishing the value of human life and culture, and fail to recognize that the natural environments interfered with by humans may still have morally relevant qualities other than pure naturalness (see Lo 1999). Two other issues central to this debate are that the key concept “natural” seems ambiguous in many different ways (see Hume 1751, App. 3, and Brennan 1988, Ch. 6, Elliot 1997, Ch. 4), and that those who argue that human interference reduces the intrinsic value of nature seem to have simply assumed the crucial premise that naturalness is a source of intrinsic value. Some thinkers maintain that the natural, or the “wild” construed as that which “is not humanized” (Hettinger and Throop 1999, p. 12) or to some degree “not under human control” (ibid., p. 13) is intrinsically valuable. Yet, as Bernard Williams points out (Williams 1992), we may, paradoxically, need to use our technological powers to retain a sense of something not being in our power. The retention of wild areas may thus involve planetary and ecological management to maintain, or even “imprison” such areas (Birch 1990), raising a question over the extent to which national parks and wilderness areas are free from our control. An important message underlying the debate, perhaps, is that even if ecological restoration is achievable, it might have been better to have left nature intact in the first place.

As an alternative to consequentialism and deontology both of which consider “thin” concepts such as “goodness” and “rightness” as essential to morality, virtue ethics proposes to understand morality -- and assess the ethical quality of actions -- in terms of “thick” concepts such as “kindness”, “honesty”, “sincerity” and “justice”. As virtue ethics speaks quite a different language from the other two kinds of ethical theory, its theoretical focus is not so much on what kinds of things are good/bad, or what makes an action right/wrong. Indeed, the richness of the language of virtues, and the emphasis on moral character, is sometimes cited as a reason for exploring a virtues-based approach to the complex and always-changing questions of sustainability and environmental care (Sandler 2007). One question central to virtue ethics is what the moral reasons are for acting one way or another. For instance, from the perspective of virtue ethics, kindness and loyalty would be moral reasons for helping a friend in hardship. These are quite different from the deontologist's reason (that the action is demanded by a moral rule) or the consequentialist reason (that the action will lead to a better over-all balance of good over evil in the world). From the perspective of virtue ethics, the motivation and justification of actions are both inseparable from the character traits of the acting agent. Furthermore, unlike deontology or consequentialism the moral focus of which is other people or states of the world, one central issue for virtue ethics is how to live a flourishing human life, this being a central concern of the moral agent himself or herself. “Living virtuously” is Aristotle's recipe for flourishing. Versions of virtue ethics advocating virtues such as “benevolence”, “piety”, “filiality”, and “courage”, have also been held by thinkers in the Chinese Confucian tradition. The connection between morality and psychology is another core subject of investigation for virtue ethics. It is sometimes suggested that human virtues, which constitute an important aspect of a flourishing human life, must be compatible with human needs and desires, and perhaps also sensitive to individual affection and temperaments. As its central focus is human flourishing as such, virtue ethics may seem unavoidably anthropocentric and unable to support a genuine moral concern for the nonhuman environment. But just as Aristotle has argued that a flourishing human life requires friendships and one can have genuine friendships only if one genuinely values, loves, respects, and cares for one's friends for their own sake, not merely for the benefits that they may bring to oneself, some have argued that a flourishing human life requires the moral capacities to value, love, respect, and care for the nonhuman natural world as an end in itself (see O'Neill 1992, O'Neill 1993, Barry 1999).

Despite the variety of positions in environmental ethics developed over the last thirty years, they have focused mainly on issues concerned with wilderness and the reasons for its preservation (see Callicott and Nelson 1998 for a collection of essays on the ideas and moral significance of wilderness). The importance of wilderness experience to the human psyche has been emphasized by many environmental philosophers. Næss, for instance, urges us to ensure we spend time dwelling in situations of intrinsic value, whereas Rolston seeks “re-creation” of the human soul by meditating in the wilderness. Likewise, the critical theorists believe that aesthetic appreciation of nature has the power to re-enchant human life.

By contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to the built environment, although this is the one in which most people spend most of their time. In post-war Britain, for example, cheaply constructed new housing developments were often poor replacements for traditional communities. They have been associated with lower amounts of social interaction and increased crime compared with the earlier situation. The destruction of highly functional high-density traditional housing, indeed, might be compared with the destruction of highly diverse ecosystems and biotic communities. Likewise, the loss of the world's huge diversity of natural languages has been mourned by many, not just professionals with an interest in linguistics. Urban and linguistic environments are just two of the many “places” inhabited by humans. Some philosophical theories about natural environments and objects have potential to be extended to cover built environments and non-natural objects of several sorts (see King 2000, Light 2001, Palmer 2003, while Fox 2007 aims to include both built and natural environments in the scope of a single ethical theory). Certainly there are many parallels between natural and artificial domains: for example, many of the conceptual problems involved in discussing the restoration of natural objects also appear in the parallel context of restoring human-made objects.

The focus on the value of wilderness and the importance of its preservation has overlooked another important problem – namely that lifestyles in which enthusiasms for nature rambles, woodland meditations or mountaineering can be indulged demand a standard of living that is far beyond the dreams of most of the world’s population. Moreover, mass access to wild places would likely destroy the very values held in high esteem by the “natural aristocrats”, a term used by Hugh Stretton (1976) to characterize the environmentalists “driven chiefly by love of the wilderness”. Thus, a new range of moral and political problems open up, including the environmental cost of tourist access to wilderness areas, and ways in which limited access could be arranged to areas of natural beauty and diversity, while maintaining the individual freedoms central to liberal democracies.

Lovers of wilderness sometimes consider the high human populations in some developing countries as a key problem underlying the environmental crisis. Rolston (1996), for instance, claims that (some) humans are a kind of planetary “cancer”. He maintains that while “feeding people always seems humane, ... when we face up to what is really going on, by just feeding people, without attention to the larger social results, we could be feeding a kind of cancer.” This remark is meant to justify the view that saving nature should, in some circumstances, have a higher priority than feeding people. But such a view has been criticized for seeming to reveal a degree of misanthropy, directed at those human beings least able to protect and defend themselves (see Attfield 1998, Brennan 1998a). The empirical basis of Rolston's claims has been queried by work showing that poor people are often extremely good environmental managers (Martinez-Alier 2002). Guha's worries about the elitist and “missionary” tendencies of some kinds of deep green environmentalism in certain rich western countries can be quite readily extended to theorists such as Rolston (Guha 1999). Can such an apparently elitist sort of wilderness ethics ever be democratised? How can the psychically-reviving power of the wild become available to those living in the slums of Calcutta or Sao Paolo? These questions so far lack convincing answers.

Furthermore, the economic conditions which support the kind of enjoyment of wilderness by Stretton's “natural aristocrats”, and more generally the lifestyles of many people in the affluent countries, seem implicated in the destruction and pollution which has provoked the environmental turn in the first place. For those in the richer countries, for instance, engaging in outdoor recreations usually involves the motor car. Car dependency, however, is at the heart of many environmental problems, a key factor in urban pollution, while at the same time central to the economic and military activities of many nations and corporations, for example securing and exploiting oil reserves. In an increasingly crowded industrialised world, the answers to such problems are pressing. Any adequate study of this intertwined set of problems must involve interdisciplinary collaboration among philosophers and theorists in the social as well as the natural sciences.

Connections between environmental destruction, unequal resource consumption, poverty and the global economic order have been discussed by political scientists, development theorists, geographers and economists as well as by philosophers. Links between economics and environmental ethics are particularly well established. Work by Mark Sagoff (1988), for instance, has played a major part in bringing the two fields together. He argues that “as citizens rather than consumers” people are concerned about values, which cannot plausibly be reduced to mere ordered preferences or quantified in monetary terms (also see Shrader-Frechette 1987, O'Neill 1993, and Brennan 1995). The potentially misleading appeal to economic reason used to justify the expansion of the corporate sector has also come under critical scrutiny by globalisation theorists (see Korten 1999). These critiques do not aim to eliminate economics from environmental thinking; rather, they resist any reductive, and strongly anthropocentric, tendency to believe that all social and environmental problems are fundamentally or essentially economic.

Other interdisciplinary approaches link environmental ethics with biology, policy studies, public administration, political theory, cultural history, post-colonial theory, literature, geography, and human ecology (for some examples, see Norton, Hutchins, Stevens, Maple 1995, Shrader-Frechette 1984, Gruen and Jamieson (eds.) 1994, Karliner 1997, Diesendorf and Hamilton 1997, Schmidtz and Willott 2002). Many of the more recent assessments of issues concerned with biodiversity, ecosystem health, poverty, environmental justice and sustainability look at both human and environmental issues, eschewing in the process commitment either to a purely anthropocentric or purely ecocentric perspective (see Hayward and O'Neill 1997, and Dobson 1999 for collections of essays looking at the links between sustainability, justice, welfare and the distribution of environmental goods). The future development of environmental ethics depend on these, and other interdisciplinary synergies, as much as on its anchorage within philosophy.

Part of environmental philosophy's project since its inception is the diagnosis of the origins of our present-day environmental extremities. The best known of these is probably Lynn White's theory. As seen in section 2 above, White argues that Judæo-Christian monotheism, because of its essentially anthropocentric attitude towards nature, is the ideological source of the modern environmental crisis. At the heart of his philosophical cum cultural-historical analysis seems to be a simple structure:

W1. Christianity leads to anthropocentrism. W2. Anthropocentrism leads to environmentally damaging behaviours. W3. So, Christianity is the origin of environmental crisis.

The second premise of White's argument also seems to have a central place in a number of rival diagnoses. In fact, the structure of the major theories in the field is regularly of this sort: (1) X leads to anthropocentrism, (2) anthropocentrism leads to environmentally damaging behaviours; therefore (3) X is the origin of environmental crisis. Three other well-known cases have already been discussed (section 3 above), namely: ecofeminism (which identifies X with those patterns of thought that are characteristically patriarchal), deep ecology (which takes X to be atomistic individualism), and the new animism (which regards the disenchantment of nature as the X -factor).

The four theories all seem to have one view in common: that anthropocentrism is at the heart of the problem of environmental destructiveness. If anthropocentrism is the problem, then perhaps non-anthropocentrism is the solution. At this point, it may be helpful to separate two theses of non-anthropocentrism, ones that are not normally distinguished in the literature:

The evaluative thesis (of non-anthropocentrism) is the claim that natural nonhuman things have intrinsic value, i.e., value in their own right independent of any use they have for others. The psycho-behavioural thesis (of non-anthropocentrism) is the claim that people who believe in the evaluative thesis of non-anthropocentrism are more likely to behave environmentally (i.e., behave in beneficial ways, or at least not in harmful ways, towards the environment) than those who do not.

Much of the last three decades of environmental ethics has been spent analysing, clarifying and examining the evaluative thesis of non-anthropocentrism, which has now achieved a nearly canonical status within the discipline. By contrast, the psycho-behavioural thesis is seldom discussed, but is part of the tacit background of environmental ethics. When it does get explicit mention this is often in the introductions or prefaces of books, or in reference works – for example, when it is said that deep ecology's “greatest influence … may be through the diverse forms of environmental activism that it inspires” (Taylor and Zimmerman 2005, compare Rolston 1988, xii, Sessions 1995, xx-xxi, and Sylvan and Bennett 1994, 4-5). If the psycho-behavioural thesis is true, then it is important in two ways: (1) it provides a rationale for both the diagnosis and solution of environmental problems, and (2) it gives practical justification to the discipline of environmental ethics itself (conceived as the mission to secure converts to the evaluative thesis of non-anthropocentrism). Conversely, if the psycho-behavioural thesis turns out to be false, then—since the thesis is the common tacit assumption of all four theories—not only the discipline itself, but also the four major diagnostic theories of the origin of the environmental predicament will be seriously undermined .

Central to the psycho-behavioural thesis is a problematic assumption: that if people believe they have a moral duty to respect nature or believe that natural things are intrinsically valuable, then they really will act in more environmental-friendly ways. This empirical question cannot be answered by purely a priori philosophical reasoning. In fact, the other core premises in the four major philosophical theories on the origin of environmental crisis are also empirical claims about social and cultural reality. To be credible, they must be able to stand up to empirical testing. For example, are people who think in dualistic and hierarchical ways (as described by feminists) in fact more likely to have anthropocentric attitudes and more likely to act harmfully towards the environment? Are people who believe in animism (as panpsychists argue) in fact less likely to have anthropocentric attitudes and also less likely to harm the environment? What about people who adopt some relational or holistic view of the world, as advocated by deep ecologists? How do they act toward nature compared to those who adopt a more individualistic and atomistic worldview? These questions about the relations among various belief systems and behaviours look no different in kind from the sorts of questions that social scientists regularly ask.

Of the major philosophical theories on the origin of environmental crisis, Lynn White's is the only one to have been empirically tested by social scientists. The net result of these studies so far has been “inconclusive”, especially when education, sex, age and social class are also factored in (Shaiko 1987, Greeley 1993, Woodrum and Hoban 1994, Eckberg and Blocker 1996, Boyd 1999). Moreover, like their philosophical counterparts, environmental sociologists often take the psycho-behavioural thesis of non-anthropocentrism for granted. Some of the best-known and most widely used survey instruments in the field are also problematic. Riley Dunlap and collaborators developed many years ago the “New Environmental Paradigm” (NEP) scale, to measure pro-environmental attitudes (Dunlap and van Liere 1978). That scale, and its later revisions (see Dunlap et al. 2000), is problematic precisely because it explicitly uses indicators of beliefs in anthropocentrism to measure the presence of un-environmental attitudes, thus assuming in advance that anthropocentric beliefs are harmful to the environment. But whether that is so should be settled by empirical investigation rather than by an act of a priori stipulation in survey design.

Despite the fact that there is a striking common underlying structure between White's theory and the other major theories discussed above, no sociological studies so far have been done on the other theories, nor on the common underlying psycho-behavioural thesis of non-anthropocentrism and its effects. This presents an opportunity for interdisciplinary collaborations among philosophers and social scientists. Many tools and methods well established in the social sciences can justifiably be adapted for use in research on environmental philosophy, giving the subject an empirical or even experimental turn. Such work may stimulate new ideas about the origins of our environmental pathologies, and for testing the extent to which belief systems and worldviews actually drive attitudes and behaviours. As long as empirical facts are relevant to philosophical and ethical thought, adoption of social science methods will be a means of keeping our theorising in touch with the motivations and behaviours of the people we are trying to describe and influence.

Similar points about the role of empirical investigations can also be made about theorizing over a range of other problems, including drought, the preservation of biodiversity, and climate change. While it has become commonplace to refer to the present era as “the age of terror”, there is increasing agreement across the entire globe that the world is facing chronic and unprecedented environmental problems, many of them of human origin. Indeed, the United States military, responding to an albeit speculative report on abrupt climate change prepared for the Pentagon by the Global Business Network (see Schwartz and Randall 2003, in the Other Internet Resources section below), have declared that the problems of adjustment to climate change constitute a far more severe threat to national and international security than does terrorism itself. Drought, changing weather patterns, the expected burden of caring for environmental refugees, the effects of consumerism, and the health decline associated with various forms of pollution are continuing and major problems for human beings themselves (see Shue 2001, Sagoff 2001, Thompson 2001), and raise crucial issues about environmental justice (see Shrader-Frechette 2002). At the same time, the continuing destruction of natural environments and the widespread loss of both plant and animal species poses increasing problems for other forms of life on the planet. In facing these problems, there will likely be great opportunities for co-operation and synergy between philosophers and both natural and social scientists.

Like many other important and interesting questions, no single discipline could claim sole ownership of those just raised about the origins of modern environmental crisis and the quandaries we now face, the relation between environmental problems and social injustice, and the vexed question of how human beings should relate to the natural environment in their pursuit of happiness and well-being. The move away from armchair speculation to link up with a wider community of inquiry may be inevitable not only in environmental ethics but in all areas of practical philosophy.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are deeply grateful to the following people who gave generously of their time and advice to help shape the final structure of this entry: Clare Palmer, Mauro Grün, Lori Gruen, Gary Varner, William Throop, Patrick O'Donnell, Thomas Heyd, and Edward N. Zalta. Also, thanks to Dale Jamieson for comments on the version revised and updated in January 2008.

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Leard, Jason. "Ethics Naturally: An Environmental Ethic Based on Naturalness." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2004. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4458/.

Nelson, Michael Paul. "The land ethic : a theory of environmental ethics defended." Thesis, Lancaster University, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.246100.

Kronlid, David. "Ecofeminism and Environmental Ethics." Doctoral thesis, Uppsala University, Department of Theology, 2003. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-3307.

This study focuses on ecofeminist ethical theory. A first aim is to clarify ecofeminist views on five central issues in the field of environmental ethics. These issues are: (1) Views of nature, (2) social constructivism and nature, (3) values of nature, (4) ethical contextualism, and (5) ethical pluralism. A second aim is to compare ecofeminist standpoints with certain standpoints within nonfeminist environmental ethical theory. A third aim is to critically discuss some of the main standpoints in ecofeminism. The analysis focuses on the works of Karen Warren, Sallie McFague, Chris Cuomo, and Carolyn Merchant. Other important sources are the environmental philosophers and ethicists J. Baird Callicott, Paul Taylor, Irene Klaver, Bryan G. Norton, Christopher Stone, Eugene Hargrove, Holmes Rolston III, Per Ariansen, Don E. Marietta, and Bruno Latour.

The result of this study is that there are no main differences between ecofeminism and nonfeminist environmental ethics regarding the main standpoints on the five issues. Rather, the significant differences are found within these main standpoints. In addition, one important characteristic of ecofeminist ethics is its "double nature," that is, the fact that it is rooted in feminism and environmentalism. The double nature of ecofeminism results in a foundation out of which ecofeminism as an environmental philosophy has a unique potential to handle some of the theoretical tensions that environmental ethics creates.

From the perspective that environmental problems consist of complex clusters of natureculture- discourse and that environmental ethical theory ought to be action guiding, it is argued that ecofeminist ethical theory has an advantage compared to nonfeminist environmental ethics. This standpoint is explained by the fact that ecofeminism holds a variety of views of nature, kinds of social constructivism and contextualism, and conceptions of values and of the self, and from the presumption that this variety reflects the reality of environmental problems. However, in order for ecofeminist ethical theory to fulfill its promise as an acceptable environmental ethical theory, its theoretical standpoints ought to be explicated and further clarified.

James, Simon Paul. "Heidegger and environmental ethics." Thesis, Durham University, 2001. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3958/.

Palmer, Clare. "Environmental ethics and process thinking /." Oxford : Clarendon press, 1998. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb37649968g.

Torres, Christopher. "What is Ethics without Justice? Reframing Environmental Ethics for Social Justice." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/20705.

Wall, Don Hargrove Eugene C. "Earth tones how environmental journalism and environmental ethics influence environmental citizenship /." [Denton, Tex.] : University of North Texas, 2007. http://digital.library.unt.edu/permalink/meta-dc-3907.

Wall, Don. "Earth Tones: How Environmental Journalism and Environmental Ethics Influence Environmental Citizenship." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2007. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3907/.

Fishel, Jason Lee. "An evaluation of environmental pragmatism : applications to environmental ethics /." Online access for everyone, 2008. http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Thesis/Spring2008/J_Fishel_042408.pdf.

Burns, Michael Edmund Reid. "Co-evolutionary relationships between environmental ethics and environmental assessment." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/52735.

Meyers, Ronald B. "A Heuristic for Environmental Values and Ethics, and a Psychometric Instrument to Measure Adult Environmental Ethics and Willingness to Protect the Environment." The Ohio State University, 2002. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1039113836.

Corbeil, Marc J. V. "Process environmental philosophy." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2003. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc6148/.

Runwen, Zhu. "Environmental Virtue Ethics : Wildlife Tourism in Sweden." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för organisation och entreprenörskap (OE), 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-76288.

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Environmental Ethics

These questions, and others like them, are explored in this series. Environmental ethics is a branch of applied philosophy that studies the conceptual foundations of environmental values as well as more concrete issues surrounding societal attitudes, actions, and policies to protect and sustain biodiversity and ecological systems. As we will see, there are many different environmental ethics one could hold, running the gamut from human-centered (or "anthropocentric") views to more nature-centered (or "non-anthropocentric") perspectives. Non-anthropocentrists argue for the promotion of nature's intrinsic, rather than instrumental or use value to humans. For some ethicists and scientists, this attitude of respecting species and ecosystems for their own sakes is a consequence of embracing an ecological worldview; it flows out of an understanding of the structure and function of ecological and evolutionary systems and processes. We will consider how newer scientific fields devoted to environmental protection such as conservation biology and sustainability science are thus often described as "normative" sciences that carry a commitment to the protection of species and ecosystems; again, either because of their intrinsic value or for their contribution to human wellbeing over the long run.

The relationship between environmental ethics and the environmental sciences, however, is a complex and often contested one. For example, debates over whether ecologists and conservation biologists should also be advocates for environmental protection — a role that goes beyond the traditional profile of the "objective" scientist — have received much attention in these fields. Likewise, we will see that issues such as the place of animal welfare concerns in wildlife management, the valuation and control of non-native species, and the adoption of a more interventionist approach to conservation and ecological protection (including proposals to relocate wild species and to geoengineer earth systems to avoid the worst effects of global climate change) frequently divide environmental scientists and conservationists. This split often has as much to do with different ethical convictions and values regarding our responsibility to species and ecosystems as it does with scientific disagreements over the interpretation of data or the predicted outcomes of societal actions and policies.

The essays in this series illustrate the diversity of environmental ethics, both as a field of study and as a broader, value-based perspective on a complex web of issues at the junction of science and society. To gain a fuller understanding of the concepts and arguments of environmental ethics, begin with this introductory overview. From here you can explore a range of topics and questions that highlight the intersection of environmental ethics, ecology, and conservation science.

Conservation Biology: Ethical Foundations

Ecology: An Ethical Perspective

Sustainability: Ethical Foundations

Ethics and Global Climate Change

Ethics of Wildlife Management and Conservation: What Should We Try to Protect?

Sustainability Science: Ethical Foundations and Emerging Challenges

Valuing Ecosystems

Advocacy, Ecology, and Environmental Ethics

Conceptualizing and Evaluating Non-Native Species

Geoengineering and Environmental Ethics

Intrinsic Value, Ecology, and Conservation

Species Conservation, Rapid Environmental Change, and Ecological Ethics

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Beliefs and Actions Towards an Environmental Ethical Life: The Christianity-Environment Nexus Reflected in a Cross-National Analysis

Published: 28 October 2020
Volume 33 , pages 421–446, ( 2020 )

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Ruxandra Malina Petrescu-Mag ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7048-4598 1 ,
Adrian Ana 1 ,
Iris Vermeir ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0440-1381 2 &
Dacinia Crina Petrescu ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5716-9793 3 , 4

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The present study seeks to introduce the European Christian community to the debate on environmental degradation while displaying its important role and theological perspectives in the resolution of the environmental crisis. The fundamental question authors have asked here is if Christianity supports pro-environmental attitudes compared to other religions, in a context where religion, in general, represents the ethical foundation of our civilization and, thus, an important behavior guide. The discussion becomes all the more interesting as many voices have identified the Christian theological tradition as ecologically bankrupt, while others as a source for environmental ethics. In seeking to refute or to confirm the Lynne White’s thesis, firstly, we aimed to rediscover the biblical ecological consciousness and the theology of care. Secondly, following the literature evidence on relevant differences between countries and the influence that religion has on approaching environmental issues, we considered the religion-environmental correlation within a particular country context. For this, data from the European Values Study survey were used, by including 20 European countries. One novelty of this contribution is to highlight the influence of the legacy of the former political regime on pro-environmental attitude and religious practices. The study testifies that the search for a common language for environmental stewardship is a difficult task and fundamental to how we behave. Despite this, within this frame of discussion, we argue that Christianity, as a major social actor, co-exists with and can enhance the interest in and respect for nature.

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BE4Life, Department of Marketing, Innovation and Organization, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Tweekerkenstraat 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

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Dacinia Crina Petrescu

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Petrescu-Mag, R.M., Ana, A., Vermeir, I. et al. Beliefs and Actions Towards an Environmental Ethical Life: The Christianity-Environment Nexus Reflected in a Cross-National Analysis. J Agric Environ Ethics 33 , 421–446 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-020-09832-1

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Considering Environmental Ethics: The Center for Ethics in Society, the Doerr School of Sustainability, and Postdoc Ann C. Thresher

What if we could use geoengineering technology to reverse global climate change rather than having to reduce our overreliance on fossil fuels, lower our consumption of meat and manufactured goods, and worry about deforestation? What if we could solve the problem of invasive species, such as carp, by creating suppression drives — genetic modifications that are quickly inherited within a species — that would eventually sterilize and eliminate carp outside their native habitats, but in the worst case scenario, could accidentally eliminate the entire species?

Who would we need to get permission from to undertake such projects? How might we decide who we are responsible for and who we are beholden to when making decisions that affect the entire planet? And given that we cannot determine precisely what the long-term effects of altering the Earth’s climate or its biodiversity will be, how would we weigh our responsibility to future generations and current populations as we work out the answers? Does nature itself have an intrinsic value that we should account for as we decide whether to design and deploy such technologies?

These are the kinds of questions with which environmental ethics, a subfield of applied ethics in philosophy, engages. Broadly, environmental ethics studies both the conceptual foundations of environmental values, as well as the more concrete concerns that affect the attitudes, actions, and policies necessary to sustain biodiversity and ecosystems.

These are also the kinds of questions Ann C. Thresher — the first joint postdoctoral fellow for the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society and the Doerr School of Sustainability — will be collaborating with faculty, instructors, and students to explore.

Rob Reich, the Center for Ethics’ Faculty Director, explains that the new partnership with the Doerr School is designed to promote a “joint, systematic exploration of the ethical questions manifold in the dilemmas of sustainability we must all confront.” Ethical questions, he contends, “are ubiquitous, arising in every aspect of our lives, from the personal to the economic. They are not just a humanistic concern, they emerge everywhere and in every discipline.”

Building an Ethics of Sustainability The breadth and scale of sustainability concerns is what prompted hundreds of people to propose ways the university could address these issues. Those proposals eventually resulted in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. As Anjana Richards , Director of Transition Planning and Implementation as the school was forming explains, “We recognized that Stanford has many world-class programs, but as we thought about 21st-century education, 21st-century students, and 21st-century sustainability and climate change problems, we wondered what we could do as a university and as a community to address these massive challenges in an integrated, strategic way.” The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability — designed to merge scholarship, educational programs and interdisciplinary collaborations to address systemic sustainability challenges — is Stanford’s answer.

“Our team, led by Lynn Hildemann, Senior Associate Dean of Education, is thinking about how we can equip our sophisticated students — who are experiencing climate change as physical and existential crises — for the tough jobs and amazing opportunities they will be facing,” says Richards.

When Anne Newman , the Center’s Director of Research, was learning about efforts to launch the Doerr School of Sustainability, she had similar questions. But, given her experience developing and administering the Center’s postdoctoral fellowship programs , she also had ideas. “We’ve been partnering postdocs with scholars from the social sciences, life sciences, and engineering for a number of years.” Given that environmental ethics is a highly regarded subfield within academic philosophy, and the Ethics Center had long been having postdocs teach an environmental ethics class, Newman began talking with Nicole Ardoin, Associate Professor in the Division of Social Sciences and Senior Fellow in the Woods Institute, and Director of the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER), who co-led the Education workstream for the new school transition. “Together,” Newman explains, “we came up with the idea of creating a joint postdoc position shared between the McCoy Family Center and the Doerr School that would focus on environmental ethics.”

“Conservation without moral values cannot sustain itself” — George Schaller Although nature was the focus of a good deal of philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth century, the subfield of environmental ethics, in which Thresher is grounded, emerged in western philosophy as a new philosophical subdiscipline in the 1970s. Many environmental ethicists argue that its inception was a response to the environmental crises identified by and communicated to the general public by scientist-writer Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring . However, Dale Jamieson, author of Ethics and the Environment : An Introduction , Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies and Director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection at New York University, describes its development even more broadly. He argues that “environmental ethics emerged in Anglophone philosophy as a result of the questions the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s were raising about the morality of war and the constitution of civil rights.” By the 1970s, he asserts, these concerns gathered enough momentum in academic philosophy to help spur “‘the applied turn,’ where philosophers became more interested in how the field could be used to illuminate social values and public policy questions.” Jamieson contends that because the environment cuts across so many disciplines, “it wasn’t until 1979 that the Environmental Ethics Journal was founded and environmental ethics became a recognized philosophical subfield.”

Since its inception, environmental ethics’ primary concern has been studying human’s relationship with nature and the moral value and status of nature and its non-human contents . As a result, many early environmental ethicists, often building upon indigenous epistemologies, developed “a theory of nature’s intrinsic value that encompasses not just humanity and other sentient animals, but nature itself,” wherein nature’s value “takes precedence over other values,” Jamieson writes.

Whatever one thinks about the idea of nature having intrinsic value, environmental problems are social problems, Dorceta Taylor, Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment, argues. Thus, they challenge our ethical value systems, especially when these problems are as widespread and destructive as the ones wrought by climate change. As a result, in addition to considering the natural environment, environmental ethicists must now ask: What do humans living in the present owe to future generations? How should individual humans live in the Anthropocene? What do we mean by “sustainability” and why is its achievement an ethical requirement in this century? And, as environmental justice advocates point to the disproportionate harm that poor, largely people of color face as the result of the pollution generated by the US and other large economies, ethicists must consider what rich, developed nations with some of the largest carbon footprints per capita owe to poor, developing countries who benefit least and are the most harmed by the excesses of late-stage capitalism.

“Bringing ethical considerations to bear on scientific questions and integrating values into the ways we think about and do science is essential,” says Emily Polk, cofounder and co-director of Stanford’s Environmental Justice Working Group . Like Richards, she believes that combining ethics and science in the Doerr School of Sustainability “can provide the space to think about the potential impacts of science before those impacts are felt.”

Physicist, Philosopher of Science, Environmental Ethicist To address the interdisciplinary nature of the Doerr School of Sustainability, the postdoctoral search prioritized finding an environmental ethicist who was also grounded in science. “We were looking for someone who had a background in STEM that would be nimble enough to work with natural and physical science scholars to access philosophical ideas,” explained Richards. That intention led the Ethics Center and the Doerr School of Sustainability to Ann C. Thresher.

“I believe Thresher will be a particularly valuable member of the intellectual communities at both the McCoy Family Center for Ethics and the Doerr School of Sustainability,” says Leif Wenar , Professor of Philosophy, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute, and a member of the Ethics Center's advisory board. “Her degree in physics and publications in the field, her expertise in biological and climate science; and her upcoming book, The Tangle of Science , co-authored with former Stanford professor Nancy Cartwright, means that Thresher has the expertise necessary to communicate with both scientists and philosophers.” Beyond her academic qualifications, Wenar also describes Thresher as “incredibly intellectually sociable.” That is, because she is truly invested in other people’s areas of expertise, Wenar believes that anyone at the Doerr School of Sustainability who thinks their work may be raising ethical concerns can talk with Thresher, and “together, they’ll be able to develop a much better understanding of the ethics of that situation.” This ground-up approach to ethics, Wenar asserts, also means that Thresher is a perfect fit for the McCoy Family Center’s mission of bringing ethical reflection to bear on pressing public problems.

Finally, Wenar points to Thresher’s paper on gene drives to suggest that in addition to using philosophical tools, she brings an engineering mindset to analyzing ethical problems that mirror the goals of the Doerr School of Sustainability. “She approaches problems by saying: here are our goals, here are the design constraints, and here are the risks and benefits of various alternatives. Let's just work through these to find the best option to provide specific policy guidance.”

Echoing Wenar’s support, Rob Jackson, professor of Earth System Science, views Thresher as a much-needed component of the new school. Jackson believes there hasn’t been enough campus-wide focus on ethics, environmental justice, and distributional justice issues. “If we are to succeed at the new school,” he argues, “it's extremely important that students are exposed to and given the formal training Thresher can provide, while they're being inculcated with the importance of technology, startups, and accelerators.”

Bridging Science and Ethics Having earned undergraduate degrees in both physics and philosophy at The University of Sydney in Australia, Thresher began her Philosophy of Science doctoral work at UC San Diego thinking she would become a philosopher of physics studying spacetime topologies. However, she discovered that “although I enjoy abstract thinking and math, they no longer felt practical enough for me. I believe environmental ethics is one of the most important things philosophers can be doing at this moment, because the tools philosophers have for analyzing big problems — breaking them down into their component parts, finding the base on which everything else rests, determining the fundamental unifying principles, and then putting these pieces back together to construct ethical, actionable next steps — can be applied to the sustainability challenges we all face.”

Thresher, whose environmental ethics work is deeply informed by her background in science, has been using these tools to examine the potential risks and harms of research itself (see her paper in progress, "How Research Harms ") and of emerging technologies. She specifically studies geoengineering and gene-drive technologies and evaluates the ways that policy tools, such as moratoriums, government intervention, and self-regulation can and cannot mitigate these threats.

Thresher also points out that the ethical difficulties posed by climate change, especially since we haven’t acted quickly enough, are only going to grow: “The bigger the problems, the bigger the solutions, and the bigger the solutions, the more extreme the risks they tend to pose.” In the case of geoengineering, for example, she argues that it’s difficult to conduct experiments on a scale relevant to geoengineering “without actually doing geoengineering.” This challenge led to the United Nations Framework Convention on Biological Diversity passing a moratorium on geoengineering research in 2010. However, because climate dangers are accelerating faster than the legislative and behavioral actions we’ve taken to address them, even the moratorium’s largely symbolic limits were essentially evacuated in 2016 . As a result, oil and gas companies’ funding of geoengineering research continues to rise, which raises a host of environmental and ethical concerns.

“Ultimately,” Thresher asserts, “science tells us what we can do. And while ethics cannot provide absolute answers, by balancing out options in a nuanced way, it can tell us what we should do. Ethics is the bridge between science and policy.”

To help build this bridge at the Doerr School of Sustainability, Thresher sees herself contributing in three ways: One is “collaborating with scientists themselves to help them think about the ethical concerns posed by their research. Two is increasing ethics education in the school, in ways similar to those undertaken by the Embedded Ethics postdoc fellows working with the computer science department. And three is bringing ethics more fully into the sphere of the school, so people are talking about scientific output, policy, and the middle ground — the ethics of their projects.”

On the Ground in the New School Since beginning her fellowship this past fall, Thresher has been hanging out in labs, listening to scientists talk about their work and asking, “Have you considered …?” Have you considered the potential impacts of your research, how it might be weaponized, what communities and species might be affected? Thresher has found biologists particularly receptive to talking about the ethical issues in their field. For instance, she is collaborating with Professor Elizabeth Hadley’s lab , whose “mission is to understand, describe, and predict how biodiversity responds to change in the Anthropocene.” Thresher and some lab members are working on creating a feasibility study for bringing Tule elk, once native to the area, back to Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve . While the chances of actually reintroducing them are low, Thresher explains that the goal is to research whether such projects are feasible and then to use these findings as a model for similar regional projects. The other related goal of the research is to contribute to the California 30x30 project — conserving 30 percent of California’s lands and coastal waters by 2030. California 30x30 must grapple with complicated ethical issues regarding the tradeoffs between people and nature, questions about our obligations towards the environment, and the balance between humans actively stewarding nature and taking a more hands-off position. “I'll be consulting with the project’s lab members and helping write about the ethics of rewilding — what we owe the elk, the natural environment, and people — as well as what we value in nature, such as biodiversity, 'naturalness,' and the instrumental/economic value of nature to humans,” says Thresher.

Thresher is also working to raise the visibility of ethics education in the Doerr School of Sustainability. She expects to be delivering more guest lectures, teaching courses and helping design syllabi and assignments. In spring 2023, Thresher will be co-teaching the “Ethics and the Anthropocene” course with Professor Hadley.

The final goal of the Ethics Center/Doerr School partnership is to position ethics more centrally within the school’s field of concern. Thresher sees herself as an ambassador who is there to get more people talking about ethics. She believes that “having a huge group of people who want to make a positive difference on the environment all integrated into a single school designed to research not only how to build solar panels, for instance, but how to use ethics to determine how and where to deploy this technology — is a truly phenomenal initiative.”

Ongoing Encounters with Ethics “Frankly,” Rob Jackson reflects, “sometimes, we need to slow down. There's a tendency for us, at places like Stanford, to think that we have the answers, that we have the technologies, and that the world really needs us to be able to get what we think is the best solution out there as quickly as possible. That can be true, but it's also dangerous, in my view, and ethicists can help us slow down long enough to grapple with the many issues that surround technology.”

Reich’s even broader hope is that “the Center for Ethics can make meaningful, ongoing encounters with ethical questions impossible to avoid, not just at the Doerr School, but in the entire university.”

Donna Hunter is a freelance writer, editor, and tutor living in San Francisco. She has a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley and was an Advanced Lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric.

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1 Environmental Ethics

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Environment ethics is a critical study of the normative issues and principles relevant to the relationship between human and natural world. In this article I tried to find that on what ethical basis should we decide how to deal with nature . The main concern is that to which inherent value can be ascribed to things that are not human, including animals, vegetation, and even land .The integrated efforts are to be put so as to examine the interrelated components of environment system . Environmental ethics has much to contribute to the solution of global environmental problems and raise awareness about environmental problems . Human have a duty to act as benign stewards of the earth.

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Moral principles define the responsibility of a particular person towards the environment. These principles, the environmental ethics establish the ethical relationship between human beings and the natural environment. The resources on earth are limited and belong to all the species that exist in nature. Though humans have right to draw their requirements from the environment but certainly not to the extent that degrades the environment and harms other species and living beings. Humans have apparently more responsibility to minimize their anthropogenic activities and to save the earth. The existing environmental ethics seem imperfect and insufficient to meet the current situation hence humans have to rethink about effective environmental ethics.

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Considering Environmental Ethics: The Center for Ethics in Society, the Doerr School of Sustainability, and Postdoc Ann C. Thresher

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