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features
1. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Keith Peterson Ecosystem Services, Nonhuman Agencies, and Diffuse Dependence
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This paper is a preliminary treatment of the categories of agency and dependence in the context of ecosystem services discourse. These categories are discussed in terms of critical categorial ontology in order to articulate adequately the nature of humankind’s dependence upon the nonhuman natural world, inadequately captured by ecosystem services discourse. Following Val Plumwood, this essay takes ecosystems services discourse as an example of one type of failure to discern various forms of agency as well as dependence, and it goes on to define diffuse dependence as the relation that corresponds to the form of agency expressed through ecosystem services.
2. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Joshua Mousie Global Environmental Justice and Postcolonial Critique
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In this article I examine contemporary accounts of global justice theory (which I designate as domestic and institutional) and how they are implemented in order to formulate notions of global environmental justice. I underscore how these accounts are limited in their ability to provide thick conceptions of environmental justice, mainly because they fail to provide promising alternative visions of global politics that can substantially combat the injustices and inequalities that are currently so popular in neoliberal environmental governance. I argue that perspectives and theoretical tools from postcolonial theory can, however, help us to begin rethinking what the phrase “environmental justice” should mean.
3. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Nicholas Mowad The Natural World of Spirit: Hegel on the Value of Nature
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Hegel provides a previously unnoticed foundation for an environmental ethic according to which the environment is not a collection of mere objects to be exploited arbitrarily. Indeed, the environment is not even merely natural, but also an expression of culture. In identifying this relation between nature and culture, Hegel anticipates “bioregionalism,” though he would also be critical of this school of thought. I conclude that Hegel offers the foundations for an environmental ethic (though not a fully articulated theory) by showing how the natural environment is part of who we are, and so ought not to be treated arbitrarily.
4. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Michael James Bennett Bergson’s Environmental Aesthetic
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This paper investigates the connection between Henri Bergson’s biological epistemology and his moral theory. Specifically, it examines the distinction between the morality of what Bergson calls “closed” and “open” societies in his late work Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). I argue that “open” morality provides the moral correlate of a non-instrumentalizing orientation toward nature. Here Bergson’s thought is disposed toward a very specific kind of environmental ethic, an aesthetic one. Bergson’s characterization of open morality, especially in the image of the mystic individual, indicates that through artistic consciousness open morality imitates the creative evolution of life.
5. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Matthew C. Ally Ecologizing Sartre’s Ontology: Nature, Science, and Dialectics
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I argue that Sartre’s philosophy can be both broadened in its aspirations and deepened in its implications through dialogue with the life sciences. Section 1 introduces the philosophical terrain. Section 2 explores Sartre’s evolving understanding of nature and human relations with nature. Section 3 explores Sartre’s perspectives on scientific inquiry, natural history, and dialectical reason. Section 4 outlines recent developments in the life sciences that bear directly on Sartre’s quiet curiosity about a naturalistic dialectics. Section 5 suggests how these developments constitute progress toward an “ecologized” dialectical philosophy consistent with Sartre’s mature ontology of praxis and pertinent to addressing the burgeoning socioecological crisis.
6. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Drew Leder Embodying Otherness: Shape-Shifting and the Natural World
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This paper explores the ability and desire of the embodied self to “shape-shift”—to experience from within the capacities of animals, or natural phenomena like trees and mountains. Shape-shifting is discussed insofar as it manifests in a broad range of cultural domains, including children’s play, mythico-religious iconography, spiritual practice, sports, the performing arts, and so on. This potential for shape-shifting is grounded not simply in our evolutionary history and biological kinships, but in the phenomenology of the lived-body. Our own powers are explored, expanded, and transformed through our communion with the non-human world.
7. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Andrew Reszitnyk Eyes Through Oil: Witnessing the Nonhuman Victims of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
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This paper evaluates Jacques Derrida’s startling claim that “the relations between humans and animals must change . . . both in the sense of an ‘ontological’ necessity and of an ‘ethical’ duty,” through an assessment of the ethical appeal emitted by nonhuman witnesses of catastrophe. Drawing upon contemporary theories of ethics, photography, and animality, it analyzes Charley Riedel’s iconic 2010 photograph of a bird covered in oil in the Gulf of Mexico, arguing that attending to visual testaments to disaster is one way to begin to challenge an anthropocentrism that has rendered life outside “the human” unworthy of ethical and political consideration.
author’s forum
8. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
David Wood The Truth about Animals
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9. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Kalpana Seshadri Animal Pedagogy and Learning by Heart
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10. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Brett Buchanan Most Beautiful Companion
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11. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Kelly Oliver Love Bites! Or Taking Ethics to Heart: Response to Critics on Animal Lessons
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book reviews
12. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Nathan M. Bell Forrest Clingerman and Mark H. Dixon, editors. Placing Nature on the Borders of Religion, Philosophy and Ethics
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13. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Jasper Van de Vijver Jeff Malpas, editor. The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies
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14. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Wendy Lynne Lee Nicholas A. Robins. Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver in the Andes
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15. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Rebecca Tuvel Mick Smith. Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World
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16. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 2
Forrest Clingerman Ingrid Leman Stefanovic and Stephen Bede Scharper, editors. The Natural City: Re-Envisioning the Built Environment
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17. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Jacob Metcalf, Thom van Dooren Editorial Preface
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The collection of essays in this special issue of Environmental Philosophy addresses the role that temporality, or lived time, should have in environmental philosophy, and especially ethics. The role of time in environmental ethics has largely been restricted to an empty container for human agency to do good or ill. By understanding time as material, produced, constructed, maintained, lived, multiple, and a more-than-human concern, the authors in this collection are able to ask which times are liveable for humans and non-humans alike. Once the specificities of lived time are accounted for, it becomes clear that not all temporalities are identical and synchronous, and that environmental philosophy must attend to the ruptures in ecological time.
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18. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
James Hatley The Virtue of Temporal Discernment: Rethinking the Extent and Coherence of the Good in a Time of Mass Species Extinction
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How might human beings be called to exercise virtue, which is to say, modes of acknowledgement, humility, and discernment, in regard to the impending (no matter how distant chronologically) extinction of the human species? It is argued that the inevitable extinction of the human species be affirmed as a good, in spite of how daunting and uncanny this act might be. This affirmation is called for as humans struggle to find an ethical response appropriate to their creaturely existence, as well as to their devastating complicity in a historical and geological moment of mass species extinction.
19. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Michelle Bastian Fatally Confused: Telling the Time in the Midst of Ecological Crises
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Focusing particularly on the role of the clock in social life, this article explores the conventions we use to “tell the time.” I argue that although clock time generally appears to be an all-encompassing tool for social coordination, it is actually failing to coordinate us with some of the most pressing ecological changes currently taking place. Utilizing philosophical approaches to performativity to explore what might be going wrong, I then draw on Derrida’s and Haraway’s understandings of social change in order to suggest a fairly unconventional, but perhaps more accurate, mode of reckoning time in the context of climate change, resource depletion, and mass extinctions.
20. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Peter S. Alagona, John Sandlos, Yolanda F. Wiersma Past Imperfect: Using Historical Ecology and Baseline Data for Conservation and Restoration Projects in North America
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Conservation and restoration programs usually involve nostalgic claims about the past, along with calls to return to that past or recapture some aspect of it. Knowledge of history is essential for such programs, but the use of history is fraught with challenges. This essay examines the emergence, development, and use of the “ecological baseline” concept for three levels of biological organization. We argue that the baseline concept is problematic for establishing restoration targets. Yet historical knowledge—more broadly conceived to include both social and ecological processes—will remain essential for conservation and restoration.