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articles
1. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 2
Christopher Cohoon Eating the Good: Plumwood’s Trophic Extensionism
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Plumwood’s late work articulates two intertwined “historic tasks”: re-situating “non-human life in ethical terms” and “human life in ecological terms.” Her well-known thesis of “weak panpsychism,” an explicit rival to moral extensionism, represents her primary approach to the first task. Her approach to the second task, however, is less conspicuous. My aim is to identify and develop this approach, which, I suggest, mobilizes the fraught idea of human edibility into a certain mimetic and critical mode of extensionism that I call trophic extensionism. Inverting moral extensionist logic, it extends not moral considerability to animals but literal edibility to humans. Plumwood’s trophic extensionism both revitalizes weak panpsychism—re-vealing an unexpected link between food and mind—and generates a bold new conception of food: no longer an ontological category, food becomes an ecological relation defined by epistemological vulnerability.
2. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 2
Andrew F. Smith Symbioculture: A Kinship-Based Conception of Sustainable Food Systems
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Symbioculture involves nurturing the lives of those in one’s ecology, including the beings one eats. More specifically, it is a kinship-based conception of food and food systems rooted in Indigenous considerations of sustainability. Relations among food sources; cultivators, distributors, and eaters; and the land they share are sustainable when they function as extended kinship arrangements. Symbioculture hereby offers salient means to resist the ecocidal, agroindustrial food system that currently dominates transnationally in a manner that responds to the urgent need—both in terms of Indigenous justice and prudence for us all—to decolonize foodways and decommodify food, food-based knowledge, and food labor.
3. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 2
Dennis Stromback Notes on Miki Kiyoshi’s Anthropological Humanism and Environmental Ethics
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This article argues for the importance of using Miki Kiyoshi’s anthropological humanism as a theoretical resource for confronting the unfolding ecological crisis. What makes Miki’s anthropological humanism valuable towards this end, in particular, is in the way he blends multiple theoretical discourses—particularly Nishida and Marx—which speak to the concerns espoused by Deep Ecology and Marxist approaches to environmental philosophy. Unlike other Kyoto School thinkers deployed in the service of building an environmental ethics in recent years, Miki’s philosophical work offers social-economic alternatives to the problem of capitalism within a non-dual framework that seeks to be non-dogmatic. This article will discuss how Miki’s anthropological humanism can enrich those conversations taking place within the “green” and “red” movements by providing them with insights by which to contest and overcome anthropocentric views of reality and the system of capitalism believed to be responsible for the environmental destruction we see today.
4. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 2
Don Beith From Biomimicry to Biosophia: Ecologies of Technology in Benyus, Oxman, Fisch, and Merleau-Ponty
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Biomimicry promises great progress in ecological design. Advocates, hinging on the work of Janine Benyus, argue that biomimicry enhances sustainable technologies. This essay suggests conceptual and ethical improvements to biomimicry: first by considering Michael Fisch’s concept of bioinspiration through studying Neri Oxman’s Silkworm Pavilion and second, through the articulation of a new concept of biosophia, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late Institution and Nature lectures. His investigation of seemingly impossible proto-mimicry prior to perception discloses a deeper comportment toward biomimicry, revealing its conditions of possibility in intercorporeal expressivity. Biosophia grounds a deeper ethic of collaboration with other lifeforms.
5. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 2
Kimberly M. Dill Three Criteria for Environmental Authenticity: A Response to the Simulation Problem
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Broadly, I endorse the view that biodiverse species and spaces warrant conservation (partially) in virtue of their power to induce epistemic (Paul 2015; Sarkar 2011), relational, and positive, psycho-physiological transformation. However, if we are (in the not-so-distant future) able to construct cross-modally replete simulations of biodiverse environments, then what reason would we have to conserve genuine, biodiverse ecosystems? In order to address this “Simulation Problem,” I argue that the authenticity of biodiverse environments matters, both in itself and insofar as authenticity plays an important psychological, cultural, personal, and epistemic role in the lives of human agents.
6. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 2
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer Unacceptable Agency: Part I of The Problem of an Unloving World
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The Earth System Governance Project is the largest scholarly body in the world devoted to articulating governance of the Earth’s systems. It recently published a “Harvesting Initiative” looking back on the first iteration of its Scientific Plan. This paper contributes to the decolonial and constructive critique of the theory of agency in that Initiative and argues that it displays “fragmentary coloniality” especially around problematic authority relations in governance. By turning to work on “worlding,” the paper argues for radicalizing questions of authority, leading us to focus not on agency but on moral relationships—work for a sequel to this paper.
book reviews
7. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 2
Jessica Ludescher Imanaka The Kingdom and the Garden
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8. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 2
Jeffrey D. Gower Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia
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9. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 2
Rika Dunlap In Praise of Risk
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10. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 2
Annie Ring Philosophy in the American West: A Geography of Thought
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11. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 2
Joshua Jones The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds
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12. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 2
Daniel Sullivan A World Otherwise: Environmental Praxis in Minamata
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articles
13. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1
Julia D. Gibson Climate Justice for the Dead and the Dying: When Past-Oriented Environmentalism Isn’t Enough
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Environmentalism has long placed heavy emphasis on strategies that seek to ensure the environment of today and the future roughly mirror the past. Yet while past-oriented approaches have come under increased scrutiny, environmental ethics in the time of climate change is still largely conceptualized as that which could pull humanity back from the brink of disaster or, at least, prevent the worst of it. As a result, practical and conceptual tools for grappling with what is owed to the dead and dying victims of environmental injustice have been and continue to be woefully underdeveloped. This paper advances scaffolding for robust environmental death ethics that are temporally pluralistic and at home within intergenerational climate justice.
14. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1
Jack Black, Jim Cherrington Temporal Ontology in Ecology: Developing an Ecological Awareness Through Time, Temporality and the Past-present Parallax
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Theoretical applications of time and temporality remain a key consideration for both climate scientists and the humanities. By way of extending this importance, we critically examine Timothy Morton’s proposed “ecological awareness” alongside Slavoj Žižek’s “parallax view.” In doing so, the article introduces a “past-present parallax” in order to contest that, while conceptions of the past are marked by “lack,” equally, our conceptions of and relations to Nature remain grounded in an ontological incompleteness, marked by contingency. This novel approach presents an ecological awareness that remains temporally attuned to the impasses and inconsistencies which frame our relations in/with Nature.
15. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1
Félix Landry Yuan The Usefulness of Uselessness for Conservation in the Ways of Zhuangzi
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Global efforts for biodiversity conservation have gained considerable momentum in recent years. Yet much remains to be learned from the minds of the ancient past regarding perspectives on relations between society and the environment. Zhuangzi is one such figure whose works may be of high relevance to contemporary conservation. While many philosophical ideals underpinning conservation stem from a mostly westernized ethos, strategies can be expanded by non-western principles such as Zhuangzi’s. In light of IPBES’ “nature’s contributions to people” concept, a globally reaching framework for conservation, I explore the applicability of one of Zhuangzi’s central teachings; the usefulness of uselessness.
16. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1
Zachary Vereb Kant’s Pre-critical Ontology and Environmental Philosophy
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In this paper I argue that Kant’s pre-critical ontology, though generally dismissed by environmental philosophers, provides ecological lessons by way of its metaphysical affinities with environmental philosophy. First, I reference where environmental philosophy tends to place Kant and highlight his relative marginalization. This marginalization makes sense given focus on his critical works. I then outline Kant’s pre-critical ontological framework and characterize the ways in which it is ecological. Finally, I conclude with some ecological reflections on the pre-critical philosophy and its possible relevance for contemporary environmental issues.
17. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1
Brian Seitz Tracks: A Material Phenomenology of the Road
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This project is a convergence of environmental philosophy and variant strains of continental philosophy. The aim is to make the familiar a bit unfamiliar, partly by understanding the road as an event, and partly by experimentally downplaying the significance of human intentions, particularly given that originary tracks were frequently the result of simple useage. We humans are always on the road, which in a fundamental sense is going nowhere or, alternatively, is possibly heading toward a dead-end.
18. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1
Joshua Mousie, Gabriel Eisen, Mahaa Mahmood How Do Houses Make the Political Possible?
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We develop the concept “political residency” in this essay to highlight both the foundational role of built environments in our political life as well as how access to, and displacement from, built environments is therefore a central feature of political harms and goods. The example of housing and housing displacement is instructive for developing our concept because it is central to most people’s everyday life, yet residential security and stability—having control with other inhabitants over shared, built spaces—is often missing from peoples’ lives, especially those who are most socially and politically vulnerable.
book reviews
19. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1
Josh Berry The Power of the Periphery: How Norway Became an Environmental Pioneer for the World
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20. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1
Will Britt Heidegger’s Concept of Philosophical Method: Innovating Philosophy in the Age of Global Warming
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