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1. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 4
News and Notes
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from the founding editor
2. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 4
Gene Hargrove A Final Word or Two
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from the guest editors
3. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 4
Jeff Gessas, Tricia Glazebrook Settler Colonialism and Environmental Ethics
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features
4. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 4
Lauren Eichler, David Baumeister Predators and Pests: Settler Colonialism and the Animalization of Native Americans
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The tethering of Indigenous peoples to animality has long been a central mechanism of settler colonialism. Focusing on North America from the seventeenth century to the pres­ent, this essay argues that Indigenous animalization stems from the settler imposition onto Native Americans of dualistic notions of human/animal difference, coupled with the settler view that full humanity hinges on the proper cultivation of land. To further illustrate these claims, we attend to how Native Americans have been and continue to be animalized as both predators and pests, and show how these modes of animalization have and continue to provide settlers motive and justification for the elimination of Native peoples and the extractive domination of Native lands.
5. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 4
Rebekah Sinclair Un-Settling Species Concepts through Indigenous Knowledge: Implications for Ethics and Science
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The voices of Native American philosophers, scientists, and storytellers need to be amplified to problematize and decolonize the often taken-for-granted concept of species in environmental ethics. Especially in the context of climate change, concepts such as cross-species native,invasive, and endangered species have become cornerstones for understanding and evaluating moral obligations to other lives.Yet, even as the species concept does ethical work, it has not itself been subject to critical ethical evaluation. Instead, uncritical treatment of the species concept can naturalize Western metaphysical conceptual habits in ways that both support settler colonial organization of the world and conflict with Indigenous ontological and ethico-epistemological understandings of species. This can be especially problematic as scientists and environmentalists increasingly seek to engage Indigenous knowledge of particular species (for the purposes of conservation, for example) while assuming the sovereignty and objectivity of Western scientific taxonomies and species concepts. Yet, far from being objective and neutral with respect to culture, Western species concepts and taxonomies were first universalized and naturalized in part through the cooption and dismissal of Indigenous species knowledges.
6. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 4
Anna Cook, Bonnie Sheehey Metaphorical and Literal Groundings: Unsettling Groundless Normativity in Environmental Ethics
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Accounts of grounded normativity in Indigenous philosophy can be used to challenge the groundlessness of Western environmental ethical approaches such as Aldo Leopold’s land ethic. Attempts to ground normativity in mainstream Western ethical theory deploy a metaphorical grounding that covers up the literal grounded normativity of Indigenous philosophical practices. Furthermore, Leopold’s land ethic functions as a form of settler philosophical guardianship that works to erase, assimilate, and effectively silence localized Indigenous knowledges through a delocalized ethical standard. Finally, grounded normativ­ity challenges settlers to question their desire for groundless normative theory and practice as reflective of their evasion of ethical responsibility for the destruction and genocide of Indigenous communities.
7. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 4
Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner Reclaiming Rainmaking from Damming Epistemologies: Indigenous Resistance to Settler Colonial Contributory Injustice
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In California Indian epistemologies, water, land, language, and knowledge are intimately connected through ancient cycles of research, ceremony, and kinship. Since creation, ‘atáaxum champúulam//Luiseño medicine people sang for rain, holding ceremonies that kept the riv­ers full, the plants strong, and our people from thirst. Rainmaking in this essay serves as an example of an Indigenous lifeway and practice that was subjected to colonial violence; rainmaking also serves as a more figurative and emblematic example of a central feature of Indigenous epistemologies in which language, land, governance/clan systems, and ceremony are linked together as an embodied practice. Embodied practices and the cluster of concepts connected to them are contrasted throughout this essay with parcels, or aspects of Indigenous lifeways that are rendered as individualized pieces or as mere resources. Indigenous lifeways are rendered as parcels or mere resources through a process of structural epistemic injustice (contributory injustice) that can be referted to as epistemic damming. Through contributory injustice, or epistemic damming, settler colonial legal and academic structures have transformed Indigenous practices by rendering them into parcels, or mere resources, and doling them out piecemeal back to Indigenous communities as a lackluster gesture at justice. This essay (1) provides sorely underdiscussed historical context of the impacts of settler colonialism on Indigenous lifeways and practices, spotlighting the specific manifestations of settler colonial violence in California, (2) shows how Indigenous practices are epistemically dammed, or subjected to structural contributory injustice, highlighting contemporary examples thereof, and (3) briefly gestures at a now-visible roadmap of avenues of Indigenous resistance with hazards such as contributory injustice flagged along the way.
8. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 4
Billie Lythberg, Dan Hikuroa How Can We Know Wai-Horotiu—A Buried River? Cross-cultural Ethics and Civic Art
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The complex interactions and ruptures between contemporary settler colonialism, environmental ethics, and Indigenous rights and worldviews often emerge in projects of civil engineering. The continued capture, control and burial of natural water courses in Aotearoa-New Zealand is a case in point, and exemplifies a failure to stay abreast of evolving understandings and renewed relationships we seek with our waterways, our ancestors. Wai-Horotiu stream used to run down what is now Queen Street, the main road in Auckland, Aotearoa-New Zealand’s largest city. Treasured by Māori as a source of wai (water) and mahinga kai (food), it is also the home of Horotiu, a taniwha or ancestral guardian—a literal ‘freshwater body’. However, as Tāmaki-Makaurau transitioned into Auckland city, Wai-Horotiu became denigrated; used as an open sewer by early settlers before being buried alive in the colonial process. How, now, can we know this buried waterway? Te Awa Tupua Act 2017 that affords the Whanganui River juristic personality and moral considerability offers one possible solution. It acknowledges that waterways, incorporating all their physical and metaphysical elements, exist in existential interlinks with Māori as part of their whakapapa (genealogical networks). This paper asks, can a corresponding and appropriate ethics of association and care be fostered in and expressed by the political descendants of British settlers (Pākehā) and later immigrants who live here under the auspices established by Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840? Here is a conversation between a Māori earth systems scientist and a Pākehā interdisciplinary scholar. Where Hikuroa speaks from and to direct whakapapa connections, beginning with pepeha, Lythberg’s narrative springboards from public art projects that facilitate more ways of knowing Wai-Horotiu. Together, we contend that a regard for Indigenous relationships with water can guide best practice for us all, and propose that creative practices can play a role in attaching people to place, and to waterways.
book reviews
9. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 4
Inês Salgueiro Christine M. Korsgaard. Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals
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10. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 4
Matthias Fritsch Hicham-Stéphane Afeissa. Esthétique de la charogne
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11. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 4
Referees 2020
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12. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 4
Index for 2020
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13. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
News and Notes
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from the guest editor
14. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
Shan Gao Nature, Wilderness, and Civilization: Perspectives from Chinese Scholars
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features
15. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
Wang-heng Chen, Xin-yu Chen The Re-Enchantment of Wilderness and Urban Aesthetics
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According to the essence of industrial civilization, wilderness is bound to disenchantment. However, in the ecological civilization era, based on the demands of ecological balance, we must reserve a certain degree of wilderness in urban environment. Therefore, we need to bring back enchantment to aesthetic appreciation of wilderness. On the surface, the re-enchantment of wilderness seems to be a regression of agricultural civilization; however, in fact, it is a transcendental development of agricultural civilization. In recent years, there have been some deviations in the application of “garden urbanism” and “landscape urbanism” have existed in contemporary Chinese urban landscaping. To some extent, the recovery of wilderness is a major mission in Chinese urban construction.
16. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
Yuedi Liu The Paradigm of the Wild, Cultural Diversity, and Chinese Environmentalism: A Response to Holmes Rolston, III
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The so-called “Paradigm of the Wild” means either environmental ethics or environmental aesthetics has gone wild. According to Holmes Rolston, III, “philosophy has gone wild.” Chinese traditional environmentalism takes another anthropocosmic way, and it has a global applicability in cultural diversity. The dichotomy of “nature-culture” is already out of date, and humans have to face the new relation of humanized-nature today. From the perspec­tive of “ethics and aesthetics” in Chinese Confucianism, a different passageway between environmental ethics and environmental aesthetics can be shaped.
17. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
Shan Gao Nature, Wilderness, and Supreme Goodness: A Comparative Study of Transcendentalism and Confucianism
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Transcendentalism and Confucianism involve different understandinsgs of the concepts of nature, wilderness, and supreme goodness in terms of the metaphysical understanding of nature and how it influences the understanding of human nature. The goodness of Tao is not transcendental as understood by transcendentalism. Rather the goodness of Tao as the important moral values is shaped by human beings’ experience of the natural world. It is this deeper philosophical reason why transcendentalism encourages the aesthetic appreciation of wilderness while Confucianism encourages the aesthetic appreciation of humanized nature.
18. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
LuYang Chen, Ziao Chen Wilderness in Ancient Chinese Landscape Painting
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Chinese painting is dominated by landscape painting, which is a unique form of artistic expression for Chinese people, while landscape generally refers to nature. Wild natural landscape can be called “wilderness,” which embodies the vitality and upward vitality of nature, and also contains unique cultural characteristics. “Wilderness” is the most important “original ecological” environment in the natural environment. Its existence has natural, ecological, and aesthetic significance. It is nature in its primitiveness and ecology in its wildness; the aesthetic lives on in it. Compared with Western landscape painting, it pays particular attention to realism, good at depicting beautiful natural scenery and recording the reality of scenery. On the other hand, Chinese landscape painting pays more attention to the expression of connotation. Chinese landscape painting focuses on nature, takes meaning as its purpose and pursues culture. Chinese landscape painting is the outstanding expression of wilderness spirit, which is mainly manifested in three aspects: (1) Chinese landscape painting is of the same origin as “Tao” (道); (2) the “wilderness” in landscape painting has a strong vitality; (3) “wilderness” has a special cultural connotation. China’s wilderness is not ecological, but is vibrant; not in the dust, but out of the dust; not in nature, but in culture.
19. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
Yuling Che, Feifei Duan Cultural Roots for the Evolution of Wilderness and the Anxieties of Urban Living
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Space being the precondition for human existence, human perception and experience vary responding to different spaces. Modern urban dwellers live in urban space where they seem to have much space mobility but end up living in a homogenized concrete jungle. This fact has influenced, if not defined, modern urban dwellers’ life experience and caused their anxieties about such an existence. However, wilderness, as opposed to urban space, is not merely a type of space, but a way of existence relating to diversity, freedom, and healthy savagery. Civilizational evolution explains the change of human perception of wilderness from fear and desire to conquer to longing and affection, and in this sense the history of the evolution of space perception is also a history of civilization because space and culture are entwined and the more diversified the types of human living space, the more diversified their existences. In the contemporary world, the significance of wilderness not only lies in its resistance to the aforementioned homogenized, unidimensional, urban human existence, but the civilization of wilderness points to a new form of civilization that is intrinsically different from technological civilization for whose disease the civilization of wilderness per se may serve as a possible remedy.
20. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 42 > Issue: 3
Yanqiu Hu, Xiaotao Zhou Wilderness Spirit and Ecological Self in the Vision of Ecopsychology
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Ecopsychology holds that a full-fledged self should be in harmony with nature, but when the human’s social self, consumptive false self, and paranoid cultural narcissism prevail, the ecological self goes from dominant existence to recessive existence. Because of this predicament with regard to the ecological self, one should make full use of wildness spirit to reshape the ecological self. Due to the abstract nature of the wilderness spirit and in an attempt to present the wilderness spirit in a more concrete and vivid way, the wilderness spirit needs to be set apart from wilderness literature so as to analyze the role that the wilderness spirit plays in rebuilding the ecological self.