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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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