Already a subscriber? - Login here
Not yet a subscriber? - Subscribe here

Browse by:



Displaying: 1-20 of 47 documents


news and notes
1. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
NEWS AND NOTES
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
features
2. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
Thomas Heyd Nature, Culture, and Natural Heritage: Toward a Culture of Nature
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Nature and culture are usually treated as opposites. Nature, on this conception, is on the wane as a result of culture. A fresh analysis of the relation between these two terms in the light of the notion of “cultural landscapes” is needed. This account allows for nature to be understood as an important, distinctive category, even while granting the constitutive role of the culturally structured gaze. Culture and nature need not be conceived in opposition to each other, for it makes sense to speak of, and pursue, a culture of nature. These considerations have important consequences for natural heritage conservation.
3. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
Charles J. List The Virtues of Wild Leisure
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
The land ethic of Aldo Leopold has increasingly received attention as an example of an environmental virtue ethic. However, an important remaining question is how to cultivate and transmit environmental virtues. The answer to this question can be found in the pursuit of wild leisure. The classical view of leisure primarily as articulated in Aristotle’s Politics provides a good starting point for an examination of wild leisure. Leopold thought wild leisure was important and associated it with his land ethic. Leopold’s view of wild leisure focused on the role of perception in ecological education and the habituation of virtue. The classical virtue of moderation when habituated by wild leisure becomes the central virtue required by an ecological conscience. Wild leisure educates just those intellectual and scientific virtues necessary for refined perception and prudence. These virtues provide connections between good citizenship and land citizenship.
discussion papers
4. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
Charles Cockrell The Value of Microorganisms
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Environmental ethics has almost exclusively been focused on multicellular organisms. However, because microorganisms form the base of the world’s food chains, allowing for the existence of all higher organisms, the complexities of the moral considerability of microorganisms deserve attention. Despite the impossible task of protecting individual microorganisms—the paradigmatic example of the limitations to a Schweitzerian “reverence for life”—microorganisms can be considered to have intrinsic value on the basis of conation, along with their enormous instrumental value. This intrinsic value even manifests itself at the individual level, although in this case the ethic can only be regulative (an ethical principle). Biocentrism is the most appropriate ethical framework for microorganisms, and the most useful normative framework for implementing the preservation and conservation of microorganisms. This ethic has implications for how we deal with disease-causing microorganisms.
5. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
David W. Kidner Fraud, Fantasy, and Fiction in Environmental Writing
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
During the past several decades, a number of accounts of environmental and ethnic wisdom have appeared which have later been exposed as fraudulent. The widespread popularity of these accounts should be understood as symptomatic of valid feelings and awarenesses that are unable to find expression in the modern world, and are usually dissociated from mainstream decision-making processes. As the natural order continues to be degraded, forms such as fiction which currently have relatively low status will become more important as vehicles for feelings, ideas, and possibilities which can find no other refuge within a world increasingly dominated by technological and economic viewpoints.
6. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
Eric B. Horn On Callicott’s Second-Order Principles
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
J. Baird Callicott has proposed two second-order principles which he believes can be used to settle conflicts between his land ethic and traditional human morality. The first of these proposes that ethical obligations arising from “more venerable and intimate” communities should take precedence over those arising from “more recently emerged and impersonal” communities, while the second proposes that “stronger” interests should take precedence over “weaker” ones. Callicott’s first second-order principle fails to specify unambiguously which communities’ obligations should take precedence because he has failed to provide a clear description of how we are to identify and compare communities. In order for his second second-order principle to be useful, a good deal more work needs to be done to spell out what is meant by describing certain interests as “stronger” than others, particularly with respect to holistic entities. While the project of fleshing out a description of the strengths of interests for holistic entities may present an interesting and fruitful challenge, the prospects for providing a description of community identification of the sort that Callicott requires are much dimmer.
book reviews
7. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
J. Robert Loftis The Aesthetics of Natural Environments
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
8. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
Kai M. A. Chan The Death of Our Planet’s Species
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
9. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
Robert Kirkman The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
10. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
Alfred I. Tauber Thoreau’s Living Ethics: Walden and the Pursuit of Virtue
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
referees
11. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
REFEREES 2005
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
index
12. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
INDEX FOR 2005
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
news and notes
13. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 3
NEWS AND NOTES
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
features
14. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 3
Costa Panayotakis Environmental Ethics and Capitalism’s Dialetic of Scarcity
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
A non-productivist Marxism departing from the analysis of capitalism’s “dialectic of scarcity” can make a valuable contribution to the field of environmental ethics. On the one hand, the analysis of capitalism’s dialectic of scarcity shows that the ethical yardstick by which capitalism should be measured is immanent in this social system’s dynamic tendencies. On the other hand, this analysis exposes capitalism’s inability to fulfill the potential for an ecologically sustainable society without unnecessary human suffering that capitalism’s technological dynamism generates. This argument can be illustrated by a critical analysis of Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist. An exploration of capitalism’s dialectic of scarcity can bring to light those weaknesses and internal contradictions of antiecological discourses that are likely to escape the attention of non-Marxist ecologists. This analysis shows that to the extent capitalism’s dialectic of scarcity encourages the fragmentation of social justice and environmental movements, a critical analysis of this dialectic can contribute to the formation of the alliance of emancipatory movements that the attainment of a just and ecologically sustainable society presupposes.
15. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 3
Stephanie Ross Landscape Perception: Theory-Laden, Emotionally Resonant, Politically Correct
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Our primal ability to see one thing in terms of another shapes our landscape perception. Although modes of appreciation are tied to personal interests and situations, there are many lines of conflict and incompatibility between these modes. A religious point of view is unacceptable to those without religious beliefs. Background knowledge is similarly required for taking an arts or science-based view of landscape, although this knowledge can be acquired. How to cultivate responses grounded in imagination, emotion, and instinct is less clear, but advocates are eager to spell out notions of virtuous exercise and effective schooling. Carlson’s science-based theory often gets the most attention because he has refined and defended it over many years, but there is a place in aesthetic nature appreciation for the formal or design elements he dismisses as well as for religious, imaginative, emotional, and ambient responses. To date, the normative aspects of these theories have been presented sketchily at best. Working out these details will chart a way for landscape appreciation to become politically correct.
discussion papers
16. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 3
Kathleen Dean Moore The Truth of the Barnacles: Rachel Carson and the Moral Significance of Wonder
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Beginning with Rachel Carson’s small book, The Sense of Wonder, I explore the moral significance of a sense of wonder—the propensity to respond with delight, awe, or yearning to what is beautiful and mysterious in the natural world when it unexpectedly reveals itself. An antidote to the view that the elements of the natural world are commodities to be disdained or destroyed, a sense of wonder leads us to celebrate and honor the more-than-human world, to care for it, to protect its thriving. If this is so, then a sense of wonder may be a virtue, perhaps a keystone virtue in our time of reckless destruction, a source of decency and hope and restraint.
17. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 3
Kimberly K. Smith What is Africa to Me?: Wilderness in Black Thought from 1860 to 1930
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
The concept of wilderness found in the black American intellectual tradition poses a provocative alternative to the preservationist concept. For black writers, the wilderness is not radically separate from human society but has an important historical and social dimension. Nor is it merely a feature of the external landscape; there is also a wilderness within, a vital energy that derives from and connects one to the external wilderness. Wilderness is the origin and foundation of culture; preserving it means preserving not merely the physical landscape but our collective memory of it. But black writers also highlight the racial essentialism that infuses both their own and traditional American concepts of the wild, giving us greater insight into why the wilderness celebrated by preservationists can be a problematic value for racial minorities.
18. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 3
Thomas Leddy A Defense of Arts-Based Appreciation of Nature
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In a pluralist and pragmatist view of aesthetic appreciation of nature, nature is validly appreciated through various cultural media including science, technology, mythology, and, in particular, the arts. Those who attack arts-based appreciation mainly think about the arts of the nineteenth century: traditional landscape painting and sculptures on pedestals. When we turn to art since the 1970s, for example, earth art, this picture changes. Allen Carlson’s attack on postmodernist and pluralist models of aesthetic appreciation does not pose significant problems for an arts-based approach, for he makes a major concession to non-scientific culture-based approaches when he allows mythological descriptions. If mythology can be taken into consideration when appreciating the natural environment, then the arts should be as well. The aesthetic object in environmental aesthetics is emergent from, and upon, the interaction of the experiencing subject(s) and the appreciated environment, the limits of which are set by the experiencing subject(s). These limits need not be narrowly science-based.
book reviews
19. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 3
Annie L. Booth Ecofeminism and Globalization
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
20. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 27 > Issue: 3
Bryan G. Norton Price, Principle, and the Environment
view |  rights & permissions | cited by