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news and notes
1. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
NEWS AND NOTES
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features
2. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
L. M. Benton Selling the Natural or Selling Out?
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In the twenty years since the first Earth Day, the environmental movement has become increasingly “commercialized.” In this paper, I examine why many environmental organizations now offer an array of products through catalogs and magazines, or manage stores and outlets. In part one, I explore some of the economic and political influences during the 1970s and 1980s that resulted in increased organizational sophistication and an increased production of environmental products. The part two, I explore the “commercialization” of environmentalism from two angles. First, in terms of a deconstructionist critique of the system of commodities and image, I demonstrate that when environmental organizations partake in this consumer culture, they actually reproduce precisely the values and institutions that they criticize. Second, from a “constructionist” perspective, I argue that environmental products can re-enchant or reconnect people with nature, and thus can help change cultural attitudes about human-naturerelationships. I conclude that environmental products are contradictory because environmental merchandise is juxtaposed uneasily between environmental ideological rhetoric and material ambition. Environmental organizations must recognize this ambiguity before they can deal with the problem effectively.
3. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Gus Di Zerega Individuality, Human and Natural Communities, and the Foundations of Environmental Ethics
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An ecologically informed view of ethics focuses upon individuals considered in relation to the communities within which they live. Such a view holds that ethics is rooted in the fundamental relationships characterizing particular types of communities. From this perspective, the different communities of the polity, family, and ecosystem superficially appear to have very different ethical systems. In fact, however, all are characterized by respect for community members. Respect is the fundamental ethical insight. This view suggests a way of harmonizing modern society’s relationship with the natural world and of bringing ethical theory into closer harmony with humankind’s most timeless insights.
4. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
William C. French Against Biospherical Egalitarianism
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Arne Naess and Paul Taylor are two of the most forceful proponents of the principle of species equality. Problematically, both, when adjudicating conflict of interest cases, resort to employing explicit or implicit species-ranking arguments. I examine how Lawrence Johnson’s critical, species-ranking approach helpfully avoids the normative inconsistencies of “biospherical egalitarianism.” Many assume species-ranking schemes are rooted in arrogant, ontological claims about human, primate, or mammalian superiority. Species-ranking, I believe, is best viewed as a justified articulation of moral priorities in response to individuals’ or entities’ relative ranges of vulnerability and need, rooted in their relative ranges of capacities and interests.
discussion papers
5. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Deane Curtin Making Peace with the Earth: Indigenous Agriculture and the Green Revolution
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Since its inception in the years following World War II, the green revolution has been defended, not just as a technical program designed to alleviate world hunger, but on moral grounds as a program to achieve world peace. In this paper, I dispute the moral claim to a politics of peace, arguing instead that the green revolution is warist in its treatment of the environment and indigenous communities, and that the agricultural practices that the green revolution was designed to supplant—principally indigenous women’s agriculture—are forms of ecological peacemaking, akin to pacifism. I argue, as well, that the warist intentions of the green revolution are characteristic of a form of domination called developmentalism. A complete understanding of domination necessitates linking developmentalism with other forms of domination such as racism, sexism, and naturism.
6. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Catriona Sandilands From Natural Identity to Radical Democracy
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Environmentalism is traversed by a dilemma between a movement toward identity politics and the impossibility of a speaking natural subject; this dilemma calls into question both the relevance of identity politics for ecological struggle and dominant classical constructions of the subject itself. Using Lacanianinspired insights on subjectivity, and the works of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on radical democracy, I investigate the alternative versions of the subject implicit in ecological discourses and suggest that it is through these alternatives that environmentalism can forge necessary alliances with other movements oriented toward human liberation. In particular, the very impossibility of a natural speaking subject suggests that the ecological project of redefining humanity’s relationships to nonhuman nature(s) is always contingent on reorienting human subjectivity itself; this fact highlights the centrality of political coalition between ecological and other social movements.
7. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Daniel P. Thero Rawls and Environmental Ethics
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The original position contractarian model of ethical reasoning put forth by John Rawls has been examined as a basis for an environmental ethic on three previous occasions in this journal and in Peter Wenz’s Environmental Justice. In this article, I critically examine each of these treatments, analyzing the proposals offered and identifying their shortcomings. I find a total of seven different proposals in this literature for modifying Rawls’ theory to augment its adequacy or as a ground environmental ethics. The diverse difficulties that arise in attempting to apply Rawls suggest the conclusion that Rawlsian ethics may not be a suitable foundation for an adequate long-term environmental ethics.
book reviews
8. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
John F. Disinger Education and the Environment: Learning to Live with Limits
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9. Environmental Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
James Hatley The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
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