The overarching goal of environmentalism as a political movement is the creation of sustainable societies that share resources fairly among people, and among people and other species. The core objectives of environmental philosophy should include articulating the ideals and principles of such just and generous sustainability, arguing for them among academics and in the public sphere, and working out their implications in particular areas of our environmental decision-making. That means challenging the goodness of endless economic growth and helping other environmental thinkers specify plausible and appealing alternatives to the economic status quo. It means ending our craven failure to honestly address population issues. It means committing to living according to our own environmental ideals. Interestingly, the mainstream philosophical tradition has some important, underutilized resources that, combined with new andcreative thinking, can help us achieve these goals and keep ethical philosophy relevant to meeting the challenges of the 21st century.

The current crisis is an open phase of a global crisis. It is a result of a false recognition of this structural crisis, previously described in the Limits to Growth Report. This crisis is not a result of overpopulation, but of the world society's maladjustment to life in a State of Change and Risk. In this rather new situation, obsolescence (moral destruction) of life-forms not adapted to new life-conditions is the main life-destroying and crisis-generating factor.To permanently overcome this crisis, we have to reinforce the UN “three pillars” world society sustainable development strategy by including into it the task of building an information basis of sustainable-development policy and economy (including a global early warning system). To achieve sustainable development, what we also need to create includes a subsidiarity-principle-based UN Sustainable Development Council with the World Sustainable Development Strategy Center, including the UN Global Dynamic Monitoring Information Center.

Environmental ethics has an identity and public image problem. Unlike the other applied ethics subfields like biomedical or business ethics, environmental ethics is surprisingly devalued and even rejected as a possible contributor to confronting effectively the global environmental crisis by anti-environmental philosophers and public policy analysts. Thus, environmental ethics has many critics, both within and outside of philosophy, who strongly challenge the contemporary, practical social relevance of this academic field.In contrast to this critical viewpoint, this essay argues for the profound significance of environmental ethics to the environmental crisis, and, in that way, seeks to present a successful rebuttal to the misguided critiques of this area of philosophy. The argument aims to demonstrate how environmental ethics can facilitate social criticism of the prevailing modern social values and the social institutions associated with the market or consumer capitalist society built upon them. My approach will center its insights and prescriptions upon the philosophical grounding of the collective movement for ecologically-and ethically-based social criticism and social change.I conclude the essay by emphasizing: 1) the normative nature of environmental problems (as opposed to an exclusive scientific or technological conception of such problems), and 2) environmental ethics and philosophy as powerful catalysts for necessary social change in order to save the world through social criticism of the status quo ecologically unsustainable and unethical (exemplified by unjust) modern social values such as, limitless economic growth. These points support the upshot that much more is at stake in the controversy over the nature and value of environmental ethics than the typical academic debate: nothing less then the fate of our planet.

Since agriculture constitutes what is probably humankind’s most extensive and prolonged engagement with the natural world, the scant attention paid to it in much of the environmental ethics literature represents something of a paradox. This paper is an attempt to address that paradox. First we offer some explanations for this neglect, tracing it to some key features of environmental ethics as it is currently practised. Then we identify some hopeful signs that things are changing in a direction that is more conducive to the inclusion of the issues raised by agriculture. Finally we offer a synthesis of these hopeful signs, incorporating a suggestion as to what it is that they all have in common.