We should conceive of illegal covert animal rescue as acts of “subrevolution” rather than as civil disobedience. Subrevolutions are revolutions that aim to overthrow some part of the government rather than the entire government. This framework better captures the relevant values than the opposing suggestion that we treat illegal covert animal rescue as civil disobedience. If animals have rights like the right not to be unjustly imprisoned and mistreated, then it does not make sense that an instance of animal rescue will be justifiable only if it meets criteria for justified civil disobedience, e.g., the requirement that the civil disobedient not rescue more animals than would be necessary to communicate their message. Thus, the framework of subrevolution is a more apt way to analyze animal rescue.

Part of what makes the environment valuable is its autonomy. There are some who think that any human influence on an environment is necessarily autonomy-compromising because it is a form of human control. In this article, I will assume human influence on the environment necessarily undermines autonomy. However, I will argue, even given this assumption, it is still possible for the intervention to enable autonomy in the long run. My focus is on genetic intervention into organisms, because some might think human influence in these cases cannot dissipate. I argue this is mistaken and, borrowing a concept from botany, I argue genes, even genes inserted into a genome by humans, can “naturalize.” Furthermore, they can function in ways that are autonomy-enabling to the individual and to the system to which the organism belongs.

Individual and collective agents, especially affluent ones, are not doing nearly enough to prevent and prepare for the worst consequences of the unfolding climate crisis. This is, I suggest, partly because our existing conceptual repertoires are inadequate to the task of motivating climate-stabilizing activities. I argue that the concept CLIMATE LEGACY meets five desiderata for concepts that, through usage, have significant potential to motivate climate action. Contrasting CLIMATE LEGACY with CARBON FOOTPRINT, CLIMATE JUSTICE, and CARBON NEUTRALITY, I clarify some advantages of thinking in terms of the former. I conclude by discussing some climate legacy-enhancing practical proposals that merit consideration.

In this article, I address and argue against the tendency to understand the anthropocene as inaugurating the end of nature. I conduct two key moves. First, by way of an engagement with the concept of anthropocene technology I explain how understanding the anthropocene as the end of nature prevents us from recognizing what the anthropocene is all about: interventionism. Secondly, I illustrate how a nondualist understanding of the human-nature relation allows us to recognize interventionism as the hallmark of the anthropocene without falling back into the hierarchical human-nature conceptions that underlie interventionism. A nondualist framework that conserves the human-nature distinction helps us in our ability to relate critically to contemporary science and technology in the anthropocene. I illustrate the conceptual narrative of the article through the specific case of gene drive technology development.

In Thinking Like a Mall, Steven Vogel proposes an environmental philosophy “after nature,” meaning one that rejects the division of the world into wild and humanized spaces. This division is false because environments are always constructed by people, who are enmeshed in landscapes and ecological processes. The opposition between wild and humanized parallels the religious division between sacred and profane, according to Vogel. He believes this dualism is an inextricable part of religious worldviews and thus that environmental philosophy must reject religion. This understanding of religion echoes the work of many scholars of religion, who define religion in terms of an opposition between sacred and profane. However, this approach fails to take into account the many traditions that do not divide the world this way. In many cultures, the sacred is connected to the profane much as the natural and the human are intertwined in Vogel’s materialist philosophy. This entanglement is evident in ecological restoration, in which human actions help construct processes that ultimately transcend human intentions and control. I argue that this is a kind of transcendence, which points to a way in which religious language can help us think about a post-natural environmental philosophy.

Many people who claim to genuinely care about nature still seem reluctant to ascribe intrinsic value to it. Environmentalists, nature friendly people in general, and even environmental activists, often hesitate at the idea that nature possesses value in its own right—value that is not reducible to its importance to human or other sentient beings. One crucial explanation of this reluctance is probably the thought that such value—at least when attached to nature—would be mysterious in one way or another, or at least very difficult to account for. In addition, Bryan Norton’s influential convergence hypothesis states that, from a practical point of view, it makes no or little difference whether we ascribe intrinsic value to nature, given the depth and variety of instrumental value it possesses. In this paper, I argue that people who genuinely care about nature cannot avoid ascribing intrinsic value (in a certain sense) to it, if they want to be able to consistently defend the kind of claims about protecting nature they arguably want to make, i.e., claims to the effect that we ought to protect for instance nature areas and species. The cost of denying intrinsic value in nature is the cost of giving up a crucial resource to philosophically defend such claims.

This paper approaches the question of terraforming—the changing of extraterrestrial environments to be capable of harboring earth-based life—by arguing for a novel conception of moral status that accounts for extraterrestrial bodies like Mars. The paper begins by addressing pro-terraforming arguments offered by James S. J. Schwartz before offering the novel account of moral status. The account offered builds on and modifies Keekok Lee’s No External Teleology Thesis (NETT), while defending a proposed Non-Fungibility Thesis (NFT). The NETT is modified and defended with specific reference to Lee’s work on artifactuality and transgenic organisms. The NFT builds on work around objectification and irreplaceability, offering an account that recognizes the importance of bearers of value above and beyond the mere value they purportedly possess. Finally, the plausibility of the account is established by an overview of its applicability to other possible candidates for moral status.

Centering Indigenous philosophical considerations, ecologies are best understood as kinship arrangements among humans, other-than-human beings, and spiritual and abiotic entities who together through the land share a sphere of responsibility based on both care and what Daniel Wildcat calls “multigenerational spatial knowledge.” Ecologically speaking, all kin can become persons by participating in processes of socialization whereby one engages in practices and performances that support responsible relations both within and across ecologies. Spheres of responsibility are not operable strictly within human relationships, nor do what count as responsibilities necessarily center on the human. No being is born a person or automatically earns this status. Personhood must be gained and can be lost. Indeed, under current ecological conditions across the planet, we arguably inhabit a world full of marginal cases.

The hegemonic discourse of sustainable development adopted as an international alternative solution to the socio-ecological crisis has implied a progression of the modern utopian project and most importantly, an intrinsic contradiction and omission that positions sustainable development as something that is not in any place. To understand, discuss, and transcend this oxymoron, we first review the modern utopian project and analyze its paradigmatic and ontological assumptions about knowledge, time, and space. Second, we show that sustainable development just re-adapted the founding premises of the modern utopias. Third, to transcend the modern utopian facet of sustainable development, we suggest an understanding of sustainability that stems from a topographical way of thinking. We suggest this approach allows us to seek alternatives to the modern epistemology and ontology that have shaped the current dominant vision of sustainable development. Finally, we propose to move from the modern utopia of sustainable development to the praxis of topographical sustainabilities to trigger a more comprehensive and relational praxis of sustainability.

Scientific cognitivism, a main position in Western environmental aesthetics, claims scientific knowledge plays a major role in the aesthetic appreciation of nature. However, the claim is controversial. This study reexamines the history of United States environmental attitudes around the nineteenth century and claims art has played the main role in nature appreciation, even with the emphasis on scientific knowledge. This paper proposes a tri-stage, Scientific Knowledge-Aesthetic Value Transformation Model and argues nature appreciation is indirectly related to knowledge. Scientific knowledge plays a part in the first, pre-appreciation stage and helps build the impression of nature that bridges scientific cognition with aesthetic appreciation in the second, impression-rebuilt stage. Finally, the engagement model is required in the third, appreciation stage. This paper also presents a two-dimensional evaluation criterion to assess various approaches of nature appreciation and artworks.

Tragic moral conflicts are situations from within which whatever one does—including abstaining from action—will be seriously wrong; even the overall right decision involves violating a moral responsibility. This article offers an account of recovery predicaments, a particular kind of tragic conflict that characterizes the current extinction crisis. Recovery predicaments occur when the human-caused extinction of a species or population cannot be prevented without breaching moral responsibilities to animals by doing violence to or otherwise severely dominating them. Recognizing the harm of acting from within recovery conflicts adds force to appeals for interrogating and dismantling the systems of thinking, valuing, and acting that bring species to the brink of extinction.