Wolf stories, including the systematic and government-sponsored killing of Yukon wolves, provide a context for the examination of assumptions about Western epistemology, and particularly science, in light of the “ethics-based epistemology” presented by Jim Cheney and Anthony Weston, with implications for research, responsibility, and animal welfare. Working from a premise of universal consideration, andminding the ethical basis of knowledge claims, enables richer conceptions of environmental ethics and creates new possibilities for animal welfare and managing for wildlife.

While environmental ethicists often critique metaphors of nature, they rarely recognize metaphors of environmental practice, and so fail to submit background models of human agency to similar critique. In consequence, descriptions of nature are often shaped by unassessed metaphors of practice, and then made to bear argument for that preferred model. To relieve arguments over “nature” of this vicarious burden, models of agency can and should become a primary topic within the field. In response to some initial misgivings from Eric Katz and taking suggestions from Bryan Norton, Steven Vogel, Holmes Rolston, III, and others, some minimal framing criteria can be developed to promote and facilitate a broad debate over the most appropriate metaphors and models of environmental practice.

David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World convincingly demonstrates the contribution that phenomenology, especially the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, can make to environmental theory. But Abram’s account suffers from several limitations that are explored here. First, although Abram intends to develop an “organic” account of thinking as grounded in the sensible world, his descriptions castigate reflection and reverse, rather than rethinking, the traditional hierarchy between mind and body. Second, Abram’s emphasis on perceptual reciprocity as the basis for an environmental ethic underplays the importance of the symbolic level of our interaction with others. Merleau-Ponty’s later work, in particular his account of the reversibility of flesh, offers a fruitful alternative to Abram’s methodology.

I take issue with several themes in Ted Toadvine’s lively paper, “Limits of the Flesh,” suggesting that he has significantly misread many of the arguments in The Spell of the Sensuous. I first engage his contention that I disparage reflection and denigrate the written word. Then I take up the assertion that I exclude the symbolic dimension of experience from my account, and indeed that I seek to eliminate the symbolic from our interactions with others. Finally, I refute his claim that my ecophenomenological stance leaves no room for resistance, contradiction, and alterity—elements that are, in fact, central to my understanding of ethics. My reply leads directly into a discussion of one of the crucial concerns of my work: the manner in which the very style of our discourse—our way of wielding words—tacitly works to either enhance, or to stifle, the solidarity between the human community and the more-than-human earth.

In risk management, de minimis risk is the idea that risks that are sufficiently small, in terms of probabilities, ought to be disregarded. In the context of the distinction between disregarding a risk and accepting it, this paper examines one suggested way of determining how small risks ought to be disregarded, specifically, the natural-occurrence view of de minimis, which has been proposed by Alvin M. Weinberg, among others. It is based on the idea that “natural” background levels of risk should be used as benchmarks and de minimis levels should be derived from those levels. This approach fails even if the doubtful distinction between what is natural and what is not can be upheld.