The doctrines and teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints support and even demand a strong environmental ethic. Such an ethic is grounded in the inherent value of all souls and in God’s commandment of stewardship. Latter-day Saint doctrine declares that all living organisms have souls and explicitly states that the ability of creatures to know some degree of satisfaction and happiness should be honored. God’s own concern for the well-being and progress of all life, and His sacrifice through Jesus Christ, illustrate the generous way that He expects His children to exercise their brief stewardship of this world. In addition, the important role nature has played in the religious lives of Latter-day Saint members, from the Prophet Joseph Smith to the present day, argues strongly for wilderness preservation as a spiritual resource for future generations.

We do not yet have a sound ontology for intrinsic value. Albert Borgmann’s work on information technology and Daniel Dennett’s thoughts on evolutionary theory can provide the basis for an account of intrinsic value in terms of what it is, how it comes into existence, where it is found, and whether it can be quantified or compared. Borgmann’s information and realization relations are cornerstones forunderstanding value. According to Borgmann, things are valuable when they are meaningful and things become meaningful as information and realizations. It is in these relations that intrinsic and extrinsic values find their common roots. Dennett’s musing on the relationship between DNA instructions, DNA readers, and phenotypes invites a commingling of information technology and evolutionary theory. His notion of design space provides a basis for the claim the biotic community has on intrinsic and extrinsic values.

Collective memory can be used conceptually to examine African-American perceptions of wildlands and black interaction with such places. The middle-American view of wildlands frames these terrains as refuges—pure and simple, sanctified places distinct from the profanity of human modification. However, wild, primitive areas do not exist in the minds of all Americans as uncomplicated or uncontaminated places. Three labor-related institutions—forest labor, plantation agriculture, and sharecropping—and terrorism and lynching have impacted negatively on black perceptions of wildlands, producing an ambivalence toward such places among African Americans.

Environmental philosophers should look beyond stereotypes to consider American suburbs as an environment worthy of serious philosophical scrutiny for three reasons. First, for better or worse, the suburbs are the environment of primary concern to most Americans, and suburban patterns of development have caught on elsewhere in the industrialized world. Second, the suburbs are much more of a problem than many environmental theorists suppose, in part because suburban patterns of development are entrenched and difficult to change, and in part because they pose an important challenge to the very idea of an environmental ethic. Third, the search for sound policies and practices for metropolitan growth involves two crucial tasks for which philosophers may be particularly well suited: grappling with the ethical complexity of the suburbs, and fostering a robust and nuanced normative debate about the future of the built environment.

The biocentric outlook on nature affirms our fellowship with other living creatures and portrays human beings as members of the Earth’s community who have equal moral standing with other living members of the community. A comparison of Paul Taylor’s biocentric theory of environmental ethics and the life and writings of St. Francis of Assisi reveals that Francis maintained a biocentric environmental ethic. This individualistc environmental ethic is grounded in biology and is unaffected by the paradigm shift in ecology in which nature is regarded as in flux rather than tending toward equilibrium. A holistic environmental ethic that accords moral standing to holistic entities (species, ecosytems, biotic communities) is more vulnerable to these changes in ecology than an environmental ethic that accords moral standing to individuals. Another strength of biocentrism is its potential to provide a unified front across religious and scientific lines.

The application of constructivism to “nature” and “wilderness” is intellectually and politically objectionable. Despite a proclivity for examining the social underpinnings of representations, constructivists do not deconstruct their own rhetoric and assumptions; nor do they consider what socio-historical conditions support their perspective. Constructivists employ skewed metaphors to describe knowledge production about nature as though the loaded language use of constructivism is straightforward and neutral. They also implicitly rely on a humanist perspective about knowledge creation that privileges the cognitive sovereignty of human subject over nature. Politically, the constructivist approach fails to take the scientific documentation of the biodiversity crisis seriously; it diverts attention toward discourses about the environmental predicament, rather than examining that predicament itself; and it indirectly cashes in on, and thus supports, human colonization of the Earth.

The familiar “centrisms” in environmental ethics aim to make ethics progressively more inclusive by expanding a single circle of moral consideration I propose a radically different kind of geometry. Multicentrism envisions a world of irreducibly diverse and multiple centers of being and value—not one single circle, of whatever size or growth rate, but many circles, partly overlapping, each with its own center. Moral consideration necessarily becomes plural and ongoing, and moral action takes place within an open-ended context of negotiation and covenant. Much critical and constructive work, both in environmental ethics proper and in many related fields, is already multicentric in spirit. It needs to be drawn together into an explicit, alternative environmental-ethical “platform.”

Although controversy concerning the morality of hunting is generally focused on sport hunting, sport hunting itself is not a morally distinctive kind of hunting. The understanding of hunting in general needs to be supplemented with reference to the goods which hunting seeks. Attempts to draw a moral distinction between sport and subsistence hunting are inadequate and historically suspect. Likewise, trying to establish sport hunting as morally distinctive by emphasizing its similarities to other sports also fails. Nevertheless, there are standards accepted by hunters that support ethical judgments about hunting. Ethical hunting requires reentry into a community of nonhuman beings governed by ecology and evolution, not human constructs, the development of virtues such as tenacity, courage, moderation, and discipline, and the achievement of a heightened respect for the biotic community in which the hunt takes place. By means of such standards, we may yet be able to determine what good hunting is even though we are unable to determine whether sport hunting is good.

The view that organisms deserve moral respect because they have their own purposes is often grounded in a specification of the biological functions that the organism has. One way to identify such functions, adopted by Gary Varner, is to determine the etiology of some behavior based on the evolution of the structures enabling it. This view suffers from some unacceptable problems, including that some organisms with profound defects will by definition have a welfare interest in their defects. For example, this view entails that the patented oncomice, intentionally engineered and bred for a genetic defect that leads to extremely high incidence of cancer, would have a welfare interest in the development of tumors. The systems-based theory of biological functions, which refers not to the evolution of structures but rather to their role in the organism, escapes these problems, and shows how a theory of an organism’s welfare interest in its purposes can be grounded in a sound naturalistic approach. This approach also has some fruitful corollaries, including an elegant theory of why species may require special moral regard.

Act utilitarians often use causation in after-the-fact assessments of accountability in group environmental harms. Such attempts are seriously flawed. Causation need not, and many times should not, be important in assessments of accountability for act utilitarians. A model that maximizes utility in such assessments called the “best fit model” provides a good alternative. Because use of this model leads to more utility than models of after-the-fact accountability which rely on causal links, act utilitarians should adhere to the “best fit model” regardless of actual causal links. Although the “best fit model” is a better method to assign accountability using an act utilitarian approach than methods involving causation, it does have a serious flaw in regard to application and future utility. Given this flaw, the model (indeed, any after-the-fact model of accountability) is not enough to ensure future utility maximization. To maximize utility to the fullest, the model should be used along with incentives to prevent environmental harm before it occurs. Perhaps if such incentives are strong enough, the model may not need to be imposed at all. However, in cases where harm does occur, the “best fit model” yields the most utility. Thus, if the “best fit model” is not an acceptable method by which to assess responsibility, neither is act utilitarianism

Industrialism’s assimilation of the natural world has developed over the centuries through complex hierarchies of effects involving ecological, cultural, and psychological dimensions. One of the consequences of this assimilation is the fragmentation of the temporal structure of the world and its replacement by a short-term logic that also infects human subjectivity. Because of this fragmentation, the healing of the natural world cannot be realized either simply or directly, and effective action requires us to locate our immediate objectives within a recovered longerterm vision of a healthy natural world.

Jesus’ teachings on neighborliness, frugality, support for the poor, and nonviolence should become more central to Christian environmental ethics. His actionoriented teachings do not explicitly mention nature, yet should have a beneficial collateral effect on environments when practiced by Christian communities. This issue affects Christian economics, simple causality models of environmental beliefs and impacts, and “love of nature” theology.

It is widely acknowledged that low-income and minority communities in liberal democratic societies suffer a disproportionate burden of environmental hazards. Is “environmental injustice” a necessary feature of liberal societies or is its prevalence due to the failure of existing liberal democracies to live up to liberal principles of justice? One leading version of liberalism, John Rawls’ “justice as fairness,” can be “extended” to accommodate the concerns expressed by advocates of environmental justice. Moreover, Rawlsian environmental justice has some significant advantages over existing conceptions of environmental justice.

Rights have been criticized as incorporating features that are antithetical to ecofeminism: rights are allegedly inherently adversarial; they are based on a conception of the person that fails to reflect women’s experience, biased in an illegitimate way toward humans rather than nonhumans, overly formal, and incapable of admitting the importance of emotion in ethics. Such criticisms are founded in misunderstandings of the ways in which rights operate and may be met by an adequate theory of rights. The notions of entitlement and immunity that flow from a conception of rights have great use and potential in environmental ethics. Nonetheless, our understanding of moral rights must be revised in order to realize this potential. The usual attribution of moral rights is structurally arbitrary because obligations arising from others’ rights are unjustifiably distinguished from other sorts of obligations for which the same sorts of justificatory bases obtain. Once this arbitrariness is recognized, there remains little reason not to extend a continuous framework of entitlement toward nonhuman animals and nature more generally. Reassessing moral rights according to a basic principle of respect delivers an integrated account of our moral obligations toward one another, and a satisfactory basis from which to account for our diverse obligations toward nonhuman animals and the environment.

On most understandings of what an ecosystem is, it is a kind of thing that can be literally, not just metaphorically, healthy or unhealthy. Health is best understood as a kind of well-being; a thing’s health is a matter of retaining those structures and functions that are good for it. While it is true both that what’s good for an ecosystem depends on how we define the system and that how we define the system depends on our interests, these facts do not force us to the conclusion that an ecosystem has no good of its own. Ecosystems and persons can have goods of their own in spite of the fact that the schemes we use to categorize them are matters that we decide upon.

Beginning with the nineteenth-century critiques of slave agriculture, African American writers have been centrally concerned with their relationship to the American landscape. Drawing on and responding to the dominant ideology of democratic agrarianism, nineteenth-century black writers developed an agrarian critique of slavery and racial oppression. This black agrarianism focuses on property rights, the status of labor, and the exploitation of workers, exploring how racial oppression can prevent a community from establishing a responsible relationship to the land. Black agrarianism serves as an important starting point for understanding black environmental thought as it developed in the twentieth century, and for illuminating the connections between social justice and environmental stewardship.