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.

The nature of the climatic response to solar variability is assessed over a long-time scale, as in the case of the periodicity of 1500 years (Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle). For this reason it is important to perform an analysis to detect the existence of this periodicity in the Holocene and the possible influence of the sun on this periodicity. For this purpose, the method of Wavelet analysis in time-frequency was used. The information of oxygen isotopes (δ18O) and Berilium-10 (10Be) at the North Pole reveals a periodicity of approximately 1000 years, whereas at the South Pole it shows the existence of a periodicity of about 1500 years. The comparison of the information of δ18O and 10Be suggests a possible solar influence on the appearance of these periodicities. Possibly the current global warming is due to Dansgaard-Oescher cycle and not by anthropogenic effects.

During our current free market era, a prevailing utilitarian ethics centered on monetary cost benefit analyses continues overriding incessantly a plethora of diverse forms of ecological knowledge and ethics present in the communities of South America, and other regions of the world. For the first time in human history, more than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities, and speaks only one of eleven dominant languages, loosing contact with the vast biodiversity and the 7,000 languages that are still spoken around the planet. This global urban enclosure and biocultural homogenization generates physical barriers and conceptual barriers that hinder the understanding of the inextricable links between the habitats of a region, the inhabitants and their habits. However, these vital links are acutely recognized in at least three families of worldviews: contemporary ecological sciences, ancestral Amerindian ecological knowledge, and Western pre-Socratic philosophical roots expressed in the archaic meaning of ethos, and ethics. South American post-Columbian history shows that large-scale exploitation, as well as monocultures that replace native habitats, have been repeatedly associated with ephemeral economic booms that left behind degraded social and ecological environments. A historical analysis of post-Columbian Chile illustrates how a unique mosaic of ecosystems and biological species, cultures, and languages have been progressively replaced by a few biological species and a uniform language and culture. These biocultural homogenization processes are the outcome of a violent conquest, overpowering the resistance of local inhabitants, and today’s scale of violent suppression of biological and cultural diversity is greater than ever. Instead of a post-colonial period we are living in the middle of an ultra-colonial era. To counterbalance these trends, at the southern end of the Americas, through inter-institutional and international collaborations led by the Chilean University of Magallanes and the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity and the University of North Texas in the US, we developed a methodological approach that we call “field environmental philosophy."

Aldo Leopold's 1949 Land Ethic is seminal in academic environmental ethics and the environmental-ethic-of-choice among professional conservationists and environmentalists. After sixty years, the sciences (evolutionary biology and ecology) that inform the land ethic have undergone much change. The land ethic can be revised to accommodate changes in its scientific foundations, but it cannot be scaled up to meet the challenge of global climate change. Fortunately, given the prominent place of Leopold in all circles environmental, he also faintly sketched an Earth Ethic in a paper written in 1923 and published posthumously in 1979. The Earth Ethic is informed less by ecology and evolutionary biology than by biogeochemistry and anticipates the Gaia Hypothesis, viz., that the Earth (or biosphere) is a whole, living being. If so Leopold thought it a worthy object of moral respect.

Adverse environmental and economic impacts of Icelandic volcano triggered discussions about nature’s astounding and unpredictable fury, alongside the inadequacy of human ingenuity and science to deal with factors that are totally independent and practically impossible to control.The first part of this article discusses questions related to understanding of deep uncertainty and possibility of effectively combining qualitative and quantitative analysis. Apparently the problem of incorporating surprise, critical threshold and abrupt changes is well studied in finance, but its poor application led to the latest financial crisis. It would be far more complicated when applied to complex or “wicked” events like deforestation, the conservation of endangered species, industrial pollution and climate change. The authors identify a range of problems in global idea of ‘sustainability’ and explore complexity of uncertainty. The second part reviews innovative approach that pretends to reconcile the needs of local communities with the protection of the natural world.

This essay discusses certain problems raised by Edmund Husserl’s conception of meaning with regard to the analysis of aesthetic experience. By referring to Jacques Derrida’s critique of phenomenological idealism I show that the metaphor of “stratification”, adopted by Husserl in his “Ideas” to a problem of discursive expression, if applied to the analysis of a work of art i.e. painting, allows to avoid the objection of “metaphysics of presence” commonly raised towards the phenomenological method.To present the major issue from the perspective of artistic practice, I interpret Honore de Balzac’s short story “Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu”. In conclusion I show that aesthetic consciousness establishes an affective and receptive dimension that is no longer logocentric. This is the main reason why modern phenomenology should focus on the problem of aesthetic experience.

The changes in the subject matter of philosophical aesthetics are accompanied today by changes in evaluation, degradation of the traditional notion of beauty and also rejection of the old rigid division between beauty and ugliness, causing the dissolution of the category divides—in the process anti-value often becomes a value understood as a formal criteria. In the artistic critique the rejection of absolutism in favor of pluralism and diversity is accompanied by the functioning of the old categories in their new meanings. One form of such anti-values is represented by the phenomenon of camp. As a specific kind of a paradox-figure, camp unveils the relation between aesthetization and anaesthetization.The new aesthetics is a dual figure, demanding examination of its two contrary aspects: aesthetical and anaesthetical. Camp’s rejection of the existing hierarchy of values, its admiration of what is not obviously ugly rather than of what is definitely not beautiful, brings this phenomenon close to Wolfgang Welch’s trend of anaesthetics. In many ways camp appears to be a theoretical model of modern identity as well as a specific type of a sophisticated aesthetic game.

The paper concerns a form of experiencing time which is specific for haiku poetry. Haiku is an expression of the momentary glimpse of time. Haiku poetry treats the moment uninstrumentally, neither as a result of the past nor as a transition to future deeds. Seen this way, the moment arises on the stream of time as a unique, existential experience. It is my attempt to explain the phenomenon of this experience of “now” as I explore the metaphors of “background”, “figure” and “composition”.

In order to fully render the “ideal of female beauty”, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was planning a picture which he never executed as an individual canvass. Its aim was to show Venus as seen from various perspectives. It was to be achieved through the use of a number of mirrors surrounding Venus in a complete circle. This project implies that the idea standing behind Rossetti’s art was to reveal the woman as the creator both of herself, being a reflection of a concept created beforehand in her mind, as well as a creator of her own image, being a reflection of this “enhanced” her, in the mirrors. At the same time an infinite number of reflections, raises the power of feminine creation to a universal level and becomes a metaphor of her being the patron goddess of art as well. Thus a “universal” space where all different ladies “meet” is created. In his early paintings, Rossetti employs a combination of different “moments of perspective” that make pictorial space “universal”. His late works become separate “mirror perspectives” of Venus. As a collection, they constitute this set of images unattainable in one picture and extend this “universal space” onto the physical space surrounding them. Also, the manner in which these paintings are executed creates an impression of a “reflection” of the eyesight of each heroine outside of the canvass, returning back into the picture. Thus a new quality is given to the connection of the pictorial space within the frames and that surrounding it.