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.

A cursory reading of Thomas Aquinas’s work can give the impression he condones a despotic or exploitative relationship between humans and the environment. Many philosophers and theologians have sought to dispel this impression and draw out a more robust Thomistic environmental ethic. In this paper, I support this endeavor by describing how, in Thomas’s work, the environment is God’s artistic property and how this notion qualifies our use of the environment. Next, I consider two concepts related to artistic property: vandalism and showcasing. I explore these concepts as they relate to the environment and find they give us reasons not to deface or destroy creatures and to look to creation for guidance in problem-solving.

Many of the major challenges facing global society are unstructured collective harms (e.g., global warming): collective in the sense that they arise as the result of the actions of, or interactions among, multiple agents, and unstructured in the sense that there is no coordination or intention to cause harm among these agents. But how should we distribute moral responsibility for these harms? In this paper, an answer is proposed to this question. This answer builds on but develops existing proposals by drawing together literatures that speak to different aspects of the question. First, it is argued that the notion of causal contribution needs to be broadened to include the idea of causation as production. Second, it is discussed how the voluntariness and foreseeability conditions are best interpreted in this context. Third, literature on moral taint is drawn to introduce additional objective (external) criteria.

In three parts, this article sketches the version of African environmental ethics that was developed and promoted by Chigbo Ekwealo who was a renowned environmental philosopher in Africa. The first part is a sketch of the principles and doctrine of his environmental ethics. The second part traces the intellectual history of his environmental ethics, the influences on it and its influence on the global environmental ethics movement. The third part is a critique of his environmental ethics based on contemporary and global circumstances. It is demonstrated how Ekwealo’s environmental ethics attempted to consciously depart from earlier versions of African environmental ethics in terms of its rejection of the neo-materialist, polemical, and supernatural features of other views. This article contributes to a reconstruction of the environmental thought of one of the founders of the African environmental movement whose thoughts are not accessible to most contemporary environmental philosophers today.

Consider the existence of six identical trees of the same species across a variety of environments. The first tree is in a wild and isolated landscape. The second is in a wilderness park. The third is in a heavily forested “tree plantation” owned by International Paper. The fourth is in the Ramble in Central Park. The fifth is in a suburban yard. The sixth is inside the six-story atrium of a Manhattan skyscraper. This paper begins with the intuition that the identical trees have different values because they exist in different environments and biological-social contexts. To understand the different evaluations of the trees we must think along a spectrum that incorporates both axiology and ontology. This thought experiment is useful in exploring arguments about both the management and the preservation of the natural world. The conclusion is that we must think along a spectrum of natural being and value to understand the dualism between humanity and nature and thereby avoid the domination of the natural environment.

I articulate what I refer to as Jefferson’s “land ethic,” drawing primarily from his Notes on the State of Virginia. In the first section, I discuss Jefferson’s conception of the intimate relationship between the natural and political constitution of America and his vindication of both. In the second section, I examine the centrality of the environment in Jefferson’s political vision for America: a landbasedrepublicanism. In the third section, I elaborate Jefferson’s view as to the proper relationship between human beings and their environment by focusing on the form of nature to which he believes human beings most intimately relate: one’s estate. Jefferson’s understanding of the land draws from John Locke’s theory of property, but whereas Locke’s concept of property is closely associated with the economic values that facilitate human destruction of the environment, Jefferson’s environmentalism focuses on the other side of the relation: the ways in which a particular nature—a climate, one’s landholding, the New World in general–can influence human nature and politics.

It is widely held that environmental risks which are distributed unequally along racial or socioeconomic lines are necessarily distributed unjustly. While disproportionality may result from the perpetration of procedural injustices—what might be termed environmental racism, the question I am concerned with is whether disproportionality, in and of itself, constitutes injustice. I examine this question from the perspective of three prominent theories of justice that largely capture the range of our intuitions about fairness and justice—utilitarianism, natural rights theory, and (Rawlsian) contractarianism. While each of these theories provides clear grounds for objecting to the imposition of risk on individuals without their consent, none provides grounds for thinking that eliminating disproportionalities along racial or socioeconomic lines, in and of itself, is called for as a matter of justice. As a result, I suggest that the concern of environmental justice should lie with identifying (and protecting) those at greatest risk, rather than identifying correlations between average risk levels and morally arbitrary characteristics possessed by individuals, such as race or socioeconomic status.

Attempts to come to grip with what appears to be the autonomy of nature have developed into several schools of thought. Among the most influential of these schools is the ecosystem integrity approach to environmental ethics, management and policy. The philosophical arm of the approach has been spearheaded by Laura Westra and her work in An Environmental Proposal for Ethics. The emphasis that this school places on pristine wilderness to model ecosystem integrity and the arguments Westra devises to justify the application of what she calls the “principle of integrity,” although clear in its goal and object of inquiry, could very well retrench dualistic thinking of the sort that environmental thinkers have been trying to undermine. More importantly, I argue that Westra misses an important implication for the way in which ecosystem integrity could be used to help develop an ethic not so confined by problems of justification in attaching values to facts and descriptions to prescriptions.

In this paper, we advance a holistic ecological approach based on a three-compartment model. This approach favors policy initiatives that lie at the intersection of the three major areas of concern common to most environmental controversies: environmental protection, provision of basic human needs, and advancing economic welfare. In support of this approach, we propose a “pluralistic stewardship”integrating core elements of anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism. After presenting the basics of our model, we then explain why it is important to identify and promote a holistic ecological approach to sustainability. Here we employ the economic concept of path dependence, emphasizing that there exist multiple paths society can follow in environmental ethics and policy but once one has been chosen, implicitly or explicitly, there may be little opportunity to reverse such choices.