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201. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Nathan Kowalsky Towards an Ethic of Animal Difference
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Extending ethical considerability to animals consistently takes the form of imperialism: progressing outward from the core of human morality, it incorporates only those animals deemed relevantly similar to humans while rejecting or reforming those lifeforms which are not. I develop an ethic of animal treatment premised on the species difference of undomesticated animals, which has the potential to reunite not only animal and environmental ethics, but environmental and interhuman ethics: each species has evolutionarily specified patterns of behavior for the proper treatment of members of its own species and members of other species.
202. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
John Charles Ryan That Seed Sets Time Ablaze: Vegetal Temporality in Judith Wright’s Botanical Poetics
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The time of vegetal life itself—denoted as plant-time in this article, following the work of Michael Marder—is essential to human-plant relations. Conceptualized as a multi-dimensional plexity, vegetal temporality embodies the endemic land-based seasons, rhythms, cycles, and timescales of flora in conjunction with human patterns. The contemporary poet Judith Wright invoked a time-space continuum throughout her writing as a means to convey the primordial character of Australian plants while resisting the imposition of a colonialist schema of time. Wright’s bold textualization of vegetal temporality embodies her commitment to fostering botanical ethics and locally-grounded activism on behalf of Aboriginal people and the Australian environment.
203. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Henry Dicks The Poetics of Biomimicry: The Contribution of Poetic Concepts to Philosophical Inquiry into the Biomimetic Principle of Nature as Model
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The Ancient Greeks understood both art and technology (techne) as imitation (mimesis) of Nature (physis). This article argues that the rapidly growing ecological innovation strategy known as biomimicry makes it possible for technology to leave behind the modern goal of “mastering and possessing” Nature and instead to rediscover the initial vocation it shared with art: imitating Nature. This in turn suggests a general strategy for philosophical inquiry into the biomimetic principle of “Nature as model”: the transposition of philosophical analyses of concepts associated primarily with poetics and related fields—mimesis, mimicry, translation, analogy, metaphor, etc.—into the philosophy of biomimicry.
204. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Judy Spark Visibility Sometimes Wandering and Sometimes Reassembled: On Being in Rain
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If we attend to things only in terms of their bearing on our own projects then our experience of them will be filtered through their compatibility or incompatibility with those aims. This essay is about the experience of rain in the northern latitudes and the work is built around a phenomenological description that relies on accounts of direct experience which are then considered through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s conception of flesh. In thinking through the phenomenon in this way, the overlapping nature of interior and exterior “reality” (and thereby human and world) can be foregrounded and the notion of a dichotomy between these realms, undermined.
205. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Simon Lumsden Veganism, Normative Change, and Second Nature
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This paper draws on the account of second nature in Aristotle, Dewey and Hegel to examine the way in which norms become embodied. It discusses the implications of this for both the authority of norms and how they can be changed. Using the example of veganism it argues that changing norms requires more than just good reasons. The appreciation of the role of second nature in culture allows us to: firstly, better conceive the difficulty and resistance of individuals to changing norms because of the material resilience of norms, habits and customs in a culture. Secondly, it argues that the effective adoption of a new norm such as veganism or the behavioral change necessary to respond to climate change, requires not just more good reasons but the creation of material pathways in the culture in which those revised norms can be inhabited.
206. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Mihnea Tanasescu Responsibility and the Ethics of Ecological Restoration
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This paper argues that the concept of responsibility can and should ground an ethics of ecological restoration. It starts with William Jordan’s concept of restoration, namely the creation of mutually beneficial human-nature relationships. It builds a concept of responsibility using the works of Hans Jonas and Martin Drenthen, understood as a correlate of our technological capacity, as well as a relationship to the possibility of meaningfulness today and in the indefinite future. It is argued that we are responsible in a deep sense for engaging in projects of restoration in order to ensure the survival of embodied meaningfulness in the world.
207. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Oli Stephano Spinoza, Ecology, and Immanent Ethics: Beside Moral Considerability
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This paper develops an immanent ecological ethics that locates human flourishing within sustaining ecological relationships. I outline the features of an immanent ethics drawn from Spinoza, and indicate how this model addresses gaps left by approaches based in moral considerability. I argue that an immanent ecological ethics provides unique resources for contesting anthropogenic harm, by 1) shifting the focus from what qualifies as a moral subject to what bodies can or cannot do under particular relations, 2) emphasizing the constitutive role of interaction and interdependence in ecosystemic existence, and 3) extending ethical regard to ecologically-ramified scales.
208. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Kaitlyn Creasy Environmental Nihilism: Reading Nietzsche against New Conservationism
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This article interprets David E. Storey’s foundation of an environmental ethic on Nietzsche’s philosophy of life as a version of new conservationism. Critically examining Storey’s various claims, the article demonstrates potentially problematic aspects of the new conservationist project. In order to both question Storey’s interpretation of a Nietzschean philosophy of life and problematize the new conservationist understanding of nature, this article returns to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. In particular, it argues from a Nietzschean perspective that the new conservationist projection of human teleology and values onto wild nature and non-human life results in a nihilistic conception of wild nature.
209. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Joachim Wündisch Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Individual Excusable Ignorance after 1990: A Study of Excusable Ignorance in Collective Action Problems
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The thesis of this paper is that individual emitters, in contrast to governments, may be justified in employing excusable ignorance as an excuse after 1990 and even well into the future. Although it may at first seem counterintuitive, this is not only true of individuals with extremely limited access to information but potentially also of highly educated individuals with almost boundless access to data, reports, and analyses. I develop the argument based on an influential account of excusable ignorance and discuss and reject an objection from expert testimony.
210. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Andrew F. Smith From Victims to Survivors? Struggling to Live Ecoconsciously in an Ecocidal Culture
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It’s hardly news that settler culture normalizes ecocide. Those of us raised as settlers who are nevertheless ecoconscious routinely blame ourselves for our failure to live up to our own best expectations when it comes to challenging the norms and practices of our culture. This leads us to overlook that we’re also—and, I think, much more so—among its victims. I outline five manifestations of victimhood routinely exhibited by the ecoconscious settler activists, scholars, and students with whom I interact. I then consider how we can transition from being victims to survivors of our culture, which is vital for ending ecocide. These two concepts, victimhood and survivorship, are regularly juxtaposed when discussing recovery for those subject to abuse, violence, and other trauma-inducing phenomena. Together they provide the basis for a clearer understanding of how we ecoconscious settlers should engage in the ongoing fight for our lives and our futures.
211. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Katharine Loevy The Ikhwan al-Safa’’s Animal Accusers:: An Islamic Debate On Animal Slavery
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In the tenth-century Iraqi fable, The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn, the animals take the human beings to court for mistreatment. The humans ultimately win the case, but not without the animals presenting a series of arguments that continue to resonate despite the ending of the trial. The following essay provides an analysis of a number of these arguments insofar as they contest human abuses of animals within the context of enslavement. It offers evidence on both philosophical and historical grounds for why we need to rethink the received interpretation of the fable’s controversial ending.
212. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Kalpita Bhar Paul A Heideggerian Perspective on Thinking about Water: Revisiting the Transition from Hydrology to Hydrosocial Nexus
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It is said that the transition from hydrology to the hydrosocial system has the potential for transforming the way currently water is seen as a natural object. The hydrosocial cycle denotes that we need to think about water beyond the definition of natural objects as the meaning of water emerges from the socio-cultural-political nexus it is embedded in. In this essay by drawing upon Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, I explore whether this transition is capable of changing the way we think about water. To philosophically capture the status of water and the thinking that is associated with it in this transitional moment, I engage with the notion of inceptual thinking, examining its possibilities within the context of this transition. My deliberation will establish that even though the hydrosocial cycle provides us with a unique space and opportunity from which to initiate inceptual thinking about water, the present orientation of hydrosocial scholarship fails to accomplish this objective. I further argue that the possibility to initiate an inceptual thinking arises from the rupture in our thinking, and our empathy toward the ‘in-between’ space of the actor and the thing. This inceptual thinking would lead toward understanding thing as gathering.
213. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Paul Ott Ecological Freedom: Aldo Leopold and the Human Ecological Relation
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This article develops the idea of ‘ecological freedom’ from Aldo Leopold’s account of ecological relations in terms of the dual notions of the “freedom from want and fear” and the “freedom to make mistakes.” Through an analysis of Leopold’s thought on technology and civilization, I develop and argue for the claim that direct experience of ecological relations, or ecological freedom, is vital to meaningful human life. The absence of ecological freedom constitutes a form of ecological alienation, which is paired with social alienation. Ecological freedom is then used as a way to understand environmental injustice and critique contemporary environmentalism.
214. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Tim Corballis Populating the Climate: Narrative In and With Climate Models
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This paper asks whether one way to link abstract scientific knowledge about the climate to the everyday imagination might be to think of climate modelling as a narrative practice. To do so, I draw on philosophical insights about narrative in scientific modelling from Norton Wise and Mary Morgan, to show that models can be deployed narratively, and that their outputs take a followable, embodied narrative form. This suggests that climate models might be deployed in an everyday storytelling practice evoking storyworlds with palpable meteorological actants.
215. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Marjolein Oele E-Co-Affectivity Beyond the Anthropocene: Rethinking the Role of Soil to Imagine a New “Us”
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Following Isabelle Stengers’s call that the anthropocene should make us feel and think differently, this paper focuses on the human task to shift its affective response. Since Stengers calls for a new “us” that seeks to participate in an entanglement, I propose to explore the material and ontogenetic functions of soil, and specifically soil pores, in reimagining a new form of e-co-affectivity. A new e-co-affective response would emphasize the usually hidden fluidity and diachronic time of pores, and, in doing so, cultivate an epistemic and aesthetic sensitivity, deceleration, and percolation.
216. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Gerard Kuperus Listening to the Salmon: Latour’s Gaia, Aboriginal Thinking, and the Earth Community
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When salmon disappear, their loss is felt among many species of animals, trees, and plants. This essay suggests listening to the salmon when it comes to learning how to become better members of the earth community, so that not our presence, but our absence would be a loss to the ecosystems that we dwell in. This argument is made through a discussion of Latour’s Facing Gaia and the Native American philosophy of the Tlingit. Albeit in different terms, both suggest ways to become better participants in a greater unity.
217. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Lauri Lahikainen, Tero Toivanen Working the Biosphere: Towards an Environmental Philosophy of Work
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Humans have arguably become a geological force that is changing the planet in profound and catastrophic ways. But what are the human practices that have such force? In this paper, we argue that work is exactly such a practice and that it is as workers that many of us are agents of global environmental change. When carbon dioxide is emitted or forests are cut down, someone is working. Yet we lack adequate descriptive and normative theories of work to understand how we are a geological force. In this paper, we suggest possible beginnings for an environmental philosophy of work.
218. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 8 > Issue: 1
Bruce D. Bromley The “Other World” Is Here: On Images, Desire, and Climate Change
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If how we envisage substances prepares the trajectory of our behavior towards them, art objects, substantial through the manner of their fashioning, can reorderhow we comport ourselves in a world that is not for us, to the extent that what we call by the name of “world” cannot be apprehended as the price paid for humanavarice when confronting a global plenitude sacrificed, always, to the scale of our need for it. To frustrate that desolation, we must enrich our view of things, andthis essay examines the thinking of Merleau-Ponty and Virginia Woolf at the service of that imperative.
219. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 8 > Issue: 1
Henry Dicks The Self-Poetizing Earth: Heidegger, Santiago Theory, and Gaia Theory
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Although Heidegger thinks cybernetics is the “supreme danger,” he also thinks that it harbours within itself poiēsis, the “saving power.” This article providesa justification of this position through an analysis of its relation to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s Santiago theory of cognition and James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’ Gaia theory. More specifically, it argues that Maturana and Varela’s criticism of cybernetics and their concomitant theory of “autopoiesis” constitutes the philosophical disclosure of “Being itself,” and that the extension of Santiago theory’s various different conceptualizations of poiēsis to Gaia theory makes possible the rise of the “saving power.”
220. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 8 > Issue: 1
Janet Donahoe The Place of Home
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In this paper, I address the normative power of place, specifically the place of home, on our embodied constitution. I explore the Husserlian notion of homeworld and its counterpoint, alienworld, to address the reasons why place would have a normative power and to what extent that normativity can be drawn into question through encounters with the alienworld. I address this with a focus upon the interconnection between place and body. Finally, I briefly think through theramifications of this priority of the homeworld for “displaced” peoples questioning whether alien place can ever take on the normative and identity power of homeplace.