a bibliographic essay on environmental ethics

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Environmental Ethics & Sustainability Bibliography

An annotated list of resources relating to environmental ethics & sustainable development. Includes web resources, books and articles.

Web Resources

American Society of Civil Engineers – Sustainability This web site discusses projects, programs, and guidelines adopted by the ASCE to promote sustainability in engineering.

U.S. Department of Energy – Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy The U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy site promotes governmental green initiatives.

U.S. Green Building Council A non-profit organization committed to promoting the goals of sustainable development through the production of LEED standards, which seek to help engineers and architects develop cost-efficient and energy-saving green buildings.

Whole Building Design Guide The WBDG is a web-based portal providing one-stop access to up-to-date information on a wide range of building-related guidance, criteria and technology from a 'whole buildings' perspective. It is made available by the National Institute of Building Sciences.

Allen, David T. and David Shonnard. 2002. Green engineering: Environmentally conscious design of chemical processes.  Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall PTR. Developed through the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s green engineering curriculum development, this book provides a comprehensive overview and introduction to green approaches to the design and development of chemical processes and products.

Anastas, Paul T. and John C. Warner. 1998. Green chemistry: Theory and practice. Oxford University Press. A discussion of environmental issues that arise in chemical and environmental engineering, as well as examples of active learning activities that can be used in chemistry and environmental engineering classrooms.

Anastas, Paul. T. et al. 2007.  Exploring opportunities in green chemistry and engineering education: a workshop summary to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. This document summarizes the presentations and discussions that took place during a workshop held in November of 2005 that was designed to look at the current state of green chemistry and green engineering education; to raise awareness about the tools that are available, and to highlight promising new areas that have yet to be fully explored.  

Azapagic, Adisa, Slobodon Perdan, and Roland Clift. 2004. Sustainable development in practice: Case studies for engineers and scientists. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. After a brief discussion of the role of professional engineers and scientists in sustainable development, this book presents a series of case studies looking at issues of water use and management, air pollution, decision-making in regard to the environment, and social and ethical dimensions of sustainable development.

Desjardins, J.R.  2000. Environmental ethics: An introduction to environmental philosophy. Belmont, C.A.: Wadsworth Thomson Learning. (3rd ed.) The text serves as an introduction to ethical theory as it applies to environmental issues and as a casebook on contemporary problems of science, industry, and individual decision-making. It provides a readable, yet philosophically careful survey of the field of environmental ethics. It is comprehensive, covering topics from the relevance of Aristotle's ethics for environmental issues to Deep Ecology and Ecofeminism.

Gorman, Michael E. Matthew M. Mehalick, and Patricia Werhane. 2000. Ethical and environmental challenges to engineering. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall. This book features full-length, multi-faceted, real-life cases of design and managerial dilemmas involving environmental ethical dilemmas in a variety of settings--together with background readings that illustrate how one can integrate ethical and environmental challenges into engineering decisions, especially early in the design process.

Haselbach, Liv. 2008. The engineering guide to LEED-new construction: Sustainable construction of engineers. New York: McGraw-Hill. A guide discussing how to apply LEED Standards to new construction projects. LEED is an internationally recognized green building certification system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. Kutz, Myer.  2007. Environmentally conscious mechanical design. Hoboker, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons. An anthology of case studies, essays and recommendations for the environmentally-friendly mechanical design of products and processes.

Olson, Robert L. and David Rejeski. 2005. Environmentalism and the technologies of tomorrow: Shaping the next industrial revolution. Washington: Island Press. Collection of essays discussing the role emerging technologies may play in protecting the environment, as well as the changing roles of governments, industry, and NGO’s in managing and shaping the use of these technologies in the future. Reiss, Michael J. and Roger Straughan. 1999. Improving nature?: The science and ethics of genetic engineering. Cambridge University Press. Discusses issues such as ecological risk, sustainable agriculture, biotechnology, environmental impact, environmental ethics. Vallero, Daniel A. and Chris Braiser. 2008. Sustainable design: The science of sustainability and green engineering.  New York: John Wiley & Sons. This volume provides a detailed explanation of the scientific principles that underlie sustainable design, as well as discussing the ethical concepts inherent in green design from a multidisciplinary perspective. Includes case studies and exercises for students.

Vallero, Daniel A. and A.P. Vesiland. 2007.  Socially responsible engineering: Justice in risk management. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley Publishing Company. This book focuses on environmental aspects of engineering ethics, gives a historic and philosophical background for the concept of environmental justice, and discusses the technical tools necessary to help engineers evaluate projects from an ethical perspective and to properly access the risk it presents to communities that may be impacted.

Vallero, Daniel. 2006. Paradigms lost: Learning from environmental mistakes, mishaps and misdeeds. Boston: Butterworth-Heinermann. This book contains a large number of case studies about environmental mistakes and disasters in engineering. Each case includes a scientific explanation of what went wrong, and how similar problems could be avoided in the future. The volume discusses issues such as ethics, risks, and reliability, how pollutants move through the environment, and best practices in dealing with environmental issues in engineering.

Van Deveer, Donald and Christine Pierce. 1997. The environmental ethics and policy book : Philosophy, ecology, economics. Wadsworth Publishing. Environmental ethics, ethics and economics, ecological risk, sustainable development. Vesilind, P. Aarne and Alastair S. Gunn. 1998. Engineering, ethics, and the environment. Cambridge University Press. A volume covering the topics of engineering ethics, environmental impact, design and the environment. Weaver, Paul, et.al. 2000. Sustainable technology development. Greenleaf Publishing. Sustainable development, design and the environment, environmental impact, technology development.

Wilcox, John R. and Louis Theodore. 1998. Engineering and environmental ethics: A case study approach. New York: Wiley Publishing . This is a collection of over 100 case studies looking at engineering ethics in the environment. Each case is accompanied by expert case studies that examine underlying philosophical aspects and discuss how the problems in the case could have been addressed better or differently. The cases are organized by engineering discipline, and environmental issue (waste disposal, public safety, etc.).

Amadei, B. and W.A. Wallace. 2009. Engineering for humanitarian development. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. 28(4): 6-15. The article discusses the imbalance of benefits that engineering has been given to developed nations, leaving underdeveloped nations without adequate facilities and infrastructure to build sustainable communities. The authors discuss the need for a new form of engineering project delivery that meets the technical and social challenges involved in working in underdeveloped communities while also delivering appropriate and sustainable solutions.  

Beamon. Benita. M. 2005. Environmental and sustainability ethics in supply chain management. Science and Engineering Ethics. 11(2): 221-234. Discusses the responsibility of professional engineers to consider the environmental impacts of products and processes they manage/design, and describes how environmentally conscious supply chain management is an important duty of the responsible engineer.

Boyle, C. and G.T.K. Coates. 2005. Sustainability principles and practice for engineers. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. 24(3): 32-39. Article describes the process the Institute of Professional Engineers of New Zealand went through to develop and provide engineers with a set of sustainability principles for engineers based on the long-term viability of the planet, and a holistic view for projects and engineering practice that integrates environmental, social, and economic issues.

Catalano, George D. 2006. Promoting peace in engineering education: modifying the ABET criteria. Science and Engineering Ethics. 12(2): 399-406. The author suggests some possible modifications that could be made to ABET Criterion 3 that support the pursuit of peace in engineering education, including ideas of sustainable development.

Duffell, R. 1998. Toward the environment and sustainability ethics in engineering education and practice. Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education & Practice. 124(3): 78-90. Stresses the importance for engineers to consider the ethics of sustainability in engineering education, in continuing education development and in practice in the United Kingdom.

Eisenbarth, Steven R. and Kenneth W. Van Treuren. 2004. Sustainable and responsible design from a Christian worldview. Science and Engineering Ethics. 10(2): 423-429. Describes efforts at Baylor University’s Engineering School to see how a Christian worldview and insights can act with engineering design to inform the non-quantifiable aspects of the engineering process, such as ethics, social impact, responsibility and sustainability.

El-Zein, Abbas, David Airey, Peter Bowden, and Henriikka Clarkeburn. 2008. Sustainability and ethics as decision-making paradigms in engineering curricula. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education. 9(2): 170. Paper explores the rationale for teaching sustainability and engineering ethics within a decision-making paradigm, and critically appraises the ways of achieving related learning outcomes.

Fenner, Richard A., Charles M. Ainger, Heater J. Cruickshank, and Peter M. Guthrie.  2005. Embedding sustainable development at Cambridge University. International Journal of Sustainable Development. 6(3): 229-241. The paper discusses efforts to introduce concepts of sustainable development into the activities of the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University, UK.

Grunwald, A. 2000. Against over-estimating the role of ethics in technology development. Science and Engineering Ethics. 6(2): 181-196. Technology development, engineering ethics, ethics and prudence, ethics and economics.

Herkert, J.R. 1998. Sustainable development, engineering, and multinational corporations: Ethical and public policy implications. Science and Engineering Ethics. 4(3): 333-346. Conflict of interest, ethics and economics, sustainable development, corporate ethics, engineering ethics.

Herkert, J.R. A. Farrell, and J.J. Winebrake. 1996. Technology choice for sustainable development.  IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. 15(2): 12-20. This article describes an operational knowledge based tool that can help determine which technologies are best suited to the needs of a sustainable society, in light of the defined goals of sustainable development.

Holmberg, J., M. Svanstrom, D. J. Peet, K. Mulder, D. Ferrer-Balas, and J. Segalas. 2008. Embedding sustainability in higher education through interaction with lecturers: Case studies from three European technical universities. European Journal of Engineering Education . 33(3): 271–282. DOI 10.1080/03043790802088491 In this paper, three universities compare their work on the integration of sustainable development into their educational programmes. The purpose is to show examples of how this can be done and to illustrate important generalised success factors.

Manion, M. 2006. Ethics engineering and sustainable development.  IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. 21(3): 39-48. The author attempts to provide a rationale for a philosophy of engineering ethics grounded in the notion of sustainable development , and urges for professors of engineering to help increase awareness by stimulating engineering students to build sustainable ideas into their designs, as well as to help transform the attitudes, values, and philosophies of the new engineer.

McIsaac, G.F., Morey, N.C. 1998. Engineers' role in sustainable development: Considering cultural dynamics. Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice. 124(4): 110-119. Sustainable development, professional responsibility, engineering ethics, design and the environment.

Meadowcroft, J. 2000. Sustainable development: a new(ish) idea for a new century? Political Studies. 48(2): 370-387. Sustainable development, environmental engineering, environmental impact, global.

Minteer, Ben and James Collins. 2008. From environmental to ecological ethics toward a practical ethics for ecologists and conservationists.  Science and Engineering Ethics. 14(4): 483-501. The authors discuss how the emerging field of ecological ethics offers a practical or scientific ethics that offers a superior approach to the ethical dilemmas often faced by ecological researchers and managers in the lab, field, and conservation facility.

Nelson, Michael P. and John A. Vucetich. On advocacy by environmental scientists: What, whether, why, and how. Conservation Biology. 23(5): 1090-1101. This article discusses the nature and appropriateness of advocacy by environmental scientists, and reports the results of a literature review during which the authors catalogued, categorized, and critiqued the arguments used for and against the appropriateness of advocacy by environmental scientists. Most arguments, whether for or against advocacy, are characterized by some significant deficiency. From their analysis of the literature, they argue that advocacy is nearly unavoidable, and that scientists, by virtue of being citizens first and scientists second, have a responsibility to advocate to the best of their abilities, to improve their advocacy abilities, and to advocate in a justified and transparent manner.

Peet, John and Hartmut Bossel. 2000. An ethics-based systems approach to indicators of sustainable development. International journal of sustainable development. 3(3): 221-238. Discusses the need and a method to identify criteria that will allow society to judge if policies promoting sustainable development are a success.

Perdan, Slobodan, Adisa Azapagic, and Roland Clift. 2000. Teaching sustainable development to engineering students. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education. 1(3): 267-279. This paper outlines the way in which a multidisciplinary approach to teaching sustainability has been embodied in learning programs and activities in engineering at the University of Surrey, UK. More specifically, it describes a project to develop a comprehensive IT-based learning resource comprising a set of multidisciplinary case studies and support material in order to aid engineering students in understanding the concepts inherent in sustainability and how solutions can be developed.

Prendergast, J. 1993. Engineering sustainable development. Civil Engineering. 63(10): 39-42. Sustainable development, civil/structural engineering, professional responsibility, environmental impact.

Rowden, K. and B. Streibig. 2004. Incorporating environmental ethics into the undergraduate engineering curriculum. Science and Engineering Ethics.  10(2): 417-422. The article describes a three-hour unit on the economic and environmental impacts of the product desig developed at Gonzaga University that focuses on the design of personal computers. Historically, products have not been designed to be recycled easily. By incorporating environmental ethics into our classrooms and industries, valuable materials can be recovered and harmful materials can be eliminated from our waste stream. Future engineers must consider the economic cost-benefit analysis of designing a product for easy material recovery and recycling versus the true cost of the disposal and continued use of virgin materials. Rusinko, C.A.  2007. Green manufacturing: An evolution of environmentally sustainable manufacturing practices and their impact on competitive outcomes.   IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. 54(3): 445-454 . This paper presents an exploratory study of the relationships between specific environmentally sustainable manufacturing practices, and specific outcomes in the U.S. carpet industry to discover if these environmentally sustainable practices are associated with positive competitive outcomes.

Sau., R. 2000. Creating sustainable global advantage for America's technology industries. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. 47(2): 283-284. Sustainable development, technology development, business, ethics and economics.

Seglas, J. D. Ferrer-Balas, and K.F. Mulder. 2010. What do engineering students learn in sustainability courses?: The effects of the pedagogical approach. Journal of Cleaner Production. 18(3): 275-284. Paper presents the results of a five year research project that analyzed how sustainable development competences were introduced into technical universities, and to evaluate which pedagogical approach facilitates student learning in this area.

Shen, Li-Yin, Vivian W.Y. Tam, Leona Tam, and Ying-Bo Ji. 2010. Project feasibility study: The key to successful implementation of sustainable and socially responsible construction.  Journal of Cleaner Production. 18(3): 254-59. This paper introduces a new approach to conducting project feasibility studies by embracing the principles of sustainable development, and including economic performance attributes, social performance attributes, and environmental attributes. Sotoudeh, M. 2005. Links between sustainability and technology development. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.  24(1): 9-14. The author discusses important official statements on the role of technology in sustainable development, and shows that sustainability entails more than using environmentally friendly technologies and projects.  The framework of sustainability implies that the impacts of a technology should be assessed using methods such as the Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA) at the global and local levels to improve positive effects.

Striebig, Bradley A. Tyler Jantzen, and Katherine Rowden. 2006. Ethical considerations of the short-term and long-term health impacts, costs, and educational value of sustainable development projects. Science and Engineering Ethics. 12(2): 345-354. This paper addresses the ethical dilemma of dealing with immediate medical needs in developing countries while trying to implement sustainable technologies as a student engineering project.

Van Dyke, Fred. 2005. Teaching ethical analysis in environmental management decisions: A process-oriented approach. Science and Engineering Ethics. 11(4) 659-669. The article discusses the ethical as well as scientific analysis needed in the decisions made by environmental managers, and discusses a case study of the prescribed burning of sagebrush to illustrate one method of teaching students to ethically evaluate a management action using an ethical decision-making framework.

Vesilind, P. Aarne. 2002. Vestal virgins and engineering ethics. Ethics and the Environment. 7(1): 92-101. Author explores how present codes of ethics are inadequate in addressing the problem of maintaining environmental quality.  The moral responsibilities of engineers, he argues, should include the commitment to provide a high quality and sustainable environment for future generations.    

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2055332. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics

Stephen M. Gardiner is Professor of Philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of the Human Dimensions of the Environment at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of A Perfect Moral Storm (Oxford, 2011), co-author of Debating Climate Ethics (Oxford, 2016), editor of Virtue Ethics, Old and New (Cornell, 2005), and co-editor of Climate Ethics: Essential Readings (Oxford, 2010). His research focuses on global environmental problems, future generations and virtue ethics.

Allen Thompson, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Oregon State University

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Environmental ethics is an academic subfield of philosophy concerned with normative and evaluative propositions about the world of nature and, perhaps more generally, the moral fabric of relations between human beings and the world we occupy. This Handbook contains forty-five newly commissioned essays written by leading experts and emerging voices. The essays range over a broad variety of issues, concepts, and perspectives that are both central to and characteristic of the field, thus providing an authoritative but accessible account of the history, analysis, and prospect of ideas that are essential to contemporary environmental ethics. The Handbook includes sections on the broad social contexts in which we find ourselves (e.g., chapters on history, science, economics, governance, and the Anthropocene), on what ought to count morally and why (e.g., chapters on humanity, animals, living individuals, ecological collectives, and wild nature), on the nature and meaning of environmental values (e.g., truth and goodness, practical reasons, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and aesthetics), on theoretical understandings of how we should act (e.g., on consequentialism, duty and obligation, character, caring relationships, and the sacred), on key concepts (e.g., responsibility, justice, gender, rights, ecological space, risk and precaution, citizenship, future generations, and sustainability), on specific areas of environmental concern (e.g., pollution, population, energy, food, water, mass extinction, technology and ecosystem management), on climate change considered as the defining environmental problem of our time (e.g., chapters on mitigation, adaptation, diplomacy, and geoengineering), and on social change (e.g., pragmatism, conflict, sacrifice, and action).

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Environmental Ethics

Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its nonhuman contents. This entry covers: (1) the challenge of environmental ethics to the anthropocentrism (i.e., human-centeredness) embedded in traditional western ethical thinking; (2) the early development of the discipline in the 1960s and 1970s; (3) the connection of deep ecology, feminist environmental ethics, and social ecology to politics; (4) the attempt to apply traditional ethical theories, including consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, to support contemporary environmental concerns; and (5) the focus of environmental literature on wilderness, and possible future developments of the discipline.

1. Introduction: The Challenge of Environmental Ethics

2. the early development of environmental ethics, 3.1 deep ecology, 3.2 feminism and the environment, 3.3 disenchantment and the new animism, 3.4 social ecology and bioregionalism, 4. traditional ethical theories and contemporary environment ethics, 5. wilderness, the built environment, poverty and politics, 6. pathologies of environmental crisis: theories and empirical research, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries.

Suppose that putting out natural fires, culling feral animals or destroying some individual members of overpopulated indigenous species is necessary for the protection of the integrity of a certain ecosystem. Will these actions be morally permissible or even required? Is it morally acceptable for farmers in non-industrial countries to practise slash and burn techniques to clear areas for agriculture? Consider a mining company which has performed open pit mining in some previously unspoiled area. Does the company have a moral obligation to restore the landform and surface ecology? And what is the value of a humanly restored environment compared with the originally natural environment? It is often said to be morally wrong for human beings to pollute and destroy parts of the natural environment and to consume a huge proportion of the planet's natural resources. If that is wrong, is it simply because a sustainable environment is essential to (present and future) human well-being? Or is such behaviour also wrong because the natural environment and/or its various contents have certain values in their own right so that these values ought to be respected and protected in any case? These are among the questions investigated by environmental ethics. Some of them are specific questions faced by individuals in particular circumstances, while others are more global questions faced by groups and communities. Yet others are more abstract questions concerning the value and moral standing of the natural environment and its nonhuman components.

In the literature on environmental ethics the distinction between instrumental value and intrinsic value (meaning “non-instrumental value”) has been of considerable importance. The former is the value of things as means to further some other ends, whereas the latter is the value of things as ends in themselves regardless of whether they are also useful as means to other ends. For instance, certain fruits have instrumental value for bats who feed on them, since feeding on the fruits is a means to survival for the bats. However, it is not widely agreed that fruits have value as ends in themselves. We can likewise think of a person who teaches others as having instrumental value for those who want to acquire knowledge. Yet, in addition to any such value, it is normally said that a person, as a person, has intrinsic value, i.e., value in his or her own right independently of his or her prospects for serving the ends of others. For another example, a certain wild plant may have instrumental value because it provides the ingredients for some medicine or as an aesthetic object for human observers. But if the plant also has some value in itself independently of its prospects for furthering some other ends such as human health, or the pleasure from aesthetic experience, then the plant also has intrinsic value. Because the intrinsically valuable is that which is good as an end in itself, it is commonly agreed that something's possession of intrinsic value generates a prima facie direct moral duty on the part of moral agents to protect it or at least refrain from damaging it (see O'Neil 1992 and Jameson 2002 for detailed accounts of intrinsic value).

Many traditional western ethical perspectives, however, are anthropocentric or human-centered in that either they assign intrinsic value to human beings alone (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a strong sense) or they assign a significantly greater amount of intrinsic value to human beings than to any nonhuman things such that the protection or promotion of human interests or well-being at the expense of nonhuman things turns out to be nearly always justified (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a weak sense). For example, Aristotle ( Politics , Bk. 1, Ch. 8) maintains that “nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man” and that the value of nonhuman things in nature is merely instrumental. Generally, anthropocentric positions find it problematic to articulate what is wrong with the cruel treatment of nonhuman animals, except to the extent that such treatment may lead to bad consequences for human beings. Immanuel Kant (“Duties to Animals and Spirits”, in Lectures on Ethics ), for instance, suggests that cruelty towards a dog might encourage a person to develop a character which would be desensitized to cruelty towards humans. From this standpoint, cruelty towards nonhuman animals would be instrumentally, rather than intrinsically, wrong. Likewise, anthropocentrism often recognizes some non-intrinsic wrongness of anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) environmental devastation. Such destruction might damage the well-being of human beings now and in the future, since our well-being is essentially dependent on a sustainable environment (see Passmore 1974, Bookchin 1990, Norton, Hutchins, Stevens, and Maple (eds.) 1995).

When environmental ethics emerged as a new sub-discipline of philosophy in the early 1970s, it did so by posing a challenge to traditional anthropocentrism. In the first place, it questioned the assumed moral superiority of human beings to members of other species on earth. In the second place, it investigated the possibility of rational arguments for assigning intrinsic value to the natural environment and its nonhuman contents.

It should be noted, however, that some theorists working in the field see no need to develop new, non-anthropocentric theories. Instead, they advocate what may be called enlightened anthropocentrism (or, perhaps more appropriately called, prudential anthropocentrism). Briefly, this is the view that all the moral duties we have towards the environment are derived from our direct duties to its human inhabitants. The practical purpose of environmental ethics, they maintain, is to provide moral grounds for social policies aimed at protecting the earth's environment and remedying environmental degradation. Enlightened anthropocentrism, they argue, is sufficient for that practical purpose, and perhaps even more effective in delivering pragmatic outcomes, in terms of policy-making, than non-anthropocentric theories given the theoretical burden on the latter to provide sound arguments for its more radical view that the nonhuman environment has intrinsic value (cf. Norton 1991, de Shalit 1994, Light and Katz 1996). Furthermore, some prudential anthropocentrists may hold what might be called cynical anthropocentrism, which says that we have a higher-level anthropocentric reason to be non-anthropocentric in our day-to-day thinking. Suppose that a day-to-day non-anthropocentrist tends to act more benignly towards the nonhuman environment on which human well-being depends. This would provide reason for encouraging non-anthropocentric thinking, even to those who find the idea of non-anthropocentric intrinsic value hard to swallow. In order for such a strategy to be effective one may need to hide one's cynical anthropocentrism from others and even from oneself.

Although nature was the focus of much nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, contemporary environmental ethics only emerged as an academic discipline in the 1970s. The questioning and rethinking of the relationship of human beings with the natural environment over the last thirty years reflected an already widespread perception in the 1960s that the late twentieth century faced a “population time bomb” and a serious environmental crisis. Among the accessible work that drew attention to a sense of crisis was Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1963), which consisted of a number of essays earlier published in the New Yorker magazine detailing how pesticides such as DDT, aldrin and deildrin concentrated through the food web. Commercial farming practices aimed at maximizing crop yields and profits, Carson speculates, are capable of impacting simultaneously on environmental and public health.

On the other hand, historian Lynn White jr., in a much-cited essay published in 1967 (White 1967) on the historical roots of the environmental crisis, argues that the main strands of Judeo-Christian thinking had encouraged the overexploitation of nature by maintaining the superiority of humans over all other forms of life on earth, and by depicting all of nature as created for the use of humans. White's thesis is widely discussed in theology, history, and has been subject to some sociological testing as well as being regularly discussed by philosophers (see Whitney 1993, Attfield 2001). Central to the rationale for his thesis were the works of the Church Fathers and The Bible itself, supporting the anthropocentric perspective that humans are the only things that matter on Earth. Consequently, they may utilize and consume everything else to their advantage without any injustice. For example, Genesis 1:27-8 states: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over fish of the sea, and over fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Likewise, Thomas Aquinas ( Summa Contra Gentiles , Bk. 3, Pt 2, Ch 112) argued that nonhuman animals are “ordered to man's use”. According to White, the Judeo-Christian idea that humans are created in the image of the transcendent supernatural God, who is radically separate from nature, also by extension radically separates humans themselves from nature. This ideology further opened the way for untrammelled exploitation of nature. Modern Western science itself, White argues, was “cast in the matrix of Christian theology” so that it too inherited the “orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature” (White jr. 1967, 1207). Clearly, without technology and science, the environmental extremes to which we are now exposed would probably not be realized. White's thesis, however, is that given the modern form of science and technology, Judeo-Christianity itself provides the original deep-seated drive to unlimited exploitation of nature. Nevertheless, White argued that some minority traditions within Christianity (e.g., the views of St. Francis) might provide an antidote to the “arrogance” of a mainstream tradition steeped in anthropocentrism.

Around the same time, the Stanford ecologist, Paul Ehrlich, published The Population Bomb (1968), warning that the growth of human population threatened the viability of planetary life-support systems. The sense of environmental crisis stimulated by those and other popular works was intensified by NASA's production and wide dissemination of a particularly potent image of earth from space taken at Christmas 1968 and featured in the Scientific American in September 1970. Here, plain to see, was a living, shining planet voyaging through space and shared by all of humanity, a precious vessel vulnerable to pollution and to the overuse of its limited capacities. In 1972 a team of researchers at MIT led by Dennis Meadows published the Limits to Growth study, a work that summed up in many ways the emerging concerns of the previous decade and the sense of vulnerability triggered by the view of the earth from space. In §10 of the commentary to the study, the researchers wrote:

We affirm finally that any deliberate attempt to reach a rational and enduring state of equilibrium by planned measures, rather than by chance or catastrophe, must ultimately be founded on a basic change of values and goals at individual, national and world levels.

The call for a “basic change of values” in connection to the environment (a call that could be interpreted in terms of either instrumental or intrinsic values) reflected a need for the development of environmental ethics as a new sub-discipline of philosophy.

The new field emerged almost simultaneously in three countries -- the United States, Australia, and Norway. In the first two of these countries, direction and inspiration largely came from the earlier twentieth century American literature of the environment. For instance, the Scottish emigrant John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club and “father of American conservation”) and subsequently the forester Aldo Leopold had advocated an appreciation and conservation of things “natural, wild and free”. Their concerns were motivated by a combination of ethical and aesthetic responses to nature as well as a rejection of crudely economic approaches to the value of natural objects (a historical survey of the confrontation between Muir's reverentialism and the human-centred conservationism of Gifford Pinchot (one of the major influences on the development of the US Forest Service) is provided in Norton 1991; also see Cohen 1984 and Nash (ed) 1990). Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (1949), in particular, advocated the adoption of a “land ethic”:

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. (vii-ix) A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. (224-5)

However, Leopold himself provided no systematic ethical theory or framework to support these ethical ideas concerning the environment. His views therefore presented a challenge and opportunity for moral theorists: could some ethical theory be devised to justify the injunction to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biosphere?

The land ethic sketched by Leopold, attempting to extend our moral concern to cover the natural environment and its nonhuman contents, was drawn on explicitly by the Australian philosopher Richard Routley (later Sylvan). According to Routley (1973 (cf. Routley and Routley 1980)), the anthropocentrism imbedded in what he called the “dominant western view”, or “the western superethic”, is in effect “human chauvinism”. This view, he argued, is just another form of class chauvinism, which is simply based on blind class “loyalty” or prejudice, and unjustifiably discriminates against those outside the privileged class. Furthermore, in his “last man” (and “last people”) arguments, Routley asked us to imagine the hypothetical situation in which the last person, surviving a world catastrophe, acted to ensure the elimination of all other living things and the destruction of all the landscapes after his demise. From the human-chauvinistic (or absolutely anthropocentric) perspective, the last person would do nothing morally wrong, since his or her destructive act in question would not cause any damage to the interest and well-being of humans, who would by then have disappeared. Nevertheless, Routley points out that there is a moral intuition that the imagined last act would be morally wrong. An explanation for this judgment, he argued, is that those nonhuman objects in the environment, whose destruction is ensured by the last person, have intrinsic value, a kind of value independent of their usefulness for humans. From his critique, Routley concluded that the main approaches in traditional western moral thinking were unable to allow the recognition that natural things have intrinsic value, and that the tradition required overhaul of a significant kind.

Leopold's idea that the “land” as a whole is an object of our moral concern also stimulated writers to argue for certain moral obligations toward ecological wholes, such as species, communities, and ecosystems, not just their individual constituents. The U.S.-based theologian and environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III, for instance, argued that species protection was a moral duty (Rolston 1975). It would be wrong, he maintained, to eliminate a rare butterfly species simply to increase the monetary value of specimens already held by collectors. Like Routley's “last man” arguments, Rolston's example is meant to draw attention to a kind of action that seems morally dubious and yet is not clearly ruled out or condemned by traditional anthropocentric ethical views. Species, Rolston went on to argue, are intrinsically valuable and are usually more valuable than individual specimens, since the loss of a species is a loss of genetic possibilities and the deliberate destruction of a species would show disrespect for the very biological processes which make possible the emergence of individual living things (also see Rolston 1989, Ch 10). Natural processes deserve respect, according to Rolston's quasi-religious perspective, because they constitute a nature (or God) which is itself intrinsically valuable (or sacred).

Meanwhile, the work of Christopher Stone (a professor of law at the University of Southern California) had become widely discussed. Stone (1972) proposed that trees and other natural objects should have at least the same standing in law as corporations. This suggestion was inspired by a particular case in which the Sierra Club had mounted a challenge against the permit granted by the U.S. Forest Service to Walt Disney Enterprises for surveys preparatory to the development of the Mineral King Valley, which was at the time a relatively remote game refuge, but not designated as a national park or protected wilderness area. The Disney proposal was to develop a major resort complex serving 14000 visitors daily to be accessed by a purpose-built highway through Sequoia National Park. The Sierra Club, as a body with a general concern for wilderness conservation, challenged the development on the grounds that the valley should be kept in its original state for its own sake.

Stone reasoned that if trees, forests and mountains could be given standing in law then they could be represented in their own right in the courts by groups such as the Sierra Club. Moreover, like any other legal person , these natural things could become beneficiaries of compensation if it could be shown that they had suffered compensatable injury through human activity. When the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, it was determined by a narrow majority that the Sierra Club did not meet the condition for bringing a case to court, for the Club was unable and unwilling to prove the likelihood of injury to the interest of the Club or its members. In a dissenting minority judgment, however, justices Douglas, Blackmun and Brennan mentioned Stone's argument: his proposal to give legal standing to natural things, they said, would allow conservation interests, community needs and business interests to be represented, debated and settled in court.

Reacting to Stone's proposal, Joel Feinberg (1974) raised a serious problem. Only items that have interests, Feinberg argued, can be regarded as having legal standing and, likewise, moral standing. For it is interests which are capable of being represented in legal proceedings and moral debates. This same point would also seem to apply to political debates. For instance, the movement for “animal liberation”, which also emerged strongly in the 1970s, can be thought of as a political movement aimed at representing the previously neglected interests of some animals (see Regan and Singer (eds.) 1976, Clark 1977, and also the entry on the moral status of animals ). Granted that some animals have interests that can be represented in this way, would it also make sense to speak of trees, forests, rivers, barnacles, or termites as having interests of a morally relevant kind? This issue was hotly contested in the years that followed. Meanwhile, John Passmore (1974) argued, like White, that the Judeo-Christian tradition of thought about nature, despite being predominantly “despotic”, contained resources for regarding humans as “stewards” or “perfectors” of God's creation. Skeptical of the prospects for any radically new ethic, Passmore cautioned that traditions of thought could not be abruptly overhauled. Any change in attitudes to our natural surroundings which stood the chance of widespread acceptance, he argued, would have to resonate and have some continuities with the very tradition which had legitimized our destructive practices. In sum, then, Leopold's land ethic, the historical analyses of White and Passmore, the pioneering work of Routley, Stone and Rolston, and the warnings of scientists, had by the late 1970s focused the attention of philosophers and political theorists firmly on the environment.

The confluence of ethical, political and legal debates about the environment, the emergence of philosophies to underpin animal rights activism and the puzzles over whether an environmental ethic would be something new rather than a modification or extension of existing ethical theories were reflected in wider social and political movements. The rise of environmental or “green” parties in Europe in the 1980s was accompanied by almost immediate schisms between groups known as “realists” versus “fundamentalists” (see Dobson 1992). The “realists” stood for reform environmentalism, working with business and government to soften the impact of pollution and resource depletion especially on fragile ecosystems or endangered species. The “fundies” argued for radical change, the setting of stringent new priorities, and even the overthrow of capitalism and liberal individualism, which were taken as the major ideological causes of anthropogenic environmental devastation. (Not that collectivist or communist countries do better in terms of their environmental record (see Dominick 1998).)

Underlying these political disagreements was the distinction between “shallow” and “deep” environmental movements, a distinction introduced in the early 1970s by another major influence on contemporary environmental ethics, the Norwegian philosopher and climber Arne Næss. Since the work of Næss has been significant in environmental politics, the discussion of his position is given in a separate section below.

3. Environmental Ethics and Politics

“Deep ecology” was born in Scandinavia, the result of discussions between Næss and his colleagues Sigmund Kvaløy and Nils Faarlund (see Næss 1973 and 1989; also see Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999 for a historical survey and commentary on the development of deep ecology). All three shared a passion for the great mountains. On a visit to the Himalayas, they became impressed with aspects of “Sherpa culture” particularly when they found that their Sherpa guides regarded certain mountains as sacred and accordingly would not venture onto them. Subsequently, Næss formulated a position which extended the reverence the three Norwegians and the Sherpas felt for mountains to other natural things in general.

The “shallow ecology movement”, as Næss (1973) calls it, is the “fight against pollution and resource depletion”, the central objective of which is “the health and affluence of people in the developed countries.” The “deep ecology movement”, in contrast, endorses “biospheric egalitarianism”, the view that all living things are alike in having value in their own right, independent of their usefulness to others. The deep ecologist respects this intrinsic value, taking care, for example, when walking on the mountainside not to cause unnecessary damage to the plants.

Inspired by Spinoza's metaphysics, another key feature of Næss's deep ecology is the rejection of atomistic individualism. The idea that a human being is such an individual possessing a separate essence, Næss argues, radically separates the human self from the rest of the world. To make such a separation not only leads to selfishness towards other people, but also induces human selfishness towards nature. As a counter to egoism at both the individual and species level, Næss proposes the adoption of an alternative relational “total-field image” of the world. According to this relationalism, organisms (human or otherwise) are best understood as “knots” in the biospherical net. The identity of a living thing is essentially constituted by its relations to other things in the world, especially its ecological relations to other living things. If people conceptualise themselves and the world in relational terms, the deep ecologists argue, then people will take better care of nature and the world in general.

As developed by Næss and others, the position also came to focus on the possibility of the identification of the human ego with nature. The idea is, briefly, that by identifying with nature I can enlarge the boundaries of the self beyond my skin. My larger -- ecological -- Self (the capital “S” emphasizes that I am something larger than my body and consciousness), deserves respect as well. To respect and to care for my Self is also to respect and to care for the natural environment, which is actually part of me and with which I should identify. “Self-realization”, in other words, is the reconnection of the shriveled human individual with the wider natural environment. Næss maintains that the deep satisfaction that we receive from identification with nature and close partnership with other forms of life in nature contributes significantly to our life quality. (One clear historical antecedent to this kind of nature spiritualism is the romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as expressed in his last work, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker )

When Næss's view crossed the Atlantic, it was sometimes merged with ideas emerging from Leopold's land ethic (see Devall and Sessions 1985; also see Sessions (ed) 1995). But Næss -- wary of the apparent totalitarian political implications of Leopold's position that individual interests and well-being should be subordinated to the holistic good of the earth's biotic community (see section 4 below) -- has always taken care to distance himself from advocating any sort of “land ethic”. (See Anker 1999 for cautions on interpreting Næss's relationalism as an endorsement of the kind of holism displayed in the land ethic, cf, Grey 1993). Some critics have argued that Næss's deep ecology is no more than an extended social-democratic version of utilitarianism, which counts human interests in the same calculation alongside the interests of all natural things (e.g., trees, wolves, bears, rivers, forests and mountains) in the natural environment (see Witoszek 1997). However, Næss failed to explain in any detail how to make sense of the idea that oysters or barnacles, termites or bacteria could have interests of any morally relevant sort at all. Without an account of this, Næss's early “biospheric egalitarianism” -- that all living things whatsoever had a similar right to live and flourish -- was an indeterminate principle in practical terms. It also remains unclear in what sense rivers, mountains and forests can be regarded as possessors of any kind of interests. This is an issue on which Næss has always remained elusive.

Biospheric egalitarianism was modified in the 1980s to the weaker claim that the flourishing of both human and non-human life have value in themselves. At the same time, Næss declared that his own favoured ecological philosophy -- “Ecosophy T”, as he called it after his Tvergastein mountain cabin -- was only one of several possible foundations for an environmental ethic. Deep ecology ceased to be a specific doctrine, but instead became a “platform”, of eight simple points, on which Næss hoped all deep green thinkers could agree. The platform was conceived as establishing a middle ground, between underlying philosophical orientations, whether Christian, Buddhist, Daoist, process philosophy, or whatever, and the practical principles for action in specific situations, principles generated from the underlying philosophies. Thus the deep ecological movement became explicitly pluralist (see Brennan 1999; c.f. Light 1996).

While Næss's Ecosophy T sees human Self-realization as a solution to the environmental crises resulting from human selfishness and exploitation of nature, some of the followers of the deep ecology platform in the United States and Australia further argue that the expansion of the human self to include nonhuman nature is supported by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, which is said to have dissolved the boundaries between the observer and the observed (see Fox 1984, 1990, and Devall and Sessions 1985; cf. Callicott 1985). These "relationalist" developments of deep ecology are, however, criticized by some feminist theorists. The idea of nature as part of oneself, one might argue, could justify the continued exploitation of nature instead. For one is presumably more entitled to treat oneself in whatever ways one likes than to treat another independent agent in whatever ways one likes. According to some feminist critics, the deep ecological theory of the “expanded self” is in effect a disguised form of human colonialism, unable to give nature its due as a genuine “other” independent of human interest and purposes (see Plumwood 1993, Ch. 7, 1999, and Warren 1999).

Meanwhile, some third-world critics have accused deep ecology of being elitist in its attempts to preserve wilderness experiences for only a select group of economically and socio-politically well-off people. The Indian writer Ramachandra Guha (1989, 1999) for instance, depicts the activities of many western-based conservation groups as a new form of cultural imperialism, aimed at securing converts to conservationism (cf. Bookchin 1987 and Brennan 1998a). “Green missionaries”, as Guha calls them, represent a movement aimed at further dispossessing the world's poor and indigenous people. “Putting deep ecology in its place,” he writes, “is to recognize that the trends it derides as “shallow” ecology might in fact be varieties of environmentalism that are more apposite, more representative and more popular in the countries of the South.” Although Næss himself repudiates suggestions that deep ecology is committed to any imperialism (see Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999, Ch. 36-7 and 41), Guha's criticism raises important questions about the application of deep ecological principles in different social, economic and cultural contexts. Finally, in other critiques, deep ecology is portrayed as having an inconsistent utopian vision (see Anker and Witoszek 1998).

Broadly speaking, a feminist issue is any that contributes in some way to understanding the oppression of women. Feminist theories attempt to analyze women's oppression, its causes and consequences, and suggest strategies and directions for women's liberation. By the mid 1970s, feminist writers had raised the issue of whether patriarchal modes of thinking encouraged not only widespread inferiorizing and colonizing of women, but also of people of colour, animals and nature. Sheila Collins (1974), for instance, argued that male-dominated culture or patriarchy is supported by four interlocking pillars: sexism, racism, class exploitation, and ecological destruction.

Emphasizing the importance of feminism to the environmental movement and various other liberation movements, some writers, such as Ynestra King (1989a and 1989b), argue that the domination of women by men is historically the original form of domination in human society, from which all other hierarchies -- of rank, class, and political power -- flow. For instance, human exploitation of nature may be seen as a manifestation and extension of the oppression of women, in that it is the result of associating nature with the female, which had been already inferiorized and oppressed by the male-dominating culture. But within the plurality of feminist positions, other writers, such as Val Plumwood (1993), understand the oppression of women as only one of the many parallel forms of oppression sharing and supported by a common ideological structure, in which one party (the colonizer, whether male, white or human) uses a number of conceptual and rhetorical devices to privilege its interests over that of the other party (the colonized: whether female, people of colour, or animals). Facilitated by a common structure, seemingly diverse forms of oppression can mutually reinforce each other (Warren 1987, 1990, 1994, Cheney 1989, and Plumwood 1993).

Not all feminist theorists would call that common underlying oppressive structure “androcentric” or “patriarchal”. But it is generally agreed that core features of the structure include “dualism”, hierarchical thinking, and the “logic of domination”, which are typical of, if not essential to, male-chauvinism. These patterns of thinking and conceptualizing the world, many feminist theorists argue, also nourish and sustain other forms of chauvinism, including, human-chauvinism (i.e., anthropocentrism), which is responsible for much human exploitation of, and destructiveness towards, nature. The dualistic way of thinking, for instance, sees the world in polar opposite terms, such as male/female, masculinity/femininity, reason/emotion, freedom/necessity, active/passive, mind/body, pure/soiled, white/coloured, civilized/primitive, transcendent/immanent, human/animal, culture/nature. Furthermore, under dualism all the first items in these contrasting pairs are assimilated with each other, and all the second items are likewise linked with each other. For example, the male is seen to be associated with the rational, active, creative, Cartesian human mind, and civilized, orderly, transcendent culture; whereas the female is regarded as tied to the emotional, passive, determined animal body, and primitive, disorderly, immanent nature. These interlocking dualisms are not just descriptive dichotomies, according to the feminists, but involve a prescriptive privileging of one side of the opposed items over the other. Dualism confers superiority to everything on the male side, but inferiority to everything on the female side. The “logic of domination” then dictates that those on the superior side (e.g., men, rational beings, humans) are morally entitled to dominate and utilize those on the inferior side (e.g., women, beings lacking in rationality, nonhumans) as mere means.

The problem with dualistic and hierarchical modes of thinking, however, is not just that that they are epistemically unreliable. It is not just that the dominating party often falsely sees the dominated party as lacking (or possessing) the allegedly superior (or inferior) qualities, or that the dominated party often internalizes false stereotypes of itself given by its oppressors, or that stereotypical thinking often overlooks salient and important differences among individuals. More important, according to feminist analyses, the very premise of prescriptive dualism -- the valuing of attributes of one polarized side and the devaluing of those of the other, the idea that domination and oppression can be justified by appealing to attributes like masculinity, rationality, being civilized or developed, etc. -- is itself problematic.

Feminism represents a radical challenge for environmental thinking, politics, and traditional social ethical perspectives. It promises to link environmental questions with wider social problems concerning various kinds of discrimination and exploitation, and fundamental investigations of human psychology. However, whether there are conceptual, causal or merely contingent connections among the different forms of oppression and liberation remains a contested issue (see Green 1994). The term “ecofeminism” (first coined by Françoise d'Eaubonne in 1974) or “ecological feminism” was for a time generally applied to any view that combines environmental advocacy with feminist analysis. However, because of the varieties of, and disagreements among, feminist theories, the label may be too wide to be informative and has generally fallen from use.

An often overlooked source of ecological ideas is the work of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School of critical theory founded by Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969). While classical Marxists regard nature as a resource to be transformed by human labour and utilized for human purposes, Horkheimer and Adorno saw Marx himself as representative of the problem of “human alienation”. At the root of this alienation, they argue, is a narrow positivist conception of rationality -- which sees rationality as an instrument for pursuing progress, power and technological control, and takes observation, measurement and the application of purely quantitative methods to be capable of solving all problems. Such a positivistic view of science combines determinism with optimism. Natural processes as well as human activities are seen to be predictable and manipulable. Nature (and, likewise, human nature) is no longer mysterious, uncontrollable, or fearsome. Instead, it is reduced to an object strictly governed by natural laws, which therefore can be studied, known, and employed to our benefit. By promising limitless knowledge and power, the positivism of science and technology not only removes our fear of nature, the critical theorists argue, but also destroys our sense of awe and wonder towards it. That is to say, positivism “disenchants” nature -- along with everything that can be studied by the sciences, whether natural, social or human.

The progress in knowledge and material well-being may not be a bad thing in itself, where the consumption and control of nature is a necessary part of human life. However, the critical theorists argue that the positivistic disenchantment of natural things (and, likewise, of human beings -- because they too can be studied and manipulated by science) disrupts our relationship with them, encouraging the undesirable attitude that they are nothing more than things to be probed, consumed and dominated. According to the critical theorists, the oppression of “outer nature” (i.e., the natural environment) through science and technology is bought at a very high price: the project of domination requires the suppression of our own “inner nature” (i.e., human nature) – e.g., human creativity, autonomy, and the manifold needs, vulnerabilities and longings at the centre of human life. To remedy such an alienation, the project of Horkheimer and Adorno is to replace the narrow positivistic and instrumentalist model of rationality with a more humanistic one, in which the values of the aesthetic, moral, sensuous and expressive aspects of human life play a central part. Thus, their aim is not to give up our rational faculties or powers of analysis and logic. Rather, the ambition is to arrive at a dialectical synthesis between Romanticism and Enlightenment, to return to anti-deterministic values of freedom, spontaneity and creativity.

In his later work, Adorno advocates a re-enchanting aesthetic attitude of “sensuous immediacy” towards nature. Not only do we stop seeing nature as primarily, or simply, an object of consumption, we are also able to be directly and spontaneously acquainted with nature without interventions from our rational faculties. According to Adorno, works of art, like natural things, always involve an “excess”, something more than their mere materiality and exchange value (see Vogel 1996, ch. 4.4 for a detailed discussion of Adorno's views on art, labour and domination). The re-enchantment of the world through aesthetic experience, he argues, is also at the same time a re-enchantment of human lives and purposes. Adorno's work remains largely unexplored in mainstream environmental philosophy, although the idea of applying critical theory (embracing techniques of deconstruction, psychoanalysis and radical social criticism) to both environmental issues and the writings of various ethical and political theorists has spawned an emerging field of "ecocritique" or "eco-criticism" (Vogel 1996, Luke 1997, van Wyk 1997, Dryzek 1997).

Some students of Adorno's work have recently argued that his account of the role of “sensuous immediacy” can be understood as an attempt to defend a “legitimate anthropomorphism” that comes close to a weak form of animism (Bernstein 2001, 196). Others, more radical, have claimed to take inspiration from his notion of “non-identity”, which, they argue, can be used as the basis for a deconstruction of the notion of nature and perhaps even its elimination from eco-critical writing. For example, Timothy Morton argues that “putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration” (Morton 2007, 5), and that “in the name of all that we value in the idea of ‘nature’, [ecocritique] thoroughly examines how nature is set up as a transcendental, unified, independent category. Ecocritique does not think that it is paradoxical to say, in the name of ecology itself: ‘down with nature!’ ” (ibid., 13).

It remains to be seen, however, whether the radical attempt to purge the concept of nature from eco-critical work meets with success. Likewise, it is unclear whether the dialectic project on which Horkheimer and Adorno embarked is coherent, and whether Adorno, in particular, has a consistent understanding of “nature” and “rationality” (see Eckersley 1992 and Vogel 1996, for a review of the Frankfurt School's thinking about nature).

On the other hand, the new animists have been much inspired by the serious way in which some indigenous peoples placate and interact with animals, plants and inanimate things through ritual, ceremony and other practices. According to the new animists, the replacement of traditional animism (the view that personalized souls are found in animals, plants, and other material objects) by a form of disenchanting positivism directly leads to an anthropocentric perspective, which is accountable for much human destructiveness towards nature. In a disenchanted world, there is no meaningful order of things or events outside the human domain, and there is no source of sacredness or dread of the sort felt by those who regard the natural world as peopled by divinities or demons (Stone 2006). When a forest is no longer sacred, there are no spirits to be placated and no mysterious risks associated with clear-felling it. A disenchanted nature is no longer alive. It commands no respect, reverence or love. It is nothing but a giant machine, to be mastered to serve human purposes. The new animists argue for reconceptualizing the boundary between persons and non-persons. For them, “living nature” comprises not only humans, animals and plants, but also mountains, forests, rivers, deserts, and even planets.

Whether the notion that a mountain or a tree is to be regarded as a person is taken literally or not, the attempt to engage with the surrounding world as if it consists of other persons might possibly provide the basis for a respectful attitude to nature (see Harvey 2005 for a popular account of the new animism). If disenchantment is a source of environmental problems and destruction, then the new animism can be regarded as attempting to re-enchant, and help to save, nature. More poetically, David Abram has argued that a phenomenological approach of the kind taken by Merleau-Ponty can reveal to us that we are part of the “common flesh” of the world, that we are in a sense the world thinking itself (Abram 1995).

In her recent work, Freya Mathews has tried to articulate a version of animism or panpsychism that captures ways in which the world (not just nature) contains many kinds of consciousness and sentience. For her, there is an underlying unity of mind and matter in that the world is a “self-realizing” system containing a multiplicity of other such systems (cf. Næss). According to Mathews, we are meshed in communication, and potential communication, with the “One” (the greater cosmic self) and its many lesser selves (Mathews 2003, 45 - 60). Materialism (the monistic theory that the world consists purely of matter), she argues, is self-defeating by encouraging a form of “collective solipsism” that treats the world either as unknowable or as a social-construction (Mathews 2005, 12). Mathews also takes inspiration from her interpretation of the core Daoist idea of wuwei as “letting be” and bringing about change through “effortless action”. The focus in environmental management, development and commerce should be on “synergy” with what is already in place rather than on demolition, replacement and disruption. Instead of bulldozing away old suburbs and derelict factories, the synergistic panpsychist sees these artefacts as themselves part of the living cosmos, hence part of what is to be respected. Likewise, instead of trying to eliminate feral or exotic plants and animals, and restore environments to some imagined pristine state, ways should be found—wherever possible—to promote synergies between the newcomers and the older native populations in ways that maintain ecological flows and promote the further unfolding and developing of ecological processes (Mathews 2004). Panpsychism, Mathews argues, frees us from the “ideological grid of capitalism”, can reduce our desire for consumer novelties, and can allow us and the world to grow old together with grace and dignity.

In summary, if disenchantment is a source of environmentally destructive or uncaring attitudes, then both the aesthetic and the animist/panpsychist re-enchantment of the world are intended to offer an antidote to such attitudes, and perhaps also inspirations for new forms of managing and designing for sustainability.

Apart from feminist-environmentalist theories and Næss's deep ecology, Murray Bookchin's “social ecology” has also claimed to be radical, subversive, or countercultural (see Bookchin 1980, 1987, 1990). Bookchin's version of critical theory takes the “outer” physical world as constituting what he calls “first nature”, from which culture or “second nature” has evolved. Environmentalism, on his view, is a social movement, and the problems it confronts are social problems. While Bookchin is prepared, like Horkheimer and Adorno, to regard (first) nature as an aesthetic and sensuous marvel, he regards our intervention in it as necessary. He suggests that we can choose to put ourselves at the service of natural evolution, to help maintain complexity and diversity, diminish suffering and reduce pollution. Bookchin's social ecology recommends that we use our gifts of sociability, communication and intelligence as if we were “nature rendered conscious”, instead of turning them against the very source and origin from which such gifts derive. Exploitation of nature should be replaced by a richer form of life devoted to nature's preservation.

John Clark has argued that social ecology is heir to a historical, communitarian tradition of thought that includes not only the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, but also the nineteenth century socialist geographer Elisée Reclus, the eccentric Scottish thinker Patrick Geddes and the latter's disciple, Lewis Mumford (Clark 1998). Ramachandra Guha has described Mumford as “the pioneer American social ecologist” (Guha 1996, 210). Mumford adopted a regionalist perspective, arguing that strong regional centres of culture are the basis of “active and securely grounded local life” (Mumford 1944, 403). Like the pessimists in critical theory, Mumford was worried about the emergence under industrialised capitalism of a “megamachine”, one that would oppress and dominate human creativity and freedom, and one that -- despite being a human product -- operates in a way that is out of our control. While Bookchin is more of a technological optimist than Mumford, both writers have inspired a regional turn in environmental thinking. Bioregionalism gives regionalism an environmental twist. This is the view that natural features should provide the defining conditions for places of community, and that secure and satisfying local lives are led by those who know a place, have learned its lore and who adapt their lifestyle to its affordances by developing its potential within ecological limits. Such a life, the bioregionalists argue, will enable people to enjoy the fruits of self-liberation and self-development (see the essays in List 1993, and the book-length treatment in Thayer 2003, for an introduction to bioregional thought).

However, critics have asked why natural features should significant in defining the places in which communities are to be built, and have puzzled over exactly which natural features these should be -- geological, ecological, climatic, hydrological, and so on (see Brennan 1998b). If relatively small, bioregional communities are to be home to flourishing human societies, then a question also arises over the nature of the laws and punishments that will prevail in them, and also of their integration into larger regional and global political and economic groupings. For anarchists and other critics of the predominant social order, a return to self-governing and self-sufficient regional communities is often depicted as liberating and refreshing. But for the skeptics, the worry remains that the bioregional vision is politically over-optimistic and is open to the establishment of illiberal, stifling and undemocratic communities. Further, given its emphasis on local self-sufficiency and the virtue of life in small communities, a question arises over whether bioregionalism is workable in an overcrowded planet.

Deep ecology, feminism, and social ecology have had a considerable impact on the development of political positions in regard to the environment. Feminist analyses have often been welcomed for the psychological insight they bring to several social, moral and political problems. There is, however, considerable unease about the implications of critical theory, social ecology and some varieties of deep ecology and animism. Some recent writers have argued, for example, that critical theory is bound to be ethically anthropocentric, with nature as no more than a “social construction” whose value ultimately depends on human determinations (see Vogel 1996). Others have argued that the demands of “deep” green theorists and activists cannot be accommodated within contemporary theories of liberal politics and social justice (see Ferry 1998). A further suggestion is that there is a need to reassess traditional theories such as virtue ethics, which has its origins in ancient Greek philosophy (see the following section) within the context of a form of stewardship similar to that earlier endorsed by Passmore (see Barry 1999). If this last claim is correct, then the radical activist need not, after all, look for philosophical support in radical, or countercultural, theories of the sort deep ecology, feminism, bioregionalism and social ecology claim to be.

Although environmental ethicists often try to distance themselves from the anthropocentrism embedded in traditional ethical views (Passmore 1974, Norton 1991 are exceptions), they also quite often draw their theoretical resources from traditional ethical systems and theories. Consider the following two basic moral questions: (1) What kinds of thing are intrinsically valuable, good or bad? (2) What makes an action right or wrong?

Consequentialist ethical theories consider intrinsic “value” / “disvalue” or “goodness” / “badness” to be more fundamental moral notions than “rightness” / “wrongness”, and maintain that whether an action is right/wrong is determined by whether its consequences are good/bad. From this perspective, answers to question (2) are informed by answers to question (1). For instance, utilitarianism, a paradigm case of consequentialism, regards pleasure (or, more broadly construed, the satisfaction of interest, desire, and/or preference) as the only intrinsic value in the world, whereas pain (or the frustration of desire, interest, and/or preference) the only intrinsic disvalue, and maintains that right actions are those that would produce the greatest balance of pleasure over pain.

As the utilitarian focus is the balance of pleasure and pain as such, the question of to whom a pleasure or pain belongs is irrelevant to the calculation and assessment of the rightness or wrongness of actions. Hence, the eighteenth century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (1789), and now Peter Singer (1993), have argued that the interests of all the sentient beings (i.e., beings who are capable of experiencing pleasure or pain) -- including nonhuman ones -- affected by an action should be taken equally into consideration in assessing the action. Furthermore, rather like Routley (see section 2 above), Singer argues that the anthropocentric privileging of members of the species Homo sapiens is arbitrary, and that it is a kind of “speciesism” as unjustifiable as sexism and racism. Singer regards the animal liberation movement as comparable to the liberation movements of women and people of colour. Unlike the environmental philosophers who attribute intrinsic value to the natural environment and its inhabitants, Singer and utilitarians in general attribute intrinsic value to the experience of pleasure or interest satisfaction as such, not to the beings who have the experience. Similarly, for the utilitarian, non-sentient objects in the environment such as plant species, rivers, mountains, and landscapes, all of which are the objects of moral concern for environmentalists, are of no intrinsic but at most instrumental value to the satisfaction of sentient beings (see Singer 1993, Ch. 10). Furthermore, because right actions, for the utilitarian, are those that maximize the overall balance of interest satisfaction over frustration, practices such as whale-hunting and the killing of an elephant for ivory, which cause suffering to nonhuman animals, might turn out to be right after all: such practices might produce considerable amounts of interest-satisfaction for human beings, which, on the utilitarian calculation, outweigh the nonhuman interest-frustration involved. As the result of all the above considerations, it is unclear to what extent a utilitarian ethic can also be an environmental ethic. This point may not so readily apply to a wider consequentialist approach, which attributes intrinsic value not only to pleasure or satisfaction, but also to various objects and processes in the natural environment.

Deontological ethical theories, in contrast, maintain that whether an action is right or wrong is for the most part independent of whether its consequences are good or bad. From the deontologist perspective, there are several distinct moral rules or duties (e.g., “not to kill or otherwise harm the innocent”, “not to lie”, “to respect the rights of others”, “to keep promises”), the observance/violation of which is intrinsically right/wrong; i.e., right/wrong in itself regardless of consequences. When asked to justify an alleged moral rule, duty or its corresponding right, deontologists may appeal to the intrinsic value of those beings to whom it applies. For instance, “animal rights” advocate Tom Regan (1983) argues that those animals with intrinsic value (or what he calls “inherent value”) have the moral right to respectful treatment, which then generates a general moral duty on our part not to treat them as mere means to other ends. We have, in particular, a prima facie moral duty not to harm them. Regan maintains that certain practices (such as sport or commercial hunting, and experimentation on animals) violate the moral right of intrinsically valuable animals to respectful treatment. Such practices, he argues, are intrinsically wrong regardless of whether or not some better consequences ever flow from them. Exactly which animals have intrinsic value and therefore the moral right to respectful treatment? Regan's answer is: those that meet the criterion of being the “subject-of-a-life”. To be such a subject is a sufficient (though not necessary) condition for having intrinsic value, and to be a subject-of-a-life involves, among other things, having sense-perceptions, beliefs, desires, motives, memory, a sense of the future, and a psychological identity over time.

Some authors have extended concern for individual well-being further, arguing for the intrinsic value of organisms achieving their own good, whether those organisms are capable of consciousness or not. Paul Taylor's version of this view (1981 and 1986), which we might call biocentrism , is a deontological example. He argues that each individual living thing in nature -- whether it is an animal, a plant, or a micro-organism -- is a “teleological-center-of-life” having a good or well-being of its own which can be enhanced or damaged, and that all individuals who are teleological-centers-of life have equal intrinsic value (or what he calls “inherent worth”) which entitles them to moral respect. Furthermore, Taylor maintains that the intrinsic value of wild living things generates a prima facie moral duty on our part to preserve or promote their goods as ends in themselves, and that any practices which treat those beings as mere means and thus display a lack of respect for them are intrinsically wrong. A more recent and biologically detailed defence of the idea that living things have representations and goals and hence have moral worth is found in Agar 2001. Unlike Taylor's egalitarian and deontological biocentrism, Robin Attfield (1987) argues for a hierarchical view that while all beings having a good of their own have intrinsic value, some of them (e.g., persons) have intrinsic value to a greater extent. Attfield also endorses a form of consequentialism which takes into consideration, and attempts to balance, the many and possibly conflicting goods of different living things (also see Varner 1998 for a more recent defense of biocentric individualism with affinities to both consequentialist and deontological approaches). However, some critics have pointed out that the notion of biological good or well-being is only descriptive not prescriptive (see Williams 1992 and O'Neill 1993, Ch. 2). For instance, the fact that HIV has a good of its own does not mean that we ought to assign any positive moral weight to the realization of that good.

Note that the ethics of animal liberation or animal rights and biocentrism are both individualistic in that their various moral concerns are directed towards individuals only -- not ecological wholes such as species, populations, biotic communities, and ecosystems. None of these is sentient, a subject-of-a-life, or a teleological-center-of-life, but the preservation of these collective entities is a major concern for many environmentalists. Moreover, the goals of animal liberationists, such as the reduction of animal suffering and death, may conflict with the goals of environmentalists. For example, the preservation of the integrity of an ecosystem may require the culling of feral animals or of some indigenous populations that threaten to destroy fragile habitats. So there are disputes about whether the ethics of animal liberation is a proper branch of environmental ethics (see Callicott 1980, 1988, Sagoff 1984, Jamieson 1998, Crisp 1998 and Varner 2000).

Criticizing the individualistic approach in general for failing to accommodate conservation concerns for ecological wholes, J. Baird Callicott (1980) has advocated a version of land-ethical holism which takes Leopold's statement “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” to be the supreme deontological principle. In this theory, the earth's biotic community per se is the sole locus of intrinsic value, whereas the value of its individual members is merely instrumental and dependent on their contribution to the “integrity, stability, and beauty” of the larger community. A straightforward implication of this version of the land ethic is that an individual member of the biotic community ought to be sacrificed whenever that is needed for the protection of the holistic good of the community. For instance, Callicott maintains that if culling a white-tailed deer is necessary for the protection of the holistic biotic good, then it is a land-ethical requirement to do so. But, to be consistent, the same point also applies to human individuals because they are also members of the biotic community. Not surprisingly, the misanthropy implied by Callicott's land-ethical holism has been widely criticized and regarded as a reductio of the position (see Aiken (1984), Kheel (1985), Ferré (1996), and Shrader-Frechette (1996)). Tom Regan (1983, p.362), for example, has condemned the holistic land ethic's disregard of the rights of the individual as “environmental fascism”. Under the pressure from the charge of ecofascism and misanthropy, Callicott (1989 Ch. 5, and 1999, Ch. 4) has later revised his position and now maintains that the biotic community (indeed, any community to which we belong) as well as its individual members (indeed, any individual who shares with us membership in some common community) all have intrinsic value. The controversy surrounding Callicott's original position, however, has inspired efforts in environment ethics to investigate possibilities of attributing intrinsic value to ecological wholes, not just their individual constituent parts (see Lo 2001 for an overview and critique of Callicott's changing position over the last two decades; also see Ouderkirk and Hill (eds.) 2002 for debates between Callicott and others concerning the metaethical and metaphysical foundations for the land ethic and also its historical antecedents). Following in Callicott's footsteps, and inspired by Næss's relational account of value, Warwick Fox in his most recent work has championed a theory of “responsive cohesion” which apparently gives supreme moral priority to the maintenance of ecosystems and the biophysical world (Fox 2007). It remains to be seen if this position will escape the charges of misanthropy and totalitarianism laid against earlier holistic and relational theories of value.

Individual natural entities (whether sentient or not, living or not), Andrew Brennan (1984) argues, are not designed by anyone to fulfill any purpose and therefore lack “intrinsic function” (i.e., the function of a thing that constitutes part of its essence or identity conditions). This, he proposes, is a reason for thinking that individual natural entities should not be treated as mere instruments, and thus a reason for assigning them intrinsic value. Furthermore, he argues that the same moral point applies to the case of natural ecosystems, to the extent that they lack intrinsic function. In the light of Brennan's proposal, Eric Katz (1991 and 1997) argues that all natural entities, whether individuals or wholes, have intrinsic value in virtue of their ontological independence from human purpose, activity, and interest, and maintains the deontological principle that nature as a whole is an “autonomous subject” which deserves moral respect and must not be treated as a mere means to human ends. Carrying the project of attributing intrinsic value to nature to its ultimate form, Robert Elliot (1997) argues that naturalness itself is a property in virtue of possessing which all natural things, events, and states of affairs, attain intrinsic value. Furthermore, Elliot argues that even a consequentialist, who in principle allows the possibility of trading off intrinsic value from naturalness for intrinsic value from other sources, could no longer justify such kind of trade-off in reality. This is because the reduction of intrinsic value due to the depletion of naturalness on earth, according to him, has reached such a level that any further reduction of it could not be compensated by any amount of intrinsic value generated in other ways, no matter how great it is.

As the notion of “natural” is understood in terms of the lack of human contrivance and is often opposed to the notion of “artifactual”, one much contested issue is about the value of those parts of nature that have been interfered with by human artifice -- for instance, previously degraded natural environments which have been humanly restored. Based on the premise that the properties of being naturally evolved and having a natural continuity with the remote past are “value adding” (i.e., adding intrinsic value to those things which possess those two properties), Elliot argues that even a perfectly restored environment would necessarily lack those two value-adding properties and therefore be less valuable than the originally undegraded natural environment. Katz, on the other hand, argues that a restored nature is really just an artifact designed and created for the satisfaction of human ends, and that the value of restored environments is merely instrumental. However, some critics have pointed out that advocates of moral dualism between the natural and the artifactual run the risk of diminishing the value of human life and culture, and fail to recognize that the natural environments interfered with by humans may still have morally relevant qualities other than pure naturalness (see Lo 1999). Two other issues central to this debate are that the key concept “natural” seems ambiguous in many different ways (see Hume 1751, App. 3, and Brennan 1988, Ch. 6, Elliot 1997, Ch. 4), and that those who argue that human interference reduces the intrinsic value of nature seem to have simply assumed the crucial premise that naturalness is a source of intrinsic value. Some thinkers maintain that the natural, or the “wild” construed as that which “is not humanized” (Hettinger and Throop 1999, p. 12) or to some degree “not under human control” (ibid., p. 13) is intrinsically valuable. Yet, as Bernard Williams points out (Williams 1992), we may, paradoxically, need to use our technological powers to retain a sense of something not being in our power. The retention of wild areas may thus involve planetary and ecological management to maintain, or even “imprison” such areas (Birch 1990), raising a question over the extent to which national parks and wilderness areas are free from our control. An important message underlying the debate, perhaps, is that even if ecological restoration is achievable, it might have been better to have left nature intact in the first place.

As an alternative to consequentialism and deontology both of which consider “thin” concepts such as “goodness” and “rightness” as essential to morality, virtue ethics proposes to understand morality -- and assess the ethical quality of actions -- in terms of “thick” concepts such as “kindness”, “honesty”, “sincerity” and “justice”. As virtue ethics speaks quite a different language from the other two kinds of ethical theory, its theoretical focus is not so much on what kinds of things are good/bad, or what makes an action right/wrong. Indeed, the richness of the language of virtues, and the emphasis on moral character, is sometimes cited as a reason for exploring a virtues-based approach to the complex and always-changing questions of sustainability and environmental care (Sandler 2007). One question central to virtue ethics is what the moral reasons are for acting one way or another. For instance, from the perspective of virtue ethics, kindness and loyalty would be moral reasons for helping a friend in hardship. These are quite different from the deontologist's reason (that the action is demanded by a moral rule) or the consequentialist reason (that the action will lead to a better over-all balance of good over evil in the world). From the perspective of virtue ethics, the motivation and justification of actions are both inseparable from the character traits of the acting agent. Furthermore, unlike deontology or consequentialism the moral focus of which is other people or states of the world, one central issue for virtue ethics is how to live a flourishing human life, this being a central concern of the moral agent himself or herself. “Living virtuously” is Aristotle's recipe for flourishing. Versions of virtue ethics advocating virtues such as “benevolence”, “piety”, “filiality”, and “courage”, have also been held by thinkers in the Chinese Confucian tradition. The connection between morality and psychology is another core subject of investigation for virtue ethics. It is sometimes suggested that human virtues, which constitute an important aspect of a flourishing human life, must be compatible with human needs and desires, and perhaps also sensitive to individual affection and temperaments. As its central focus is human flourishing as such, virtue ethics may seem unavoidably anthropocentric and unable to support a genuine moral concern for the nonhuman environment. But just as Aristotle has argued that a flourishing human life requires friendships and one can have genuine friendships only if one genuinely values, loves, respects, and cares for one's friends for their own sake, not merely for the benefits that they may bring to oneself, some have argued that a flourishing human life requires the moral capacities to value, love, respect, and care for the nonhuman natural world as an end in itself (see O'Neill 1992, O'Neill 1993, Barry 1999).

Despite the variety of positions in environmental ethics developed over the last thirty years, they have focused mainly on issues concerned with wilderness and the reasons for its preservation (see Callicott and Nelson 1998 for a collection of essays on the ideas and moral significance of wilderness). The importance of wilderness experience to the human psyche has been emphasized by many environmental philosophers. Næss, for instance, urges us to ensure we spend time dwelling in situations of intrinsic value, whereas Rolston seeks “re-creation” of the human soul by meditating in the wilderness. Likewise, the critical theorists believe that aesthetic appreciation of nature has the power to re-enchant human life.

By contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to the built environment, although this is the one in which most people spend most of their time. In post-war Britain, for example, cheaply constructed new housing developments were often poor replacements for traditional communities. They have been associated with lower amounts of social interaction and increased crime compared with the earlier situation. The destruction of highly functional high-density traditional housing, indeed, might be compared with the destruction of highly diverse ecosystems and biotic communities. Likewise, the loss of the world's huge diversity of natural languages has been mourned by many, not just professionals with an interest in linguistics. Urban and linguistic environments are just two of the many “places” inhabited by humans. Some philosophical theories about natural environments and objects have potential to be extended to cover built environments and non-natural objects of several sorts (see King 2000, Light 2001, Palmer 2003, while Fox 2007 aims to include both built and natural environments in the scope of a single ethical theory). Certainly there are many parallels between natural and artificial domains: for example, many of the conceptual problems involved in discussing the restoration of natural objects also appear in the parallel context of restoring human-made objects.

The focus on the value of wilderness and the importance of its preservation has overlooked another important problem – namely that lifestyles in which enthusiasms for nature rambles, woodland meditations or mountaineering can be indulged demand a standard of living that is far beyond the dreams of most of the world’s population. Moreover, mass access to wild places would likely destroy the very values held in high esteem by the “natural aristocrats”, a term used by Hugh Stretton (1976) to characterize the environmentalists “driven chiefly by love of the wilderness”. Thus, a new range of moral and political problems open up, including the environmental cost of tourist access to wilderness areas, and ways in which limited access could be arranged to areas of natural beauty and diversity, while maintaining the individual freedoms central to liberal democracies.

Lovers of wilderness sometimes consider the high human populations in some developing countries as a key problem underlying the environmental crisis. Rolston (1996), for instance, claims that (some) humans are a kind of planetary “cancer”. He maintains that while “feeding people always seems humane, ... when we face up to what is really going on, by just feeding people, without attention to the larger social results, we could be feeding a kind of cancer.” This remark is meant to justify the view that saving nature should, in some circumstances, have a higher priority than feeding people. But such a view has been criticized for seeming to reveal a degree of misanthropy, directed at those human beings least able to protect and defend themselves (see Attfield 1998, Brennan 1998a). The empirical basis of Rolston's claims has been queried by work showing that poor people are often extremely good environmental managers (Martinez-Alier 2002). Guha's worries about the elitist and “missionary” tendencies of some kinds of deep green environmentalism in certain rich western countries can be quite readily extended to theorists such as Rolston (Guha 1999). Can such an apparently elitist sort of wilderness ethics ever be democratised? How can the psychically-reviving power of the wild become available to those living in the slums of Calcutta or Sao Paolo? These questions so far lack convincing answers.

Furthermore, the economic conditions which support the kind of enjoyment of wilderness by Stretton's “natural aristocrats”, and more generally the lifestyles of many people in the affluent countries, seem implicated in the destruction and pollution which has provoked the environmental turn in the first place. For those in the richer countries, for instance, engaging in outdoor recreations usually involves the motor car. Car dependency, however, is at the heart of many environmental problems, a key factor in urban pollution, while at the same time central to the economic and military activities of many nations and corporations, for example securing and exploiting oil reserves. In an increasingly crowded industrialised world, the answers to such problems are pressing. Any adequate study of this intertwined set of problems must involve interdisciplinary collaboration among philosophers and theorists in the social as well as the natural sciences.

Connections between environmental destruction, unequal resource consumption, poverty and the global economic order have been discussed by political scientists, development theorists, geographers and economists as well as by philosophers. Links between economics and environmental ethics are particularly well established. Work by Mark Sagoff (1988), for instance, has played a major part in bringing the two fields together. He argues that “as citizens rather than consumers” people are concerned about values, which cannot plausibly be reduced to mere ordered preferences or quantified in monetary terms (also see Shrader-Frechette 1987, O'Neill 1993, and Brennan 1995). The potentially misleading appeal to economic reason used to justify the expansion of the corporate sector has also come under critical scrutiny by globalisation theorists (see Korten 1999). These critiques do not aim to eliminate economics from environmental thinking; rather, they resist any reductive, and strongly anthropocentric, tendency to believe that all social and environmental problems are fundamentally or essentially economic.

Other interdisciplinary approaches link environmental ethics with biology, policy studies, public administration, political theory, cultural history, post-colonial theory, literature, geography, and human ecology (for some examples, see Norton, Hutchins, Stevens, Maple 1995, Shrader-Frechette 1984, Gruen and Jamieson (eds.) 1994, Karliner 1997, Diesendorf and Hamilton 1997, Schmidtz and Willott 2002). Many of the more recent assessments of issues concerned with biodiversity, ecosystem health, poverty, environmental justice and sustainability look at both human and environmental issues, eschewing in the process commitment either to a purely anthropocentric or purely ecocentric perspective (see Hayward and O'Neill 1997, and Dobson 1999 for collections of essays looking at the links between sustainability, justice, welfare and the distribution of environmental goods). The future development of environmental ethics depend on these, and other interdisciplinary synergies, as much as on its anchorage within philosophy.

Part of environmental philosophy's project since its inception is the diagnosis of the origins of our present-day environmental extremities. The best known of these is probably Lynn White's theory. As seen in section 2 above, White argues that Judæo-Christian monotheism, because of its essentially anthropocentric attitude towards nature, is the ideological source of the modern environmental crisis. At the heart of his philosophical cum cultural-historical analysis seems to be a simple structure:

W1. Christianity leads to anthropocentrism. W2. Anthropocentrism leads to environmentally damaging behaviours. W3. So, Christianity is the origin of environmental crisis.

The second premise of White's argument also seems to have a central place in a number of rival diagnoses. In fact, the structure of the major theories in the field is regularly of this sort: (1) X leads to anthropocentrism, (2) anthropocentrism leads to environmentally damaging behaviours; therefore (3) X is the origin of environmental crisis. Three other well-known cases have already been discussed (section 3 above), namely: ecofeminism (which identifies X with those patterns of thought that are characteristically patriarchal), deep ecology (which takes X to be atomistic individualism), and the new animism (which regards the disenchantment of nature as the X -factor).

The four theories all seem to have one view in common: that anthropocentrism is at the heart of the problem of environmental destructiveness. If anthropocentrism is the problem, then perhaps non-anthropocentrism is the solution. At this point, it may be helpful to separate two theses of non-anthropocentrism, ones that are not normally distinguished in the literature:

The evaluative thesis (of non-anthropocentrism) is the claim that natural nonhuman things have intrinsic value, i.e., value in their own right independent of any use they have for others. The psycho-behavioural thesis (of non-anthropocentrism) is the claim that people who believe in the evaluative thesis of non-anthropocentrism are more likely to behave environmentally (i.e., behave in beneficial ways, or at least not in harmful ways, towards the environment) than those who do not.

Much of the last three decades of environmental ethics has been spent analysing, clarifying and examining the evaluative thesis of non-anthropocentrism, which has now achieved a nearly canonical status within the discipline. By contrast, the psycho-behavioural thesis is seldom discussed, but is part of the tacit background of environmental ethics. When it does get explicit mention this is often in the introductions or prefaces of books, or in reference works – for example, when it is said that deep ecology's “greatest influence … may be through the diverse forms of environmental activism that it inspires” (Taylor and Zimmerman 2005, compare Rolston 1988, xii, Sessions 1995, xx-xxi, and Sylvan and Bennett 1994, 4-5). If the psycho-behavioural thesis is true, then it is important in two ways: (1) it provides a rationale for both the diagnosis and solution of environmental problems, and (2) it gives practical justification to the discipline of environmental ethics itself (conceived as the mission to secure converts to the evaluative thesis of non-anthropocentrism). Conversely, if the psycho-behavioural thesis turns out to be false, then—since the thesis is the common tacit assumption of all four theories—not only the discipline itself, but also the four major diagnostic theories of the origin of the environmental predicament will be seriously undermined .

Central to the psycho-behavioural thesis is a problematic assumption: that if people believe they have a moral duty to respect nature or believe that natural things are intrinsically valuable, then they really will act in more environmental-friendly ways. This empirical question cannot be answered by purely a priori philosophical reasoning. In fact, the other core premises in the four major philosophical theories on the origin of environmental crisis are also empirical claims about social and cultural reality. To be credible, they must be able to stand up to empirical testing. For example, are people who think in dualistic and hierarchical ways (as described by feminists) in fact more likely to have anthropocentric attitudes and more likely to act harmfully towards the environment? Are people who believe in animism (as panpsychists argue) in fact less likely to have anthropocentric attitudes and also less likely to harm the environment? What about people who adopt some relational or holistic view of the world, as advocated by deep ecologists? How do they act toward nature compared to those who adopt a more individualistic and atomistic worldview? These questions about the relations among various belief systems and behaviours look no different in kind from the sorts of questions that social scientists regularly ask.

Of the major philosophical theories on the origin of environmental crisis, Lynn White's is the only one to have been empirically tested by social scientists. The net result of these studies so far has been “inconclusive”, especially when education, sex, age and social class are also factored in (Shaiko 1987, Greeley 1993, Woodrum and Hoban 1994, Eckberg and Blocker 1996, Boyd 1999). Moreover, like their philosophical counterparts, environmental sociologists often take the psycho-behavioural thesis of non-anthropocentrism for granted. Some of the best-known and most widely used survey instruments in the field are also problematic. Riley Dunlap and collaborators developed many years ago the “New Environmental Paradigm” (NEP) scale, to measure pro-environmental attitudes (Dunlap and van Liere 1978). That scale, and its later revisions (see Dunlap et al. 2000), is problematic precisely because it explicitly uses indicators of beliefs in anthropocentrism to measure the presence of un-environmental attitudes, thus assuming in advance that anthropocentric beliefs are harmful to the environment. But whether that is so should be settled by empirical investigation rather than by an act of a priori stipulation in survey design.

Despite the fact that there is a striking common underlying structure between White's theory and the other major theories discussed above, no sociological studies so far have been done on the other theories, nor on the common underlying psycho-behavioural thesis of non-anthropocentrism and its effects. This presents an opportunity for interdisciplinary collaborations among philosophers and social scientists. Many tools and methods well established in the social sciences can justifiably be adapted for use in research on environmental philosophy, giving the subject an empirical or even experimental turn. Such work may stimulate new ideas about the origins of our environmental pathologies, and for testing the extent to which belief systems and worldviews actually drive attitudes and behaviours. As long as empirical facts are relevant to philosophical and ethical thought, adoption of social science methods will be a means of keeping our theorising in touch with the motivations and behaviours of the people we are trying to describe and influence.

Similar points about the role of empirical investigations can also be made about theorizing over a range of other problems, including drought, the preservation of biodiversity, and climate change. While it has become commonplace to refer to the present era as “the age of terror”, there is increasing agreement across the entire globe that the world is facing chronic and unprecedented environmental problems, many of them of human origin. Indeed, the United States military, responding to an albeit speculative report on abrupt climate change prepared for the Pentagon by the Global Business Network (see Schwartz and Randall 2003, in the Other Internet Resources section below), have declared that the problems of adjustment to climate change constitute a far more severe threat to national and international security than does terrorism itself. Drought, changing weather patterns, the expected burden of caring for environmental refugees, the effects of consumerism, and the health decline associated with various forms of pollution are continuing and major problems for human beings themselves (see Shue 2001, Sagoff 2001, Thompson 2001), and raise crucial issues about environmental justice (see Shrader-Frechette 2002). At the same time, the continuing destruction of natural environments and the widespread loss of both plant and animal species poses increasing problems for other forms of life on the planet. In facing these problems, there will likely be great opportunities for co-operation and synergy between philosophers and both natural and social scientists.

Like many other important and interesting questions, no single discipline could claim sole ownership of those just raised about the origins of modern environmental crisis and the quandaries we now face, the relation between environmental problems and social injustice, and the vexed question of how human beings should relate to the natural environment in their pursuit of happiness and well-being. The move away from armchair speculation to link up with a wider community of inquiry may be inevitable not only in environmental ethics but in all areas of practical philosophy.

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• The International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE)
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• Center for Environmental Philosophy
• Centre for Applied Ethics
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aesthetics: environmental | animals, moral status of | communitarianism | consequentialism | critical theory | ecology | ecology: biodiversity | ethics: virtue | feminist (interventions): ethics | globalization | justice: intergenerational | metaethics | panpsychism | respect | value: intrinsic vs. extrinsic

Acknowledgments

The authors are deeply grateful to the following people who gave generously of their time and advice to help shape the final structure of this entry: Clare Palmer, Mauro Grün, Lori Gruen, Gary Varner, William Throop, Patrick O'Donnell, Thomas Heyd, and Edward N. Zalta. Also, thanks to Dale Jamieson for comments on the version revised and updated in January 2008.

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Environmental ethics : what really matters, what really works

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• *=NEW TO THIS EDITION
• Rules, Principles, and Integrity: A General Introduction
• PART I. WHAT REALLY MATTERS? ESSAYS ON VALUE IN NATURE
• CHAPTER 1. WHERE WE ARE AND HOW WE GOT HERE: THE ROOTS OF CRISIS
• 1-1. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: Guilt
• 1-2. Lynn White, Jr., Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis
• 1-3. J. Baird Callicott Environmental Philosophy Is Environmental Activism: The Most Radical and Effective Kind
• * 1-4. Shepard Krech, Pleistocene Extinctions
• 1-5. Howard F. Lyman with Glen Merzer, Mad Cowboy: The Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat
• * 1-6. Michael Pollan, Agricultural Contradictions of Obesity
• * 1-7. Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
• CHAPTER 2. RESPECT FOR NATURE
• 2-1a. Introduction: The Last Man and the Search for Objective Value
• 2-1b. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: Respect for Animals
• 2-2. Peter Singer, All Animals Are Equal
• 2-3. Mark Sagoff, Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce
• 2-4. Holmes Rolston III, Values in and Duties to the Natural World
• 2-5. Ian Whyte, The Elephant Management Dilemma
• 2-6. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: Respect for Life
• 2-7. Christopher D. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing
• 2-8. Gary Varner, Biocentric Individualism
• 2-9. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: Equal Respect
• 2-10. Paul W. Taylor, The Ethics of Respect for Nature
• 2-11. David Schmidtz, Are All Species Equal?
• CHAPTER 3. HOLISTIC ETHICS
• 3-1. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: The Land
• 3-2. Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic
• * 3-3. Arne Naess, The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary
• 3-4. Elliott Sober, Philosophical Problems for Environmentalism
• 3-5. Ramachandra Guha, Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique
• CHAPTER 4. ECOFEMINISM
• 4-1. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: Three Models of Oppression
• 4-2. Kristen Hessler and Elizabeth Willott, Feminism and Ecofeminism
• 4-3. Karen J. Warren, The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism
• * 4-4. Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen, Ecofeminism: Global Justice and Planetary Health
• 4-5. Gita Sen, Women, Poverty, and Population: Issues for the Concerned Environmentalist
• 4-6. V. Rukmini Rao, Women Farmers of India's Deccan Plateau
• CHAPTER 5. ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
• 5-1. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: Justice to Win
• * 5-2. Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy
• * 5-3. Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit
• 5-4. David Schmidtz, Natural Enemies: An Anatomy of Environmental Conflict
• CHAPTER 6. HOW WILD DOES NATURE HAVE TO BE?
• 6-1. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: An Allegory
• * 6-2. John Muir, Hetch Hetchy Valley
• 6-3. Martin H. Krieger, What's Wrong with Plastic Trees?
• * 6-4. Elizabeth Willott, Restoring Nature, Without Mosquitoes?
• * 6-5. David Pitcher and Jennifer Welchman, Can an Environmental Paradise be Regained? The Hetch Hetchy Valley Question
• CHAPTER 7. FINDING OUR PLACE IN NATURE
• 7-1. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: Dominating Nature
• * 7-2. Val Plumwood, Being Prey
• 7-3. Freya Mathews, Letting the World Grow Old: An Ethos of Countermodernity
• * 7-4. Michelle Nijhuis, Bonfire of the Superweeds
• 7-5a. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: Learning to Belong
• * 7-5. Ronald Sandler, Environmental Virtue Ethics
• 7-6. Thomas E. Hill Jr., Ideals of Human Excellence and Preserving Natural Environments
• 7-7. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: The Simple Life"
• 7-8. Mark Sagoff, Do We Consume Too Much?
• * 7-9. Joshua Colt Gambrel and Philip Cafaro, The Virtue of Simplicity
• * 7-10. Paul Schwennesen, On the Ethics of Ranching
• PART II. WHAT REALLY WORKS? ESSAYS ON HUMAN ECOLOGY
• CHAPTER 8. WEIGHING OUR OPTIONS
• 8-1. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: Optimal Pollution
• 8-2. Steven Kelman, Cost-Benefit Analysis: An Ethical Critique
• 8-3. Andrew Brennan, Moral Pluralism and the Environment
• * 8-4. Martha Nussbaum, The Costs of Tragedy: Some Moral Limits of Cost-Benefit Analysis
• 8-5. David Schmidtz, A Place for Cost-Benefit Analysis
• CHAPTER 9. SUSTAINABILITY
• 9-1. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: The Logic of the Commons
• 9-2. Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons
• 9-3. David Schmidtz, The Institution of Property
• * 9-4. Carol M. Rose, Liberty, Property, Environmentalism
• * 9-5. Dan C. Shahar, Free-Market Environmentalism pace Environmentalism?
• CHAPTER 10. WHAT IT TAKES TO PRESERVE WILDERNESS
• 10-1. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: South Africa
• 10-2. David Schmidtz, When Preservationism Doesn't Preserve
• * 10-3. David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott, Reinventing the Commons: An African Case Study
• * 10-4. Lynn Scarlett, Choices, Consequences, and Cooperative Conservation
• CHAPTER 11. OVERPOPULATION AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
• 11-1. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: The Population Bomb
• 11-2. Peter Singer, Famine, Affluence, and Morality
• 11-3. Garrett Hardin, Living on a Lifeboat
• 11-4. Holmes Rolston, III, Feeding People Versus Saving Nature
• 11-5. Henry Shue, Global Environment and International Inequality
• 11-6. Elizabeth Willott, Recent Population Trends
• CHAPTER 12. CLIMATE CHANGE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
• 12-1. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: Handing Down a Warmer World
• * 12-2. Dale Jamieson, Ethics, Public Policy, and Global Warming
• * 12-3. Stephen Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Corruption
• * 12-4. Andrew Light, Climate Ethics for Climate Action
• * 12-5. John Christy, Testimony, U.S. House Ways and Means Committee
• CHAPTER 13. CITIES AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT THEM
• 13-1. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: Taking Scarcity Seriously
• 13-2. Jessica Woolliams, Designing Cities and Buildings as if They Were Ethical Choices
• 13-3. Lynn Scarlett, Making Waste Management Pay
• 13-4. Robert Glennon, Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What to Do About It
• * 13-5. Garland Cox, Energy
• * 13-6. Tom Fournier, Air Pollution Abatement Strategies
• CHAPTER 14. TECHNOLOGY AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
• 14-1. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: Innovation and Risk Management
• * 14-2. Gary Comstock, Ethics and Genetically Modified Foods
• * 14-3. Paul Thompson and William Hannah, Novel and Normal Risk: Where Does Nanotechnology Fit In?
• * 14-4. Joshua Colt Gambrel, Virtue Theory and Genetically Modified Crops
• CHAPTER 15. ENVIRONMENTALISM IN PRACTICE
• 15-1. Questions for Reflection and Discussion: The Ethics of Confrontation
• 15-2. Bryan G. Norton, The Environmentalists' Dilemma: Dollars and Sand Dollars
• 15-3. Bryan G. Norton, Fragile Freedoms
• 15-4. Paul Watson, Tora! Tora! Tora!
• 15-5. Kate Rawles, The Missing Shade of Green
• 15-6. Andrew Light, Taking Environmental Ethics Public.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

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Ira Loren Wiggins and Dorothy Bruce Wiggins Memorial Book Fund

Environmental ethics

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Science Library (Li and Ma)

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Creators/contributors, contents/summary.

• Notes on Contributors x Preface to the Second Edition xii Source Credits xiv Part I Theoretical Background 1 1 Ethical Reasoning 3 Michael Boylan 2 The Self in Context: A Grounding for Environmentalism 14 Michael Boylan Evaluating a Case Study: Developing a Practical EthicalViewpoint 25 3 Worldview Arguments for Environmentalism 32 A. The Land Ethic and Deep Ecology 35 The Land Ethic 35 Aldo Leopold The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary42 Arne Naess What Is Social Ecology? 46 Murray Bookchin B. Eco-Feminism and Social Justice 59 Ecofeminism and Feminist Theory 59 Carolyn Merchant The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism 64 Karen J. Warren Patently Wrong: The Commercialization of Life Forms 71 Wanda Teays C. Aesthetics 83 Aesthetics and the Value of Nature 83 Janna Thompson Worldview and the Value-Duty Link to Environmental Ethics95 Michael Boylan Evaluating a Case Study: Finding the Conflicts 109 4 Anthropocentric versus Biocentric Justifications 115 A. Anthropocentric Justifications 118 Human Rights and Future Generations 118 Alan Gewirth Environmental Values, Anthropocentrism and Speciesism 122 Onora O Neill B. Biocentric Justifications 135 Environmental Ethics: Values in and Duties to the Natural World135 Holmes Rolston III Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics 152 Paul W. Taylor C. Searching the Middle 163 Reconciling Anthropocentric and Nonanthropocentric EnvironmentalEthics 163 James P. Sterba On the Reconciliation of Anthropocentric and NonanthropocentricEnvironmental Ethics 176 Brian K. Steverson Reconciliation Reaffirmed: A Reply to Steverson 186 James P. Sterba Evaluating a Case Study: Assessing Embedded Levels 191 Part II Applied Environmental Problems 199 5 Pollution and Climate Change 201 A. Air and Water Pollution 203 Blue Water 203 Michael Boylan Polluting and Unpolluting 216 Benjamin Hale Moral Valuation of Environmental Goods 231 Mark A. Seabright B. Climate Change 243 Does a Failure in Global Leadership Mean It s All Over?Climate, Population, and Progress 243 Ruth Irwin Collective Responsibility and Climate Change 257 Seumas Miller Evaluating a Case Study: Applying Ethical Issues 268 6 Animal Rights 275 All Animals Are Equal 277 Peter Singer The Radical Egalitarian Case for Animal Rights 291 Tom Regan A Critique of Regan s Animal Rights Theory 300 Mary Anne Warren Mary Anne Warren and Duties to Animals 308 Michael Boylan Against Zoos 313 Dale Jamieson Evaluating a Case Study: Structuring the Essay 321 7 Sustainability 329 A. Sustainability: What It Is and How It Works 331 Defining Sustainability Ethics 331 Randall Curren A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics, and the Problem of Moral Corruption 345 Stephen M. Gardiner Sustainability and Adaptation: Environmental Values and theFuture 358 Bryan G. Norton B. Sustainability and Development 371 Sustainable Development : Is It a Useful Concept?371 Wilfred Beckerman On Wilfred Beckerman s Critique of Sustainable Development387 Herman E. Daly Evaluating a Case Study: Cases on Sustainability 393 Further Reading 394.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

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