The story of change and growth, i.e., evolution, in the traditional manner, involves an epistemology of indigenous knowledge systems that admits both evolution and the divine—and therefore the human capacity for free choice—that tells us that fossil fuels are a bad choice. Steven Biko’s message of “Black Consciousness” responds to the dilemma of how we belong to the species that is damaging the planetary ecosystem, amd yet how we can deny complicity by saying that reclaiming our culture enables us to see what we have done, so we can refuse complicity with the system that has divided us and take responsibility for giving birth to new life. The uncertainties of climate change can be thought through using race, class, gender, sexual orientation, indigeneity, and disability as categories of analysis. The result is an understanding that through both climate science and lived experience, we can know enough to know we ought to act on climate change. We do not need more research; we need instead an acceptance of our ignorance amid a sense of ethical responsibility. This story speaks of liberation from oppression and of climate action as deeply entangled in

Aldo Leopold’s draft essay “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest” from 1923 (first published in the introductory volume of Environmental Ethics in the 1979) shows that his initially expressed moral concerns were primary to his view of conservation. In addition, this early essay also challenged dominant perceptions of environmental degradation in the southwestern United States in the 1920s. For these reasons, it provides a framework for examining conservation as a moral issue in South and West Africa, especially in the nations of South Africa and Ghana, building on J. Baird Callicott’s summaries of Yoruba (Nigerian/West African) and San (southern African) environmental ethics in Earth’s Insights (1994). In the context of poverty, traditional community taboos may have already supplied the social norms of conservation that Leopold desired, but they are marginalized by modernization. As in Leopold’s essay, mainstream perceptions of environmental degradation viewed through the lens of political ecology suggest that international market forces may be more ecologically disruptive than traditional peasant agriculture. Land ethics similar to Leopold’s are implicit within the political philosophies of two of the regions’ most respected recent leaders, Nelson Mandela (South Africa), who promoted land reform, and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), who promoted pan-Africanism over neocolonialism. Community-based solutions to conservation issues illustrate the successes, failures, and the challenging complexity of modernization in these subregions.

Ubuntu originated in small-scale societies in precolonial Africa. It stresses metaphysical and moral interconnectedness of humans, and newer Africapitalist approaches absorb ubuntu ideology, with the aims of promoting community wellbeing and restoring a love of local place that global free trade has eroded. Ecological degradation violates these goals, which ought to translate into care for the nonhuman world, in addition to which some sub-Saharan thought systems promote environmental concern as a value in its own right. The foregoing story is reinforced by field research on African hunting operations that appear—counterintuitively—to reconcile conservation with business imperatives and local community interests. Though acknowledging shortcomings, I maintain these hunting enterprises do, by and large, adopt Africapitalist and ubuntu attitudes to enhance community wellbeing, environmental sustainability, and long-term economic viability. I also examine how well-intentioned Western conservation agendas are neocolonial impositions that impede local control while exacerbating environmental destruction and socioeconomic hardship. Ubuntu offers a conciliatory epistemology, which Africapitalism incorporates, and I conclude by considering how standard moral theories and political divisions become less antagonistic within these sub-Saharan frameworks, so even opponents can find common cause.

Brazil has a long history of environmental problems, but philosophy seems to lag behind other disciplines that actively consider this history. Nonetheless, there is a sufficiently rich intellectual tradition to allow a genuine environmental philosophy to emerge. Based on a detailed overview of discussions pertaining to environmental reflection and activism in Brazil, three fields of tension in recent Brazilian environmental history—military developmentalism versus militant environmental activism, anthropocentric realism versus ecocentric utopia, and sustainable development versus strong sustainability—presuppose philosophical positions and represent three corresponding “intellectual culprits” that need to be addressed. Among emerging trends in environmental philosophy, two avenues of thought can be highlighted as promising for dispersing these “culprits”: ethnocultural pluralism and global environmental responsibility.

Brasil tiene una larga historia de problemas ambientales, pero la filosofía parece ir atrás de otras disciplinas que activamente consideran esta historia. Sin embargo, existe una tradición intelectual suficientemente rica para permitir el surgimiento de una filosofía ambiental genuina. Basados sobre una detallada panorámica de las discusiones pertenecientes a la reflexión ambiental y al activismo en Brasil, este trabajo revela tres campos de tensión en su historiaambiental reciente –desarrollismo militar versus activismo ambiental militante, realismo antropocéntrico versus utopía ecocéntrica, desarrollo sostenible versus sostenibilidad dura–todo lo cual presupone posiciones filosóficas y representa tres correspondientes "culpables intelectuales" que deben abordarse. Entre las tendencias emergentes de la filosofía ambiental, pueden destacarse dos avenidas de pensamiento que prometen dispersar estos "culpables": pluralismo etnocultural y responsabilidad ambiental global.

Is animal farming permissible when animals would have a positive welfare? The happy animal farming problem represent the paradigmatic problem in population ethics, because its simple structure introduces the most important complications of population ethics. Three new population ethical theories that avoid the counter-intuitive repugnant and sadistic conclusions are discussed and applied to the animal farming problem. Breeding farm animals would not be permissible according to these theories, except under some rather unrealistic conditions, such as those farm animals being so happy that they themselves would prefer a continuation of animal farming. Given the fact that many people believe that most farm animals are not so happy and the fact that one can formulate reasonable population ethical theories that condemn happy animal farming, it can be concluded that it is better to avoid animal farming and the consumption of animal products in general.

In risk management, de minimis risk is the idea that risks that are sufficiently small, in terms of probabilities, ought to be disregarded. In the context of the distinction between disregarding a risk and accepting it, this paper examines one suggested way of determining how small risks ought to be disregarded, specifically, the natural-occurrence view of de minimis, which has been proposed by Alvin M. Weinberg, among others. It is based on the idea that “natural” background levels of risk should be used as benchmarks and de minimis levels should be derived from those levels. This approach fails even if the doubtful distinction between what is natural and what is not can be upheld.

The aim of this paper is to focus on the idea of depth developed by Arne Næss, which is related both to his research methodology and some of its anthropological/cosmological implications. Far from being purely a psychological dimension (as argued by Warwick Fox), in Næss’s perspective, the subject of depth is a methodological and ontological issue that underpins and lays the framework for the deep ecology movement. We cannot interpret the question of “depth” without considering the “relational ontology” that he himself has developed in which the “ecological self” is viewed as a “relational union within the total field.” Based on this point of view, I propose that we are able to reinterpret the history of the deep ecology movement and its future, while rereading its politics, from the issue of depth.

El objetivo del presente artículo es enfocarse en la idea de profundidad desarrollada por Arne Næss, que tiene que ver con su metodología de investigación y con algunas de sus implicaciones antropológicas/cosmológicas. Lejos de ser una dimensión meramente psicológica (como sostiene Warwick Fox), el tema de la profundidad es, en la filosofía de, un tema metodológico y ontológico, que fundamenta y constituye el marco teórico del Movimiento de la Ecología Profunda. No podemos interpretar el tema de la “profundidad” sin tener en cuenta la “ontología relacional” que el mismo Næss ha desarrollado, en la que el “self ecológico” constituye una “unión relacional dentro del campo total”. A partir de este punto de vista, entonces, podemos interpretar la historia del Movimiento de la Ecología Profunda (y su futuro), ilustrando su política a la luz del tema de la profundidad.

A moral Kantian approach can be developed to deal with the nonidentity problem with regard to environmental intergenerationl justice—at least in cases of depletion or risky policy. Being a duty-oriented moral theory, this approach allows both that people coming into existence in a nonidentity situation can be glad to exist while simultaneously taking into account depletion or risky policy, to which their existence is causally related, as possibly being morally wrong because of a violation of moral duties.

Both Arne Naess and Warwick Fox have argued that deep ecology, in terms of “Selfrealization,” is essentially nonmoral. I argue that the attainment of the ecological Self does not render morality in the richest sense “superfluous,” as Fox suggests. To the contrary, the achievement of the ecological Self is a precondition for being a truly moral person, both from the perspective of a robust Kantian moral frameworkand from the perspective of Aristotelian virtue ethics. The opposition between selfregard and morality is a false one. The two are the same. The ecological philosophy of Naess and Fox is an environmental ethic in the grand tradition of moral philosophy.

El presente artículo sostiene que, sobre la base de un enfoque moral kantiano, podemos abordar el problema de la no-identidad –al menos en los casos de agotamiento de recursos o políticas riesgosas. Ahora bien, al ser una teoría moral orientada a los deberes, permite tanto que las personas que llegan a existir en una situación de no-identidad puedan estar contentas de existir como que, simultáneamente, consideren que el agotamiento de recursos o la política arriesgada (con la que su existencia está relacionada causalmente) es moralmente errónea debido a la violación de deberes morales.

There have been several recent defenses of biocentric individualism, the position that all living beings have at least some moral standing, simply insofar as they are alive. I develop a virtue-based version of biocentric individualism, focusing on a virtue of reverence for life. In so doing, I attempt to show that such a virtuebased approach allows us to avoid common objections to biocentric individualism, based on its supposed impracticability (or, on the other hand, its emptiness).

Recent disclosures regarding the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and his own version of National Socialism have led me to rethink my earlier efforts to portray Heidegger as a forerunner of deep ecology. His political problems have provided ammunition for critics, such as Murray Bookchin, who regard deep ecology as a reactionary movement. In this essay, I argue that, despite some similarities, Heidegger’s thought and deep ecology are in many ways incompatible, in part because deep ecologists—in spite of their criticism of the ecologically destructive character of technological modernity—generally support a “progressive” idea of human evolution.

The problems of environmental ethics are so basic that the exploration of an alternative metaphysics or attendant ethical theory is not a sufficiently radical solution. In fact, the assumptions entailed in adefinition of systematic philosophy that gives us a tradition of metaphysics might themselves be the source of the current crisis. We might need to revision the responsibilities of the philosopher and think in terms of the artist rather than the “scientific of first principles.” Taoism proceeds from art rather than science, and produces an ars contextualis: generalizations drawn from human experience in the most basic processes of making aperson, making a community and making a world. This idea of an “aesthetic cosmology” is one basis for redefining the nature of the relatedness that obtains between particular and world-between tao and te.

Much philosophical attention has been devoted to “The Land Ethic,” especially by Anglo-American philosophers, but little has been paid to A Sand County Almanac as a whole. Read through the lens of continental philosophy, A Sand County Almanac promulgates an evolutionary-ecological world view and effects a personal self- and a species-specific Self-transformation in its audience. It’s author, Aldo Leopold, realizes these aims through descriptive reflection that has something in common with phenomenology-although Leopold was by no stretch of the imagination a phenomenologist. Consideration of human-animal intersubjectivity, thematized in A Sand County Almanac, brings to light the moral problem of hunting and killing animal subjects. Leopold does not confront that problem, but it is confronted and resolved by Jose Ortega y Gassett, Henry Beston, and Paul Shepard in terms of an appropriate human relationship with wild-animal Others. Comparison with the genuinely Other-based Leopold-Ortega-Beston-Shepard wild-animal ethic shows the purportedly Other-based humanand possibly animal ethic of Emmanuel Levinas actually to be Same-based after all.