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81. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 2
Christopher Cohoon Eating the Good: Plumwood’s Trophic Extensionism
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Plumwood’s late work articulates two intertwined “historic tasks”: re-situating “non-human life in ethical terms” and “human life in ecological terms.” Her well-known thesis of “weak panpsychism,” an explicit rival to moral extensionism, represents her primary approach to the first task. Her approach to the second task, however, is less conspicuous. My aim is to identify and develop this approach, which, I suggest, mobilizes the fraught idea of human edibility into a certain mimetic and critical mode of extensionism that I call trophic extensionism. Inverting moral extensionist logic, it extends not moral considerability to animals but literal edibility to humans. Plumwood’s trophic extensionism both revitalizes weak panpsychism—re-vealing an unexpected link between food and mind—and generates a bold new conception of food: no longer an ontological category, food becomes an ecological relation defined by epistemological vulnerability.
82. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Christopher D. DiBona Listening to Nature’s Voices: Human and Animal Autonomy in Hegel
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This article reconstructs Hegel’s account of nature’s autonomy and argues for its significance for his understanding of human autonomy and the relation between nature and spirit. It argues that Hegel treats the actualization of nature’s autonomy—epitomized by the phenomena of animal voice and birdsong—as a vital component of the actualization of free human spirit. Drawing on this analysis, the article then offers an ecological gloss on Hegel’s interest in the progressive actualization of freedom in the modern world. It concludes by sketching a Hegelian account of what it might mean to listen to nature’s voices.
83. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Russell J. Duvernoy Thinking in Crisis: Towards an Ethics of Speculation?
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The paper critically explores tensions inherent in speculative thinking in the context of climate change. It argues that speculative thinking is not a supererogatory luxury or idle pastime, but rather an essential necessity, especially in the context of climate change. Understanding this requires becoming more aware of operative tensions of speculative practice. In particular, the paper focusses on how climate discourses intersect and engage our variable affective economies through the affect of fear and proposes two practical virtues (“speculative courage” and “contemplative attending”) to be cultivated towards a responsible practice of speculative thought in this context.
84. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Agustín Mercado-Reyes Orcid-ID The Lesser Number: On Action and Geoengineering
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The current crises put before us alternatives of action that require decision; for example, the decision of whether to deploy or investigate SRM geoengineering to counter global warming, which is here taken as the central example. Attending to the ontological richness of value in the elements of the world, of which scientific models and thought are a very particular and limited kind, can cast a different light into the decision process, which otherwise would almost unavoidably devolve into “infernal alternatives,” as Isabelle Stengers calls them: impossible choices between two evils.
85. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Tom Greaves Practicing Positive Aesthetics
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This paper rethinks positive aesthetics as a group of aesthetic practices rather than a set of doctrines or judgments. The paper begins by setting out a general approach to aesthetic practices based on Pierre Hadot’s notion of philosophical “spiritual exercises.” Three practices of positive aesthetics are then described: focusing the beauty of each thing; envisioning the beauty of everything; and allowing the beauty of all things. The paper warns against possible dangers to which each practice may fall prey, dangers that divert the practice from its perception cultivating and enhancing potential. The paper ends by drawing out key implications of this way of considering positive aesthetics for our understanding of beauty, negativity and artificiality.
86. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Gabriella Colello, Swapna Pathak, Marcos S. Scauso Solutions for Whom and by Whom?: Environmental Norms and Intersectional Decoloniality
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Many actors use the norm of climate justice to fight climate change and to struggle against global inequities internationally and domestically. Despite the enormous diversity of ways in which actors have deployed ideas of climate justice, many of the policies framed within this norm sustain oppressive, silencing, and/or assimilating tendencies. Hence, this paper looks at the biases that were introduced from ideas of “sustainable development” into the discourse of climate justice. Through the cases of India and Oceania, the paper illustrates the ways in which colonial legacies of single-axis thinking and development emphasize a particular struggle at the expense of other experiences and ways of life.
87. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
Robert Frodeman The Role of Humanities Policy in Public Science
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The relationship between philosophy and the community has become relevant again. It has been the government itself, in the form of public science agencies, which has turned to philosophy and the humanities for help, rather than vice versa. Since 1990, US federal science agencies * agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation * have steadily increased their support of social science and humanities research. This support is all the more striking in that it has happened at a time when federal support for direct humanities research, through the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, has declined. The times demand a corollary to the field of science policy. Just as science policy seeks to offer a systematic evaluation of how science contribute to decision making, humanities policy can methodically investigate how the humanities can better contribute to policy making and how it can help science and technology take better account of societal values.
88. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
Ellen M. Maccarone The Ethics of Advocacy: Scientists and Environmental Policy
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A current issue in environmental ethics concerns the role of scientists as advocates for environmental policy. Some have argued that scientists should not be permitted to be policy advocates. I will argue that it is morally permissible for scientists to be advocates for environmental policies for four reasons. First, since scientists are also citizens it is improper to deny them the opportunity to advocate for certain policies. Second, scientists possess some expertise in these areas should be sought out to advocate for these positions precisely because they are the ones with the knowledge, understanding and access to objective studies relating to policy issues. Third, I will argue that while objectivity is required for research, advocacy for policy issues does not entail the failure of objectivity. Last, scientists advocating for environmental policy meets the ethical requirements for advocacy generally offered by Robert Audi. These give us good reason to think it is morally permissible for scientists to act as advocates for environmental policy.
89. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
Gabriel Griffith REPORT ON BOOKS AND ARTICLES
90. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic EDITORIAL PREFACE
91. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
W. S. K. Cameron Can We Afford the Tough Love of Liberals?: A Deflationary Look at Garrett Hardin’s Lifeboat Ethic
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In two shocking articles that appeared in 1968 and 1974, Garrett Hardin argued that the population explosion was producing a “tragedy of the commons.” Since we lack an effective method of sharing common resources, the strong incentive for individuals to appropriate them selfishly would soon lead to their collapse. To mitigate this danger, Hardin proposed a “lifeboat ethic”: less populated and -polluted Western countries should deny food aid to developing nations, where it would save lives only to increase population pressure, and they should close their borders to immigration to prevent their lifeboats from becoming overcrowded and going down with the rest. This paper challenges and complicates Hardin’s account of the tragedy. While there is something right about his view, its vulnerability to a series of empirical challenges reflects its conceptual limitations. I argue that we need to develop a broadly ethical and arguably religious solution to the twin challenges of population growth and pollution. If the liberal commitment to negative freedom is, ironically, largely responsible for our current ecological bind, our only hope of escape is to build bridges between traditions in search of a thicker sense of ethicopolitical obligation.
92. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
Heather Douglas Boundaries between Science and Policy: Descriptive Difficulty and Normative Desirability
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In the debate over the role of science in environmental policy, it is often assumed that science can and should be clearly demarcated from policy. In this paper, I will argue that neither is the case. The difficulty of actually differentiating the scientific arena from the policy arena becomes apparent the moment one attempts to actually locate the boundary. For example, it is unclear whether scientific summaries to be used by regulatory agencies are in the realm of science or policy. If science, then should the authors consider the regulatory implications of uncertainties? If policy, then what is the relevance of a peer review of the document solely by scientists? This descriptive problem is only accentuated by a normative problem: should we try to keep the two realms distinct? The traditional answer has been yes, for the primary reason that the science should not be infected by the social and ethical values so prevalent in the policy realm. I will argue that, to the contrary, social and ethical values are desirable components of scientific reasoning. Indeed, on closer examination, the norms for valuesin reasoning are the same for science and policy. If I am correct, the pressure to delineate science from policy abates.
93. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
Adam Briggle Visions of Nantucket: The Aesthetics and Policy of Wind Power
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Natural science and economics are regularly used as means for adjudicating environmental controversies. But can these become stalking-horses for other concerns? Might some environmental controversies be aesthetic in nature and likely to resist resolution unless and until we acknowledge this? This paper uses the case study of a proposed wind farm to examine the relationships between the humanities, sciences, and stakeholders in environmental decision making. After providing background on wind power and the proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm, it addresses four questions: What does “aesthetics” mean? Howwere aesthetic concerns expressed in the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), and what were the shortcomings of the EIS process? How could it be improved? This last question raises issues about how to rationally adjudicate matters of aesthetics in environmental policy making. The paper concludes with some thoughts on why this is such an important (and thorny) issue and what role humanists should play in environmental disputes.
94. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 2
Joshua Mason Report on Books and Articles
95. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 2
Joseph P. Lawrence Beauty Beyond Appearance: Nature and the Transcendent
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Environmental philosophers tend to be particularly wary of the language of “transcendence.” From Heidegger to contemporary feminism, we find the idea that the failure to respect nature is grounded in Platonism and Abrahamic religion. The denial of earth began, we are told, with the separation of the intelligible form from the actual thing, or, even worse, of the creator from the created. From this point of view what we need is a restored pantheistic sense, a new and revitalized paganism. I counter this assertion by a reading of Plato’s Phaedrus that shows that respect itself is grounded in the recognition of transcendence. With the Bookof Job, I maintain that the voice of the transcendent God is what enables Job not only to see past his sufferings but for the first time to encounter the beauty of nature. Overcoming anthropocentrism requires a relationship to transcendence as such.
96. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 2
John Mizzoni, Ph.D. A Case Study in Environmental Conflict: The Two Pennsylvania Environmentalists Rachel Carson and Gifford Pinchot
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Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946) was a noted forestry expert, a conservationist, and governor of Pennsylvania. Rachel Carson (1907-1964), celebrated for her groundbreaking books that raised awareness of the negative human impact on the natural environment, was born, raised, and educated in Pennsylvania. Although these Pennsylvanians are both environmentalists, they approached the natural environment very differently and embody two main positions in contemporary environmental ethics. After situating their environmental legacies among contemporary environmental ethics, this paper then discusses implications of the irreconcilability of their positions on environmental progress; the concept of environmental legacy; and the importance of reflecting on the lives of environmentalists like Pinchot and Carson.
97. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 2
Robert Kirkman Ethics and Scale in the Built Environment
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On the way to a phenomenology of the moral space within which people make decisions about the built environments they inhabit, I take up Bryan Norton’s proposal for a non-linear, multi-scalar approach to environmental ethics. Inspired by a recent development in ecology, hierarchy theory, Norton’s key insight is that ethical concerns play themselves out across distinct spatio-temporal scales. I adapt this insight to the context of the built environment by way of a phenomenology of constraint as a scaling criterion, then go on to specify how ethical concerns might be mapped onto the complex scalar relationships thus revealed.
98. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 2
Ted Toadvine Gestalts and Refrains: On the Musical Structure of Nature
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Western philosophy and culture have often posited a structural homology between music and nature. In a contemporary version of this association, deep ecologist Arne Naess proposes that the basic units of reality are hierarchically nested gestalts of a fundamentally relational character. I argue that Naess’s gestalt model fails to account for non-holistic or non-sensical experiences and for creative change in nature. I then suggest the concept of the “refrain”developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as the basis for an alternative musical model of nature that avoids these limitations.
99. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 2
James D. Hatley Techne and Phusis: Wilderness and the Aesthetics of the Trace in Andrew Goldsworthy
100. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 2
Scott Cameron, Kenneth Maly, Ingrid Leman Stefanovic EDITORIAL PREFACE