Environmental Ethics Cheat Sheet
From BluWiki
The key question here is what do each of these ethicists think an environmental has to do? Think in terms of answering the questions: "Environmental ethics has to..." or "A successful environmental ethic...". Example: A successful environmental is one that addresses the problem of the human/nature duality as we talk about Wilderness (Cronan).
Keep this short. Just a few lines to summarize positions.
Contents |
Larry White
Categories: Cosmology shift advocate (term for this?), critiques christianity
What we read: The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis (3/26/09)
Believes: What’s more important is not better science or greener technologies, but attending to and changing our background cosmologies. He says it’s not going to work if we just argue about how many parts per million da da da da da. If the roots are religious, so must be the remedy. This is a case for cosmological shift.
Civilization learned its bad habits from medieval Christianity. Problems:
- Cyclical view of time
- Dichotomy between human and nature
- Replaced animism (attribution of a soul to plants) with sainthood
- Creation story, which encourages dominion view -- God created the world for our use
What does ee have to do: Address the problematic cosmologies that are at the root of many religious and cultural institutions.
Susan Emmerich
Categories: Ecological manager,
What we read: Tangier Waterman's Covenant (3/26/09)
Believes:
What does ee have to do: Help us search traditions for existing positive ecological narratives and highlight them as a way of bringing about a change in worldview.
Thomas Berry
Categories:
What we read: Spirituality of the Earth (3/26/09)
Believes: There's a huge power in words and framing metaphors. We need a new metaphor. Stewardship metaphor implies management. What if our problems outstrip the metaphors we're using? We shouldn't look back to old metaphors (cf. Emmerich), but come up with new ones.
What does ee have to do: Help us to discover new metaphors to correspond to the problems and world we face now?
Stegner
Categories: Existence value theorist,
What we read:
Believes: Wilderness is important just as an idea. This is existence value: valuing something just for existing, even if you won't ever go there. But why is it important then? This runs against our American pragmatic sensibilities.
The idea of wilderness sustains us. Our ideals are written into the landscape. Freedom is more important to us than total use or consumption.
What does ee have to do:
Birch
Categories: anti-imperialist, subversivist
What we read: The Incarceration of Wilderness (4/2/09)
Believes: Our wilderness idea serves to preserve a dysfunctional story where we don’t know how to live in nature.
The idea of Wilderness is the problem. Wilderness preservation is another stanza in the western song of imperialism, like native American reservations. It assumes that we have both the power and the mandate to partition the world into wilderness and not. Calling one thing wilderness justifies our use/abuse of the rest of the land.
BUT, the incarceration ultimately never works because Wilderness has subversive potential. Otherness is ontologically at the heart of moral reality, and it can call us out and change us even if we try to tame it. Others refuse to be finally fixated. We will maintain just enough wilderness intact to preserve the possibility for your perception to be transformed.
What does ee have to do: EE has to address the way we talk/act about things like wilderness, and in particular has to be attentive to the ways our wilderness preservation efforts implicitly encourage the use/exploitation of the rest of the land.
Cronan
Categories: anti- human/nature-duality
What we read: The Trouble with Wilderness (4/2/09)
Believes: The human/nature duality that the idea of Wilderness creates is bad and leaves us with no idea how to relate to "real wilderness". Wilderness is the projection of our ideas about ourselves and natures, and those ideas are dualist. When humanity and nature are together, humans subdue it and win. And where real wilderness is, humans aren’t. That means necessarily that we won’t know how to live in real wilderness or even deal with it. That’s bad. We need to take responsibility for how our ideas (Wilderness, Frontier) shape us.
Nature can call us out and change us (also cf. Birch). Wilderness preserves are preserves of moral education.
- Freddie: Wilderness in America has been feared, sought, worshipped (if not as object, then as setting for worship), romanticized, feminized, controlled, reclaimed, reinterpreted; in short, it has functioned as a mirror reflecting dominant trends in civilization, and Cronon therefore recognizes it as a construction. He’s arguing that the human cultural construction of 'wilderness' threatens responsible environmentalism because its dualisms value an artificial and impossible separation of humans and nature, and I think he’s right.
“Wilderness is more a state of mind than a fact of nature, and the state of mind that today most defines wilderness is wonder.”
What does ee have to do: EE has to address the problem of the human/nature duality as we talk about Wilderness. It should address the fact that nature separated from culture is problematic.
Wendell Berry
Categories: Virtue Ethicist, localist, place ethicist
What we read:
Believes: Land relationships should be like marriages, where we have to live with the consequences of our actions in a particular place.
Local decisionmaking leads to better local solutions.
What does ee have to do: Set out what virtuous, right living with the land looks like?
Sagoff
Categories: Localist, place ethicist
What we read:
Believes: Local decisionmaking leads to better local solutions.
We should be suspicious of our end visions for an environment. He makes the connection between exotic species and xenophobia. Species showing up where they don’t belong. The way that we think about monk parakeets in New Haven is the same way we think prejudicially about the Irish immigrants, or the Mexican immigrants. Lots of place ethics are trying to either return eden to eden, or getting back to eden as it had been found, and that embodies a kind of fascist homogeneity.
National environmental groups tend to play out ideological battles in local places. They don't necessarily care about a particular forest.
What does ee have to do:
Holmes Rolston
Categories: Intrinsic value theorist
What we read: Conserving natural value (4/9/09)
Believes:
- Nature is value-producing.
- Evolution tends towards the ideal of complexity. A grizzly bear is an evolutionary accomplishment. Therefore we ought to defend that kind of complexity.
- Not protecting biodiversity is the folly that our descendents are least likely to forgive us for. Protect biodiversity.
What does ee have to do: Highlight evolutionary/biological complexity and its intrinsic value, and encourage us to protect it.
Christopher Stone
Categories: pluralist, pragmatist?
What we read: Should Trees Have Standing?
Believes: We need to populate all the morally credible alternatives. Get all the alternatives on the table. There’s no chance for a unifying theory, so do what the sciences do and partition ee, using different perspectives for different problems
What does ee have to do: Ethics needs to justify caring.
Andrew Light
Categories: pragmatist, pluralist
What we read:
Believes:
What does ee have to do: We’re trying to mobilize meaningful environmental change. A decent theory is one that fits the problem, but one that also fits with a decent part of society’s moral commitments. It’s got to take the commitments and move it into a call to action.
Minteer and Manning
Categories: pluralist, pragmatist, managers (they assume management) (is this synonymous w conservationist?)
What we read:
Believes: We’ve been too obsessed with monism (arguing against plurality – arguing that there’s only one right way). We lose shared resources to effect meaningful change. M&M make a strong case that a plural approach is Democratic. They want to have democratic conversations over specific case studies.
- EE is a field shaped around real, urgent problems. EE has to do something.
- Pluralism is about seeing what’s in your toolbox, and then the ethicists comes to a problem and picks the right tool. And those tools need to be available to the wider public which participates in the deliberative sphere.
- We should participate in a civic management scheme by which we might arrive at a perspective that values loving the environment.
What does ee have to do: Provide credible, ethical understandings of real problems for the deliberating public to consider so that we can decide how to manage the environment.
Critiques:
- JDH:But the public making choices here depends on them having a description of the problem, which is always going to be subject to strong bias by who states the problem in the first place. AND we can’t count on people to make real even-keeled choices. They make narrow-minded choices based on the minimal knowledge they have. That’s why we need specialists making choices, and why we have things like the EPA defending particular environmental views and protections even though everyone doesn’t agree with it.
Willis Jenkins
Categories: pragmatist (moral pragmatist, not a political pragmatist),
What we read:
Believes:
- There’s greater possibility for change by working through problems face. We don’t face this tradeoff that we think we face between radical change and dealing with actual problems. Pessimistic about the possibilities for conversion. Conversion happens through actually working through problems.
- We have to work with the commitments communities actually have and make environmental questions intelligible to those commitments. It’s necessary to approach people in a way that allows them to use the tools and language of their traditions, religious or otherwise.
- It doesn’t make sense to talk about a principle apart from the way it organizes. Creation makes sense as we talk about the way it organizes life. Ideas are sustained by coherent patterns of action in the world. When evangelicals say that our responsibility to god means we have a responsibility to the biosphere, that’s compelling.
What does ee have to do: Has to help us bring about change? Has to invite description from the various communities it’s addressed to.
Peter Singer
Categories:
What we read:
Believes: prioritizes the suffering of sentients over everything. Suffering of sentients is bad, and is the most important thing in the universe
What does ee have to do: address/minimize the suffering of sentients?
Aldo Leopold
Categories: Conservationist, intrinsic value-ist, manager, argues w/ all four modes of argument (virtue, act, consequence and responsibility)
What we read: Sand County Almanac
Believes: "Think like a mountain."
“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the earth’s living ecosystems. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
What does ee have to do: It should "build receptivity into the still unlovely human mind." (SCA 295)
Critiques:
- JDH: Leopold won't work for addressing the environmental crisis because his epistemology is rooted in the things you can see immediately around you. There's no room for 3rd party (ex: scientific) data. "Personal attentiveness" would have to be extended to attentiveness to ecological science. Does that screw up this ethic?"
Barry Lopez
Categories:
What we read:
Believes: We're on the "boat" again. The “ruthless, angry search for wealth” of Columbus set the tone for our continent which we still inhabit (9). He’s saying, you’re in this story which is really bad and you don’t realize it. And it’s a silly, vain, futile story. But that violent corruption needn’t define us. We can make a different choice.
We have a monumental decision to make, and only our companions on the boat to look to. We have got to feel the sense that monumental change will happen.
What does ee have to do: Be about people living in their place with wisdom. EE isn't governmental.
Terminology
Pragmatists
- ...say stop working on meta-narratives and work on specific problems and specific solutions. They want to work with the problems we have, and often to appeal to the positions that people actually hold. The “answers” will come from working out the problems.
- Say environmental ethics has to do something.
- Most say pragmatists can only hope to effect modest changes.
- Pose the question: is it necessary to bring about a whole new world-view, or can we use what people already have?
- Require an optimism that solving problems is possible.
Pluralists
- Want to think of ethics as providing a toolbox from which we can choose the right tool for the right situation.
- Reject monism.
Place ethicists
also Localists
- Value comes from who we are in a particular place and community. (nb: we should be suspicious of universal claims like intrinsic value coming from a place ethicist)
- Local decisionmaking leads to better local solutions.
Big Questions
- What is the role of narrative in environmental ethics? What is the role of classical nature writing (Carson, Berry, Terry Tempest Williams)
- Narrative makes accessible and compelling a particular kind of relationship with nature.
- Narrative can allow others to serve as a proxy of environmental experience.
- Does employing more than one form of ethical argument (virtue, act, consequence, responsibility) make an argument incoherent, or can it strengthen the argument? (cf. Aldo Leopold)
- Where should a problem like climate change direct our attention?
- Larry White: our cosmologies
- Willis, et al: the civic commitments that we hold to address the problem at hand
