Informal waste reclaimers contribute significantly to waste management globally. Yet, their lives and labor are influenced by various environmental, social, and spatial injustices with roots in racist and exclusionary colonial systems. Using post-apartheid South Africa as an example from the Global South, a new materialist reading of the interaction between black waste reclaimers and plastics as recyclable material is presented in this article. The central argument is that the harms these workers are exposed to, and the recycling industry at large are underpinned by the racist and colonial practices, which render them disposable under capitalism. Foregrounding such instances of environmental racism serves as a corrective to the absence of sustained engagement with race in new materialist writings. While the new materialisms criticize human/nonhuman dichotomies, the category of ¡®the human¡¯ remains largely intact. Waste disproportionately affects marginalized black bodies, and understanding such violent relations is vital in addressing environmental destruction in the twenty-first century.

Thaddeus Metz has developed and defended a ¡°modal-relational¡± account of moral status based on his interpretation of salient Sub-Saharan African values. Roughly, on this account, a being has moral status to the degree it can enter into friendly or communal relationships with characteristic human beings. In this paper, it is argued that this theory¡¯s true significance for environmental ethics has thus far not been recognized. Metz¡¯s own view is that the theory entails that only sentient beings have moral status. It is argued here this is a mistake, and, once this error is corrected, the view can be used to synthesize major, competing accounts of moral status into a novel, unified account of the moral status of human beings, sentient animals, non-sentient organisms, and inanimate members of the ¡°web of life.¡± The result is a new framework for thinking about the moral status of various natural entities, which ought to be of great interest to environmental ethicists.

The environmental crisis is an immediate existential threat. It is also, however, psychologically overwhelming. This combination is potentially deadly¡ªwe need to act fast, but often find ourselves paralyzed, drowning in anxiety, angst, and despair. To combat this, the standard narrative in academia is we ought to turn to eco-hope and eco-optimism. Here, I argue while both of these emotions are important, researchers have left an important tool for combating paralysis off the table: eco-anger. I survey the history of anger as a force for social change, and as a means of motivating action in the face of overwhelming negative emotions, arguing it needs to be pushed to the fore of our eco-emotion conversations. I then show what features eco-anger must have to be productive, distinguish between anger as action-motivating and anger as action-guiding, and respond to worries that anger may be a counter-productive emotion.

In our contemporary world, the rights of nature have become an important legal device for environmental protection. Some of the most influential rights of nature frameworks can be found in non-Western contexts and have been strongly influenced by ecocentric accounts of nature. This article addresses the question of whether rights of nature can be implemented in Western contexts as well, focusing in particular on Europe. It first examines ecocentric justifications of the rights of nature and discusses two possible non-ecocentric alternatives. Second, two models for implementing rights of nature¡ªthe nature¡¯s rights model and the legal personhood model¡ªare compared to demonstrate how different combinations of elements from both models can fit different socio-cultural contexts, including Western ones.

Industrial agriculture led to a worldwide homogenization of crops and modes of cultures, but also of landscapes and relationships to the land, threatening at the same time biodiversity and cultural diversity. Developing alternatives to the agro-industrial system inherited from the twentieth century is therefore one of the greatest challenges facing humankind today. This article advocates for the promotion of the French concept of ¡°terroir¡± as a foundational framework for preserving biocultural diversity, illustrating an ethical way of relating to the land. Already enshrined in European law for three decades and under study at the UNESCO and the FAO, it encourages farmers to adopt ecologically virtuous practices, while ensuring greater economic incomes. Moreover, it enhances the value of their work and their specific relationship with their environment in the long run. It also epitomizes broader worldwide initiatives, which propose basing agriculture not against the environment (both human and natural) but in symbiosis with it.

This paper examines the role of interspecies communication in the pursuit of coexistence with wolves returning to the Netherlands. Low-conflict coexistence with wolves in densely populated countries calls for an abandonment of the traditional culture-nature dichotomy. Moreover, it requires that humans learn to understand the wolf¡¯s needs and ways perceiving the world, and engage in a ¡®negotiation process¡¯ with wolves about how to share the landscape. However, the mere knowledge of how other beings perceive the world does not suffice; it might even lead to a more controlling human attitude towards wildlife. Sharing landscapes with resurging wolves in a more ¡®meaningful¡¯ or ¡®convivial¡¯ way, requires a willingness to co-adapt and recognize wolves as beings with agency and a legitimate claim to space. A mutual learning process is needed, in which humans and nonhumans both can learn how to thrive, and how to avoid unnecessary conflicts in a shared landscape.

There are extensive literatures on two kinds of non-anthropocentric values: animal welfare and such environmental goods as biodiversity and ecosystem integrity. These values are also widely recognized and have influenced public policy. But there is no generally accepted overarching conception of the welfare of life on Earth. Such conceptions are described here, their potential utility is explained, and various objections and difficulties are addressed. So broad a conception of welfare must have multiple components, including an expansive conception of physical health and, for sentient life forms, a conception of hedonic well-being. These are incommensurable, so methods are needed for accommodating and aggregating incommensurable values. Such methods are described. Finally, three problems of application are briefly discussed: establishing well-grounded measures of welfare, obtaining the data necessary to use them, and making the results intelligible to decision-makers and the public.

Rewilding is often promoted and defended with eudaimonistic reasons, by appeals to living better, happier lives. It has long been argued eudaimonistic reasoning is hopelessly self-interested and, in an environmental context, anthropocentric. Holmes Rolston¡¯s classic critique of environmental virtue ethics stands to challenge the rewilding movement¡¯s increasing focus on happier lives, rather than intrinsic natural value. This critique misses the mark, however, by insisting on an impressively longstanding, yet unhelpfully rigid distinction between egoistic and altruistic ethical reasoning. In this way, Rolston¡¯s critique serves as an example of some much older and larger tensions which haunt everyday ethical thinking, tensions between desiring the good and doing what¡¯s right, between self-love and selfishness. This paper embraces Rolston¡¯s lifelong love of our living world, while nuancing what it means to hope for a Good Life within it.

Steven Vogel¡¯s work makes two main points: 1) environmental philosophy should be about environments that are always, at least partially, human built, rather than about a nonhuman nature and 2) environmental problems require collective political solutions rather than individual ethical ones. This paper addresses both themes, although its primary focus is on the second. It presents a sort of genealogy of environmental ethics, which seeks to answer the question, why, given the obviously political character of environmental problems, have English-language environmental philosophers focused so intently on ethics? It is argued the dominance of environmental ethics amongst philosophers reflects an uninvestigated commitment to liberal, individualist, political principles. That is, the implicit rejection of politics in favor of ethics is itself a (tacit) political decision with real political and environmental ramifications. I then turn to Vogel¡¯s work, in which he commits an analogous, but lesser, mistake, accepting J¨¹rgen Habermas¡¯s view of politics which is itself, in many ways, a reformulation of the same liberal political views that have misled so many environmental ethicists.

The transition to renewable energy, already underway, requires a massive infrastructure overhaul. Without a commitment to justice this transition risks reproducing the problems of the fossil fuel regime. The emerging area of energy democracy aims to avoid this pitfall. It unites two key features of Vogel¡¯s postnatural environmental philosophy: the adoption of democratic governance as a normative methodology and the inclusion of the built environment, such as infrastructure, in the philosophy's scope. After demonstrating how the energy democracy movement is one answer to Vogel¡¯s call for a postnatural ethic, I examine a case study showing how a commitment to democratic discourse could facilitate just energy transitions. Ideals of deliberative discourse should guide practices of building a shared environment including renewable energy infrastructures, doing so democratically and justly. In Vogel's spirit, we can see how these ideals can especially counteract two problems: privatization and manipulation.

The paper brings together Steven Vogel¡¯s concept of the environment and the category of the world in Hannah Arendt¡¯s and Malcom Ferdinand¡¯s interpretations. First, the similarities between the concepts are shown: they both refer to the networks of things and relationships and, as such, emphasize the political dimension of ecological concerns. Second, it is argued Vogel¡¯s discursive model of politics can be enriched with the aid of the model of non-appropriative relating implied by the concept of the world. Two amendments to Vogel¡¯s project are analyzed. It is shown that non-appropriative relating provides additional support for the central value of Vogel¡¯s approach, i.e., non-domination. In the next step, it is argued the model offers insights into the problem that Vogel considers important but impossible to solve, namely¡ªthe question of politically relating to non-human beings.

This paper considers the prospects for a green Kantian philosophy. It does so by revisiting Steven Vogel¡¯s postnaturalist objections against Kant. Though Descartes is part of the story, Kant is a primary environmental obstacle for Vogel. Like others in environmental philosophy, Vogel criticizes Kant for his dualism, anthropocentrism, idealism, and nonconsequentialism. The present paper looks into the first two objections. It begins by reconstructing Vogel¡¯s argument against ¡°nature¡± to appreciate his claim that modern philosophy haunts contemporary environmental philosophy. After pointing out difficulties with Vogel¡¯s objections, resources in Kant are explored to assuage Vogel¡¯s concerns regarding noumena and non-human animals. The paper concludes with a glimpse of an alternate interpretation of Kant that has the potential to respond to the remaining worries of idealism and nonconsequentialism.

Steven Vogel and Albert Borgmann have much in common. Both thinkers agree we collectively and materially build our environment. Both also believe communal discussion is essential for constructing better environments. Yet Borgmann does not hesitate to speak of ¡°eloquent things,¡± while Vogel insists on nature¡¯s silence. This essay examines that disagreement, arguing Vogel¡¯s position is made stronger by the inclusion of what Borgmann calls ¡°deictic discourse.¡± Such discourse testifies to the goodness of things, but without being either straightforward first-person speech, or the kind of ventriloquism that worries Vogel. Deictic discourse does not eschew responsibility; it accepts a deep responsibility not only for the practices it advocates, but for the wellbeing of its subject. The essay concludes by arguing deictic discourse plays a crucial and ineliminable role in the type of transparent conversations about practice Vogel promotes.

The concept ¡®nature¡¯ and the role it has played in conservation philosophy have been criticized on theoretical and ethical grounds. Theoretical critiques include that it is ambiguous and implies a false human-nature dichotomy and/or human exceptionalism. Ethical critiques include that it has been used to justify unjust conservation practices, such as colonial erasure and displacing Indigenous and local peoples from their lands. More recently, the concept has been criticized on the grounds that under conditions of high rate and high magnitude anthropogenic change it is not reliable for guiding effective conservation decision-making. Do these critiques imply theorists and practitioners ought to develop a conservation philosophy without ¡®nature¡¯? Drawing from work by Steve Vogel and Sally Haslanger, I advocate taking an ameliorative approach to ¡®nature,¡¯ rather than abandoning the concept altogether. ¡®Nature¡¯ is not an ontologically privileged category that has special moral or value properties, but sufficiently ameliorated, it nevertheless has a crucial role to play in the future of conservation philosophy.

Karen Warren¡¯s ecofeminism contends that the domination or subjugation of women is linked to the domination or subjugation of nature. This essay argues she is largely correct in her views on this subject, and certain dimensions of social science help establish this conclusion firmly. The paper begins by reviewing Warren¡¯s position, and one line of criticism of it, to clarify the interpretation of her work that informs this commentary. It then shows how developments in social science, especially regarding the concept of ¡°social dominance orientation,¡± validate Warren¡¯s claim that women¡¯s and nature¡¯s oppression are connected, along with her contention that these connections entail elements of dualism, hierarchy, and domination. It concludes by examining two approaches to environmental issues found in the social science literature, and discusses what is problematic about one and promising about the other, ultimately highlighting the potential of interventions focused on connectedness to nature.

This article offers a conceptual clarification of the Aristotelian component in environmental virtue ethics (EVE). It demonstrates that throughout the last four decades, contributors to EVE have favored an Aristotelian foundation (though a Humean base also has been proposed), and it presents six theoretical challenges and two underexplored possibilities premised on such an Aristotelian foundation of EVE. These two possibilities concern: 1) Aristotle¡¯s notion of the city-state (polis), denoting not only a densely populated area, but also agricultural land outside the city-walls, implying agrarian virtues were implicit in the Aristotelian framework; this is valuable to modern agriculture, and the ways in which environmentally friendly virtues are integrated into food production and consumption. 2) Aristotle¡¯s understanding of well-being (eudaimonia) as existing not only at an individual level, but also at a collective level; the latter is relevant to the prospect of upscaling eudaimonia to a structural level, within the limits of an ecologically sustainable citizenship.

Eugene Hargrove¡¯s impact on the field of environmental philosophy is hard to adequately convey. His service as an activist, educator, and the founder of the journal Environmental Ethics created the context in which the field thrived. His legacy also provides a strong foundation for environmental ethics and activism of the future. Today, environmental philosophy is expanding to include human-dominated environments, once thought to fall outside of the purview of the discipline. Work in these ¡°blind spots¡± is imperative if we wish to improve sustainability and stem the ecological bleeding that marks the Anthropocene. Hargrove¡¯s theoretical work on ¡°weak anthropocentric intrinsic value¡± opens a space for environmental ethics to better understand human-dominated environments. If Paul B. Thompson is right that the way we farm should be of utmost concern for environmentalists, then Hargrove¡¯s insights could help protect large swaths of land beyond parkland borders.

Although Eugene Hargrove did not invent weak anthropocentrism, his version lacks adequate representation in several pedagogical and research venues in environmental ethics. In turn, weak anthropocentrism is one of the lesser-appreciated approaches when compared to areas such as ecocentrism. The author argues Hargrove¡¯s version remains highly applicable to several of today¡¯s ecological issues and advances in neighboring subfields, such as philosophy of technology, philosophy of food, and the emerging area of philosophy of the city. These points suggest weak anthropocentrism could require additional study to understand how it could enhance environmental thought and could benefit philosophy¡¯s future in classrooms and research explorations.

The connections between structural violence and the climate crisis have received scant attention in the literature, despite their significant implications. Structural violence is deeply entrenched in our social, cultural, and economic systems, to the extent ordinary individuals, engaged in legal and routine activities, can become indirect participants in harming others. The climate crisis is not only an expression of structural violence but also deepens structural violence, creating a vicious cycle through multi-directional and self-reinforcing linkages. To address violent outcomes and resolve the climate crisis, we need to shift power relations at the heart of our social and cultural arrangements. Taking a structural lens has the power to radically change how we tackle the problem of climate change. Rather than focusing solely on state-level goals and ambitions, this lens highlights the moral gravity of the climate crisis, pressing for urgent action to address the violence exerted among ourselves as human beings and to the environment on which we depend.

Hargrove¡¯s ontological argument for Aesthetic Foundation of Wilderness Preservation was the extension of the thinking paradigm from human beings to moral consideration and aesthetic appreciation of wilderness. The thinking paradigm was based on the framework of traditional Western philosophy, which includes metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. In this article, I will examine Hargrove¡¯s ontological argument by making a little comparison with the perspective of a Chinese philosophical framework. This paper will be divided into three parts. In the part I, I will summarize Hargrove¡¯s ontological argument for natural beauty and environmental preservation. In part II, I will examine the metaphysical framework in Hargrove¡¯s ontological argument. I argue it is the extension of Plato¡¯s metaphysics of the ultimate reality to wilderness. In Part III, I will examine the ethical and aesthetic framework in his ontological argument. I point out Hargrove¡¯s ethical framework comes from ethical rationalism and his aesthetic framework is the legacy of Plato¡¯s aesthetics. By comparison, Chinese metaphysics stresses the process and Chinese ethics stresses care. The two different directions promote the aesthetic appreciation of agricultural land rather than wilderness.

In recent decades, it has often been argued by environmental ethicists that human beings and the natural world ought to be considered as equals in some basic sense. The aim of this paper is to make sense of this view by examining what role, if any, the idea of equality ought to play in environmental ethics. Specifically, we have two aims: the first aim is to identify those environmental claims that are distinctively egalitarian. The second aim is to show these claims do not rest on a principled and convincing justification. Our main contention is therefore that equality has no place in environmental ethics. There are other promising ways to argue that our relationship with the natural environment must be fundamentally revised. By bringing clarity to this debate and dispelling the possibility of equality-based arguments, we hope to contribute to this endeavor.

Biocentric egalitarianism is the view that all living things share an equal fundamental moral status qua living things. In light of the well-known problems with past philosophical attempts to argue for this position, this paper proposes a way biocentric egalitarian claims might be understood and possibly vindicated. Relying on frameworks developed in recent discussions of the ¡°basis of equality¡± in human-centered ethics, the paper argues that thinking of egalitarian claims as justified by (rather than as justifying) social ideals provides the best way of understanding the basis of biocentric egalitarian claims in environmental ethics. The paper first reviews arguments for biocentric egalitarianism and their central flaws and proceeds to survey different models for justifying egalitarian claims among humans. The paper argues the Social Ideal approach to justification is the one most likely to be helpful to biocentric egalitarians.

Environmental ethicists often make claims about the intrinsic value of nature or parts thereof. Advances in intrinsic value theory, most notably Ben Bradley¡¯s ¡®Two Concepts of Intrinsic Value,¡¯ successfully cleave the concept of intrinsic value into two: a Moorean and Kantian variety. This paper seeks to classify and organize different environmental theorists within a Bradley-inspired framework, helping to bring clarity and charity to the claims of older and newer environmental ethicists. These two types of intrinsic value help explain why different thinkers have differing intuitions on e.g., culling cases. As well as valuing nature suis generis, the paper considers the value that might accrue from other relational properties in nature, such as beauty, biodiversity, and rarity.

The use of genetic engineering is increasingly discussed for nature conservation. At the same time, recent animal ethics approaches debate whether humans should genetically engineer wild animals to improve their welfare. This paper examines if obligations towards wild sentient animals require humans to genetically engineering wild animals, while arguing that there is no moral need to do so. The focus is on arguments from animal ethics, but they are linked to conservation ethics, highlighting the often neglected overlap between the two fields. The paper emphasizes that a) the benefits of genetic engineering are overestimated and at the same time harms from its development and use underestimated, b) the assumption that genetic engineering is an appropriate ¡®last resort¡¯ tool is wrong, c) many arguments in favor of genetic engineering are based on an inadequate understanding of ecology and biotechnological processes, and d) the debate downplays the importance of self-determination for wild animals.

This paper is concerned with Michel Serres¡¯s critique of property. Through the concept of ¡®le propre,¡¯ which in French can mean both ¡®clean¡¯ and ¡®one¡¯s own,¡¯ and a naturalist reading of Rousseau, he proposes a ¡®stercorian¡¯ eco-criticism of property. Focusing on concepts of limits provides a fruitful angle from which to illuminate Serres¡¯s critique of law and property. The first section will introduce Serres as a thinker of limits, borders, and boundaries. In the second and third parts, attention will be drawn to his eco-criticism of law and property from a feminist and philosophy of science perspective, concluding with a fourth part, in which Serres¡¯s approach will be contextualized in relation to other naturalisms. His work has far-reaching consequences for discourses of human agency in the context of the Anthropocene and makes a crucial contribution to how a new naturalist criticism of property might be conceived.

Taking the regime established by the Convention on Biological Diversity as a foundation, the purpose of this article is twofold. First, it examines how the international biodiversity regime integrates the private property paradigm into its toolbox for conservation and sustainability and then critically evaluates the shortcomings of the intellectual property mechanism. Second, it argues that the increasing ubiquity of open access emerging technologies should lead the international community to carefully assess the benefits for conservation research of reverting to a framework that places biodiversity within the global commons. The impasse between global commons advocates and the intellectual property status quo obscures the underlying problematic of the ¡°commodity fiction¡± of biodiversity and increasing use of digital sequence information likely exacerbates power asymmetries. One remedy explored here is an alternative to these two approaches that dislodges rather than discards the concept of private property. Drawing inspiration from Polanyi and building on May (2010), the article shows how a hybrid approach bridging a public and private conception of genetic resources and traditional knowledge could more effectively and equitably distribute benefits to countries and communities providing resources of value to industry.

The recent accumulation of environmental crises poses a radical challenge to the conceptual organization of the modern Western political imaginary and the history of political thought by unsettling its ontological understanding of ¡®nature¡¯. Specifically, to the extent that they rely on such troublesome understandings, this means the central notions we use to orient ourselves politically, such as labor, can no longer straightforwardly serve this purpose. This paper has argued a paradoxical return to Locke against Locke, and the insight into the entanglements of labor, property, and nature this enables, can provide us with a way of holding together the complexity of this predicament. The first part recovered from the critical scholarship on Locke of the past 50 years the manifold ways in which Lockean ideas about labor are caught up with specific assumptions about colonialism, gendered hierarchies, and nature. The second part argued no singular conceptual reconstruction of labor can do justice to its hybrid character, which the present predicament has revealed. The third part argued, by recovering what the Lockean heritage has obscured, the critical scholarship gives us a way into the knotty problems of the organization of labor and the structure of the political collective.

The ¡°private¡± dimension of social life is problematic, posing conceptual, political, and ecological challenges. Some of these problems arise from the very nature of private property as it is enshrined in social life, which demands special privileges be granted to ¡°private¡± matters on the grounds that these are private, because the predominant representation of the involved rights is that they reflect claims of the holders, rather than legitimate claims of society as a whole in allocating responsibilities, benefits, and duties. The claim to the rationality of allocations of property rights, this article argues, must be questioned in light of the kind of commonality that is revealed in a striking manner by environmental issues (although it is not restricted to environmental matters). This questioning makes sense in relation to an analysis of social interactions, beyond the problematic opposition between the private sphere and public life.

This paper explores environmental protection policies and initiatives, such as conservation, through the lens of an orientalist epistemic injustice. This is a form of epistemic injustice that occurs when the orientalizing of space and access to sovereign systems of knowledge causes the assigning of an unjust deflated or elevated level of credibility to a knower. Under this framework of orientalist epistemic injustice, the author criticizes the credibility excess assigned to Western subjects that perform conservation efforts in third-world countries and the related credibility deficit assigned to indigenous and local knowledge and conservation practices.

There is a remarkable trend in contemporary environmentalism that emphasizes ¡®accepting responsibility¡¯ for the natural world in contrast to outdated preservationist thinking that shirks such responsibility. This approach is often explained and justified by reference to the anthropocene: this fundamentally new epoch¡ªdefined by human domination¡ªrequires active human intervention to avert planetary catastrophe. However, in this paper, I suggest this rhetoric encourages a flight from history. This often jubilant, sometimes anxious, yearning for unprecedented human innovation and¡ªultimately¡ªcontrol in our new millennia mirrors the Futurist movement that took off near the beginning of the last century. Despite the significant differences in the details of how academics have defended this twenty-first-century environmental outlook, they all represent the true flight from history; they too quickly jettison the ideas of historical environmentalists and so misunderstand the environmental values at the heart of preservation that are more salient than ever.

In this article, rewilding¡¯s orientation towards the past is discussed. A response is given to the criticisms that condemn rewilding for its retrospectivity, either as nostalgically clinging to the past or escaping history. Instead, it is shown how rewilding can embrace nostalgia as part of a critical, (counter-)cultural vision aimed at the transformation of modern culture. Its main goal can be seen as threefold: first, it is aimed at providing a more nuanced assessment of rewilding¡¯s contested stance towards the past (and thereby, the future) through the lens of nostalgia. Second, it is demonstrated how, seen through this lens, cultural and ecological aspects of rewilding appear inextricably intertwined. Third, the concepts of ¡®cultural rewilding¡¯ and ¡®recovery¡¯ are introduced as valuable notions within rewilding. In sum, an appeal is provided for rewilders to embrace the past by dedicating attention towards cultural heritage, history, memory, and tradition.

In this article, two ways of thinking about the potential disruptiveness of de-extinction and gene drives for conservation are presented. The first way of thinking zooms in on particular technologies and assesses the disruptiveness of their potential implications. This approach is exemplified by a framework proposed by Hopster (2021) that is used to conduct our assessment. The second way of thinking turns the logic of the first around. Here, the question is how gene drives and de-extinction fit into a wider and partly pre-existing context of disruption of human-nature relations. By only zooming in on a particular technology and its potential implications, the context out of which the technology is born is unavoidably disregarded. Gene drives and de-extinction are catalysts of a wider disruption already underway. And it is precisely because this disruption is already underway that the terrain is opened for the development and application of these technologies. In other words, the disruptiveness of these technologies strengthens the disruptiveness that was already underway and vice versa. It is argued that the two ways of thinking about emerging technologies in conservation need to go together, meaning in technology assessment both perspectives need to be included.

Ecotage, or the destruction of property for the sake of promoting environmental ends, is beginning to (re)establish itself both as a topic of public discussion and as a radical activist tactic. In response to these developments, a small but growing academic literature questions whether, and if so under what conditions, ecotage can be morally justified. This paper contributes to the literature by arguing that instances of ecotage are pro tanto justified insofar as they are instances of effective and proportionate self- and/or other-defense. Having elucidated and defended its central claim, this paper concludes by briefly considering some other morally relevant features of ecotage that might tell for or against its overall justification in particular cases.

Many environmental ethicists think evolutionary processes are good or, put differently, that they are morally valuable. Furthermore, many claim this value can be compromised when humans disrupt or cause a break in these processes. In this paper, I argue this account is mistaken. Evolution is not good. Furthermore, evolution cannot be ¡°broken¡± by mere human involvement. There is no preordained trajectory in evolution; randomness, genetic drift, and historical contingency influence all evolutionary histories. Additionally, to think humans necessarily undermine so-called ¡°natural¡± processes and turn them artificial is to ignore Vogel (2011, 2015), and insist on pre-Darwinian dualism. There is no morally meaningful distinction between natural selection and artificial selection; they are both simply selection. Furthermore, animals shape their own evolutionary trajectories, their progenies¡¯, and those of other organisms through their intentions and choices¡ªas is illustrated in the theory of niche construction. Human involvement in evolutionary processes does not ¡°break¡± them nor does it necessarily reduce the value of the end products of those processes.

Recently, it has been argued by several scholars that we have moral reasons to limit our procreation due to the harmful environmental consequences it entails. These calls for procreative restraint are typically made in relation to other lifestyle choices, such as minimizing driving and air travel. In such comparisons, it is assumed that the environmental impact of procreation encompasses the lifetime consumption of the child created, and potentially that of further descendants. After an overview of these arguments, I go on to provide an examination of the main benefits of procreation, in relation to those of consumption, i.e., other lifestyle choices. My normative assumption is that benefits hold moral relevance, alongside harms. Procreation may benefit procreators and may provide more collective benefits. Some benefits tend to preempt the environmental impact associated with procreation. I conclude that the benefits of procreation are substantial and typically greater than those of consumption.

The cause of global environmental decline is clear: an immense and rapidly growing human economy. In response, environmentalists should advocate policies leading to fewer people, lower per capita consumption, and less harmful technologies. All three of these must be addressed, not just one instead of the others. That is our best remaining hope to create sustainable societies and preserve what global biodiversity remains. Sharing Earth justly with other species and protecting it for future human generations are achievable goals, but only if we recognize limits to growth, show restraint in both consumption and procreation, replace maximizing thinking with sufficiency thinking, and cultivate gratitude for what we receive from nature. Efficiency cannot take the place of ethics. Cleverness cannot take the place of wisdom. Humanity must learn to recognize and appreciate ¡®enough.¡¯

Procreative limitarians, according to Kalle Grill, believe that we¡ªespecially the globally wealthy¡ªshould limit our procreative behaviors in order to reduce our impact on the natural environment. However, according to Grill, limitarians tend not to perform a complete moral analysis of procreating, as they cite the costs without noting the substantial benefits. In particular, Grill argues that procreation has benefits that consumption lacks, which is relevant for deciding where to focus in our efforts to mitigate environmental harms. As one of the limitarians cited by Grill, I think this is an interesting argument to consider, but I will here suggest that it does not succeed in fully responding to the force of the limitarian position.

This article considers the possibility of constructing an authentic environmental ethic from Buddhist sources. It first outlines the major critiques of historical Buddhist approaches to the natural world and parses some of the philological and linguistic barriers to such a construction. It then considers some of the recent philosophical critiques of such a project and reviews the major points of tension between the Buddhist philosophical tradition and the kinds of environmental ethics found in the land ethic and deep ecology. Ultimately, this article asserts that such tension is relieved if we begin from Buddhist philosophical principles and construct an environmental ethic from the ground up. It argues a Buddhist environmental ethic emerges from the combination of the goal of liberating all sentient beings from du?kha, an understanding of du?kha as dependently arising, and a novel recognition of the environment as a major cause of this du?kha.

The author argues non-human, sentient animals have aggregation-trumping rights by explaining why and how they should be included in the scope of Kantian contractualism. He explains that the beings to whom we owe duties¡ªwho can be wronged by our treatment¡ªare all those with the capacity for first-person, subjective experience; i.e., all sentient beings. To determine what duties we owe to such beings, we should reflect on the principles for the general regulation of behavior that could be hypothetically justified to their imaginary perfectly reasonable counterparts; i.e., even though animals actually cannot understand or reflect on the reasons we have for treating them in a particular way, burdening them unjustifiably is wrong to them. The author argues this inclusive contractualist theory can explain all the distinctive moral phenomena that T. M. Scanlon¡¯s approach does and so is a more attractive contractualist moral theory.

Many of the major challenges facing global society are unstructured collective harms (e.g., global warming): collective in the sense that they arise as the result of the actions of, or interactions among, multiple agents, and unstructured in the sense that there is no coordination or intention to cause harm among these agents. But how should we distribute moral responsibility for these harms? In this paper, an answer is proposed to this question. This answer builds on but develops existing proposals by drawing together literatures that speak to different aspects of the question. First, it is argued that the notion of causal contribution needs to be broadened to include the idea of causation as production. Second, it is discussed how the voluntariness and foreseeability conditions are best interpreted in this context. Third, literature on moral taint is drawn to introduce additional objective (external) criteria.

In three parts, this article sketches the version of African environmental ethics that was developed and promoted by Chigbo Ekwealo who was a renowned environmental philosopher in Africa. The first part is a sketch of the principles and doctrine of his environmental ethics. The second part traces the intellectual history of his environmental ethics, the influences on it and its influence on the global environmental ethics movement. The third part is a critique of his environmental ethics based on contemporary and global circumstances. It is demonstrated how Ekwealo¡¯s environmental ethics attempted to consciously depart from earlier versions of African environmental ethics in terms of its rejection of the neo-materialist, polemical, and supernatural features of other views. This article contributes to a reconstruction of the environmental thought of one of the founders of the African environmental movement whose thoughts are not accessible to most contemporary environmental philosophers today.

Consider the existence of six identical trees of the same species across a variety of environments. The first tree is in a wild and isolated landscape. The second is in a wilderness park. The third is in a heavily forested ¡°tree plantation¡± owned by International Paper. The fourth is in the Ramble in Central Park. The fifth is in a suburban yard. The sixth is inside the six-story atrium of a Manhattan skyscraper. This paper begins with the intuition that the identical trees have different values because they exist in different environments and biological-social contexts. To understand the different evaluations of the trees we must think along a spectrum that incorporates both axiology and ontology. This thought experiment is useful in exploring arguments about both the management and the preservation of the natural world. The conclusion is that we must think along a spectrum of natural being and value to understand the dualism between humanity and nature and thereby avoid the domination of the natural environment.

A cursory reading of Thomas Aquinas¡¯s work can give the impression he condones a despotic or exploitative relationship between humans and the environment. Many philosophers and theologians have sought to dispel this impression and draw out a more robust Thomistic environmental ethic. In this paper, I support this endeavor by describing how, in Thomas¡¯s work, the environment is God¡¯s artistic property and how this notion qualifies our use of the environment. Next, I consider two concepts related to artistic property: vandalism and showcasing. I explore these concepts as they relate to the environment and find they give us reasons not to deface or destroy creatures and to look to creation for guidance in problem-solving.

The hegemonic discourse of sustainable development adopted as an international alternative solution to the socio-ecological crisis has implied a progression of the modern utopian project and most importantly, an intrinsic contradiction and omission that positions sustainable development as something that is not in any place. To understand, discuss, and transcend this oxymoron, we first review the modern utopian project and analyze its paradigmatic and ontological assumptions about knowledge, time, and space. Second, we show that sustainable development just re-adapted the founding premises of the modern utopias. Third, to transcend the modern utopian facet of sustainable development, we suggest an understanding of sustainability that stems from a topographical way of thinking. We suggest this approach allows us to seek alternatives to the modern epistemology and ontology that have shaped the current dominant vision of sustainable development. Finally, we propose to move from the modern utopia of sustainable development to the praxis of topographical sustainabilities to trigger a more comprehensive and relational praxis of sustainability.

Scientific cognitivism, a main position in Western environmental aesthetics, claims scientific knowledge plays a major role in the aesthetic appreciation of nature. However, the claim is controversial. This study reexamines the history of United States environmental attitudes around the nineteenth century and claims art has played the main role in nature appreciation, even with the emphasis on scientific knowledge. This paper proposes a tri-stage, Scientific Knowledge-Aesthetic Value Transformation Model and argues nature appreciation is indirectly related to knowledge. Scientific knowledge plays a part in the first, pre-appreciation stage and helps build the impression of nature that bridges scientific cognition with aesthetic appreciation in the second, impression-rebuilt stage. Finally, the engagement model is required in the third, appreciation stage. This paper also presents a two-dimensional evaluation criterion to assess various approaches of nature appreciation and artworks.

Centering Indigenous philosophical considerations, ecologies are best understood as kinship arrangements among humans, other-than-human beings, and spiritual and abiotic entities who together through the land share a sphere of responsibility based on both care and what Daniel Wildcat calls ¡°multigenerational spatial knowledge.¡± Ecologically speaking, all kin can become persons by participating in processes of socialization whereby one engages in practices and performances that support responsible relations both within and across ecologies. Spheres of responsibility are not operable strictly within human relationships, nor do what count as responsibilities necessarily center on the human. No being is born a person or automatically earns this status. Personhood must be gained and can be lost. Indeed, under current ecological conditions across the planet, we arguably inhabit a world full of marginal cases.

Tragic moral conflicts are situations from within which whatever one does¡ªincluding abstaining from action¡ªwill be seriously wrong; even the overall right decision involves violating a moral responsibility. This article offers an account of recovery predicaments, a particular kind of tragic conflict that characterizes the current extinction crisis. Recovery predicaments occur when the human-caused extinction of a species or population cannot be prevented without breaching moral responsibilities to animals by doing violence to or otherwise severely dominating them. Recognizing the harm of acting from within recovery conflicts adds force to appeals for interrogating and dismantling the systems of thinking, valuing, and acting that bring species to the brink of extinction.

Current ecological threats, such as the sixth mass extinction or climate change, highlight the need to evaluate the moral implications of changing populations, both human and non-human. The paper sketches a non-anthropocentric and multispecies sufficientarian account of population ethics. After discussing several other options for multispecies population ethics, the paper proposes a two-level account of multispecies sufficientarianism, according to which the value of populations depend on two kinds of sufficientarian thresholds. First, there is a species-relativized individual-level threshold for what species-specific flourishing is for an organism. Second, there is a population-level threshold for a sufficiently viable population enough to support the species-specific flourishing of the current and future members of that population. The paper concludes by discussing some of the practical implications and concerns raised by the two-level account suggested.

This article considers the collective obligations humans have to wild animals. One proposal, put forward by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, argues that we should understand wild animals as living in sovereign communities, is argued against. A Sovereignty Model is a poor fit for the unique interests of wild animals and requires stretching this concept beyond recognition. Most crucially, however, it ignores and obscures ways that human states must work to prevent their own citizens from harming wild animals. Instead, it is argued that wild animals should be seen as living in Wild Animal Protectorates, a new political category, inspired by protected states that exist among human states. This framework for thinking about the relationship between human states and wild animals has advantages over a Sovereignty Model when it comes to issues of borders, political representation, and international protection.

This article examines the concepts of alienation and identification in the context of the Anthropocene. It is a common claim in environmental thinking that alienation from nature drives ecological destruction and that a part of the cure for such an unhealthy relationship to nature is to recover a sense of identification with nature. The article challenges this view, by arguing that in the Anthropocene identification with nature may not be solely good, alienation from nature may not be solely bad, and identification and alienation may not be mutually exclusive phenomena. This thesis is defended through a critique of Arne N?ss¡¯s view on identification and alienation, and by drawing and elaborating on Simon Hailwood¡¯s study of alienation in environmental philosophy and Adorno¡¯s critique of ¡°identity-thinking.¡± It also considers a specific case, the so-called ¡°Plastic Whale¡± that was stranded outside the coast of Norway in 2017.

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.

Many people who claim to genuinely care about nature still seem reluctant to ascribe intrinsic value to it. Environmentalists, nature friendly people in general, and even environmental activists, often hesitate at the idea that nature possesses value in its own right¡ªvalue that is not reducible to its importance to human or other sentient beings. One crucial explanation of this reluctance is probably the thought that such value¡ªat least when attached to nature¡ªwould be mysterious in one way or another, or at least very difficult to account for. In addition, Bryan Norton¡¯s influential convergence hypothesis states that, from a practical point of view, it makes no or little difference whether we ascribe intrinsic value to nature, given the depth and variety of instrumental value it possesses. In this paper, I argue that people who genuinely care about nature cannot avoid ascribing intrinsic value (in a certain sense) to it, if they want to be able to consistently defend the kind of claims about protecting nature they arguably want to make, i.e., claims to the effect that we ought to protect for instance nature areas and species. The cost of denying intrinsic value in nature is the cost of giving up a crucial resource to philosophically defend such claims.

In this article, I address and argue against the tendency to understand the anthropocene as inaugurating the end of nature. I conduct two key moves. First, by way of an engagement with the concept of anthropocene technology I explain how understanding the anthropocene as the end of nature prevents us from recognizing what the anthropocene is all about: interventionism. Secondly, I illustrate how a nondualist understanding of the human-nature relation allows us to recognize interventionism as the hallmark of the anthropocene without falling back into the hierarchical human-nature conceptions that underlie interventionism. A nondualist framework that conserves the human-nature distinction helps us in our ability to relate critically to contemporary science and technology in the anthropocene. I illustrate the conceptual narrative of the article through the specific case of gene drive technology development.

This paper approaches the question of terraforming¡ªthe changing of extraterrestrial environments to be capable of harboring earth-based life¡ªby arguing for a novel conception of moral status that accounts for extraterrestrial bodies like Mars. The paper begins by addressing pro-terraforming arguments offered by James S. J. Schwartz before offering the novel account of moral status. The account offered builds on and modifies Keekok Lee¡¯s No External Teleology Thesis (NETT), while defending a proposed Non-Fungibility Thesis (NFT). The NETT is modified and defended with specific reference to Lee¡¯s work on artifactuality and transgenic organisms. The NFT builds on work around objectification and irreplaceability, offering an account that recognizes the importance of bearers of value above and beyond the mere value they purportedly possess. Finally, the plausibility of the account is established by an overview of its applicability to other possible candidates for moral status.

Different arguments in favor of the moral relevance of the concept of biodiversity (e.g., in terms of its intrinsic or instrumental value) face a range of serious difficulties, despite that biodiversity constitutes a central tenet of many environmentalist practices and beliefs. That discrepancy is considerable for the debate on potential moral reasons for protecting biodiversity. This paper adds a new angle by focusing on the potential of the concept of natural otherness¡ªspecifically individual and process otherness in nature¡ªfor providing additional moral reasons in favor of the protection of biodiversity as variety. Four arguments are presented. Two arguments draw on the individual natural otherness of nonhuman living beings and two additional arguments draw on the process otherness of active nature. The upshot is that each of these arguments¡ªif successful¡ªprovides a moral reason in favor of the protection of biodiversity.

In Thinking Like a Mall, Steven Vogel proposes an environmental philosophy ¡°after nature,¡± meaning one that rejects the division of the world into wild and humanized spaces. This division is false because environments are always constructed by people, who are enmeshed in landscapes and ecological processes. The opposition between wild and humanized parallels the religious division between sacred and profane, according to Vogel. He believes this dualism is an inextricable part of religious worldviews and thus that environmental philosophy must reject religion. This understanding of religion echoes the work of many scholars of religion, who define religion in terms of an opposition between sacred and profane. However, this approach fails to take into account the many traditions that do not divide the world this way. In many cultures, the sacred is connected to the profane much as the natural and the human are intertwined in Vogel¡¯s materialist philosophy. This entanglement is evident in ecological restoration, in which human actions help construct processes that ultimately transcend human intentions and control. I argue that this is a kind of transcendence, which points to a way in which religious language can help us think about a post-natural environmental philosophy.

In this paper, an ecologically extended ethic of authenticity is developed in dialogue with the Norwegian environmentalist Arne Naess and the Japanese ethicist Watsuji Tetsur¨­. More specifically, Naess¡¯s concept of Self-realization is supplemented and supported with Watsuji¡¯s ethic of authenticity (±¾À´ÐÔ) and phenomenology of climate (ïLÍÁ). And the ecological potential of Watsuji¡¯s thought is realized in relation to Naess¡¯s ideas of human responsibility and symbiosis. After establishing an ecologically extended ethic of authenticity, the practical application of this concept is then demonstrated in relation to satoyama and the preservation of nature in Japan. Whilst the intended outcome is to develop an ecologically extended ethic of authenticity, a secondary aim is to illustrate the benefit and importance of cross-cultural dialogue to advance philosophical thought and understanding.

Part of what makes the environment valuable is its autonomy. There are some who think that any human influence on an environment is necessarily autonomy-compromising because it is a form of human control. In this article, I will assume human influence on the environment necessarily undermines autonomy. However, I will argue, even given this assumption, it is still possible for the intervention to enable autonomy in the long run. My focus is on genetic intervention into organisms, because some might think human influence in these cases cannot dissipate. I argue this is mistaken and, borrowing a concept from botany, I argue genes, even genes inserted into a genome by humans, can ¡°naturalize.¡± Furthermore, they can function in ways that are autonomy-enabling to the individual and to the system to which the organism belongs.

Empathy, and its role in human-human and human-animal relationships, has been discussed at length in recent years. Empathy for plants has received little to no attention. In this essay I briefly examine existing theory about human-plant empathy, primarily Marder¡¯s account of a projective empathy. I use contemporary scholarship by Dan Zahavi, as well as phenomenological accounts of empathy, to query this understanding of empathy and to lay the conceptual groundwork for developing an account of empathy for plants in line with Max Scheler¡¯s embodied empathy. In doing so, I sketch an account of the basis for human-plant empathy, including the gestures and behaviors that an empathy for plants may pay particular heed to. The essay concludes by outlining how such an empathy for plants may be developed.

The question of whether or not people are part of nature is relevant to discuss humans¡¯ role on earth and their environmental responsibilities. This article introduces the perspectival account of the concept of ¡®nature,¡¯ which starts from the observation that we talk about the environment from a particular, human perspective. In this account, the term ¡®nature¡¯ is used to refer to those parts of and events in the environment we perceive as being shaped by typically human activities. Humans themselves are part of nature insofar as they participate in and are products of natural processes. Therefore, in this account, nature is not only the passive environment, but also something active and generative that does not operate human creativity, but rather and it in shaping our environment. According to the perspectival account, the ¡®nature¡¯ concept expresses a particular relationship between the human agent and the non-human environment, which can be the starting point for normative theory.

Recent decades have witnessed a surge in philosophical attention to the moral standing of non-human animals. Kantians, Neo-Kantians, utilitarians, and radical animal rights theorists have staked their claims in the literature. Here Fred Feldman¡¯s desert-adjusted utilitarianism is introduced into the fray. After canvassing the prominent competitors in the dialectic, a conception of an overall moral ranking (relative to a moral choice scenario) consonant with desert-adjusted utilitarianism is developed. Then the conception¡¯s implications regarding the particular locations of individual people and animals in such rankings across various scenarios is explored. Ultimately, it is argued that when it comes to evaluating whether or not some benefit (or burden) morally ought to be bestowed upon some specific person or animal, this new conception of an overall moral ranking is sensitive to a wider range of morally relevant phenomena than its more prominent competitors.

The value of nature has been extensively debated in environmental ethics. There has been less discussion, however, about how one should understand the relation between this value and normativity, or reasons: if something in nature is seen as valuable, how should we understand the relation between this fact and claims about reasons to, for example, protect it or promote its existence? The ¡°commonsense¡± view is that value gives rise to reasons. The buck-passing account of value (BPA), on the other hand, implies that for an entity or state of affairs in nature to be valuable just is for it to have properties (other than that of being valuable) that provide reasons to promote or have a pro-attitude towards it. BPA has been extensively debated, but has received little attention in environmental philosophy. In this paper, it is argued that the view suggests a ¡°reasons first¡± approach to environmental ethics, and that it should be preferred to competing accounts of value in the context of environmental ethics.

The problem of responsibility to future generations is inherently related to responsibility for the environment. Attempting to provide a new grounding for the figuration of such responsibility, Hans Jonas used Immanuel Kant¡¯s ethics as a paradigm of traditional ethics to provide a critique of their limitations in addressing these issues, and he found three crucial problems in Kant¡¯s ethics (formalism, presentism, and individualism). Kant¡¯s philosophy provides enough material for an answer to Jonas by building an account which 1) gives a teleological grounding of responsibility for the environment and consequently responsibility to future generations; 2) enables the establishment of collective responsibility towards the idea of moral progress, which includes future generations; and 3) answers Jonas¡¯s challenge by extending moral concerns to other living and non-living beings and especially to future generations.

This article explains how strong sustainability ethics has emerged and developed as a new field over the last two decades as a critical response to influential conceptions of weak sustainability. It investigates three competing, normative approaches to strong sustainability: the communitarian approach, the Rawlsian approach, and the capabilities approach. Although these approaches converge around the idea that there are critical, non-substitutable natural resources and services, they diverge on how to reconcile human development and environmental protection. The aim of the paper is to provide a critical overview of these three perspectives, but also and mostly to show that when we put them into dialogue with each other, we can clarify the demands of sustainability. The paper concludes that the capabilities approach is the most suitable way to think about sustainability, but only if it goes beyond its dominantly anthropocentric view.

We should conceive of illegal covert animal rescue as acts of ¡°subrevolution¡± rather than as civil disobedience. Subrevolutions are revolutions that aim to overthrow some part of the government rather than the entire government. This framework better captures the relevant values than the opposing suggestion that we treat illegal covert animal rescue as civil disobedience. If animals have rights like the right not to be unjustly imprisoned and mistreated, then it does not make sense that an instance of animal rescue will be justifiable only if it meets criteria for justified civil disobedience, e.g., the requirement that the civil disobedient not rescue more animals than would be necessary to communicate their message. Thus, the framework of subrevolution is a more apt way to analyze animal rescue.

Many climate change ethicists argue wealthy nations have duties of justice to combat climate change. However, Posner and Weisbach disagree because there is a poor fit between the principles of justice and the problem of climate change. I argue in this paper that Posner and Weisbach¡¯s argument relies on what Judith Shklar calls ¡°the normal model of justice,¡± the view that injustice results when principles are violated. Applying Shklar¡¯s critique of normal justice, I argue that Posner and Weisbach¡¯s argument limits injustice to include complaints that match rules and principles, shielding the unjust from responsibility and assuming falsely that judgments about injustice can be made from a singular perspective. Drawing on Shklar, this paper develops an account of climate change as a complement to mainstream climate ethicists. On this account, injustice results from indifference and the voices of those impacted by climate change and climate change policy have priority.

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¡ªcounterintuitively¡ªto 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.

John Cage and Henry David Thoreau draw attention to the indeterminacy of wild nature and imply humans cannot entirely control the natural world. This paper argues Cage and Thoreau each encourages his audience to recognize their own human limitations in relation to wildness, and thus each helps his audience to develop greater humility before nature. By reflecting on how Thoreau¡¯s theory relates to Cage¡¯s music, we can recognize how Cage¡¯s music contributes to audiences¡¯ environmental moral education. We can appreciate the role of music in helping audiences to develop values conducive to environmentally sustainable practices.

Individual and collective agents, especially affluent ones, are not doing nearly enough to prevent and prepare for the worst consequences of the unfolding climate crisis. This is, I suggest, partly because our existing conceptual repertoires are inadequate to the task of motivating climate-stabilizing activities. I argue that the concept CLIMATE LEGACY meets five desiderata for concepts that, through usage, have significant potential to motivate climate action. Contrasting CLIMATE LEGACY with CARBON FOOTPRINT, CLIMATE JUSTICE, and CARBON NEUTRALITY, I clarify some advantages of thinking in terms of the former. I conclude by discussing some climate legacy-enhancing practical proposals that merit consideration.

Plato¡¯s ideas on the value of nature and humankind are reconsidered. The traditional suggestion that his thought is ethically anthropocentric is rejected. Instead ¡°Ethical Ratiocentrism¡± (ER) is the environmental worldview found in the dialogues. According to ER, human life is not intrinsically valuable, but only rational life is. ER is consistent with Plato¡¯s holistic axiological outlook but incompatible with ethical anthropocentrism.

For decades now, environmental philosophers from Arne N?ss to Freya Mathews have dreamt of environmental ethics that ¡°make things happen.¡± We contend such ethics can be found in Nordic children¡¯s tales¡ªthose scriptures of moral guidance, and influential propellers of environmental action. In this essay we discuss the moral-imaginative worlds of fictitious in Nordic children¡¯s tales, choosing some of the most canonical stories of the Nordics as our focal point. We argue the complex and often inconsistent philosophical mediations between human and more-than-human worlds as imagined by Astrid Lindgren, Selma Lagerl?f, Thorbj?rn Egner, or Tove Jansson are as viable philosophical works as other, more systematic studies in environmental ethics. Further, we argue that places, or indeed larger geographical regions, animate the moral imagination of the characters who live there, suggesting there is a reciprocal and mutually enhancing relationship between dwelling, thinking, and acting, between being animated and becoming animateur. Indeed, we may speak of this animated and animating, cultural-ecological topos as part of a genuine . Coruscating in this ecosphere are the sparkles of ¡®literary ecological ethics,¡¯ which influence human actions, not as much through analysis, documentation, or argument as through world-making stories, images, and models of environmental heroines.

According to an environmental application of Rawlsian principles of justice, the well-ordered society cannot tolerate the perpetration of certain environmental harms. This paper gives an account of those harms committed in the form of ecocide. The concept of ecocide is developed, as well as the ideal of eco-relational pluralism, as conceptual tools for defending citizens¡¯ environmental interests. This paper aims to identify persuasive and reasonably acceptable justice claims for compelling states to curtail environmentally destructive activities through recourse to principles firmly established in the liberal tradition, while simultaneously exploring the limitations of such an approach.

Many theorists who argue that individuals have a personal responsibility to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs) tie the amount of GHGs that an individual is obligated to reduce to the amount that an individual releases, or what is often called a carbon footprint. The first section of this article argues that this approach produces standards that are too burdensome in some contexts. Section two argues that this approach produces standards of responsibility that are too lenient in other contexts and sketches an alternative account of personal responsibility that treats it as an obligation to take certain kinds of opportunities to reduce GHGs, regardless of how little or much gas an individual releases through her own actions. Section three argues that this alternative conception of personal responsibility is well positioned to rebut the Argument from Inconsequentialism, widely considered the most significant challenge to the assumption that individuals are capable of bearing a responsibility to reduce GHGs.