Environmental Ethics Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Growing evidence of human-induced environmental damage has raised popular awareness that we ought to act and think differently about nature. The bad effects of fossil fuel emissions, marine pollution, deforestation, urban sprawl, and unchecked population growth have raised a set of ethical questions. Is technology the answer to environmental problems, or should we transform our consumption patterns and production processes? Is population growth or unequal resource distribution a greater cause of land degradation? Are societies morally obligated to ensure the resource needs of future people? Do nonhuman entities have value beyond their usefulness to humans? Do animals and plants have moral standing and therefore rights?

In response to these and other questions, scholars and activists since the 1970s have forged the distinct and growing field of environmental ethics. This branch of philosophy reflects on society’s conception and treatment of nonhuman nature in moral terms, offering both ideal codes of conduct and policy guidelines. It seeks to craft theories that explain the motivations and consequences of human actions on earthly life, and it proposes what ought to be done.

Environmental ethics took root in the 1960s, a decade of transformational politics and social consciousness. Frequently cited as a wakeup call to the world about the ruin of nature, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, documented how industrial technologies-particularly the use of DDT-have harmed the planet’s ecosystems and have jeopardized human well-being. Slightly later, Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) alerted the public to what he described as an impending crisis caused by unsustainable population levels at the global scale. While scholars in the United States, Australia, and Norway laid the foundations for environmental ethics in academia and political movements, key concepts-such as the virtue of sustainable resource use or wilderness protection – were articulated by earlier economists, naturalists, foresters, and artists, people like: George Catlin, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and Aldo Leopold. Leopold, especially, laid the cornerstones of an explicit “land ethic” in his Sand County Almanac, published in 1949. For him, the extending the concept of community to land involves an extension of morality beyond the purely human realm: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” In addition to the problem of how humans should understand “community” (should we consider the concept holistically, ecologically?) scholars have deliberated on the moral standing of other sentient beings. The subject of animal liberation today constitutes an important subfield of environmental ethics. Debate on the question of animal rights draw on diverse ethical theories, including utilitarianism, a view that weighs and seeks to balance good and bad effects, or costs and benefits, and deontology; a theory that privileges questions of right and wrong rather than good and bad.

Two Theoretical Poles

Generally speaking, environmental ethics spans two theoretical poles. One situates humankind within the biosphere and puts human interests on equal footing with the interests of other animate beings. The other subordinates the elements of the biosphere-“natural resources”-to the interests of humankind. The first perspective embraces holism or “biocentrism.” The second is anthropocentric in that debates about environmental ethics tend to center on how our acts upon nature may enhance or worsen human life. At each extreme, thinkers propose ways in which to value the natural environment, and the terms environment and nature themselves reflect philosophical pBibliography: Anthropocentric ethics gauge the instrumental value of the environment, while the recognition of nature’s “intrinsic value” suits holistic viewpoints.

Efforts to theorize intrinsic value reflects some scholars’ dissatisfaction with existing moral categories and principles, which they find too limited in applicability or conceptual content. Regarding the conventional understanding of morals and ethics, for example, some argue that human practices upon the earth not only affect the living conditions of present and future people but also present and future nonhuman creatures. The concept of morality therefore must extend to include other species. Moral extensionism seeks to broaden the range of moral considerability beyond humans to plants and animals, beyond individuals to entire species, or even beyond species to ecosystems.

Conceptual limitations of existing categories include the idea of nature’s instrumental value. Some ethicists argue that plants, animals, soils, waters, and forests possess value that is not solely derived from their usefulness to humans (including uses such as aesthetic appreciation or spiritual inspiration). They also possess an intrinsic value, a goodness in and of themselves without regard to their effect on other entities. Intrinsic value serves as a core principle of “deep ecology,” a movement begun in Scandinavia by Norwegian philosopher, Arne Naess. Naess’ term, biospheric egalitarianism, represents one of the key guideposts for deep ecology. In a similar vein, key issues of environmental ethics have inspired often politically subversive, intellectual movements. For example, feminist analyses have been brought to bear on environmental issues and have illuminated patriarchal patterns and effects in the human domination of nature. Also focusing on the negative effects of unequal social relations and power, Marxist-inspired environmental perspectives include the subfields of social ecology, which focuses on the problem of humanity’s alienation from nature, as well as the expanding field of political ecology, which focuses on the effects of capitalism on nature and humanity, and on the effects of environmental change on social structures.

Bibliography:

Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society (Black Rose Books, 1980);
Brennan, Thinking About Nature (Routledge, 1988);
Brennan (ed.), The Ethics of the Environment (Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1995);
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Hamish Hamilton, 1962);
Paul Erlich, The Population Bomb (Amereon Limited, 1976);
Joesph Des Jardins, Environmental Ethics: An Introduction to Environmental Philosophy (Wadsworth, 1993);
Eric Katz, Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997);
Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press, 1997);
Andew Light and Holmes Rolston, eds., Environmental Ethics (Blackwell Publishers, 2002);
Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, Lifestyle (Cambridge University Press, 1990);
Paul Robbins, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (Blackwell Publishers, 2004);
Alison Stone, “Introduction: Nature, Environmental Ethics, and Continental Philosophy,” Environmental Values (v.14, 2005);
Richard Sylvan and David Bennet, The Greening of Ethics (The White Horse Press, 1994);
Karen Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters (Sagebrush Press, 2000).