Environmental Ethics

Abstract

Environmental ethics focuses on questions concerning how we ought to inhabit the world; what constitutes a good life or a good society; and who, where, or what merits moral standing. The field emerged most significantly in the 1960s from an increasing awareness of the global environmental condition, although its multiple roots stretch back through the conservation legacy of Roosevelt and Leopold, the transcendentalism of Thoreau and Muir, a growing wilderness movement, insights from the ecological sciences and their precursors, and 19th-century Arcadian sentiments. The field of environmental ethics emerged as a reaction to the perception of growing environmental crises, such as the transformation of Australian forests into pine plantations, rivers afire in the industrialized regions of the United States, the pressure of population growth on natural resources, and the preservation of wild lands. In the United States these concerns led to legislative action such as the Wilderness Act (1964) and the formulation of several key pieces of legislation reflecting concern for environmental health and well-being, such as the Clean Water Act (1972) the Endangered Species Act (1973), and the establishment of both Earth Day and the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. These events and others have most frequently been read through the lens of Western philosophy, with Aristotle, Hume, Spinoza, and others serving as theoretical guides, and Western science functioning as both source of and solution to environmental problems. Contributions from non-Western cultures illuminate other forms of relating to the land, based on very different metaphysical understandings. There is often a fine line, for example, between the animate and inanimate, or communal and individual—a line of moral considerability found in other cultures that some Western philosophers seek to blur. Rather than establishing separate categories for non-Western environmental ethics, or those offered by feminists, we have focused on the arguments and investigations within the field. Through creating constellations of individuals with similar concerns, we have created a taxonomy of discourse on selected topics. This article opens with general overviews of environmental ethics in single-author monographs and edited anthologies. Foundational texts from philosophy, science, and the humanities provide an interdisciplinary context for the concepts explored in sections on the human place in nature, moral consideration, putting environmental ethics into practice, and issues of and for the future.