Showing papers in "Environmental Ethics in 2005"

The Value of Microorganisms

Abstract: * Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute, Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom MK7 6AA. Cockell’s primary interests are in the microbiology of extreme rocky environments and understanding how microbes colonize extreme environments. From this work has sprung an interest in the environmental ethics of the microbial world and the exploration of space. The author is grateful for the helpful comments from two anonymous reviewers, Peter Hartel and Holmes Rolston, III. 1 Charles Cockell, “The Rights of Microbes,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 29 (2004): 141–50. Environmental ethics has almost exclusively been focused on multicellular organisms. However, because microorganisms form the base of the world’s food chains, allowing for the existence of all higher organisms, the complexities of the moral considerability of microorganisms deserve attention. Despite the impossible task of protecting individual microorganisms—the paradigmatic example of the limitations to a Schweitzerian “reverence for life”—microorganisms can be considered to have intrinsic value on the basis of conation, along with their enormous instrumental value. This intrinsic value even manifests itself at the individual level, although in this case the ethic can only be regulative (an ethical principle). Biocentrism is the most appropriate ethical framework for microorganisms, and the most useful normative framework for implementing the preservation and conservation of microorganisms. This ethic has implications for how we deal with disease-causing microorganisms.

Wolf stories: Reflections on science, ethics, and epistemology

Abstract: * Jickling, Faculty of Education, Lakehead University, 955 Oliver Road, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada P7B 5E1 (bob.jicklin@lakeheadu.ca); Paquet, Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4 (ppaquet@sasktel.net). Jickling, a long-time Yukon resident, taught environmental ethics and environmental education at Yukon College for many years. He now divides his time between his home in Whitehorse, Yukon and Thunder Bay, Ontario where he recently accepted a faculty position at Lakehead University. His research interests include philosophy of education—particularly conceptual analyses of key concepts, environmental ethics, relationships between ethics and education, and relationships between ethics and epistemology. He is also the founding editor of the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education. Paquet is a conservation biologist specializing in large carnivores living in human dominated systems. He has written extensively about carnivore ecology and coexistence of humans and carnivores. Paquet has degrees in philosophy of science, wildlife biology, zoology, and behavioral ecology. Wolf stories, including the systematic and government-sponsored killing of Yukon wolves, provide a context for the examination of assumptions about Western epistemology, and particularly science, in light of the “ethics-based epistemology” presented by Jim Cheney and Anthony Weston, with implications for research, responsibility, and animal welfare. Working from a premise of universal consideration, and minding the ethical basis of knowledge claims, enables richer conceptions of environmental ethics and creates new possibilities for animal welfare and managing for wildlife.

Allen Carlson’s Environmental Aesthetics and the Protection of the Environment

Abstract: Evaluation of the contribution that Allen Carlson' s environmental aesthetics can make to environmental protection shows that Carlson's positive aesthetics, his focus on the functionality of human environments for their proper aesthetic appreciation, and his integration of ethical concern with aesthetic appreciation all provide fruitful, though not unproblematic, avenues for an aesthetic defense of the environment.

Naturalness and de minimis Risk

Abstract: In risk management, de minimis risk is the idea that risks that are sufficiently small, in terms of probabilities, ought to be disregarded. In the context of the distinction between disregarding a risk and accepting it, this paper examines one suggested way of determining how small risks ought to be disregarded, specifically, the natural-occurrence view of de minimis, which has been proposed by Alvin M. Weinberg, among others. It is based on the idea that "natural" background levels of risk should be used as benchmarks and de minimis levels should be derived from those levels. This approach fails even if the doubtful distinction between what is natural and what is not can be upheld.

What is Africa to Me?: Wilderness in Black Thought from 1860 to 1930

Abstract: The concept of wilderness found in the black American intellectual tradition poses a provocative alternative to the preservationist concept. For black writers, the wilderness is not radically separate from human society but has an important historical and social dimension. Nor is it merely a feature of the external landscape; there is also a wilderness within, a vital energy that derives from and connects one to the external wilderness. Wilderness is the origin and foundation of culture; preserving it means preserving not merely the physical landscape but our collective memory of it. But black writers also highlight the racial essentialism that infuses both-their own and traditional ~ m e i i c a n concepts of the wild, giving us greater insight into why the wilderness celebrated by preservationists can be a problematic value for racial minorities.

Instrumental Value in Nature as a Basis for the Intrinsic Value of Nature as a Whole

Abstract: * Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of the Sunshine Coast, Sippy Downs, Queensland, Australia 4556; email: elliot@usc.edu.au. Elliot is the author of Faking Nature: The Ethics of Environmental Restoration (London: Routledge, 1997) and of a number of articles and book chapters on issues in environmental ethics. 1 See, for example, Holmes Rolston, III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 197–98. Some environmental ethicists believe that nature as whole has intrinsic value. One reason they do is because they are struck by the extent to which nature and natural processes give rise to so much that has intrinsic value. The underlying thought is that the value-producing work that nature performs, its instrumentality, imbues nature with a value that is more than merely instrumental. This inference, from instrumental value to a noninstrumental value (such as intrinsic value or systemic value), has been criticized. After all, it seems to rely on the bizarre idea that a thing’s instrumental value could be a basis for it’s intrinsic value. This idea, however, is not as easy to dismiss as many might think. Review of the obvious arguments that might be deployed to defeat it shows that they have to be rejected, suggesting that a thing’s instrumental value could be, and arguably is, a basis for it’s intrinsic value. Defending this apparently bizarre idea provides a way of justifying the claim that nature as a whole has intrinsic value. Instrumental Value in Nature as a Basis for the Intrinsic Value of Nature as a Whole