This article argues that holistic ecocentrism unnecessarily introduces elements to explain why we ought to halt biodiversity loss. I suggest that atomistic accounts can justify the same conclusion ...

1 Solving for pattern: an ecological approach to reshape the human building instinct Geetanjali Rajesh Date, Deborah Dutta, and Sanjay Chandrasekharan (All authors contributed equally) Abstract The human species' adaptive advantage is driven by its ability to build new material structures and artifacts. Engineering is the modern manifestation of this building instinct, and its advent has made the construction

An interesting feature of the 2020 COVID pandemic so far1 has been how a large proportion of the population of democratic societies have been more or less willing to accept sometimes quite severe restrictions of their liberty and substantial hits to GDP. It is almost as if millions and millions of people actually do think that their health and wellbeing, and that of their family, friends, and of wider

Opposition against greenhouse gas emissions reductions is strong among some conservative Christian groups, especially in the United States. In this paper, we identify five scripture-based arguments ...

The enduring and consistent rise of the far right has enabled its representatives to affect environmental debates at a larger scale. Although such incursions are often labeled ‘ecofascist', the term itself term may be insufficient to account for the complexity of this intersection. Building upon existing attempts to organize such discourses in a coherent sub-ideological set, ‘far right ecologism’ (FRE)

The rise of ‘populism’, often conflated with authoritarianism, is frequently viewed as being antagonistic to environmental values, where the latter are associated with ‘liberal elites’. However, with a less pejorative understanding of populism, we might be able to identify elements within that can be usefully channelled and mobilised towards the urgent rescue of human and non-human life. This paper

Aesthetic and historical values are commonly distinguished from each other. Yet there has not been sustained discussion of what, precisely, differs between them. In fact, recent scholarship has focused on various ways in which the two are related. I argue, though, that historical value can differ in an interesting way from aesthetic value and that this difference may have significant implications for

Crises provide moments for reflection, rethinking, seeing the potential for restructuring, and making decisions to change everyday practices. Coronavirus has exposed the structure of the dominant economic system and its inequities. The response to the social crisis is a call for relating to other humans regardless of colour, creed, gender, sexual orientation, age or religion. The response to the ecological

Although similar environmental issues are present across the globe, residents of different countries vary in the extent to which they are concerned about and act upon these issues. Drawing on data from the 2010 Environment module of the International Social Survey Programme, this study tests the structural comparability of environmental attitudes across 32 countries and examines how pro-environmental

In this article, we reflect critically on how moral actions are categorised in some recent studies on moral spillovers. Based on classic concepts from moral philosophy, we present a framework to categorise moral actions. We argue that with a finer classification of the moral values, associated behaviour is better understood, and this understanding helps to identify the conditions under which moral

The need for energy system change in order to address the energy 'trilemma' of security, affordability and sustainability is well documented and requires the active involvement of individuals, families and communities who currently engage with these systems and technologies. Alongside technical developments designed to address these challenges, alternative ways of living are increasingly being envisaged

This paper proposes an epistemological approach to analyse social-ecological systems from a process perspective in order to better tackle the co-constitution of the social and the ecological and th ...

This paper explores factors shaping perceptions of Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) among st a range of informed stakeholders, with a particular focus on their role in future social and political systems. We find considerable ambivalence regarding the role of climate targets and incumbent interests in relation to GGR. Our results suggest that GGR is symbolic of a fundamental debate – occurring not only

Capitalism is often modernised and stabilised by its very critics. Gramsci called this paradox a 'passive revolution'. What are the pitfalls through which critique becomes absorbed? This question is taken up using a Cultural Political Economy approach for analysing the resistant potential of 'degrowth discourses' against the neoliberal hegemony. Degrowth advocates an economy without growth in order

The plain speaking of the new environmental movements places emphasis on an imminent ecological crisis, but the 'new' environmentalists appear to lack insight into what specific action is required, to what they stand in opposition and more generally the political and economic context within which they (as social movements) are operating. The fact is that political and economic elites around the world

I regularly pass several homeless persons surviving on the streets even in winter. One sits on a folded scrap of a blanket leaning against a wall looking thin, pale and resigned, doing some calligraphy of messages on card for those who want them. Almost everyone walks quickly past, some manoeuvring to the opposite side of the wide pavement, others almost treading on some of their sparse belongings

In this paper we investigate the fundamental idea at stake in current bioeconomies, such as Europe’s Bio-Based Economy (BBE). We argue that basing an economy upon ecology is an ambivalent effort, causing confusion and inconsistencies. The dominant framing of the damaged biosphere as a market-failure in bioeconomies such as the BBE is problematic. We present alternative conceptualisations of bioeconomies

The Norwegian state-owned Petroleum Fund’s market value is more than one trillion US dollars. The Norwegian state has become one of the world’s largest stockowners. The Fund was established in 1990 and in 2006 it was renamed the ‘Government Pension Fund Global’, as savings for future generations. What kind of values form the basis for describing the Petroleum Fund in this way? This article shows that

Contributing to the cultural ecosystem services literature, this paper draws on the in-depth place narratives of two coastal case-study sites in Wales (UK) to explore how people experience and understand landscape change in relation to their sense of place, and what this means for their wellbeing. Our place narratives reveal that participants understand coastal/intertidal landscapes as complex socio-ecological

We explored the relationship between materialism, awareness of environmental consequences and environmental philanthropic behavior with a web survey (n=2,079) targeted at potential donors living in Finland. Environmental philanthropic behavior comprise of donations of money and/or time to environmental charities. The awareness of environmental consequences was divided into egoistic, altruistic and

Previous research has alluded to the predominance of atheism in participant pools in the Nonhuman Animal rights movement (Galvin and Herzog, 1992; Guither, 1998) as well as the correlation between atheism and support for anti-speciesism (Gabriel et al., 2012; The Humane Society, 2014), but no study to date has independently examined this demographic. This article presents a profile of 210 atheists

Hydraulic fracturing ('fracking') has enabled the recovery of previously inaccessible resources and rendered new areas of the underground 'productive'. While a number of studies in the US and UK have examined public attitudes toward fracking and its various impacts, how people conceptualise the deep underground itself has received less attention. We argue that views on resources, risk and the deep

The study examines the intersection of individual life-histories, organisational histories and societal histories and reveals how religion, in several different expressions, serves to provide a con ...

Reification is a concept of critical theory that denotes certain problematic, habitualised forms of objectification. In this article, I examine whether the concept can be applied in environmental philosophy and what value it has for environmental critical theory. I begin by introducing the concept and the two senses in which reification of the non-human world has been discussed in the literature: first

Environmental ethicists have been arguing for decades that swift action to protect our natural environment is morally paramount, and that our concern for the environment should go beyond its importance for human welfare. It might be thought that the widespread acceptance of moral anti-realism would undermine the aims of environmental ethicists. One reason is that recent empirical studies purport to

In this article I shall propose María Zambrano’s poetic reason as a suitable method for developing a knowledge of animal being. To do so, I will follow the analyses (Derrida, Coetzee) that place animal thinking in the poetic sphere, thus showing the need for a poetic/literary knowledge to make a philosophical knowledge of the animal possible. Animal writing expresses our nature in relation to animal

The key role that animals play in our aesthetic appreciation of the natural world has only gradually been highlighted in discussions in environmental aesthetics. In this paper I make use of the phenomenological notion of ‘perceptual sense’ as developed by Merleau-Ponty to argue that open-ended expressive-responsive movement is the primary aesthetic ground for our appreciation of animals. It is through

The Anthropocene overthrows classical dichotomies like technology and nature and a new class of beings emerges: hybrids. The transitive status of hybrids - which establishes an extra, separate, ‘third’ ontological category, going beyond the dichotomy between nature and technology - constitutes a significant problem for environmental philosophy and philosophy of technology since they traditionally focus

On a planetary level, the potential for harm by a minority of humanity, due to the scale of intensive energy and material use, is combined with destructive military technology and material, chemical and biological interventions. In popular consciousness, the power of a few to cause planetary destruction became evident with the creation of nuclear weapons. In a world where ‘competition’ in all forms

Insofar as development implies economic growth, the term 'sustainable development' appears to some as a contradiction in terms. However, such conclusions still lack a thorough examination of the conceptual structure of the two terms between which there is a purported contradiction. In order to address this issue, the present paper scrutinises some of the assumptions which underwrite the ideologies

I am writing this editorial from a neighbourhood in the UK’s second largest city, Birmingham, where bird song and car engines intermittently can be heard competing for attention. While my preference is for ‘living in the sticks’, rather than a city, I nevertheless like Birmingham for its generally down to earth, friendly people, and its multicultural, innovative, collaborative spirit. Still, I struggle

This article engages with pragmatic sociology to understand an environmental dispute and its underlying moral issues in a direct-democratic and bottom-up setting. The non-establishment of a planned national park in the Swiss Alps serves as a case study to analyse principles of worth presented in national park negotiations. We point to the complex nature of conservation negotiations and argue that loosely

The idea of ecological democracy is a promising one, a combination of two sets of appealing core normative values – environmental concern and engagement on the one hand, and democratic legitimacy and procedure on the other. Yet, these two sets of values are quite different, and not so easily reconciled. Theorists of ecological democracy have long struggled with this dual (and duelling) set of promises

This article provides theoretical foundations to the widespread intuition that an individual duty to reduce one's carbon emissions should not be overly demanding, and should leave some space to personal life-projects. It does so by looking into the moral structure of aggregative problems such as climate change, and argues that contributing to climate change is less wrong than causing the same amount

This paper explores the potential of ‘new nature writing’ – a literary genre currently popular in the UK – as a kind of arts activism, in particular, how it might engage with the environmental crisis and lead to a kind of collective politics. We note the limitations of the genre, notably the reproduction of class, gender and ethnic hierarchies, the emphasis on nostalgia and loss, and the stress on

This article contributes to the environmental justice debate by analysing the case of the ILVA steel plant in Taranto, Italy. It accounts for the radical polarisation of the public debate between industrialists and environmentalists. These dominant perspectives are polarised but not politicised. In the reading of the crisis, both fronts adopt similar techno-scientific arguments while failing to problematise

An investigation of public support for coastal adaptation options and public finance options in Florida evaluated stakeholder judgments and how they changed through a participatory engagement process. The study found that public finance mechanisms that imposed fiscal burdens on those who directly benefit from hazard reduction were rated as more acceptable than others. Significantly, visualisations

Tailoring climate change messages to a particular spatial scale (e.g. a specific country or region) is often seen as an effective way to frame communication about climate change. Yet the empirical evidence for the effectiveness of this strategy is scarce, and little is known about how recipients react to spatially-framed climate change messages. To learn more about the effects and usefulness of different

Environmental knowledge and values permeate policy and management processes in numerous ways, with some forms often having a stronger impact than others. These processes can be relatively slow and long-term. Some, however, are more immediate and rapidly evolving. Many of us engaged in contemporary research on environmental matters in the UK are concerned with the potential shape of environmental management

Courts have determined that adaptive management does not satisfy the Endangered Species Act's requirement to use the 'best available science'. This is due, in part, to the failure to recognise the role of non-epistemic values in science. We examine the role of values in the legal controversy over the scientific reports and adaptive management plans for endangered salmon in the Columbia River Basin

For most of the twentieth century, nature conservation activities were connected to the protection of agrarian landscapes. During the late 1980s, the introduction of the concept of ‘new wilderness’ offered new opportunities for ecologists, but at the same time produced conflicts with traditional nature and landscape conservation. At the heart of the conflict were different visions of the relation between

Rewilding is an increasingly popular strategy in landscape management, yet it is also controversial, especially when applied in culturally ‘layered’ landscapes. In this paper I examine what is morally at stake in debates between proponents of rewilding and those that see traditional cultural landscapes as worthy of protection. I will argue that rewilding should not only be understood as a conservation

This paper is about rewilding and the tensions it involves. Rewilding is a relatively novel approach to nature conservation, which seeks to be proactive and ambitious in the face of continuing environmental decline. Whilst definitions of rewilding place a strong emphasis on non-human agency, it is an inescapably human aspiration resulting in a range of social conflicts. The paper focuses on the case

People who speak up about the unpleasant realities of environmental degradation, capitalist exploitation and the growth economy are likely to be criticised for 'negative framing' - while corporations undermine truths by casting them as social constructs with no objective validity. Environmentalists increasingly conform to the idea of telling nice stories using abstract metaphors rather than seeking

To combat the ecological crisis, fundamental change is required in how humans perceive nature. This paper proposes that the human–nature bifurcation, a deeply entrenched and environmentally pathological metaphysical mental model, stems from embodied and tacitly held substance-biased belief systems. Process philosophy can aid us, inter alia, in providing an alternative framework for reinterpreting this

The complexity of understanding and navigating human–nature relations calls for diverse angles of philosophical approach, and the articles in this issue exemplify that diversity, engaging questions of ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics and epistemology. They are connected, however, by a thread that runs through environmental philosophy: a desire to broaden or reframe understandings of humans’ places in

On 25 September 2015, the seventieth session of the General Assembly in the United Nations approved new Sustainable Development Goals building upon the vision of the original Millennium Development Goals. I argue that this post-2015 agenda still neglects fundamental qualities of cultural sovereignty that are key to maintaining sustainable practices, values and lifestyle habits. No single goal emphasises

The formulation and implementation of policies addressing the need to adapt to climate change can be difficult due to the long-term, uncertain nature of localised climate change impacts and associated vulnerabilities. Difficulties are intensified because policy interventions can involve high costs, foregone opportunity and changes to people's way of life. Factors such as these can spur an uncritical

Researchers working in the field of ecosystem services (ES) have long acknowledged the importance of recognising multiple values in ecosystems and biodiversity. Yet the operationalisation of value pluralism in ES assessments remains largely elusive. The aim of this research is to present a taxonomy of values and valuation methods to widen the evaluative space for ES. First, we present our preanalytic

Core to Environmental Values is thought-provoking interdisciplinary discussion on citizen-consumer tensions, individual agency and social behavioural change, and human–nature relationships, often with direct reference to accelerated, human induced, environmental and climate change. This issue includes contributions that critically examine how the concept of economic growth has deep, culturally embedded

One central question of climate justice is how to fairly allocate remaining 'carbon space' or a global emissions budget. Some commentators hold that the idea of fairness is hopelessly equivocal on this point. Others claim that we need a complete theory of distributive justice to answer the question. This paper argues that on the contrary, given only weak assumptions about fairness, we can show that

Governments have been slow to address climate change. If non-governmental agents share a responsibility in light of the slow pace of government action then it is a collective responsibility. I examine three models of collective responsibility, especially Iris Young's social connection model, and assess their value for identifying a collective, among all emitters, that can share responsibility. These

Ethicists and social scientists alike have advocated for the inclusion of vulnerable populations in research and decision-making on climate engineering. Unfortunately, there have been few efforts to do so. The research presented in this paper was designed to build knowledge about how vulnerable populations think about climate engineering. The goal of this manuscript is to bring the ethics literature

Waste has often been a target of literature and policy promoting pro-environmental behaviour. However, little attention has been paid to how subjects interpret and construct waste in their daily lives. In this article we develop a synthesis of practice theory and psycho-social concepts of attachment and transitional space to explore how biographically patterned relationships and attachments to practice

Local opposition to infrastructure projects that implement renewable energy (RE), such as wind farms, is often strong even if state-wide support for RE is strikingly high. The slogan 'Not In My Backyard' (NIMBY) has become synonymous for this kind of protest. This paper revisits the question of what might be wrong with those who are NIMBYs about RE projects, and how best to address them. I will argue

Our language and metaphors about environmental issues reflect and affect how we perceive and manage them. Discourse on invasive species is dominated by aggressive language of aliens and invasion, which contributes to the use of war-like metaphors to promote combative control. This language has been criticised for undermining scientific objectivity, misleading discourse, and restricting how invasive

Recent proposals in political philosophy concerning nonhuman animals as property-holders - by John Hadley and Steve Cooke - have focused on the interests that nonhuman animals have in access to and use of their territories. The possibility that such rights might be grounded on the basis of a Lockean (that is, labour-mixing) account of property has been rejected. In this paper, I explore four criticisms

Utria National Park is a remote biodiversity hotspot in Colombia. It encompasses ancestral territories of the Embera indigenous peoples and borders territories of Afro-descendant communities in El Valle. We explore environmental value conflicts regarding the use of the park, describing them as a Wicked Problem that has no clear solution. Juxtaposing how the territory is perceived by different communities

Local perceptions of protected areas are important for conservation and the sustainability of protected areas. We undertook qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork to explore relationships between people and protected areas in the Blouberg mountain range, South Africa. The history of land use and current relationships with protected areas reveal legacies of marginalisation and immiseration, giving credence

Environmental commodification, trading and offsetting are business as usual approaches to environmental policy. There is also consensus across political divides about the need for economic growth. Many environmental NGOs have become apologists for corporate self-regulation, market mechanisms, carbon pricing/trading and biodiversity offsetting/banking, while themselves commercialising species 'protection'