scholarly journals The Future of Environmental Ethics

2011 ◽  
Vol 69 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Holmes Rolston
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Ethical Concern ◽  
Aldo Leopold ◽  
John Muir ◽  
Daily News ◽  
Rachel Carson ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
The Future

Environmental ethics has a future as long as there are moral agents on Earth with values at stake in their environment. Somewhat ironically, just when humans, with their increasing industry and development, seemed further and further from nature, having more power to manage it, just when humans were more and more rebuilding their environments with their super technologies, the natural world emerged as a focus of ethical concern. Environmental alarms started with prophets such as Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, John Muir, and David Brower, and have, over recent decades, become daily news.

From Arbor Day to the Environmental Sabbath: Nature, Liturgy, and American Protestantism

1991 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-323
Author(s):  
Leigh Eric Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Aldo Leopold ◽  
John Muir ◽  
Rachel Carson ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
Religious Perspectives ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
American Churches

In the past two decades considerable theological energy has been expended in the construction of various ecological theologies and spiritualities. Process theologians, ecofeminists, and theologians of creation, earth, nature, ecology, and land have been elucidating religious perspectives that they hope will help transform human attitudes toward nature and the environment. These writers have sought to reorient Christianity away from anthropocentric views that claim human dominion over nature, premillennial expectations that embrace the destruction of this world, soteriological preoccupations that focus on individual salvation, and otherworldly assumptions that foster alienation from the earth and nature. Some sanguine observers have seen this recent ferment as the greening of American theology or even the greening of the American churches. At the same time, intellectual historians have paid increasing attention to the history of Western ideas about nature and have debated at length the impact of Christianity's theological heritage on the environmental crisis. Specifically, a number of historians have constructed a genealogy of American conservationist and preservationist thought by tracing out a line that includes, among others, George Catlin, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson.

scholarly journals The need for adequate argumentation for the protection of biotic community

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 97-107
Author(s):  
Marcin Klimski
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Aldo Leopold ◽  
Biotic Community ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
The World

The changing state and quality of the environment is now taken for granted by communities living in many distant parts of the world. It is felt more and more intensely that disadvantageous interference in the natural environment will sooner or later have an impact on the biotic community, including humans themselves. However, the problem has not yet been so clearly accentuated, so as to prevent the effects, which often become irreversible. Environmental ethics is one of the scientific disciplines which has attempted to find proper arguments for the protection of the biotic community, as well as to enhance the feelings of responsibility and care for the socio-natural environment. Among the ethical ideas which are developed in this context, the holistic view presents the broadest scope of human moral responsibility for the natural world. Such an approach is considered to have originated in the writings of the American researcher, Aldo Leopold. His ideas and great determination have become well known to those who were not indifferent to the issues of respect for the environment and environmental protection. The article outlines the possibility to incorporate arguments based on the thought of Aldo Leopold, in the process of environmental education, whose aim is the protection of biotic community.

Ratiocentrism, Intrinsic Value, and the Moral Status of the Nonhuman Natural World

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-370
Author(s):  
Edward Uzoma Ezedike ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Categorical Imperative ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Moral Consideration ◽  
Moral Obligations ◽  
Moral Agents

Kant’s doctrine of the “categorical imperative” with respect to ratiocentrism needs to be examined for its implications for environmental ethics. Kant’s argument is that moral actions must be categorical or unqualified imperatives that reflect the sovereignty of moral obligations that all rational moral agents could figure out by virtue of their rationality. For Kant, humans have no direct moral obligations to non-rational, nonhuman nature: only rational beings, i.e., humans, are worthy of moral consideration. I argue that this position is excessively anthropocentric and ratiocentric in excluding the nonhuman natural world from moral consideration. While conceding that nonhuman nature is instrumentally valuable owing to some inevitable existential, ontological considerations, moral obligation should be extended to the natural world in order to achieve environmental wholeness.

The Bible and Environmentalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Calvin B. DeWitt
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
New World ◽  
Life Support ◽  
Aldo Leopold ◽  
John Muir ◽  
Theodore Roosevelt ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Rachel Carson ◽  
Adam And Eve ◽  
The Bible

The Bible describes the satisfying and joyful appointment given to Adam and Eve to serve and to keep the Garden of Eden, but their disastrous choice to know evil spoiled people and their life-support system. In the New World, millennia later, settlers in the Eden of America again lost ground, but between 1864 and 1964 they were alerted, principally by five biblically informed people—George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson—who after their deaths came to be called environmentalists and whose message was termed environmentalism. Their testimony and his personal experience motivated Professor Lynton Caldwell to help design flagship legislation that would inaugurate the remarkable environmental decade of the 1970s. This was joined in 2016 by Laudato Si’, bringing hope that the long-standing stewardship tradition would be rekindled not only in America but around the globe.

Make the change

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. S14-S15
Author(s):  
Claire Hewson
Keyword(s):  
Global Warming ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Future

Against the background of the pandemic and global warming, the theme of The Big Draw 2021, an art festival which takes place this month, is ‘Make the change’. The focus is to explore the ways we look after each other and the natural world to make a positive impact on the future.

scholarly journals The 'Future Internet' and crime: Towards a criminology of the Internet of Things

Crimen ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-271
Author(s):  
Sanja Milivojević ◽  
Elizabeth Radulski
Keyword(s):  
Internet Of Things ◽  
Radio Frequency Identification ◽  
Future Internet ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
Emerging Issues ◽  
Smart Things ◽  
The Internet Of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is poised to revolutionise the way we live and communicate, and the manner in which we engage with our social and natural world. In the IoT, objects such as household items, vending machines and cars have the ability to sense and share data with other things, via wireless, Bluetooth, or Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology. "Smart things" have the capability to control their performance, as well as our experiences and decisions. In this exploratory paper, we overview recent developments in the IoT technology, and their relevance for criminology. Our aim is to partially fill the gap in the literature, by flagging emerging issues criminologists and social scientists ought to engage with in the future. The focus is exclusively on the IoT while other advances, such as facial recognition technology, are only lightly touched upon. This paper, thus, serves as a starting point in the conversation, as we invite scholars to join us in forecasting-if not preventing-the unwanted consequences of the "future Internet".

The Wilderness Idea

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marybeth Lorbiecki
Keyword(s):  
Rocky Shore ◽  
Aldo Leopold ◽  
Wilderness Act ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Waves ◽  
At Home ◽  
Wilderness Society

It was supposed to be a day of short, easy paddles and portages. But that is before the winds show up, gale force and pummeling wave after wave against us, determined to lock us down on the island. We pull our three canoes laden with children and camping gear along the edges of the rocky shore to try to find an easier launching point. The teens then take steering positions, as we throw our shoulders into our paddles and dig, over, and over into those icy blasts of heavy, strong-armed water. Any lapse sends the canoe back. One slip of weight, and we’ll tip, losing all our gear, and we’ll have to struggle to stay alive against hypothermia, even in August. We’re tired. We’re cold. And we’re swearing against the powers that push at us, testing us. But we’re alive and we know it. We feel it in our bones and spirit like never at home. And we’re so darned grateful to be here. This is the wilderness. No directions came with this country—the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) between Minnesota and Ontario. They could have been so easily lost. In the 1930s and 1940s, Aldo Leopold, Sigurd Olson, and other lovers of the outdoors saw these granite-sheathed lakes for what they were—places of rugged beauty and unspoiled wild communities that once developed could not be recovered. They called a halt to unthinking “progress” for a chance to rest in what was and preserve it for the future. Leopold explained that “Recreation is valuable in proportion to the degree to which it differs from and contrasts with workaday life.” So if Leopold were here, what progress would he note on the wilderness front, where the waves of progress push so hard against the concept? First, he would have admired the persistence of his comrade Howard Zahniser from the Wilderness Society. How “Zahnie” patiently built partnerships over his ten years as secretary of the Society and then persevered for another nine crafting the Wilderness Act. He endured 65 drafts and all the associated lobbying of Congress.

Reading Nature Religiously

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-188
Author(s):  
Nancy Menning
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Lectio Divina ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Essential Aspect ◽  
Environmental Virtue ◽  
To Come ◽  
Spiritual Reading

Our ability to live well depends not only on what we do, but also on who we are. With respect to human-land relationships, we need to become more virtuous. And virtue is cultivated through practice. This paper transforms classical spiritual reading practices into a means of cultivating environmental virtue. Lectio divina is a longstanding practice for reading scripture religiously, motivated by a desire to come to a deeper understanding of and richer relationship with the sacred dimensions of experience. I describe an adaptation of lectio divina suitable for reading nature religiously and offer two illustrations. By reading nature religiously, we may develop environmental virtues, becoming more attentive, more thoughtful, more committed, more reverent, and more humble as we encounter the natural world. This model of a practice for cultivating environmental virtue enriches an essential aspect of environmental ethics, enhancing our prospects for attaining human and ecological flourishing.

The Scientific Sublime

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan G. Gross
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Rachel Carson ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Crucial Difference ◽  
Stephen Jay Gould ◽  
Stephen Hawking

The sublime evokes our awe, our terror, and our wonder. Applied first in ancient Greece to the heights of literary expression, in the 18th-century the sublime was extended to nature and to the sciences, enterprises that viewed the natural world as a manifestation of God's goodness, power, and wisdom. In The Scientific Sublime, Alan Gross reveals the modern-day sublime in popular science. He shows how the great popular scientists of our time--Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson--evoke the sublime in response to fundamental questions: How did the universe begin? How did life? How did language? These authors maintain a tradition initiated by Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, towering 18th-century figures who adapted the literary sublime first to nature, then to science--though with one crucial difference: religion has been replaced wholly by science. In a final chapter, Gross explores science's attack on religion, an assault that attempts to sweep permanently under the rug two questions science cannot answer: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of the good life?

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