Dewey and Environmental Philosophy

2017 ◽  
pp. 712-732
Author(s):  
Paul B. Thompson ◽  
Zachary Piso
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Awareness ◽  
Environmental Philosophy ◽  
Environment Interaction ◽  
Human Control ◽  
The Core ◽  
Environmental Pragmatism

Though environmental philosophers trace the roots of environmental awareness to the decades of John Dewey’s prominence, Dewey himself was conspicuously mum about the environmental controversies of his day. A Deweyan environmental pragmatism, then, must find sustenance in less prosaically environmental themes of the American philosopher’s project. This chapter attends to Dewey’s notion of organism-environment interaction, which is at the core of Dewey’s understanding of experience and which informs Dewey’s philosophy from epistemology to aesthetics. The chapter stresses that Dewey’s notion of organism-environment interaction is an account of how organisms dynamically respond to changes in their environment. However, contrary to several misinterpretations of environmental pragmatism, this dynamic responsiveness is not a call for human control over nature. Indeed, we conclude that an environmental philosophy oriented by Dewey’s notion of organism-environment interaction provides promising approaches to interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and environmental justice.

scholarly journals Environmental justice, settler colonialism, and more-than-humans in the occupied West Bank: An introduction

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Irus Braverman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
West Bank ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The West ◽  
The Core ◽  
Waste Concrete

Our special issue provides a first-of-its kind attempt to examine environmental injustices in the occupied West Bank through interdisciplinary perspectives, pointing to the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts within which they occur and to their more-than-human implications. Specifically, we seek to understand what environmental justice—a movement originating from, and rooted in, the United States—means in the context of Palestine/Israel. Moving beyond the settler-native dialectic, we draw attention to the more-than-human flows that occur in the region—which include water, air, waste, cement, trees, donkeys, watermelons, and insects—to consider the dynamic, and often gradational, meanings of frontier, enclosure, and Indigeneity in the West Bank, challenging the all-too-binary assumptions at the core of settler colonialism. Against the backdrop of the settler colonial project of territorial dispossession and elimination, we illuminate the infrastructural connections and disruptions among lives and matter in the West Bank, interpreting these through the lens of environmental justice. We finally ask what forms of ecological decolonization might emerge from this landscape of accumulating waste, concrete, and ruin. Such alternative visions that move beyond the single axis of settler-native enable the emergence of more nuanced, and even hopeful, ecological imaginaries that focus on sumud, dignity, and recognition.

Environmental Justice: Making Policy, One Skirmish at a Time

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Baehler
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Environmental Hazards ◽  
Vulnerable Population ◽  
Environmental Discourse ◽  
The Core ◽  
Established Fact ◽  
Core Idea ◽  
Vulnerable Population Groups

Environmental justice refers to both a concept and a social movement that originally spun off from the American civil rights establishment in the 1980s. The core idea focuses on the now well-established fact that members of vulnerable population groups tend to experience disproportionately higher levels of exposure to environmental hazards, less access to green amenities, and fewer opportunities to have their environmental concerns heard and remedied compared to their wealthier and whiter counterparts. Environmental justice terminology is deeply embedded in contemporary environmental discourse and governance in multiple countries, but its ability to alleviate real instances of environmental mal-distribution has been strongest at the local level thanks to the concept’s power to mobilize diverse networks of activists around local causes.

Terraforming

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Pak
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Human Impact ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Environmental Awareness ◽  
Environmental Philosophy ◽  
Planetary Environments ◽  
Gaia Hypothesis ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
The Uk

This book explores the emergence and development of terraforming in science fiction from H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) to James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar (2009). Terraforming is the process of making other worlds habitable for human life. Its counterpart on Earth—geoengineering—has been positioned as a possible means of addressing the effects of climate change. This book asks how science fiction has imagined the ways we shape both our world and other planets and how stories of terraforming reflect on science, society and environmentalism. It traces the growth of the motif of terraforming in stories by such writers as H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon in the UK, American pulp science fiction by Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, the counter cultural novels of Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin and Ernest Callenbach, and Pamela Sargent’s Venus trilogy, Frederick Turner’s epic poem of terraforming, Genesis, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s acclaimed Mars trilogy. It explores terraforming as a nexus for environmental philosophy, the pastoral, ecology, the Gaia hypothesis, the politics of colonisation and habitation, tradition and memory. This book shows how contemporary environmental awareness and our understanding of climate change is influenced by science fiction, and how terraforming in particular has offered scientists, philosophers, and many other readers a motif to think in complex ways about the human impact on planetary environments. Amidst contemporary anxieties about climate change, terraforming offers an important vantage from which to consider the ways humankind shapes and is shaped by their world.

Establishment of a cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) core collection based on agro-morphological descriptors

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ranjana Bhattacharjee ◽  
Dominique Dumet ◽  
Paul Ilona ◽  
Soyode Folarin ◽  
Jorge Franco
Keyword(s):  
Manihot Esculenta ◽  
Core Collection ◽  
Phenotypic Diversity ◽  
Crop Improvement ◽  
International Institute ◽  
Environment Interaction ◽  
Manihot Esculenta Crantz ◽  
Linear Discriminant ◽  
The Core ◽  
Entire Collection

International Institute of Tropical Agriculture maintains 2544 cassava accessions (Manihot esculenta Crantz) from 28 countries in its field bank. Being vegetatively propagated, this poses challenges in maintenance in terms of cost as well as in labour requirements. A core collection representing the range of phenotypic diversity present in the entire collection would enhance the conservation aspects and increase the potential for its exploitation in crop improvement programmes. The present study aimed to establish a core collection using 40 agro-morphological traits evaluated at two locations using a different number of accessions in each location. To meet the challenges generated by the types of variables and include maximum diversity in the core collection, a sequential strategy based on five major concepts was used: hierarchical multiple factor analysis allowing the mixture of variables of different kinds; three-way analysis that included the effect of genotype × environment interaction in the clustering process; linear discriminant function to assign all those individuals who were included in one location but not in the other to the groups that were generated from the common number of accessions evaluated in both locations; and D-allocation method to select samples from each cluster. The representativeness of the core subset to the entire collection was further estimated by comparing means and variances, range, and distances between accessions. The established cassava core collection consisted of 428 accessions that conserved 15% higher phenotypic diversity with no redundancies. The phenotypic diversity represented in this core collection will be a guide to users of cassava germplasm in their crop improvement programmes.

Landscaping Nature’s Otherness in Pre-1960s Terraforming and Proto-Gaian Stories

Terraforming ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 18-55
Author(s):  
Chris Pak
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Energy Economics ◽  
Environmental Philosophy ◽  
Initial Growth ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Living World ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Mechanistic View

This chapter brings to bear environmental philosopher Keekok Lee’s three fundamental environmental theses (the Asymmetry, Autonomy and No-Teleology Theses) to consider how science fiction constructs human relationships to cosmological nature. It considers how pre-1950s science fiction engages with concepts now central to environmental philosophy before moving on to examine the sublime in proto-Gaian living world narratives. Underlying this discussion is the concept of nature’s otherness, a relationship between non-human nature and the human. It builds on the insight that the initial growth of ecologism in the 1880s involved two strands, a mechanistic view of nature based on energy economics and a monism that involved a vitalist view of nature as essentially irreducible to mechanistic conceptions. These concepts form the core of the readings to follow.

Public Participation in Environmental Protection: Ideals, Challenges and Solutions

2014 ◽  
Vol 962-965 ◽  
pp. 1680-1684
Author(s):  
Xue Hai Hu ◽  
Lin Tang
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Public Participation ◽  
Environmental Protection ◽  
Environmental Awareness ◽  
The Self ◽  
Environmental Organizations ◽  
Environmental Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Property ◽  
Environmental Interests

Since the environment is a kind of public property, environmental protection requires public participation. In order to realize the ideals of public participation in environmental protection, we need to enhance the democratization of national administrative agencies, guarantee the civil environmental rights, balance the environmental interests of different groups in light of environmental justice, promote public environmental awareness and cultivate the self-governing spirit in environmental protection. As there are definitely many problems in the public participation of environmental protection, we need to strengthen education in environmental protection, promote public participation in environmental protection and provide support to the civil environmental organizations so as to realize public participation in environmental protection.

The community of Ursula Franklin Academy: Ursula as friend and inspiration

2018 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. xxv-xxviii
Author(s):  
Seth Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Secondary School ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
School Board ◽  
Real World ◽  
Structural Elements ◽  
Integrated Technology ◽  
The Core ◽  
Global Challenges ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
Toronto District School Board

Founded in 1995, Ursula Franklin Academy is a Toronto District School Board secondary school that specializes in integrated technology and academics for the real world. Ursula herself was actively involved in the planning of the school, and her values and activism continue to shape our program and community. One of the core structural elements that emerged from the early planning phases was The Wednesday Program, a place where teachers and students can design and deliver unique, locally developed curriculum. Though we no longer have Ursula with us, we work in her memory to best prepare students for the personal and global challenges they face, towards a world with social and environmental justice.

Notes on ‘Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World’

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Baird Callicott
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Environmental Philosophy ◽  
Ecological Approach ◽  
Kyoto School ◽  
The Core ◽  
Japanese Buddhism ◽  
Ecological Self ◽  
The World ◽  
First Time

How to conceive and experience one’s self is the linchpin for achieving an efficacious environmental philosophy. Naess was among the first to put the question of self at the center of environmental philosophy and laid cautious claim to ‘introduce … a concept of ecological self’ for the first time. Naess’ ‘ecological self’ is vitiated by at least four flaws: (i) an eclectic and mutually inconsistent set of informative sources (Freud, Fromm, William James; Mohandas Ghandhi and Advaita Vedanta); (ii) a narrow conception of ethics drawn principally from Kant; (iii) inattention to state-of-the-art ecology (the science) as a model for an ecological self; (iv) reinforcing rather than deconstructing the insidious notion of self as substance. A self resonant with ecology would posit the self as a knot, nexus, or node in a skein of social and environmental relationships. Such relationships are internal. The classical antecedent of such an ecological self is not the Hindu Ātman/Brahman—the universal substance in all—as per Naess, but the Buddhist Anātman or Anattā (No-self)/Śūnyatā (Emptiness). In the hybrid philosophical expression of Japanese Buddhism by members of the Kyoto School, the core of the internally related ecological self is the topos of mu.

Kant, Chakrabarty, and the Crises of the Anthropocene

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-67
Author(s):  
David Baumeister ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Environmental Philosophy ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Environmental Humanities ◽  
The Core ◽  
Critical Insight ◽  
Insight Into

Dipesh Chakrabarty has identified Immanuel Kant’s distinction between the human’s moral and animal dimensions as an underlying source of the failure of the humanities to respond to the ecological crises of the Anthropocene. Although relevant for the environmental humanities generally, Chakrabarty’s critique is especially germane to contemporary environmental philosophy. It shows how the reality of anthropogenic climate change renders central aspects of Kant’s influential conception of human nature untenable. While closer examination of Kant’s writings corroborates the core of Chakrabarty’s reading, there nonetheless remain positive resources in Kant’s philosophy for contemporary environmental thinking, for, although Kant does regard the human’s moral and animal dimensions as conceptually separable, he also understands them to be inextricably bound within the nature of human beings. Attending to the interplay between these Kantian commitments, a new critical insight into one of the basic tensions of the Anthropocene era can be attained.

Transcending Tragedy: The Idea of Civility

1974 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 547-560 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenn Tinder
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Human Control ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Ideal

This article belongs in the area of what Karl Jaspers calls “existential elucidation.” It is concerned less with political ideals than with the relationship of the person to those ideals and to the realities that often contradict them.During recent centuries political activity has been increasingly governed by the confidence that history is under human control. The tragedies and disappointments of the twentieth century, however, cast serious doubt on this confidence. Thus it is incumbent on us to reconsider man's whole stance in relation to history. The core of the article is the definition of an alternative stance, which I call “civility.”The clue to civility was provided by Plato when he suggested, in The Republic, that although the ideal city probably could not be realized in history, its form might be reproduced here and there in the souls of individuals. In pursuance of this clue, civility is defined, on the one hand, as partial detachment from action, and from the ideological preoccupations frequently accompanying action, and, on the other hand, as concentration on governance of the self. Although such governance entails historical independence, it does not set one apart from others; on the contrary, its fundamental principle is openess to the totality of the human.

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