Compassion and Self-Concern in Halakhic Environmental Decision-Making

The prevailing stance in Jewish orthodoxy is that environmental issues are extra-legal and not under the purview of halakhah (Jewish law). While considered important, environmental protection falls only under “midat haḥasidut” (extraordinary piety). This ultimately translates into environmental protection being treated as non-obligatory and only under the purview of righteous behavior rather than obligation. This has created a significant barrier to halakhically driven environmental decision-making. I argue that this worldview emerges from the process of conceptualizing the prohibition of bal tashḥit—“waste not,” the prohibition against wastefulness originating in Deuteronomy 20:19. This verse gave rise to two worldviews: one which was prioritized of not destroying the environment out of compassion for the non-human world, and another marginalized worldview that emphasized a self-concerned environmentalism which equates harm to the environment as self-harm. Privileging this latter worldview creates a pathway to advance Jewish legal discourse and align it with mainstream environmentalism.

Environmental Decision Support Systems as a Service: Demonstration on CE-QUAL-W2 Model

An Environmental Decision Support System (EDSS) can be used as an important tool for rehabilitation and preservation of ecosystems. Nonetheless, high assimilation costs (both money and time) are one of the main reasons that these tools are not widely adapted in practice. This work presents a low-cost paradigm of "EDSS as a Service", this paradigm is demonstrated for developing Water Quality EDSS as a Service that utilizes the well-known CE-QUAL-W2 model as a kernel for deriving optimized decisions. The paradigm is leveraging new open-source technologies in software development (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm) with cloud computing in order to significantly reduce assimilation costs of the EDSS for organizations and researchers working on rehabilitation and preservation of water bodies.

Indigenous Publicity in American Public Lands Controversies: Environmental Participation in the Fight for Bears Ears National Monument

Environmental decision-making scholars have attended closely to the role of publics and counterpublics in environmental controversies. However, this body of work has undertheorized the ways that Indigeneity may complicate access to or desirability of American publicity as a driving force in environmental advocacy. Inclusion within the American national body both functions as an advocacy tool for Native people and as a colonial discourse that may undermine sovereignty goals. Through a critical rhetorical analysis of documents at the center of the controversy over Bears Ears National Monument, this essay explicates the deployment of American publicity both to support and to undermine Native advocacy for the Monument. Scholars of rhetoric and environmental decision-making must re-orient toward publicity in a way that accounts for settler colonialism and decolonization.

A Procedural Idea of Environmental Democracy: the 'Débat Public' Paradigm within the EU Framework

The aim of this paper is to analyse the 'débat public' procedure, which finds its roots in the Canadian legal system and its most defined formulation in France, and which more recently has been circulating to Italy – first at the regional level and, since 2016, at the national level. The first part of the paper will thus be devoted to a historical overview of the débat public and to how it is implemented in each of the two legal systems. The second part will subsequently distil the 'paradigm', i. e. those distinctive traits that make the débat public an autonomous research subject, within the multi-layered legislative framework of environmental governance in Europe. Three main features of the paradigm will be pointed out (Participation, Effectiveness, Authority), thus highlighting how it can respond to the needs in light of which it has been designed, namely dealing with proximity conflicts and providing a forum for the construction of shared rational decisions in environmental decision-making. The paper eventually leads to the conclusion that the débat public, with its codified rules and procedures, represents the first and probably the most noticeable attempt towards the institutionalisation and generalisation of deliberative practices in environmental decision-making, thus towards developing a procedural stance in environmental democracy.