environmental ethics essay topics

Environmental Ethics Research Paper Topics

This comprehensive guide to environmental ethics research paper topics is designed to provide students and researchers with a wide array of subjects in the field of environmental ethics. The topics are carefully categorized into ten distinct areas, each offering ten unique research themes. This guide also provides expert advice on how to select a topic and how to write a compelling research paper on environmental ethics. Furthermore, it introduces iResearchNet’s professional writing services, which can assist students in crafting custom research papers on any given topic.

100 Environmental Ethics Research Paper Topics

The field of environmental ethics is a vast and diverse area of study that intersects with various disciplines such as philosophy, ecology, and sociology. It explores the moral relationship of human beings to the environment and its non-human contents. Here, we provide a comprehensive list of environmental ethics research paper topics, divided into ten categories, each with ten topics.

Academic Writing, Editing, Proofreading, And Problem Solving Services

Get 10% off with 24start discount code.

Theoretical Foundations of Environmental Ethics

• The role of anthropocentrism in environmental ethics.
• Biocentrism and its implications for environmental conservation.
• Ecocentrism: A holistic approach to environmental ethics.
• Deep ecology versus shallow ecology: A comparative study.
• The concept of intrinsic value in nature.
• The Gaia hypothesis and its ethical implications.
• Ecofeminism: A critical analysis.
• The role of religion in shaping environmental ethics.
• The concept of environmental justice.
• The principle of sustainability in environmental ethics.

Environmental Ethics and Wildlife Conservation

• Ethical considerations in wildlife conservation.
• The moral status of animals in environmental ethics.
• The ethics of hunting: A critical analysis.
• The ethical implications of animal captivity.
• The role of zoos and wildlife parks in conservation: An ethical perspective.
• The ethics of animal experimentation.
• The ethical implications of species extinction.
• The ethics of biodiversity conservation.
• The ethical dimensions of wildlife trade.
• The ethics of animal rights versus conservation needs.

Environmental Ethics and Climate Change

• The ethical implications of climate change.
• The ethics of climate change mitigation strategies.
• The ethical dimensions of climate change adaptation.
• The concept of climate justice.
• The ethics of intergenerational equity in the context of climate change.
• The ethical implications of geoengineering solutions to climate change.
• The ethics of carbon trading.
• The moral responsibility of developed nations in climate change.
• The ethical dimensions of climate change denial.
• The ethics of climate change communication.

Environmental Ethics and Pollution

• The ethical implications of pollution.
• The ethics of plastic pollution.
• The ethical dimensions of air pollution.
• The ethics of water pollution.
• The ethical implications of soil pollution.
• The ethics of noise pollution.
• The ethical dimensions of light pollution.
• The ethics of electronic waste.
• The ethical implications of nuclear pollution.
• The ethics of pollution control measures.

Environmental Ethics and Resource Management

• The ethical implications of resource extraction.
• The ethics of deforestation.
• The ethical dimensions of water management.
• The ethics of land use and land management.
• The ethical implications of overfishing.
• The ethics of agricultural practices.
• The ethical dimensions of mining activities.
• The ethics of waste management.
• The ethical implications of energy production and use.
• The ethics of sustainable resource management.

Environmental Ethics and Technology

• The ethical implications of green technology.
• The ethics of genetic engineering in the context of environmental conservation.
• The ethical dimensions of nanotechnology.
• The ethics of biotechnology in agriculture.
• The ethical implications of geoengineering.
• The ethics of renewable energy technologies.
• The ethical dimensions of information technology and the environment.
• The ethics of technology and waste management.
• The ethical implications of technology in wildlife conservation.
• The ethics of technology in climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Environmental Ethics and Urbanization

• The ethical implications of urbanization.
• The ethics of urban sprawl.
• Theethical dimensions of urban green spaces.
• The ethics of urban planning and design.
• The ethical implications of urban agriculture.
• The ethics of urban waste management.
• The ethical dimensions of urban water management.
• The ethics of urban air quality.
• The ethical implications of urban biodiversity.
• The ethics of sustainable urban development.

Environmental Ethics and Food Production

• The ethical implications of industrial agriculture.
• The ethics of organic farming.
• The ethical dimensions of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
• The ethics of animal farming and animal rights.
• The ethical implications of aquaculture.
• The ethics of food waste.
• The ethical dimensions of food labeling.
• The ethics of food security and food sovereignty.
• The ethical implications of dietary choices.
• The ethics of sustainable food systems.

Environmental Ethics and Human Health

• The ethical implications of environmental health hazards.
• The ethics of environmental health policies.
• The ethical dimensions of environmental diseases.
• The ethics of health and environmental justice.
• The ethical implications of environmental toxins and human health.
• The ethics of occupational health and safety in environmentally hazardous industries.
• The ethical dimensions of climate change and human health.
• The ethics of health impacts of pollution.
• The ethical implications of the health-environment nexus.
• The ethics of health in the Anthropocene.

Environmental Ethics and Environmental Education

• The ethical implications of environmental education.
• The ethics of environmental literacy.
• The ethical dimensions of environmental awareness campaigns.
• The ethics of environmental activism.
• The ethical implications of environmental values in education.
• The ethics of teaching sustainability.
• The ethical dimensions of environmental justice education.
• The ethics of environmental education in policy-making.
• The ethical implications of youth involvement in environmental issues.
• The ethics of interdisciplinary approaches in environmental education.

In conclusion, the field of environmental ethics offers a rich array of topics for research papers. These topics span a wide range of issues, from theoretical foundations to practical applications, and from local to global scales. They invite us to critically examine our relationship with the environment and to explore new ways of thinking and acting that promote environmental sustainability and justice.

Environmental Ethics Research Guide

Environmental ethics plays a critical role in our understanding of environmental issues and the development of sustainable solutions. As students studying environmental science, it is essential to delve into the realm of environmental ethics and explore its significance in shaping our relationship with the natural world. This page aims to provide a comprehensive guide on environmental ethics research paper topics, helping you navigate the complexities of ethical considerations in environmental decision-making.

In today’s world, environmental challenges are more pressing than ever before. From climate change and deforestation to pollution and resource depletion, our planet faces numerous threats that require urgent attention. However, addressing these issues goes beyond scientific and technical solutions. It requires an ethical framework that guides our choices and actions, taking into account the moral and philosophical dimensions of environmental problems.

The field of environmental ethics explores the moral values and principles that inform our relationship with nature, the rights of non-human beings, and the responsibilities we hold towards future generations. By examining different ethical theories and perspectives, we gain insights into the ethical dilemmas surrounding environmental issues and can develop informed and ethical solutions.

This page serves as a valuable resource for students like you who are tasked with writing a research paper on environmental ethics. Whether you are new to the field or seeking inspiration for your next paper, the following sections will provide a wealth of information, guidance, and topic ideas to help you embark on a successful research journey.

Throughout this page, we will explore various aspects of environmental ethics, including different ethical frameworks, the concept of environmental justice, the ethics of sustainability, and the ethical considerations associated with specific environmental challenges. By delving into these environmental ethics research paper topics, you will develop a deeper understanding of the ethical dimensions of environmental science and be better equipped to critically analyze and contribute to the ongoing discourse in the field.

It is important to note that environmental ethics is a dynamic field with evolving perspectives and ongoing debates. As you navigate through the research paper topics and expert advice provided on this page, keep in mind that the goal is not to arrive at definitive answers but to foster critical thinking, engage in ethical deliberation, and contribute to the growing body of knowledge in environmental ethics.

Choosing an Environmental Ethics Topic

Choosing a compelling and relevant research topic is essential for crafting a successful environmental ethics research paper. With the wide range of issues and perspectives within the field, it can be overwhelming to narrow down your focus. To help you navigate this process, we have compiled ten expert tips to guide you in choosing environmental ethics research paper topics that are engaging, thought-provoking, and academically valuable.

• Identify your area of interest : Begin by reflecting on your personal interests and passions within the field of environmental ethics. Consider the ethical dimensions of specific environmental issues that resonate with you. This will help you stay motivated and engaged throughout your research and writing process.
• Explore current debates and controversies : Stay updated on current debates and controversies in environmental ethics. Scan recent literature, academic journals, and reputable online sources to identify topics that are generating significant discussion. Engaging with these debates can provide a fresh perspective and contribute to the ongoing discourse in the field.
• Conduct preliminary research : Before finalizing a topic, conduct preliminary research to ensure that there is sufficient information and scholarly resources available. Explore academic databases, books, and reputable websites to gauge the availability of relevant literature and sources for your chosen topic.
• Consider interdisciplinary approaches : Environmental ethics is a multidisciplinary field that intersects with various disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, ecology, law, and economics. Consider incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives into your research topic to provide a comprehensive analysis and broaden the scope of your paper.
• Narrow down your focus : Once you have identified a general area of interest, narrow down your focus by refining your research question. Clearly define the specific aspect of environmental ethics you wish to explore and formulate a concise and focused research question that guides your investigation.
• Consult with your instructor or advisor : Seek guidance from your instructor or advisor to ensure that your chosen topic aligns with the objectives and requirements of your research paper. They can provide valuable insights and help you refine your topic based on their expertise.
• Consider the practical implications : Environmental ethics research often addresses real-world challenges and policy implications. Consider topics that have practical relevance and examine the ethical considerations associated with proposed solutions or policy frameworks.
• Engage with diverse perspectives : Environmental ethics is a field characterized by diverse perspectives and theories. Choose a topic that allows you to explore different ethical frameworks, cultural perspectives, and stakeholder viewpoints. This will help you develop a well-rounded understanding of the topic and foster critical thinking.
• Identify gaps in the literature : Conduct a literature review to identify gaps or areas that have not been extensively explored within the realm of environmental ethics. Select a topic that fills these gaps and contributes to the existing knowledge base. This will enable you to make a unique and valuable contribution to the field.
• Reflect on personal and societal relevance : Finally, consider the personal and societal relevance of your chosen topic. Reflect on how it connects with broader environmental concerns, social justice issues, and the well-being of communities and ecosystems. Choosing a topic that resonates with these broader contexts will make your research more impactful and meaningful.

By following these expert tips, you can confidently select an environmental ethics research paper topic that aligns with your interests, engages with relevant debates, and contributes to the ongoing discourse in the field. Remember to remain open-minded, adaptable, and willing to refine your topic as you delve deeper into the research process.

How to Write an Environmental Ethics Research Paper

Writing an environmental ethics research paper requires careful planning, critical thinking, and effective communication of your ideas. Whether you are exploring ethical dimensions of climate change, biodiversity conservation, or environmental justice, the following ten tips will guide you in crafting a compelling and well-structured research paper in the field of environmental ethics.

• Understand the scope and purpose : Familiarize yourself with the scope and purpose of environmental ethics as a discipline. Gain a comprehensive understanding of the key concepts, theories, and ethical frameworks that underpin the field. This will provide a solid foundation for your research and analysis.
• Develop a clear research question : Formulate a clear and concise research question that addresses the ethical dimensions of your chosen environmental issue. The research question should be specific, focused, and provide a framework for your investigation.
• Conduct a thorough literature review : Begin by conducting a comprehensive literature review to understand the existing body of knowledge on your research topic. Explore relevant scholarly articles, books, and academic journals to gain insights into the different perspectives, debates, and theoretical frameworks within the field of environmental ethics.
• Analyze and evaluate different ethical theories : Environmental ethics encompasses a wide range of ethical theories, including anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism. Analyze and evaluate these theories in the context of your research question. Consider their strengths, weaknesses, and applicability to the environmental issue you are examining.
• Collect and analyze empirical data : Depending on the nature of your research, collect and analyze empirical data to support your arguments. This may involve conducting surveys, interviews, or case studies to gather firsthand information. Analyze the data using appropriate statistical or qualitative methods to derive meaningful insights.
• Consider stakeholder perspectives : Environmental ethics often involves considering the perspectives of different stakeholders, including communities, policymakers, industry representatives, and environmental organizations. Engage with these diverse viewpoints to gain a holistic understanding of the ethical challenges and potential solutions related to your research topic.
• Address counterarguments : Anticipate and address counterarguments to your research findings or ethical positions. Engage with opposing viewpoints and demonstrate a nuanced understanding of the complexities surrounding your chosen environmental issue. This will strengthen your argument and showcase your ability to critically evaluate multiple perspectives.
• Organize your paper effectively : Structure your research paper in a logical and organized manner. Begin with an introduction that provides background information, states the research question, and outlines the significance of your study. Use clear headings and subheadings to organize your content, and ensure a smooth flow between sections.
• Support your arguments with evidence : Back up your arguments and claims with credible evidence and scholarly sources. Use a combination of empirical data, case studies, and theoretical frameworks to support your analysis. Properly cite all your sources following the appropriate citation style (e.g., APA, MLA, Chicago).
• Conclude with a strong summary and reflection : In your conclusion, summarize the key findings of your research and restate the importance of your research question. Reflect on the implications of your study for environmental ethics, policy, or practice. Highlight the broader significance of your research and suggest avenues for future research.

By following these ten tips, you will be well-equipped to write an impactful environmental ethics research paper. Remember to maintain a critical and ethical stance throughout your writing, engage with the complexities of the environmental issues at hand, and make connections between theory and practice.

Custom Research Paper Writing Services

When it comes to writing a comprehensive and well-researched environmental ethics research paper, you may encounter challenges along the way. If you find yourself in need of expert assistance, iResearchNet is here to help. Our writing services provide a range of benefits and features that can support you in crafting a high-quality and customized research paper on environmental ethics. Here are thirteen features that set our services apart:

• Expert degree-holding writers : Our team consists of expert writers with advanced degrees in environmental science and related fields. They possess in-depth knowledge and expertise in environmental ethics and are well-equipped to tackle complex research topics.
• Custom written works : We understand the importance of originality and tailor each research paper according to your unique requirements and instructions. Our writers conduct thorough research and develop custom-written works that address your specific research question and objectives.
• In-depth research : Our writers are skilled researchers who delve deep into the literature and conduct extensive research to ensure that your paper is well-informed and backed by credible sources. They stay updated with the latest developments in environmental ethics to provide current and relevant insights.
• Custom formatting : We offer custom formatting options to align your research paper with the required citation style, whether it’s APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian, or Harvard. Our writers are proficient in various citation styles and ensure accurate and consistent formatting throughout your paper.
• Top quality : Quality is our utmost priority. We adhere to rigorous quality control measures to deliver research papers of the highest standard. Our writers follow a systematic approach to ensure that every aspect of your paper meets the highest quality benchmarks.
• Customized solutions : We understand that every research paper is unique, and we tailor our services to meet your specific needs. Whether you require assistance with topic selection, literature review, methodology, or analysis, we provide customized solutions that address your research requirements.
• Flexible pricing : We offer competitive and flexible pricing options to accommodate students with varying budgets. Our pricing structure is transparent, and we strive to provide affordable services without compromising on quality.
• Short deadlines : We recognize the importance of meeting deadlines. If you have a tight schedule and need your research paper urgently, our writers can work efficiently to deliver within short time frames, even as little as 3 hours.
• Timely delivery : We value punctuality and understand the significance of submitting your research paper on time. Our writers work diligently to ensure that your paper is delivered within the agreed-upon deadline, allowing you sufficient time for review and revisions.
• 24/7 support : Our customer support team is available 24/7 to address any queries or concerns you may have. Whether you need assistance with placing an order, communicating with your writer, or tracking the progress of your paper, our support team is ready to assist you at any time.
• Absolute privacy : We prioritize the confidentiality and privacy of our clients. Your personal information and order details are treated with the utmost confidentiality, and we have robust security measures in place to ensure the protection of your data.
• Easy order tracking : Our user-friendly platform allows you to easily track the progress of your order. You can stay updated on the status of your research paper, communicate with your writer, and upload additional materials or instructions as needed.
• Money-back guarantee : We are committed to customer satisfaction, and we offer a money-back guarantee to provide you with peace of mind. If you are not satisfied with the final research paper, we will work to resolve any issues or provide a refund, ensuring your satisfaction.

At iResearchNet, we are dedicated to supporting students in their academic journey by offering top-notch writing services for environmental ethics research papers. Our team of expert writers, customized solutions, and commitment to quality and customer satisfaction make us a reliable choice for your research paper needs. Place your order today and let us assist you in achieving your academic goals.

Unlock Your Academic Potential with Our Services

Are you ready to excel in your environmental science studies and make a meaningful contribution to the field of environmental ethics? Don’t let the challenges of writing a research paper hold you back. At iResearchNet, we offer comprehensive writing services that can empower you to produce a stellar environmental ethics research paper. With our expert writers, customized solutions, and commitment to quality, we are here to support you every step of the way.

Maximize your research paper’s impact and showcase your understanding of environmental ethics with the assistance of our expert team. Our services go beyond just writing – we provide in-depth research, customized solutions, and adherence to academic standards to ensure your paper stands out. Let us help you unlock your academic potential and make a positive difference in the field of environmental science.

Ready to take the next step in your academic journey? Place your order today and experience the benefits of our writing services. Our expert degree-holding writers, in-depth research, custom formatting, and top-quality papers are just a few clicks away. Don’t let time constraints or complex topics hinder your progress. With our flexible pricing, short deadlines, and 24/7 support, you can confidently order a custom environmental ethics research paper tailored to your requirements.

ORDER HIGH QUALITY CUSTOM PAPER

180+ Excellent Environmental Essay Topics and Ideas

Table of Contents

If you are a school or a college student, then in your academic life you will be asked to write an essay on environmental topics at least once. Right now, do you want to write a brilliant environmental essay for your assignment? Are you searching for the best environmental essay topics?

In our world, a lot of environmental issues exist, and hence, for writing an academic essay, you have a wide range of environmental essay topics to focus on. But choosing one specific topic out of a wide range of topics is a tedious process. So, to help you in selecting a good environmental essay topic, here, in this blog post, we have shared important tips for essay topic selection. Also, we have composed a list of the top environmental essay topic ideas for you to explore and write about.

Continue reading this blog post and get significant ideas for your environmental essay writing assignment.

How to Write an Engaging Environmental Essay

Writing environmental essays is common at all academic levels. Whenever your instructor assigns a task for you to write an environmental essay, make sure to come up with an original topic for the environmental essay.

The first step in the essay writing process is the topic selection. During the essay topic selection phase, initially, gather a lot of ideas and conduct preliminary research, and then, based on your research results, finalize a perfect topic for discussion.

In order to gather essay topic ideas dealing with environmental problems, you can refer to the following sources.

• Environmental journals and sources
• Documentaries
• The latest news developments on the environment

After you have identified a good environmental essay topic, prepare an essay outline to organize your ideas and structure your essay content. Then, with the help of your essay outline, prepare a detailed draft of your environmental essay by including the essential components such as the introduction, body, and conclusion. Finally, after completing the essay, proofread the essay content completely and edit it if there are any errors.

An environmental essay is said to be top-rated only if it

• Highlights possible measures of ecological conservation.
• Offers a valid solution to environmental problems .
• Provides new insights on trending environmental issues.
• Expresses the benefits of the environment to man and vice versa.

So, when writing environmental essays, make sure to cover all the above-mentioned points that are relevant to your essay topic. The essay you write should be simple, informative, and persuasive. Mainly, to make your readers believe your arguments, explain the major ideas of your essay with supporting evidence.

Environmental Essay Topic Selection Tips

Choosing a topic is the first and essential step in the essay writing process. Generally, for academic assignments, research paper writing, or essay writing competitions, the instructors will give a list of environmental essay topics for you to choose from. At times, they will not give you any ideas and will ask you to select a topic on your own.

In such cases, you need to pick a unique essay topic that will fetch an A+ grade. To help you in selecting a good environmental essay topic, here we have shared a few important tips. Make sure to follow them all while you are searching for an essay topic.

• Choose a topic that you are passionate about and have a strong knowledge of.
• The topic should excite and educate your readers.
• It should not be too broad. If the topic is too broad, then narrow them down and select any specific topic or subtopic.
• The environmental essay topic you choose should provide a valid solution.
• The topic should contain various sources of reference.
• It should have numerous pieces of evidence and examples.

Most importantly, along with all the above-mentioned tips, make sure to check whether or not the topic you have decided to write on satisfies the instructor’s writing instructions if there are any.

List of Environmental Essay Topics and Ideas

Here we have sorted different categories and have listed the top interesting environmental essay topics and ideas for students to consider when writing academic assignments.

If you are asked to write an environmental essay on any unique topic, then check the list of the essay topic ideas mentioned below and feel free to choose a topic that is ideal for you.

Environmental Essay Topics on Climate Change

• The difference between the impact of climate change on urban and rural territories
• Climate change and agriculture: a complex relationship
• The demographic impact of climate change
• How does climate change affect biodiversity?
• Climate Change impact on different social groups
• Regional-specific impacts of climate change
• The economic damage of climate change
• Climate change representation in media
• How much has transport evolution impacted climate change?
• Historical reaction to global changes in climate
• Climate change response that has the most potential in averting the crisis
• Have humans created the problem of climate change?
• List some simple things that governments could do to help address climate change problems.
• Climate change effects on the marine life
• Diseases that could come from the climate change
• Impact of climate change on the ecological state of Earth’s natural resources
• Impact of climate change on agricultural activities across the globe.
• Human activities have contributed to climate change.
• Leading causes of global climate change.
• Explain Global Warming with an emphasis on the Arctic

Additional Environmental Essay Topics on Climate Change

• Analyze the impact of climate change on the marine and forest ecosystems of the world
• How climate change affects the freshwater ecosystem and grassland ecosystem?
• Analyze the impact of climate change on Antarctic ice sheets
• Describe the potential impact of climate change on farming and food security with respective solutions
• Discuss the role of climate change adaptation strategies in reducing vulnerability and enhancing resilience
• Describe the way different countries are tackling climate change and things that can be learned by the United States from these countries
• How is climate change affecting the stability and development of the global economy?

Ecology Essay Topics

• Ecology and society interactions
• Specifics of marine ecology
• Ecology and optimization: indivisible concepts
• Ecology changes after major damaging events.
• Energy crisis and ecology
• The future of tropical and rainforest ecology
• Ecology and tourism: helpful or harmful?
• Aging process as an ecological concept
• How have our food needs reshaped the ecology?
• The political presence of ecology
• Can any general laws be highlighted in ecology?
• Diversity and stability in ecology
• Software simulations and modeling in ecology
• The problems of invasion ecology and how they can be avoided
• How are new predators introduced into an area?
• How is the ecosystem of your backyard different from the ecosystem of another person’s backyard ecosystem?
• How is a desert ecosystem different from a forest ecosystem?
• Describe the causes and effects of black holes
• What is the ecological footprint?
• Overconsumption and its impact on ecology
• Identification of the key factors responsible for disturbing ecological balance
• Food Chain vs. Ecological Pyramid

Read more: Top-rated Ecology Research Topics For Academic Writing

Environmental Essay Topics on Global Warming

• Global warming and rising sea levels.
• The effects of Global Warming on the Environment.
• Is global warming real or a mere theory by scientists?
• The political aspect of global warming is mentioned in presidential debates.
• Should biodiversity be taught in middle schools as a part of global warming education?
• The causes of ocean temperatures increase through the lens of global warming
• Volcano activity in 2021: a clear sign of global warming?
• The role of the world’s scouting in the prevention of climate change dangers.
• Power plants in the United States and carbon dioxide emissions.
• Deforestation problem in Brazil: Amazon Forests case study.
• Global Warming: Issue Analysis.
• Global Warming: Harmful Impact on the Polar Bears.
• Global Warming and Other Ecology Issues.

Sustainability Essay Topics

• Solar electricity: how to achieve maximal sustainability
• Key indicators of the sustainability of the business.
• Is global sustainability achievable?
• Pros and cons of innovation for sustainability
• Sustainable chemical production through biological processes
• Economical advantages of sustainable businesses
• How to minimize machine energy consumption for potential sustainability?
• Sustainability of e-learning and working remotely
• How to maintain sustainability with business growth?
• Sustainable methods for managing and using water resources.
• The Impact of Green Energy on Environment and Sustainable Development
• A Robust Strategy for Sustainable Energy
• Environmental Conditions in Tunnels Towards an Environmentally Sustainable Future
• The Sustainable Hotel Environment
• International Environment Management and Sustainability
• Sustainability Development: Balancing Economic, Social and Environmental Dimensions
• What is the Environmental sustainability concept in the hospitality industry
• Trends, Opportunities, and Challenges of Environmental Sustainability
• Sustainability in Canada and the Impact of Coca-Cola Company on Environmental Protection

Environmental Science Essay Questions

• What are the causes of the decline in food resources?
• Discuss how the endemic and endangered animal species of the world survive.
• How green and sustainable are biofuels?
• The use of plants as heavy metal filters for water sources
• The impact of aerosols on the environment
• The problem of biodegradability of aging chemicals
• How does migration change with extreme events?
• Problems of wastewater treatment and personal care products
• Why are botanic gardens the best instruments for climate change research?
• The science of fisheries and the most sustainable approach to them
• Physical, Natural Environmental Issues Affecting the Food Industries.
• Reduction of CO2 from Atmosphere Resulting In a Better Future.
• Drinking Water and Sanitation.

Argumentative Environmental Essay Topics

• How green are electric cars?
• Can civilization survive by using only renewable sources of energy?
• Can quality public transportation reduce the carbon footprint?
• Are humans a primary reason for natural disasters?
• Can large cities get rid of air pollution from motor vehicles?
• Can we introduce environment conservation as a core course?
• Why should each home have a tree?
• Discuss alternative forms of energy that people can use
• Should the government promote the recycling of all products?
• Can we achieve a green environment devoid of any pollutants?
• How do factories and industries waste energy?
• Why are most people ignorant of protecting the environment?
• Do people observe ecological guidelines?
• Should we encourage a paperless society?
• Ways in which animals damage the environment

Read more: Argumentative Essay Topics That You Must Consider

Essay Topics on Environmental Issues

• Waste production challenges in Iceland and Faroes
• Ozone layer depletion in China and transparency of the reports
• Acid rain: how fair is an analysis of the causes that deal with ecological damage?
• Should genetic modification of crops be forbidden?
• An ethical aspect of overfishing in the Mediterranean Sea.
• How can biotechnologies and eco-energy affect population growth and the list of increased needs?
• The definition of biodiversity through the lens of globalization and technology
• International trading agreements and the problem of deforestation
• The use of AI technologies for the prevention of water pollution in the engineering sector.
• Urbanization versus Rural lifestyles

Environmental Law Essay Topics

• Can international environmental law be effectively enforced?
• The impact of scientific activism on the environmental law
• The ignorance of the general public on the question of environmental law
• Environmental law versus corporation Lobbyism
• Conflicts on an international level in environmental law discussions
• What should be a priority of international environmental legislation?
• How to encourage compliance with international environmental law norms?
• An impact of the Kyoto Protocol on pollution Levels
• The participation of non-governmental organizations in environmental law development.
• How to spread successful green policies from developed countries to the rest of the world?

Technology Saving Environmental Essay Topics

• How is smart home technology a game-changer?
• Is technology more damaging to the environment?
• Are electric vehicles the way to go?
• The part of technology in developing environment conservation techniques
• Technological methods of monitoring greenhouse gases
• Using an infrared sensor to monitor methane gas
• New in wastewater-filtering – multi-soil-layering
• The use of biofiltration to control the air pollution level.
• The IoT is used for resource management.
• Energy-saving innovations as a conservation effort

Environmental Essay Ideas on Human Impact

• The spread of nano plastic across the world – reasons and consequences
• The impact of military conflicts on conservation efforts
• Agricultural activities are a ticking time bomb on the environment.
• Are Genetically Modified Organisms a threat to the environment?
• Chemicals emitted by man deplete the ozone layer.
• Water pollution by humans next to rivers, seas, and oceans
• Why burning coal by humans is causing excessive acid rain
• The impact of heavy metal mining on the environment.
• Could nature return to the norm after human extinction?
• How is overfishing impacting aquatic life?

Environment Essay Topics on Conservation

• Do people celebrate ‘World Environment Day’ as they ought to?
• Are technological advances such as 5G harmful to the environment?
• Should the government provide recycling facilities to homesteads?
• Do you think it is necessary to have environmental awareness forums?
• Should schools introduce cycling as a means of transport to school?
• Why should everybody help to protect the environment?
• Should the government impose restrictions on deep-sea fishing?
• Should people buy bottled water?
• Why you should turn off your computer when you are not using it
• The role of science education in environmental conservation efforts

Interesting Environment Essay Prompts

• Should the penalties for littering be more severe?
• What causes glaciers to melt in the Polar Regions?
• Causes of hurricanes and tsunamis
• How are mental health and the natural environment related?
• Effects of harmful gases on the human respiratory system
• The influence of Confucianism on ecological conservation
• Can people live without electricity for a day?
• How has the coronavirus helped to recover the environment?
• Do people value street trees as nature beautifiers?
• Assess the impacts of daily activities on the environment
• Eco-man: the features of the formation of personal qualities.
• Ecological movements: domestic and foreign experience.
• Quality of life and the quality of the environment.
• Foreign experience in nature management.
• Health and radiation.
• Laws and principles of social ecology.
• Why is the garbage problem worse than we thought?
• Ways to adapt religious teachings to environmental conservation
• Mathematical model of the climate change historic evolution
• The analysis of the current radioactive situation in the Chornobyl Nuclear Plant.
• Discuss how the fulfillment of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals can reduce the adverse impact of global warming-led climate change
• Critically analyze the effectiveness of market-based approaches (e.g., carbon pricing) in reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases
• Describe the eight ethical principles of climate change and their impact on the world’s vulnerable populations

Impressive Environmental Essay Ideas

• What is earth day, and why is it important?
• How to prevent Pandas’ extinction
• Explain the impact of melting glaciers on the environment.
• Analyze the reason behind birds’ migration.
• Explain how green technology can help the environment.
• Write about the different types of environmentalism.
• Explain how fossil fuels damage the environment.
• Discuss the ecotourism regulations in your country.
• Write about carpooling and its contribution to the environment.
• Explain the different water recycling methods.

Final Words

We hope you have identified an excellent topic from the list of the top environmental essay topics and ideas suggested above. If you still haven’t identified the essay topic and are not confident enough to prepare a brilliant environmental essay, then contact us for Environmental assignment help . We have a team of academic writers to assist you in writing top-quality, low-cost, and plagiarism-free essays as per your requirements on time.

Without any hesitation, quickly avail of our essay writing service and get reliable academic assistance beyond your expectations with 24×7 customer support.

Related Post

220 Amazing Religious Research Paper Topics and Ideas

Read and Understand How to Write a Research Proposal

100+ Controversial Research Topics and Ideas to Focus On

About author.

Jacob Smith

I am an Academic Writer and have affection to share my knowledge through posts’. I do not feel tiredness while research and analyzing the things. Sometime, I write down hundred of research topics as per the students requirements. I want to share solution oriented content to the students.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

• Featured Posts

140 Unique Geology Research Topics to Focus On

200+ outstanding world history topics and ideas 2023, 190 excellent ap research topics and ideas, 150+ trending group discussion topics and ideas, 170 funny speech topics to blow the minds of audience, who invented exams learn the history of examination, how to focus on reading 15 effective tips for better concentration, what is a rhetorical analysis essay and how to write it, primary school teacher in australia- eligibility, job role, career options, and salary, 4 steps to build a flawless business letter format, get help instantly.

Raise Your Grades with Assignment Help Pro

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Environmental Ethics

Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its non-human contents. This entry covers: (1) the challenge of environmental ethics to the anthropocentrism (i.e., human-centeredness) embedded in traditional western ethical thinking; (2) the development of the discipline from the 1960s and 1970s; (3) the connection of deep ecology, feminist environmental ethics, animism and social ecology to politics; (4) the attempt to apply traditional ethical theories, including consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, to support contemporary environmental concerns; (5) the broader concerns of some thinkers with wilderness, the built environment and the politics of poverty; and (6) the ethics of sustainability and climate change.

1. Introduction: The Challenge of Environmental Ethics

2. the development of environmental ethics, 3.1 deep ecology, 3.2 feminism and the environment, 3.3 disenchantment and the new animism, 3.4 social ecology and bioregionalism.

Supplementary Document: Biodiversity Preservation

5. Wilderness, the Built Environment, Poverty and Politics

• Supplementary Document: Pathologies of Environmental Crisis – Theories and Empirical Research

Other Internet Resources

Related entries.

Suppose putting out natural fires, culling feral animals or removing some individual members of overpopulated species is necessary for the protection of the integrity of a certain ecosystem. Will these actions be morally permissible or even required? Is it morally acceptable for farmers in non-industrial countries to practise slash and burn techniques to clear areas for agriculture? Consider a mining company which has performed open pit mining in some previously unspoiled area. Does the company have a moral obligation to restore the landform and surface ecology? And what is the value of a humanly restored environment compared with the originally natural environment? Many people think that it is morally wrong for human beings to pollute and destroy parts of the natural environment and to consume a huge proportion of the planet’s natural resources. If that is wrong, is it simply because a sustainable environment is essential to human existence and well-being? Or is such behaviour also wrong because the natural environment and/or its various contents have certain values in their own right so that these values ought to be respected and protected in any case? These are among the questions investigated by environmental ethics. Some of them are specific questions faced by individuals in particular circumstances, while others are more global questions faced by groups and communities. Yet others are more abstract questions concerning the value and moral standing of the natural environment and its non-human components.

In the literature on environmental ethics the distinction between instrumental value and intrinsic value (in the sense of “non-instrumental value”) is of considerable importance. The former is the value of things as means to further some other ends, whereas the latter is the value of things as ends in themselves regardless of whether they are also useful as means to other ends. For instance, certain fruits have instrumental value for bats who feed on them, since feeding on the fruits is a means to survival for the bats. However, it is not widely agreed that fruits have value as ends in themselves. We can likewise think of a person who teaches others as having instrumental value for those who want to acquire knowledge. Yet, in addition to any such value, it is normally said that a person, as a person, has intrinsic value, i.e., value in their own right independently of their prospects for serving the ends of others. For another example, a certain wild plant may have instrumental value because it provides the ingredients for some medicine or as an aesthetic object for human observers. But if the plant also has some value in itself independently of its prospects for furthering some other ends such as human health, or the pleasure from aesthetic experience, then the plant also has intrinsic value. Because the intrinsically valuable is that which is good as an end in itself, it is commonly agreed that something’s possession of intrinsic value generates a prima facie direct moral duty on the part of moral agents to protect it or at least refrain from damaging it (see O’Neil 1992 and Jamieson 2002 for detailed accounts of intrinsic value).

Many traditional western ethical perspectives, however, are anthropocentric or human-centered in that either they assign intrinsic value to human beings alone (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a strong sense) or they assign a significantly greater amount of intrinsic value to human beings than to any non-human things such that the protection or promotion of human interests or well-being at the expense of non-human things turns out to be nearly always justified (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a weak sense). For example, Aristotle ( Politics , Bk. 1, Ch. 8) apparently maintains that “nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man”. Such purposive or teleological thinking may encourage the belief that the value of non-human things in nature is merely instrumental. It is difficult for anthropocentric positions to articulate what is wrong with the cruel treatment of non-human animals, except to the extent that such treatment may lead to bad consequences for human beings. Immanuel Kant (“Duties to Animals and Spirits”, in Lectures on Ethics ), for instance, suggests that cruelty towards a dog might encourage a person to develop a character which would be desensitized to cruelty towards humans. From this standpoint, cruelty towards non-human animals would be instrumentally, rather than intrinsically, wrong. Likewise, anthropocentrism often recognizes some non-intrinsic wrongness of anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) environmental devastation. Such destruction might damage the well-being of human beings now and in the future, since our very existence and well-being is essentially dependent on a sustainable environment. This argument was made in the previous century (see Passmore 1974; Bookchin 1990; Norton et al . (eds.) 1995), and seems subsequently to have garnered wide public support (see the results of surveys in Pew 2018).

When environmental ethics emerged as a new sub-discipline of philosophy in the early 1970s, it did so by posing a challenge to traditional anthropocentrism. In the first place, it questioned the assumed moral superiority of human beings to members of other species on earth. In the second place, it investigated the possibility of rational arguments for assigning intrinsic value to the natural environment and its non-human contents. It should be noted, however, that some theorists working in the field see no need to develop new, non-anthropocentric theories. Instead, they advocate what may be called enlightened anthropocentrism (or, perhaps more appropriately called, prudential anthropocentrism). Briefly, this is the view that all the moral duties we have towards the environment are derived from our direct duties to its human inhabitants. The practical purpose of environmental ethics, they maintain, is to provide moral grounds for social policies aimed at protecting the earth’s environment and remedying environmental degradation. Enlightened anthropocentrism, they argue, is sufficient for that practical purpose, and perhaps even more effective in delivering pragmatic outcomes, in terms of policy-making, than non-anthropocentric theories given the theoretical burden on the latter to provide sound arguments for its more radical view that the non-human environment has intrinsic value (cf. Norton 1991, de Shalit 1994, Light and Katz 1996). Furthermore, some prudential anthropocentrists may hold what might be called cynical anthropocentrism, which says that we have a higher-level anthropocentric reason to be non-anthropocentric in our day-to-day thinking. Suppose that a day-to-day non-anthropocentrist tends to act more benignly towards the non-human environment on which human well-being depends. This would provide reason for encouraging non-anthropocentric thinking, even to those who find the idea of non-anthropocentric intrinsic value hard to swallow. In order for such a strategy to be effective one may need to hide one’s cynical anthropocentrism from others and even from oneself. The position can be structurally compared to some indirect form of consequentialism and may attract parallel critiques (see Henry Sidgwick on utilitarianism and esoteric morality, and Bernard Williams on indirect utilitarianism).

Although nature was the focus of much nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, contemporary environmental ethics only emerged as an academic discipline in the 1970s. The questioning and rethinking of the relationship of human beings with the natural environment over the last thirty years reflected an already widespread perception in the 1960s that the late twentieth century faced a human population explosion as part of a serious environmental crisis. Among the accessible work that drew attention to a sense of crisis was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1963), which consisted of a number of essays earlier published in the New Yorker magazine detailing how pesticides such as DDT, aldrin and dieldrin concentrated through the food web. Commercial farming practices using these chemicals to maximize crop yields and profits, Carson speculates, are capable of impacting simultaneously on environmental and public health. Their use, she claims, can have the side effects of killing other living things (besides the targeted insects) and causing human disease. While Carson correctly fears that over-use of pesticides may lead to increases in some resistant insect species, the intensification of agriculture, land-clearing and massive use of neonicotonoid pesticides has subsequently contributed to a situation in which, according to some reviews, nearly half of insect species are threatened with extinction (Sánchez-Bayo and Wickhuys 2019, and compare van der Sluijs and Vaage 2016, Komonen, Halme and Kotiaho 2019). Declines in insect populations not only threaten pollination of plant species, but may also be responsible for huge declines in some bird populations (Goulson 2021) and appear to go hand in hand with cascading extinctions across ecosystems worldwide (Kehoe, Frago and Sanders 2021).

In a much cited essay (White 1967) on the historical roots of the environmental crisis, historian Lynn White argued that the main strands of Judeo-Christian thinking had encouraged the overexploitation of nature by maintaining the superiority of humans over all other forms of life on earth, and by depicting all of nature as created for the use of humans. White’s thesis was widely discussed in theology, history, and has been subject to some sociological testing as well as being regularly discussed by philosophers (see Whitney 1993, Attfield 2001). Central to the rationale for his thesis were the works of the Church Fathers and The Bible itself, supporting the anthropocentric perspective that humans are the only things on Earth that matter in themselves. Consequently, they may utilize and consume everything else to their advantage without any injustice. For example, Genesis 1: 27–8 states: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over fish of the sea, and over fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Likewise, Thomas Aquinas ( Summa Contra Gentiles , Bk. 3, Pt 2, Ch 112) argued that non-human animals are “ordered to man’s use”. According to White, the Judeo-Christian idea that humans are created in the image of the transcendent supernatural God, who is radically separate from nature, also by extension radically separates humans themselves from nature. This ideology further opened the way for untrammeled exploitation of nature. Modern Western science itself, White argued, was “cast in the matrix of Christian theology” so that it too inherited the “orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature” (White 1967: 1207). Clearly, without technology and science, the environmental extremes to which we are now exposed would probably not be realized. The point of White’s thesis, however, is that given the modern form of science and technology, Judeo-Christianity itself provides the original deep-seated drive to unlimited exploitation of nature. Nevertheless, White argued that some minority traditions within Christianity (e.g., the views of St. Francis) might provide an antidote to the “arrogance” of a mainstream tradition steeped in anthropocentrism. This sentiment is echoed in later Christian writings on attitudes to nature (see for example Berry 2018, chs 10, 11, and compare Zaheva and Szasz 2015).

Around the same time, the Stanford ecologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich warned in The Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1968) that the growth of human population threatened the viability of planetary life-support systems. The sense of environmental crisis stimulated by those and other popular works was intensified by NASA’s production and wide dissemination of a particularly potent image of Earth from space taken at Christmas 1968 and featured in the Scientific American in September 1970. Here, plain to see, was a living, shining planet voyaging through space and shared by all of humanity, a precious vessel vulnerable to pollution and to the overuse of its limited capacities. In 1972 a team of researchers at MIT led by Donella Meadows published the Limits to Growth study, a work that summed up in many ways the emerging concerns of the previous decade and the sense of vulnerability triggered by the view of the earth from space. In the commentary to the study, the researchers wrote:

We affirm finally that any deliberate attempt to reach a rational and enduring state of equilibrium by planned measures, rather than by chance or catastrophe, must ultimately be founded on a basic change of values and goals at individual, national and world levels. (Meadows et al. 1972: 195)

The call for a “basic change of values” in connection to the environment (a call that could be interpreted in terms of either instrumental or intrinsic values) reflected a need for the development of environmental ethics as a new sub-discipline of philosophy. The aim of facing up to the challenge of limited resources was fostered subsequently by studies of the growing human “ecological footprint” on the earth (Rees 1992, Wackernagel et al . 2018) and by the exploration of “planetary boundaries” and the concept of a “safe operating space for humanity” (Rokström et al . 2009, Biermann and Kim 2020).

The new field emerged almost simultaneously in three countries—the United States, Australia, and Norway. In the first two of these countries, direction and inspiration largely came from the earlier twentieth century American literature of the environment. For instance, the Scottish emigrant John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club and “father of American conservation”) and subsequently the forester Aldo Leopold had advocated an appreciation and conservation of things “natural, wild and free”. Their concerns were motivated by a combination of ethical and aesthetic responses to nature as well as a rejection of crudely economic approaches to the value of natural objects (a historical survey of the confrontation between Muir’s reverentialism and the human-centred conservationism of Gifford Pinchot (one of the major influences on the development of the US Forest Service) is provided in Norton 1991; also see Cohen 1984 and Nash (ed) 1990). Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949), in particular, advocated the adoption of a “land ethic”:

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. (Leopold 1949: vii–ix) A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. (Leopold 1949: 224–5)

However, Leopold himself provided no systematic ethical theory or framework to support these ethical ideas concerning the environment. His views therefore presented a challenge and opportunity for moral theorists: could some ethical theory be devised to justify the injunction to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biosphere?

The land ethic sketched by Leopold, attempting to extend our moral concern to cover the natural environment and its non-human contents, was drawn on explicitly by the Australian philosopher Richard Routley (later Sylvan). According to Routley (1973 (cf. Routley and Routley 1980)), the anthropocentrism imbedded in what he called the “dominant western view”, or “the western superethic”, is in effect “human chauvinism”. This view, he argued, is just another form of class chauvinism, which is simply based on blind class “loyalty” or prejudice, and unjustifiably discriminates against those outside the privileged class. Echoing the plot of a popular movie some three years earlier (see Lo and Brennan 2013), Routley speculates in his “last man” (and “last people”) arguments about a hypothetical situation in which the last person, surviving a world catastrophe, acts to ensure the elimination of all other living things and the last people set about destroying forests and ecosystems after their demise. From the human-chauvinistic (or absolutely anthropocentric) perspective, the last person would do nothing morally wrong, since his or her destructive act in question would not cause any damage to the interests and well-being of humans, who would by then have disappeared. Nevertheless, Routley points out that there is a moral intuition that the imagined last acts would be morally wrong. An explanation for this judgment, he argues, is that those non-human objects in the environment, whose destruction is ensured by the last person or last people, have intrinsic value, a kind of value independent of their usefulness for humans. From his critique, Routley concluded that the main approaches in traditional western moral thinking were unable to allow the recognition that natural things have intrinsic value, and that the tradition required overhaul of a significant kind.

Leopold’s idea that the “land” as a whole is an object of our moral concern also stimulated writers to argue for certain moral obligations toward ecological wholes, such as species, communities, and ecosystems, not just their individual constituents. The U.S.-based theologian and environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III, for instance, argued that species protection was a moral duty (Rolston 1975). It would be wrong, he maintained, to eliminate a rare butterfly species simply to increase the monetary value of specimens already held by collectors. Like Routley’s “last man” arguments, Rolston’s example is meant to draw attention to a kind of action that seems morally dubious and yet is not clearly ruled out or condemned by traditional anthropocentric ethical views. Species, Rolston went on to argue, are intrinsically valuable and are usually more valuable than individual specimens, since the loss of a species is a loss of genetic possibilities and the deliberate destruction of a species would show disrespect for the very biological processes which make possible the emergence of individual living things (also see Rolston 1989, Ch 10). Natural processes deserve respect, according to Rolston’s quasi-religious perspective, because they constitute a nature (or God) which is itself intrinsically valuable (or sacred).

Meanwhile, the work of Christopher Stone (a professor of law at the University of Southern California) had become widely discussed. Stone (1972) proposes that trees and other natural objects should have at least the same standing in law as corporations. This suggestion was inspired by a particular case in which the Sierra Club had mounted a challenge against the permit granted by the U.S. Forest Service to Walt Disney Enterprises for surveys preparatory to the development of the Mineral King Valley, which was at the time a relatively remote game refuge, but not designated as a national park or protected wilderness area. The Disney proposal was to develop a major resort complex serving 14000 visitors daily to be accessed by a purpose-built highway through Sequoia National Park. The Sierra Club, as a body with a general concern for wilderness conservation, challenged the development on the grounds that the valley should be kept in its original state for its own sake.

Stone reasoned that if trees, forests and mountains could be given standing in law then they could be represented in their own right in the courts by groups such as the Sierra Club. Moreover, like any other legal person , these natural things could become beneficiaries of compensation if it could be shown that they had suffered compensatable injury through human activity. When the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, it was determined by a narrow majority that the Sierra Club did not meet the condition for bringing a case to court, for the Club was unable and unwilling to prove the likelihood of injury to the interest of the Club or its members. In dissenting minority judgments, however, justices Douglas, Blackmun and Brennan mentioned Stone’s argument: his proposal to give legal standing to natural things, they said, would allow conservation interests, community needs and business interests to be represented, debated and settled in court. Stone’s work was later cited in the successful arguments to grant personhood to rivers and other natural features in various parts of the world. In some of these cases, Stone’s arguments—along with those of Arne Næss (see below)—have been said to provide analogues to indigenous understandings of the intrinsic value of the land and the interconnections of such understandings with human actions and ancestral spirituality (Morris and Ruru 2010, Kramm 2020). Similar suggestions have also been made about Leopold’s work, but such claims need to be interpreted with caution (White 2015).

Reacting to Stone’s proposal, Joel Feinberg (1974) raised a serious problem. Only items that have interests, Feinberg argued, can be regarded as having legal standing and, likewise, moral standing. For it is interests which are capable of being represented in legal proceedings and moral debates. This same point would also seem to apply to political debates. For instance, the movement for “animal liberation”, which also emerged strongly in the 1970s, can be thought of as a political movement aimed at representing the previously neglected interests of some animals (see Regan and Singer (eds.) 1976, Clark 1977, and also the entry on the moral status of animals ). Granted that some animals have interests that can be represented in this way, would it also make sense to speak of trees, forests, rivers, barnacles, or termites as having interests of a morally relevant kind? This issue was hotly contested in the years that followed. Meanwhile, John Passmore (1974) argued, like White, that the Judeo-Christian tradition of thought about nature, despite being predominantly “despotic”, contained resources for regarding humans as “stewards” or “perfectors” of God’s creation. Skeptical of the prospects for any radically new ethic, Passmore cautioned that traditions of thought could not be abruptly overhauled. Any change in attitudes to our natural surroundings which stood the chance of widespread acceptance, he argued, would have to resonate and have some continuities with the very tradition which had legitimized our destructive practices.

In sum, then, Leopold’s land ethic, the historical analyses of White and Passmore, the pioneering work of Routley, Stone and Rolston, and the warnings of scientists, had by the late 1970s focused the attention of philosophers and political theorists firmly on the environment. The confluence of ethical, political and legal debates about the environment, the emergence of philosophies to underpin animal rights activism and the puzzles over whether an environmental ethic would be something new rather than a modification or extension of existing ethical theories were reflected in wider social and political movements. The rise of environmental or “green” parties in Europe in the 1980s was accompanied by almost immediate schisms between groups known as “realists” versus “fundamentalists” (see Dobson 1990). The “realists” stood for reform environmentalism, working with business and government to soften the impact of pollution and resource depletion especially on fragile ecosystems or endangered species. The “fundies” argued for radical change, the setting of stringent new priorities, and even the overthrow of capitalism and liberal individualism, which were taken as the major ideological causes of anthropogenic environmental devastation. It is not clear, however, that collectivist or communist countries do particularly well in terms of their environmental record (see Dominick 1998). At the same time, the rise of “environmental authoritarianism” in some non-democratic countries appears to show that liberal democracies may not have a monopoly on effective action to support sustainability and biodiversity (Beeson 2010, Shahar 2015).

Underlying these political disagreements was the distinction between “shallow” and “deep” environmental movements, a distinction introduced in the early 1970s by another major influence on contemporary environmental ethics, the Norwegian philosopher and climber Arne Næss. Since the work of Næss has been significant in environmental politics, the discussion of his position is given in a separate section below.

3. Environmental Ethics and Politics

“Deep ecology” was born in Scandinavia, the result of discussions between Næss and his colleagues Sigmund Kvaløy and Nils Faarlund (see Næss 1973 and 1989; also see Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999 for a historical survey and commentary on the development of deep ecology). All three shared a passion for the great mountains. On a visit to the Himalayas, they became impressed with aspects of “Sherpa culture” particularly when they found that their Sherpa guides regarded certain mountains as sacred and accordingly would not venture onto them. Subsequently, Næss formulated a position which extended the reverence the three Norwegians and the Sherpas felt for mountains to other natural things in general.

The “shallow ecology movement”, as Næss (1973) calls it, is the “fight against pollution and resource depletion”, the central objective of which is “the health and affluence of people in the developed countries.” The “deep ecology movement”, in contrast, endorses “biospheric egalitarianism”, the view that all living things are alike in having value in their own right, independent of their usefulness to others. The deep ecologist respects this intrinsic value, taking care, for example, when walking on the mountainside not to cause unnecessary damage to the plants.

Inspired by Spinoza’s metaphysics, another key feature of Næss’s deep ecology is the rejection of atomistic individualism. The idea that a human being is such an individual possessing a separate essence, Næss argues, radically separates the human self from the rest of the world. To make such a separation not only leads to selfishness towards other people, but also induces human selfishness towards nature. As a counter to egoism at both the individual and species level, Næss proposes an alternative relational “total-field image” of the world. According to this relationalism, organisms (human or otherwise) are best understood as “knots” in the biospherical net. The identity of a living thing is essentially constituted by its relations to other things in the world, especially its ecological relations to other living things. If people conceptualise themselves and the world in relational terms, the deep ecologists argue, then people will take better care of nature and the world in general.

As developed by Næss and others, the position also came to focus on the possibility of the identification of the human ego with nature. The idea is, briefly, that by identifying with nature I can enlarge the boundaries of the self beyond my skin. My larger—ecological—Self (the capital “S” emphasizes that I am something larger than my body and consciousness), deserves respect as well. To respect and to care for my Self is also to respect and to care for the natural environment, which is actually part of me and with which I should identify. Næss quotes the example of Saami people and their identification with the rivers on which they depend for sustenance. Recognition of such identification has underpinned the establishment in New Zealand of legal personhood for some rivers and other natural areas (Kramm 2020). “Self-realization” is thus the realization of a wider ecological Self. Næss maintains that the deep satisfaction that we receive from identification with nature and close partnership with other forms of life in nature contributes significantly to our life quality. (One historical antecedent to this kind of nature spiritualism is the romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as expressed in his last work, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker )

When Næss’s view crossed the Atlantic, it was sometimes merged with ideas emerging from Leopold’s land ethic (see Devall and Sessions 1985; also see Sessions (ed) 1995). But Næss—wary of the supposed totalitarian political implications of Leopold’s position that individual interests and well-being should be subordinated to the holistic good of the earth’s biotic community (see section 4 below)—took care to distance himself from advocating any sort of “land ethic”. (See Anker 1999 for cautions on interpreting Næss’s relationalism as an endorsement of the kind of holism displayed in the land ethic; cf. Grey 1993, Taylor and Zimmerman 2005). Some critics have argued that Næss’s deep ecology is no more than an extended social-democratic version of utilitarianism, which counts human interests in the same calculation alongside the interests of all natural things (e.g., trees, wolves, bears, rivers, forests and mountains) in the natural environment (see Witoszek 1997). However, Næss failed to explain in any detail how to make sense of the idea that oysters or barnacles, termites or bacteria could have interests of any morally relevant sort at all. Without an account of this, Næss’s early “biospheric egalitarianism”—that all living things whatsoever had a similar right to live and flourish—was an indeterminate principle in practical terms. It also remains unclear in what sense rivers, mountains and forests can be regarded as possessors of any kind of interests. This is an issue on which Næss always remained elusive.

Biospheric egalitarianism was modified in the 1980s to the weaker claim that the flourishing of both human and non-human life has value in itself, without any commitment to these values being equal. At the same time, Næss declared that his own favoured ecological philosophy—“Ecosophy T”, as he called it after his Tvergastein mountain cabin—was only one of several possible foundations for an environmental ethic. Deep ecology ceased to be a specific doctrine, but instead became a “platform” of eight simple points on which Næss hoped all deep green thinkers could agree. The platform was conceived as establishing a middle ground, between underlying orientations, whether indigenous, Christian, Buddhist, Daoist, process philosophy, or whatever, and the practical principles for action in specific situations, principles generated from the underlying philosophies. Thus the deep ecological movement became explicitly pluralist both morally and epistemologically (see Brennan 1999; c.f. Light 1996, Akamani 2020).

While Næss’s Ecosophy T sees human Self-realization as a solution to the environmental crises resulting from human selfishness and exploitation of nature, some of the followers of the deep ecology platform in the United States and Australia further argue that the expansion of the human self to include non-human nature is supported by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, which is said to have dissolved the boundaries between the observer and the observed (see Fox 1984, 1990, and Devall and Sessions 1985; cf. Callicott 1985). These “relationalist” developments of deep ecology are, however, criticized by some feminist theorists. The idea of nature as part of oneself, they argue, could justify the continued exploitation of nature instead. For one is presumably more entitled to treat oneself in whatever ways one likes than to treat another independent agent in whatever ways one likes. According to these feminist critics, the deep ecological theory of the “expanded self” is in effect a disguised form of human colonialism, unable to give nature its due as a genuine “other” independent of human interest and purposes (see Plumwood 1993, Ch. 7, 1999, and Warren 1999).

Meanwhile, other critics accuse deep ecology of being elitist in its attempts to preserve wilderness experiences for only a select group of economically and socio-politically well-off people. Ramachandra Guha (1989, 1999) for instance, depicts the activities of many western-based conservation groups as a new form of cultural imperialism, aimed at securing converts to conservationism (cf. Bookchin 1987 and Brennan 1998a). “Green missionaries”, as Guha calls them, represent a movement aimed at further dispossessing the world’s poor and indigenous people. “Putting deep ecology in its place,” he writes, “is to recognize that the trends it derides as “shallow” ecology might in fact be varieties of environmentalism that are more apposite, more representative and more popular in the countries of the South.” Although Næss himself repudiates suggestions that deep ecology is committed to any form of imperialism (see Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999, Ch. 36–7 and 41), Guha’s criticism raises important questions about the application of deep ecological principles in different social, economic and cultural contexts. Finally, in other critiques, deep ecology is portrayed as having an inconsistent utopian vision (see Anker and Witoszek 1998).

Broadly speaking, a feminist issue is any that contributes in some way to understanding the oppression of women. Feminist theories attempt to analyze women’s oppression, its causes and consequences, and suggest strategies and directions for women’s liberation. By the mid 1970s, feminist writers had raised the issue of whether patriarchal modes of thinking encouraged not only widespread inferiorizing and colonizing of women, but also of people of colour, animals and nature. Sheila Collins (1974), for instance, argued that male-dominated culture or patriarchy is supported by four interlocking pillars: sexism, racism, class exploitation, and ecological destruction.

Emphasizing the importance of feminism to the environmental movement and various other liberation movements, some writers, such as Ynestra King (1989a and 1989b), argue that the domination of women by men is historically the original form of domination in human society, from which all other hierarchies—of rank, class, and political power—flow. For instance, human exploitation of nature may be seen as a manifestation and extension of the oppression of women, in that it is the result of associating nature with the female, which had been already inferiorized and oppressed by the male-dominating culture. But within the plurality of feminist positions, other writers, such as Val Plumwood (1993), understand the oppression of women as only one of the many parallel forms of oppression sharing and supported by a common ideological structure, in which one party (the colonizer, whether male, white or human) uses a number of conceptual and rhetorical devices to privilege its interests over that of the other party (the colonized: whether female, people of colour, or animals). Facilitated by a common structure, seemingly diverse forms of oppression can mutually reinforce each other (Warren 1987, 1990, 1994, Cheney 1989, and Plumwood 1993).

Not all feminist theorists would call that common underlying oppressive structure “androcentric” or “patriarchal”. But it is generally agreed that core features of the structure include dichotomies, hierarchical thinking, and a “logic of domination”, which are typical of, if not essential to, male-chauvinism. These patterns of thinking and conceptualizing the world, many feminist theorists argue, also nourish and sustain other forms of chauvinism including human-chauvinism (i.e., anthropocentrism), which is responsible for much human exploitation of, and destructiveness towards, nature. Writers comment on dichotomous forms of thinking which depict the world in polar opposite terms, such as male/female, masculinity/femininity, reason/emotion, freedom/necessity, active/passive, mind/body, pure/soiled, white/coloured, civilized/primitive, transcendent/immanent, human/animal, culture/nature. When these dichotomies involve hierarchy and domination they are often labelled "dualisms". Under the influence of such dualisms all the first items in these contrasting pairs are assimilated with each other, and all the second items are likewise linked with each other. For example, the male is seen to be associated with the rational, active, creative, Cartesian human mind, and civilized, orderly, transcendent culture; whereas the female is regarded as tied to the emotional, passive, determined animal body, and primitive, disorderly, immanent nature. These interlocking dualisms are not just descriptive dichotomies, according to the feminists, but involve a prescriptive privileging of one side of the opposed items over the other. Dualism confers superiority to everything on the male side, but inferiority to everything on the female side. The “logic of domination” then dictates that those on the superior side (e.g., men, rational beings, humans) are morally entitled to dominate and utilize those on the inferior side (e.g., women, beings lacking in rationality, non-humans) as mere means.

The problem with dualistic modes of thinking, however, is not just that they are epistemically unreliable. It is not just that the dominating party often falsely sees the dominated party as lacking (or possessing) the allegedly superior (or inferior) qualities, or that the dominated party often internalizes false stereotypes of itself given by its oppressors, or that stereotypical thinking often overlooks salient and important differences among individuals. More important, according to feminist analyses, the very premise of prescriptive dualism—the valuing of attributes of one polarized side and the devaluing of those of the other, the idea that domination and oppression can be justified by appealing to attributes like masculinity, rationality, being civilized or developed, etc.—is itself problematic.

Feminism represents a radical challenge for environmental thinking, politics, and traditional social ethical perspectives. It promises to link environmental questions with wider social problems concerning various kinds of discrimination and exploitation, and fundamental investigations of human psychology. However, whether there are conceptual, causal or merely contingent connections among the different forms of oppression and liberation remains a contested issue (see Green 1994). The term “ecofeminism” (first coined by Françoise d’Eaubonne in 1974) or “ecological feminism” was for a time generally applied to any view that combines environmental advocacy with feminist analysis. However, because of the varieties of, and disagreements among, feminist theories, the label may be too wide to be informative (see the entry on feminist environmental philosophy ).

An often overlooked source of ecological ideas is the work of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School of critical theory founded by Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969). While classical Marxists regard nature as a resource to be transformed by human labour and utilized for human purposes, Horkheimer and Adorno saw Marx himself as representative of the problem of “human alienation”. At the root of this alienation, they argue, is a narrow positivist conception of rationality—which sees rationality as an instrument for pursuing progress, power and technological control, and takes observation, measurement and the application of purely quantitative methods to be capable of solving all problems. Such a positivistic view of science combines determinism with optimism. Natural processes as well as human activities are seen to be predictable and manipulable. Nature (and, likewise, human nature) is no longer mysterious, uncontrollable, or fearsome. Instead, it is reduced to an object strictly governed by natural laws, which therefore can be studied, known, and employed to our benefit. By promising limitless knowledge and power, the positivism of science and technology not only removes our fear of nature, the critical theorists argue, but also destroys our sense of awe and wonder towards it. That is to say, positivism “disenchants” nature—along with everything that can be studied by the sciences, whether natural, social or human.

The progress in knowledge and material well-being may not be a bad thing in itself, where the consumption and control of nature is a necessary part of human life. However, the critical theorists argue that the positivistic disenchantment of natural things (and, likewise, of human beings—because they too can be studied and manipulated by science) disrupts our relationship with them, encouraging the undesirable attitude that they are nothing more than things to be probed, consumed and dominated. According to the critical theorists, the oppression of “outer nature” (i.e., the natural environment) through science and technology is bought at a very high price: the project of domination requires the suppression of our own “inner nature” (i.e., human nature)—e.g., human creativity, autonomy, and the manifold needs, vulnerabilities and longings at the centre of human life. To remedy such an alienation, the project of Horkheimer and Adorno is to replace the narrow positivistic and instrumentalist model of rationality with a more humanistic one, in which the values of the aesthetic, moral, sensuous and expressive aspects of human life play a central part. Thus, their aim is not to give up our rational faculties or powers of analysis and logic. Rather, the ambition is to arrive at a dialectical synthesis between Romanticism and Enlightenment, to return to anti-deterministic values of freedom, spontaneity and creativity.

In his later work, Adorno advocates a re-enchanting aesthetic attitude of “sensuous immediacy” towards nature. Not only do we stop seeing nature as primarily, or simply, an object of consumption, we are also able to be directly and spontaneously acquainted with nature without interventions from our rational faculties. According to Adorno, works of art, like natural things, always involve an “excess”, something more than their mere materiality and exchange value (see Vogel 1996, ch. 4.4 for a detailed discussion of Adorno’s views on art, labour and domination). The re-enchantment of the world through aesthetic experience, he argues, is also at the same time a re-enchantment of human lives and purposes. Adorno’s work remains largely unexplored in mainstream environmental philosophy, although the idea of applying critical theory (embracing techniques of deconstruction, psychoanalysis and radical social criticism) to both environmental issues and the writings of various ethical and political theorists has spawned the field of “écocritique” or “ecocriticism” (Vogel 1996, Luke 1997, van Wyk 1997, Dryzek 1997, Garrard 2014).

Some students of Adorno’s work have argued that his account of the role of “sensuous immediacy” can be understood as an attempt to defend a “legitimate anthropomorphism” that comes close to a weak form of animism (Bernstein 2001, 196). Others, more radical, have claimed to take inspiration from his notion of “non-identity”, which, they argue, can be used as the basis for a deconstruction of the notion of nature and perhaps even its elimination from ecocritical writing. For example, Timothy Morton argues that “putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration” (Morton 2007, 5), and that “in the name of all that we value in the idea of ‘nature’, [ecocritique] thoroughly examines how nature is set up as a transcendental, unified, independent category. Ecocritique does not think that it is paradoxical to say, in the name of ecology itself: ‘down with nature!’” (ibid., 13). In this vein, some thinkers have insisted that environmental ethics makes a mistake in drawing a significant distinction between the natural and the artificial (Vogel 2015). Such an idea, however, has drawn fierce criticism from some Marxist theorists who argue that the “end of nature” thesis is deeply confused (for example Malm 2018). It remains to be seen, however, whether the radical attempt to purge the concept of nature from ecocritical work meets with success. Likewise, it is unclear whether the dialectic project on which Horkheimer and Adorno embarked is coherent, and whether Adorno, in particular, has a consistent understanding of “nature” and “rationality” (see Eckersley 1992 and Vogel 1996, for a review of the Frankfurt School’s thinking about nature, and on rationality see also the entry on critical theory ).

On the other hand, the new animists have been much inspired by the serious way in which some indigenous peoples placate and interact with animals, plants and inanimate things through ritual, ceremony and other practices (for examples see Kimmerer 2020). According to the new animists, the replacement of traditional animism (the view that personalized souls are found in animals, plants, and other material objects) by a form of disenchanting positivism directly leads to an anthropocentric perspective, which is accountable for much human destructiveness towards nature. In a disenchanted world, there is no meaningful order of things or events outside the human domain, and there is no source of sacredness or dread of the sort felt by those who regard the natural world as peopled by divinities or demons (Stone 2006). When a forest is no longer sacred, there are no spirits to be placated and no mysterious risks associated with clear-felling it. A disenchanted nature is no longer alive. It commands no respect, reverence or love. It is nothing but a giant machine, to be mastered to serve human purposes. The new animists argue for reconceptualizing the boundary between persons and non-persons. For them, “living nature” comprises not only humans, animals and plants, but also mountains, forests, rivers, deserts, and even planets.

Whether the notion that a mountain or a tree is to be regarded as a person is taken literally or not, the attempt to engage with the surrounding world as if it consists of other persons might possibly provide the basis for a respectful attitude to nature (see Harvey 2005 for a popular account of the new animism). If disenchantment is a source of environmental problems and destruction, then the new animism can be regarded as attempting to re-enchant, and help to save, nature. More poetically, David Abram has argued that a phenomenological approach of the kind taken by Merleau-Ponty can reveal to us that we are part of the “common flesh” of the world, that we are in a sense the world thinking itself (Abram 1995).

In her work, Freya Mathews has tried to articulate a version of animism or panpsychism that captures ways in which the world (not just nature) contains many kinds of consciousness and sentience. For her, there is an underlying unity of mind and matter in that the world is a “self-realizing” system containing a multiplicity of other such systems (cf. Næss). According to Mathews, we are meshed in communication, and potential communication, with the “One” (the greater cosmic self) and its many lesser selves (Mathews 2003, 45–60). Materialism (the monistic theory that the world consists purely of matter), she argues, is self-defeating by encouraging a form of “collective solipsism” that treats the world either as unknowable or as a social-construction (Mathews 2005, 12). Mathews also takes inspiration from her interpretation of the core Daoist idea of wuwei as “letting be” and bringing about change through “effortless action”. The focus in environmental management, development and commerce should be on “synergy” with what is already in place rather than on demolition, replacement and disruption. Instead of bulldozing away old suburbs and derelict factories, the synergistic panpsychist sees these artefacts as themselves part of the living cosmos, hence part of what is to be respected. Likewise, instead of trying to eliminate feral or exotic plants and animals, and restore environments to some imagined pristine state, ways should be found—wherever possible—to promote synergies between the newcomers and the older native populations in ways that maintain ecological flows and promote the further unfolding and developing of ecological processes (Mathews 2004). Panpsychism, Mathews argues, frees us from the “ideological grid of capitalism”, can reduce our desire for consumer novelties, and can allow us and the world to grow old together with grace and dignity. Again, some of Mathews work echoes indigenous understandings of an enlarged subjectivity. As Deborah Rose puts it: “subjectivity in the form of sentience and agency is not solely a human prerogative but is located throughout other species and perhaps throughout country itself” (Rose 2005, 302).

In summary, if disenchantment is a source of environmentally destructive or uncaring attitudes, then both the aesthetic and the animist/panpsychist re-enchantment of the world are intended to offer an antidote to such attitudes, and perhaps also inspirations for new forms of managing and designing for sustainability. The general project of re-enchanting the world has surprising resonances with the views of others who draw more explicitly on scientific understandings of life on earth. Earth systems science, for example, draws on the Gaia hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock (Lovelock 1972, 1979) suggesting that living things acting together regulate significant aspects of the global environment (Lovelock and Margulis 1974). Later writers describe the Gaia hypothesis as conjecturing that something overlooked by previous scientific thinking was of vital importance to understanding the one thing that supports all life on earth, namely a great stabilizing feedback system which regulates itself in a way that maintains the habitability of the planet (Lenton et al . 2020). This feedback system is itself under threat from a changing climate, human overpopulation and reductions in biodiversity (see further section 6 below and also Latour 2017). In place of a vision of a grand cosmic self, champions of Gaia theory argue for recognizing the value of Life itself, where the capital "L" draws attention to the great feedback system—a single entity comprising all the living things descended from the last universal common ancestor (Mariscal and Dolittle 2008).

Apart from feminist-environmentalist theories and Næss’s deep ecology, Murray Bookchin’s “social ecology” has also claimed to be radical, subversive, or countercultural (see Bookchin 1980, 1987, 1990). Bookchin’s version of critical theory takes the “outer” physical world as constituting what he calls “first nature”, from which culture or “second nature” has evolved. Environmentalism, in his view, is a social movement, and the problems it confronts are social problems. While Bookchin is prepared, like Horkheimer and Adorno, to regard (first) nature as an aesthetic and sensuous marvel, he regards our intervention in it as necessary. He suggests that we can choose to put ourselves at the service of natural evolution, to help maintain complexity and diversity, diminish suffering and reduce pollution. Bookchin’s social ecology recommends that we use our gifts of sociability, communication and intelligence as if we were “nature rendered conscious”, instead of turning them against the very source and origin from which such gifts derive. Exploitation of nature should be replaced by a richer form of life devoted to nature’s preservation.

John Clark has argued that social ecology is heir to a historical, communitarian tradition of thought that includes not only the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, but also the nineteenth century socialist geographer Elisée Reclus, the eccentric Scottish thinker Patrick Geddes and the latter’s disciple, Lewis Mumford (Clark 1998). Ramachandra Guha has described Mumford as “the pioneer American social ecologist” (Guha 1996, 210). Mumford adopted a regionalist perspective, arguing that strong regional centres of culture are the basis of “active and securely grounded local life” (Mumford 1944, 403). Like the pessimists in critical theory, Mumford was worried about the emergence under industrialised capitalism of a “megamachine”, one that would oppress and dominate human creativity and freedom, and one that—despite being a human product—operates in a way that is out of our control. While Bookchin is more of a technological optimist than Mumford, both writers have inspired a regional turn in environmental thinking. Bioregionalism gives regionalism an environmental twist. This is the view that natural features should provide the defining conditions for places of community, and that secure and satisfying local lives are led by those who know a place, have learned its lore and who adapt their lifestyle to its affordances by developing its potential within ecological limits. Such a life, the bioregionalists argue, will enable people to enjoy the fruits of self-liberation and self-development (see the essays in List 1993, and the book-length treatment in Thayer 2003, for an introduction to bioregional thought).

However, critics have asked why natural features should be significant in defining the places in which communities are to be built, and have puzzled over exactly which natural features these should be—geological, ecological, climatic, hydrological, and so on (see Brennan 1998b). If relatively small, bioregional communities are to be home to flourishing human societies, then a question also arises over the nature of the laws and punishments that will prevail in them, and also of their integration into larger regional and global legal, political and economic groupings. For anarchists and other critics of the predominant social order, a return to self-governing and self-sufficient regional communities is often depicted as liberating and refreshing. But for the skeptics, the worry remains that the bioregional vision is politically over-optimistic and is open to the establishment of illiberal, stifling and undemocratic communities. Further, given its emphasis on local self-sufficiency and the virtue of life in small communities, a question arises over whether bioregionalism is workable in an overcrowded planet. Later bioregional proposals have identified ways of connecting with nature by showing stewardship for green infrastructure within cities (Andersson et al. 2014).

Deep ecology, feminism, and social ecology had a considerable impact on the development of political positions in regard to the environment. Feminist analyses have often been welcomed for the psychological insight they bring to several social, moral and political problems. There is, however, considerable unease about the implications of critical theory, social ecology and some varieties of deep ecology and animism. Some writers have argued, for example, that critical theory is bound to be ethically anthropocentric, with nature as no more than a “social construction” whose value ultimately depends on human determinations (see Vogel 1996). Others have argued that the demands of “deep” green theorists and activists cannot be accommodated within contemporary theories of liberal politics and social justice (see Ferry 1998). A further suggestion is that there is a need to reassess traditional theories such as virtue ethics, which has its origins in ancient Greek philosophy (see the following section) within the context of a form of stewardship similar to that earlier endorsed by Passmore (see Barry 1999). If this last claim is correct, then the radical activist need not, after all, look for philosophical support in radical, or countercultural, theories of the sort deep ecology, feminism, bioregionalism and social ecology claim to be (but see Zimmerman 1994).

4. Traditional Ethical Theories and Contemporary Environment Ethics

Although environmental ethicists often try to distance themselves from the anthropocentrism embedded in traditional ethical views (Passmore 1974, Norton 1991 are exceptions), they also quite often draw their theoretical resources from traditional ethical systems and theories. Consider the following two basic moral questions: (1) What kinds of thing are intrinsically valuable, good or bad? (2) What makes an action right or wrong?

Consequentialist ethical theories consider intrinsic “value” / “disvalue” or “goodness” / “badness” to be more fundamental moral notions than “rightness” / “wrongness”, and maintain that whether an action is right/wrong is determined by whether its consequences are good/bad. From this perspective, answers to question (2) are informed by answers to question (1). For instance, utilitarianism, a paradigm case of consequentialism, regards pleasure (or, more broadly construed, the satisfaction of interest, desire, and/or preference) as the only intrinsic value in the world, whereas pain (or the frustration of desire, interest, and/or preference) is the only intrinsic disvalue, and maintains that right actions are those that would produce the greatest balance of pleasure over pain (see the entry on consequentialism ).

As the utilitarian focus is the balance of pleasure and pain as such, the question of to whom a pleasure or pain belongs is irrelevant to the calculation and assessment of the rightness or wrongness of actions. Hence, the eighteenth century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (1789), and later Peter Singer (1993), have argued that the interests of all the sentient beings (i.e., beings who are capable of experiencing pleasure or pain)—including non-human ones—affected by an action should be taken equally into consideration in assessing the action. Furthermore, rather like Routley (see section 2 above), Singer argues that the anthropocentric privileging of members of the species Homo sapiens is arbitrary, and that it is a kind of “speciesism” as unjustifiable as sexism and racism. Singer regards the animal liberation movement as comparable to the liberation movements of women and people of colour. Unlike the environmental philosophers who attribute intrinsic value to the natural environment and its inhabitants, Singer and utilitarians in general attribute intrinsic value to the experience of pleasure or interest satisfaction as such, not to the beings who have the experience. Similarly, for the utilitarian, non-sentient objects in the environment such as plant species, rivers, mountains, and landscapes, all of which are the objects of moral concern for environmentalists, are of no intrinsic but at most instrumental value to the satisfaction of sentient beings (see Singer 1993, Ch. 10). Furthermore, because right actions, for the utilitarian, are those that maximize the overall balance of interest satisfaction over frustration, practices such as whale-hunting and the killing of an elephant for ivory, which cause suffering to non-human animals, might turn out to be right after all: such practices might produce considerable amounts of interest-satisfaction for human beings, which, on the utilitarian calculation, outweigh the non-human interest-frustration involved. As the result of all the above considerations, it is unclear to what extent a utilitarian ethic can also be an environmental ethic. This point may not so readily apply to a wider consequentialist approach, which attributes intrinsic value not only to pleasure or satisfaction, but also to various objects and processes in the natural environment.

Deontological ethical theories, in contrast, maintain that whether an action is right or wrong is for the most part independent of whether its consequences are good or bad (see the entry on deontological ethics ). From the deontologist perspective, there are several distinct moral rules or duties (e.g., “not to kill or otherwise harm the innocent”, “not to lie”, “to respect the rights of others”, “to keep promises”), the observance/violation of which is intrinsically right/wrong; i.e., right/wrong in itself regardless of consequences. When asked to justify an alleged moral rule, duty or its corresponding right, deontologists may appeal to the intrinsic value of those beings to whom it applies. For instance, “animal rights” advocate Tom Regan (1983) argues that those animals with intrinsic value (or what he calls “inherent value”) have the moral right to respectful treatment, which then generates a general moral duty on our part not to treat them as mere means to other ends. We have, in particular, a prima facie moral duty not to harm them. Regan maintains that certain practices (such as sport or commercial hunting, and experimentation on animals) violate the moral right of intrinsically valuable animals to respectful treatment. Such practices, he argues, are intrinsically wrong regardless of whether or not some better consequences ever flow from them. Exactly which animals have intrinsic value and therefore the moral right to respectful treatment? Regan’s answer is: those that meet the criterion of being the “subject-of-a-life”. To be such a subject is a sufficient (though not necessary) condition for having intrinsic value, and to be a subject-of-a-life involves, among other things, having sense-perceptions, beliefs, desires, motives, memory, a sense of the future, and a psychological identity over time.

Some authors have extended concern for individual well-being further, arguing for the intrinsic value of organisms achieving their own good, whether those organisms are capable of consciousness or not. Paul Taylor’s version of this view (1981 and 1986), which we might call biocentrism , is a somewhat deontological example. He argues that each individual living thing in nature—whether it is an animal, a plant, or a micro-organism—is a “teleological-center-of-life” having a good or well-being of its own which can be enhanced or damaged, and that all individuals who are teleological-centers-of life have equal intrinsic value (or what he calls “inherent worth”) which entitles them to moral respect. Furthermore, Taylor maintains that the intrinsic value of wild living things generates a prima facie moral duty on our part to preserve or promote their goods as ends in themselves, and that any practices which treat those beings as mere means and thus display a lack of respect for them are intrinsically wrong. For a summary and overview of Taylor’s biocentric ethic, see Brennan and Lo 2010, 69—86. A biologically detailed defence of the idea that living things have representations and goals and hence have moral worth is found in Agar 2001. Unlike Taylor’s egalitarian and deontological biocentrism, Robin Attfield (1987) argues for a hierarchical view that while all beings having a good of their own have intrinsic value, some of them (e.g., persons) have intrinsic value to a greater extent. Attfield also endorses a form of consequentialism which takes into consideration, and attempts to balance, the many and possibly conflicting goods of different living things (see also Varner 1998 for a defense of biocentric individualism with affinities to both consequentialist and deontological approaches). However, some critics have pointed out that the notion of biological good or well-being is only descriptive not prescriptive (see Williams 1992 and O’Neill 1993, Ch. 2). For instance, even if HIV has a good of its own this does not mean that we ought to assign any positive moral weight to the realization of that good.

Subsequently the distinction between these two traditional approaches has taken its own specific form of development in environmental philosophy. Instead of pitting conceptions of value against conceptions of rights, it has been suggested that there may be two different conceptions of intrinsic value in play in discussion about environmental good and evil. One the one side, there is the intrinsic value of states of affairs that are to be promoted—and this is the focus of the consequentialist thinkers. On the other (deontological) hand there is the intrinsic values of entities to be respected (see Bradley 2006, McShane 2014). These two different foci for the notion of intrinsic value still provide room for fundamental argument between deontologists and consequentialist to continue, albeit in a somewhat modified form.

Note that the ethics of animal liberation or animal rights and biocentrism are both individualistic in that their various moral concerns are directed towards individuals only—not ecological wholes such as species, populations, biotic communities, and ecosystems. None of these is sentient, a subject-of-a-life, or a teleological-center-of-life, but the preservation of these collective entities is a major concern for many environmentalists. Moreover, the goals of animal liberationists, such as the reduction of animal suffering and death, may conflict with the goals of environmentalists. For example, the preservation of the integrity of an ecosystem may require the culling of feral animals or of some indigenous animal populations that threaten to destroy fragile habitats. So there are disputes about whether the ethics of animal liberation is a proper branch of environmental ethics (see Callicott 1980, 1988, Sagoff 1984, Jamieson 1998, Crisp 1998 and Varner 2000).

Criticizing the individualistic approach in general for failing to accommodate conservation concerns for ecological wholes, J. Baird Callicott (1980) once advocated a version of land-ethical holism which takes Leopold’s statement “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” to be the supreme deontological principle. In this theory, the earth’s biotic community per se is the sole locus of intrinsic value, whereas the value of its individual members is merely instrumental and dependent on their contribution to the “integrity, stability, and beauty” of the larger community. A straightforward implication of this version of the land ethic is that an individual member of the biotic community ought to be sacrificed whenever that is needed for the protection of the holistic good of the community. For instance, Callicott maintains that if culling a white-tailed deer is necessary for the protection of the holistic biotic good, then it is a land-ethical requirement to do so. But, to be consistent, the same point also applies to human individuals because they are also members of the biotic community. Not surprisingly, the misanthropy implied by Callicott’s land-ethical holism was widely criticized and regarded as a reductio of the position (see Aiken (1984), Kheel (1985), Ferré (1996), and Shrader-Frechette (1996)). Tom Regan (1983, p.362), in particular, condemned the holistic land ethic’s disregard of the rights of the individual as “environmental fascism”. Since then commentators have noted the links between fascism and conservation thinking (Biehl and Staudenmaier 2011). The subsequent emergence of explicitly ecofascist on-line movements and terrorist acts that claim to be ecologically-inspired (Lawton 2019) lead one writer to declare that there is a danger the world will enter an age of “climate barbarism”(Klein 2019).

Under pressure from the charge of ecofascism and misanthropy, Callicott (1989 Ch. 5, and 1999, Ch. 4) later revises his neo-Leopodian position to maintain that the biotic community (indeed, any community to which humans belong) as well as its individual members (indeed, any individual who shares with us membership in some common community) all have intrinsic value. To further distance himself from the charge of ecofascism, Callicott introduced explicit principles which prioritize obligations to human communities over those to natural ones. He called these “second-order” principles for specifying the conditions under which the land ethic’s holistic and individualistic obligations were to be ranked. As he put it:

... obligations generated by membership in more venerable and intimate communities take precedence over these generated in more recently-emerged and impersonal communities... The second second-order principle is that stronger interests (for lack of a better word) generate duties that take precedence over duties generated by weaker interests. (Callicott 1999, 76)

Lo 2001 provides an overview and critique of Callicott’s changing position over two decades, while Ouderkirk and Hill (eds.) 2002 gives an overview of debates between Callicott and others concerning the metaethical and metaphysical foundations for the land ethic and also its historical antecedents. As Lo points out, the final modified version of the land ethic needs more than two second-order principles, since a third-order principle is needed to specify Callicott’s implicit view that the second second-order principle generally countermands the first one when they come into conflict (Lo 2001, 345). In later work, Callicott follows Lo’s suggestion, while cautioning against aiming for too much precision in specifying the demands of the land ethic (Callicott 2013, 66–7). While Callicott’s reading of Leopold is widely regarded as authoritative, later writers have queried whether Leopold might be better interpreted a a moral pluralist (Dixon 2017) and have also raised doubts about the form of Darwinism that Leopold is supposed to have espoused (Millstein 2015). For further critique of Callicott on Leopold, see also Newman, Varner and Linquist 2017, ch.10.

The controversy surrounding Callicott’s original position, however, has inspired efforts in environmental ethics to investigate possibilities of attributing intrinsic value to ecological wholes, not just their individual constituent parts. Following in Callicott’s footsteps, and inspired by Næss’s relational account of value, Warwick Fox has championed a theory of “responsive cohesion” which aims to give supreme moral priority to the maintenance of ecosystems and the biophysical world (Fox 2007). It remains to be seen if this position escapes the charges of misanthropy and totalitarianism laid against earlier holistic and relational theories of value.

Individual natural entities (whether sentient or not, living or not), Andrew Brennan (1984, 2014) argues, are not designed by anyone to fulfill any purpose and therefore lack “intrinsic function” (i.e., the function of a thing that constitutes part of its essence or identity conditions). This, he proposes, is a reason for thinking that individual natural entities should not be treated as mere instruments, and thus a reason for assigning them intrinsic value. Furthermore, he argues that the same moral point applies to the case of natural ecosystems, to the extent that they lack intrinsic function. In the light of Brennan’s proposal, Eric Katz (1991 and 1997) argues that all natural entities, whether individuals or wholes, have intrinsic value in virtue of their ontological independence from human purpose, activity, and interest, and maintains the deontological principle that nature as a whole is an “autonomous subject” which deserves moral respect and must not be treated as a mere means to human ends. Carrying the project of attributing intrinsic value to nature to its ultimate form, Robert Elliot (1997) argues that naturalness itself is a property in virtue of possessing which all natural things, events, and states of affairs, attain intrinsic value. Furthermore, Elliot argues that even a consequentialist, who in principle allows the possibility of trading off intrinsic value from naturalness for intrinsic value from other sources, could no longer justify such kind of trade-off in reality. This is because the reduction of intrinsic value due to the depletion of naturalness on earth, according to him, has reached such a level that any further reduction of it could not be compensated by any amount of intrinsic value generated in other ways, no matter how great it is.

As the notion of “natural” is understood in terms of the lack of human contrivance and is often opposed to the notion of “artifactual”, one much contested issue concerns the value of those parts of nature that have been touched by human artifice—for instance, previously degraded natural environments which have been humanly restored. Based on the premise that the properties of being naturally evolved and having a natural continuity with the remote past are “value adding” (i.e., adding intrinsic value to those things which possess those two properties), Elliot argues that even a perfectly restored environment would necessarily lack those two value-adding properties and therefore be less valuable than the originally undegraded natural environment. Katz, on the other hand, argues that a restored nature is really just an artifact designed and created for the satisfaction of human ends, and that the value of restored environments is instrumental. He further argues that restoration is a form of the “domination of reality” and controversially compares such domination to Nazi policies of xenophobia, nativism and eliminationsm (Katz 2021). Critics have pointed out that advocates of a moral dichotomy between the natural and the artifactual run the risk of diminishing the value of human life and culture, and fail to recognize that the natural environments interfered with by humans may still have morally important qualities other than pure naturalness (see Lo 1999, and Katz’s response in Katz 2012).

Two other issues central to this debate are that the key concept “natural” seems ambiguous in many different ways (see Hume 1751, App. 3; Mill 1874; Brennan [1988] 2014; Ch. 6; Elliot 1997, Ch. 4), and that those who argue that human interference reduces the intrinsic value of nature seem to have simply assumed the crucial premise that naturalness is a source of intrinsic value. Some thinkers maintain that the natural, or the “wild” construed as that which “is not humanized” (Hettinger and Throop 1999, p. 12) or to some degree “not under human control” (ibid., p. 13) is intrinsically valuable. Yet, as Bernard Williams points out (Williams 1992), we may, paradoxically, need to use our technological powers to retain a sense of something not being in our power. The retention of wild areas may thus involve planetary and ecological management to maintain, or even “imprison” such areas (Birch 1990), raising a question over the extent to which national parks and wilderness areas are free from our control. An anlogy with gardening has sometimes been used to explore the nature of restoration (Allison 2004).

Given the significance of the concept of naturalness in these debates, it is perhaps surprising that there has been relatively little analysis of that concept itself in environmental thought. In his pioneering work on the ethics of the environment, Holmes Rolston has worked with a number of different conceptions of the natural (see Brennan and Lo 2010, pp.116–23, for an analysis of three senses of the term “natural” that may be found in Rolston’s work). An explicit attempt to provide a conceptual analysis of a different sort is found in Siipi 2008, while an account of naturalness linking this to historical narratives of place is given in O’Neill, Holland and Light 2008, ch. 8 (compare the response to this in Siipi 2011). For reflections on how to protect “one nature with several representations” from the perspective of science policy see Ducarme and Couvet 2020.

Finally, as an alternative to consequentialism and deontology both of which consider “thin” concepts such as “goodness” and “rightness” as essential to morality, virtue ethics proposes to understand morality—and assess the ethical quality of actions—in terms of “thick” concepts such as “kindness”, “honesty”, “sincerity” and “justice”. These, and other excellent traits of character are virtues (see the entry on virtue ethics ). As virtue ethics speaks quite a different language from the other two kinds of ethical theory, its theoretical focus is not so much on what kinds of things are good/bad, or what makes an action right/wrong. Indeed, the richness of the language of virtues, and the emphasis on moral character, is sometimes cited as a reason for exploring a virtues-based approach to the complex and always-changing questions of sustainability and environmental care (Hill 1983, Wensveen 2000, Sandler 2007). One question central to virtue ethics is what the moral reasons are for acting one way or another. For instance, from the perspective of virtue ethics, kindness and loyalty would be moral reasons for helping a friend in hardship. These are quite different from the deontologist’s reason (that the action is demanded by a moral rule) or the consequentialist reason (that the action will lead to a better over-all balance of good over evil in the world). From the perspective of virtue ethics, the motivation and justification of actions are both inseparable from the character traits of the acting agent. Furthermore, unlike deontology or consequentialism the moral focus of which is other people or states of the world, one central issue for virtue ethics is how to live a flourishing human life, this being a central concern of the moral agent himself or herself. “Living virtuously” is Aristotle’s recipe for flourishing. Versions of virtue ethics advocating virtues such as “benevolence”, “piety”, “filiality”, and “courage”, have also been held by thinkers in the Chinese Confucian tradition. The connection between morality and psychology is another core subject of investigation for virtue ethics. It is sometimes suggested that human virtues, which constitute an important aspect of a flourishing human life, must be compatible with human needs and desires, and perhaps also sensitive to individual affection and temperaments. As its central focus is human flourishing as such, virtue ethics may seem unavoidably anthropocentric and unable to support a genuine moral concern for the non-human environment. But just as Aristotle has argued that a flourishing human life requires friendships and one can have genuine friendships only if one genuinely values, loves, respects, and cares for one’s friends for their own sake, not merely for the benefits that they may bring to oneself, some have argued that a flourishing human life requires the moral capacities to value, love, respect, and care for the non-human natural world as an end in itself (see O’Neill 1992, O’Neill 1993, Barry 1999). Not only Aristotle, but also Kant can be used in support of such a position. Toby Svoboda argues, for example, that even indirect duties to protect nature can be the basis of good moral reasons to promote the flourishing of natural things, regardless of whether doing so promotes human interests (Svoboda 2019). Other virtue ethicists claim to be able to provie an account of what it is to feel guilt about damage people have done to the environment and to make sense of the idea of a genuine feeling of gratitude toward nature “for being what it is” (Wood 2019).

Despite the variety of positions in environmental ethics developed over the last thirty years, they have often focused on issues concerned with wilderness and the reasons for its preservation (see Callicott and Nelson 1998 for a collection of essays on the ideas and moral significance of wilderness). The importance of wilderness experience to the human psyche has been emphasized by many environmental philosophers. Næss, for instance, urges us to ensure we spend time dwelling in situations of intrinsic value, whereas Rolston seeks “re-creation” of the human soul by meditating in the wilderness. Likewise, the critical theorists believe that aesthetic appreciation of nature has the power to re-enchant human life. As wilderness becomes increasingly rare, people’s exposure to wild things in their natural state has become reduced, and according to some authors this may reduce the chance of our lives and other values being transformed as a result of interactions with nature. An argument by Bryan Norton draws attention to an analogy with music. Someone exposed for the first time to a new musical genre may undergo a transformation in musical preferences, tastes and values as a result of the experience (Norton 1987. Such a transformation can affect their other preferences and desires too, in both direct and indirect ways (see Sarkar 2005, ch. 4, esp. pp. 82–7). In the attempt to preserve opportunities for experiences that can change or enhance people’s valuations of nature, there has been a move since the early 2000s to find ways of rewilding degraded environments, and even parts of cities (Fraser 2009, Monbiot 2013). Note that such rewilding is distinct from more traditional forms of restoration, since it need not be pursued with the intention of re-creating some original landscape or biological system (duToit and Pettorelli 2019). A spectacular form of rewilding may be associated with efforts to resurrect some long-dead species by using genetic technology to combine the DNA of an extinct species with the DNA of some closely-related contemporary species. For a review of some of the issues about de-extinction see Minteer 2015, and also Siipi and Finkelman 2017. Cautions about thinking of de-extinction as radically different from more conventional conservation and restoration practices are expressed in Novak 2018.

By contrast to the focus on wild places, relatively little attention has been paid to the built environment, although this is the one in which most people spend most of their time. In post-war Britain, for example, cheaply constructed new housing developments were often poor replacements for traditional communities. They have been associated with lower amounts of social interaction and increased crime compared with the earlier situation. The destruction of highly functional high-density traditional housing, indeed, might be compared with the destruction of highly diverse ecosystems and biotic communities. Likewise, the loss of the world’s huge diversity of natural languages has been mourned by many, not just professionals with an interest in linguistics. Urban and linguistic environments are just two of the many “places” inhabited by humans. Some philosophical theories about natural environments and objects have potential to be extended to cover built environments and non-natural objects of several sorts (see King 2000, Light 2001, Palmer 2003, while Fox 2007 aims to include both built and natural environments in the scope of a single ethical theory). Certainly there are many parallels between natural and artificial domains: for example, many of the conceptual problems involved in discussing the restoration of natural objects such as landscapes and ecosystems also appear in the parallel context of restoring human-made objects such as buildings and works of art (Vogel 2015).

Lovers of wilderness sometimes consider the high human populations in some developing countries as a key problem underlying the environmental crisis. Rolston (1996), for instance, claims that (some) humans are a kind of planetary “cancer”. He maintains that while “feeding people always seems humane, ... when we face up to what is really going on, by just feeding people, without attention to the larger social results, we could be feeding a kind of cancer.” This remark is meant to justify the view that saving nature should, in some circumstances, have a higher priority than feeding people. But such a view has been criticized for seeming to reveal a degree of misanthropy, directed at those human beings least able to protect and defend themselves (see Attfield 1998, Brennan 1998a). The empirical basis of Rolston’s claims has been queried by work showing that poor people are often extremely good environmental managers (Martinez-Alier 2002). Guha’s worries about the elitist and “missionary” tendencies of some kinds of deep green environmentalism in certain rich western countries can be quite readily extended to theorists such as Rolston (Guha 1999). Can such an apparently elitist sort of wilderness ethics ever be democratised? How can the psychically-reviving power of the wild become available to those living in the slums of Kolkata or São Paolo? These questions so far lack convincing answers.

Connections between environmental destruction, unequal resource consumption, poverty and the global economic order have been discussed by political scientists, development theorists, geographers and economists as well as by philosophers. Links between economics and environmental ethics are particularly well established. Work by Mark Sagoff (1988), for instance, has played a major part in bringing the two fields together. He argues that “as citizens rather than consumers” people are concerned about values, which cannot plausibly be reduced to mere ordered preferences or quantified in monetary terms. Sagoff’s distinction between people as consumers and people as citizens was intended to blunt the use of cost-benefit analysis as the final arbiter in discussions about nature’s value. Of course, spouses take out insurance on each others’ lives. We pay extra for travel insurance to cover the cost of cancellation, illness, or lost baggage. Such actions are economically rational. They provide us with some compensation in case of loss. No-one, however, would regard insurance payments as replacing lost limbs, a loved one or even the joys of a cancelled vacation. So it is for nature, according to Sagoff. We can put dollar values on a stand of timber, a reef, a beach, a national park. We can measure the travel costs, the money spent by visitors, the real estate values, the park fees and all the rest. But these dollar measures do not tell us the value of nature any more than my insurance premiums tell you the value of a human life (also see Shrader-Frechette 1987, O’Neill 1993, and Brennan 1995). If Sagoff is right, cost-benefit analysis cannot be a basis for an ethic of sustainability any more than for an ethic of biodiversity. The potentially misleading appeal to economic reason used to justify the expansion of the corporate sector has also come under critical scrutiny by globalisation theorists (see Korten 1999). These critiques do not aim to eliminate economics from environmental thinking; rather, they resist any reductive, and strongly anthropocentric, tendency to believe that all social and environmental problems are fundamentally or essentially economic. The development of ecological economics explores the scope for common ground between economists and environmental policy-makers, and also the role of environmental ethics in such discussions (Washington and Maloney 2020).

Other interdisciplinary approaches link environmental ethics with biology, policy studies, public administration, political theory, cultural history, post-colonial theory, literature, geography, and human ecology (for some examples, see Norton, Hutchins, Stevens, Maple 1995, Shrader-Frechette 1984, Gruen and Jamieson (eds.) 1994, Karliner 1997, Diesendorf and Hamilton 1997, Schmidtz and Willott 2002). Many assessments of issues concerned with biodiversity, ecosystem health, poverty, environmental justice and sustainability look at both human and environmental issues, eschewing in the process commitment either to a purely anthropocentric or purely ecocentric perspective (see Hayward and O’Neill 1997, and Dobson 1999 for collections of essays looking at the links between sustainability, justice, welfare and the distribution of environmental goods). The future development of environmental ethics depends on these, and other interdisciplinary synergies, as much as on its anchorage within philosophy (Dereniowska and Matzke 2014).

6. Sustainability and Climate Change

The Convention on Biological Diversity discussed in the supplementary document on Biodiversity Preservation was influenced by Our Common Future , an earlier United Nations document on sustainability produced by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987). The commission was chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway at the time, and the report is sometimes known as the Brundtland Report. This report noted the increasing tide of evidence that planetary systems vital to supporting life on earth were under strain. The key question it raised is whether it is equitable to sacrifice options for future well-being in favour of supporting current lifestyles, especially the comfortable, and sometimes lavish, forms of life enjoyed in the rich countries. As Bryan Norton puts it, the world faces a global challenge to see whether different human groups, with widely varying perspectives, can perhaps “accept responsibility to maintain a non-declining set of opportunities based on possible uses of the environment”. The preservation of options for the future can be readily linked to notions of equity if it is agreed that “the future ought not to face, as a result of our actions today, a seriously reduced range of options and choices, as they try to adapt to the environment that they face” (Norton 2001: 419). Note that references to “the future” need not be limited to the future of human beings only. In keeping with the non-anthropocentric focus of much environmental philosophy, a care for sustainability and biodiversity can embrace a care for opportunities available to non-human living things.

However, when the concept “sustainable development” was first articulated in the Brundtland Report, the emphasis was clearly anthropocentric. In face of increasing evidence that planetary systems vital to life-support were under strain, the concept of sustainable development is constructed in the report to encourage certain globally coordinated directions and types of economic and social development. The report defines “sustainable development” in the following way:

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts: the concept of “needs”, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs. Thus the goals of economic and social development must be defined in terms of sustainability in all countries—developed or developing, market-oriented or centrally planned. Interpretations will vary, but must share certain general features and must flow from a consensus on the basic concept of sustainable development and on a broad strategic framework for achieving it. (WCED 1987, Ch. 2, paragraphs 1–2)

The report goes on to argue that “the industrial world has already used much of the planet’s ecological capital. This inequality is the planet’s main ‘environmental’ problem; it is also its main ‘development’ problem” (WCED 1987, Overview, paragraph 17). In the concept of sustainable development the report combines the resource economist’s notion of “sustainable yield” with the recognition that developing countries of the world are entitled to economic growth and prosperity. The notion of sustainable yield involves thinking of forests, rivers, oceans and other ecosystems, including the natural species living in them, as a stock of “ecological capital” from which all kinds of goods and services flow. Provided the flow of such goods and services does not reduce the capacity of the capital itself to maintain its productivity, the use of the systems in question is regarded as sustainable. Thus, the report argues that “maximum sustainable yield must be defined after taking into account system-wide effects of exploitation” of ecological capital (WCED 1987, Ch. 2, paragraph 11).

There are clear philosophical, political and economic precursors to the Brundtland concept of sustainability. For example, John Stuart Mill (1848, IV. 6. 1) distinguished between the “stationary state” and the “progressive state” and argued that at the end of the progressive state lies the stationary state, since “the increase of wealth is not boundless”. Mill also recognized a debt to the gloomy prognostications of Thomas Malthus, who had conjectured that population tends to increase geometrically while food resources at best increase only arithmetically, so that demand for food will ultimately outstrip the supply (see Milgate and Stimson 2009, Ch. 7, and the discussion of Malthus in the Political Economy section of the Spring 2016 version of the entry on Mill ). Reflection on Malthus led Mill to argue for restraining human population growth:

Even in a progressive state of capital, in old countries, a conscientious or prudential restraint on population is indispensable, to prevent the increase of numbers from outstripping the increase of capital, and the condition of the classes who are at the bottom of society from being deteriorated (Mill 1848, IV. 6. 1).

Such warnings resonate with pessimism about increasing human population and its impact on the poorest people, as well as on loss of biodiversity, fresh water scarcity, overconsumption and climate change. In their controversial work The Population Bomb , Paul and Anne Ehrlich, argue that without restrictions on population growth, including the imposition of mandatory birth control, the world faced “mass starvation” in the short term (Ehrlich 1968). This prediction was not fulfilled. In a subsequent defence of their early work, the Ehrlichs declared that the most serious flaw in their original analysis “was that it was much too optimistic about the future”, and comment that “Since The Bomb was written, increases in greenhouse gas flows into the atmosphere, a consequence of the near doubling of the human population and the near tripling of global consumption, indicate that the results will likely be catastrophic climate disruption caused by greenhouse heating” (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2009, 66). It was also in 1968 that Garrett Hardin published his much cited article on the “tragedy of the commons” arguing that common resources can always be subject to degradation and extinction in the face of the rational pursuit of self-interest. For Hardin, the increasing pressure on shared resources, and increasing pollution, are inevitable results of the fact that “there is no technical solution to the population problem” (Hardin 1968). The problem may be analysed from the perspective of the so-called prisoner’s dilemma (also see the entry on the free rider problem ). Despite the pessimism of writers at the time, and the advocacy of setting limits to population growth, there was also an optimism that echoes Mill’s own view that a “stationary state” would not be one of misery and decline, but rather one in which humans could aspire to more equitable distribution of available and limited resources. This is clear not only among those who recognize limits to economic growth (Meadows et al. 1972) but also among those who champion the move to a steady state economy (Daly 1991) or at least want to see more account taken of ecology in economics (Norgaard 1994, Rees 2020).

The Brundtland report puts less emphasis on limits than do Mill, Malthus and later writers. It depicts sustainability as a challenge and opportunity for the world to become more socially, politically and environmentally fair. In pursuit of intergenerational justice , it suggests that there should be new human rights added to the standard list, for example, that “All human beings have the fundamental right to an environment adequate for their health and well being” (WCED 1987, Annexe 1, paragraph 1). The report also argues that “The enjoyment of any right requires respect for the similar rights of others, and recognition of reciprocal and even joint responsibilities. States have a responsibility towards their own citizens and other states” (ibid., chapter 12, paragraph 83). Since the report’s publication, many writers have supported and defended the view that global and economics [normative] and economic justice require that nations which had become wealthy through earlier industrialization and environmental exploitation should allow less developed nations similar or equivalent opportunities for development especially in term of access to environmental resources (Redclift 2005). As intended by the report the idea of sustainable development has become strongly integrated into the notion of environmental conservation. The report has also set the scene for a range of subsequent international conferences, declarations, and protocols many of them maintaining the emphasis on the prospects for the future of humanity, rather than considering sustainability in any wider sense.

Some non-anthropocentric environmental thinkers have found the language of economics used in the report unsatisfactory in its implications since it already appears to assume a largely instrumental view of nature. The use of notions such as “asset”, “capital” and also the word “resources” in connection with natural objects and systems has been identified by some writers as instrumentalizing natural things which are in essence wild and free. The objection is that such language promotes the tendency to think of natural things as mere resources for humans or as raw materials with which human labour could be mixed, not only to produce consumable goods, but also to generate human ownership (Plumwood 1993, Sagoff 2004). If natural objects and systems have intrinsic value independent of their possible use for humans, as many environmental philosophers have argued, then a policy approach to sustainability needs to consider the environment and natural things not only in instrumental and but also in intrinsic terms to do justice to the moral standing that many people believe such items possess. Despite its acknowledgment of there being “moral, ethical, cultural, aesthetic, and purely scientific reasons for conserving wild beings” (WCED 1987, Overview, paragraph 53), the strongly anthropocentric and instrumental language used throughout the Brundtland report in articulating the notion of sustainable development can be criticised for defining the notion too narrowly, leaving little room for addressing sustainability questions directly concerning the Earth’s environment and its non-human inhabitants: should, and if so, how should, human beings reorganise their ways of life and the social-political structures of their communities to allow sustainability and equity not only for all humans but also for the other species on the planet?

The concern for preserving nature and non-human species is addressed to some extent by making a distinction between weaker and stronger conceptions of sustainability (Beckerman 1995). Proponents of weak sustainability argue that it is acceptable to replace natural capital with human-made capital provided that the latter has equivalent functions. If, for example, plastic trees could produce oxygen, absorb carbon and support animal and insect communities, then they could replace the real thing, and a world with functionally equivalent artificial trees would seem just as good—from an economic perpective—as one with real or natural trees in it. For weak sustainability theorists, the aim of future development should be to maintain a consistently productive stock of capital on which to draw, while not insisting that some portion of that capital be natural. Strong sustainability theorists, by contrast, generally resist the substitution of human for natural capital, insisting that a critical stock of natural things and processes be preserved. By so doing, they argue, rivers, forests and biodiverse systems are maintained, hence providing maximum options—options in terms of experience, appreciation, values, and ways of life—for the future human inhabitants of the planet (Norton 2005). The Brundtland report can also be seen as advocating a form of strong sustainability in so far as it recommends that a “first priority is to establish the problem of disappearing species and threatened ecosystems on political agendas as a major resource issue” ( ibid ., chapter 6, paragraph 57). Furthermore, despite its instrumental and economic language, the report in fact endorses a wider moral perspective on the status of and our relation to nature and non-human species, evidenced by its statement that “the case for the conservation of nature should not rest only with development goals. It is part of our moral obligation to other living beings and future generations” (WCED 1987, chapter 2, paragraph 55). Implicit in the statement is not only a strong conception of sustainability but also a non-anthropocentric conception of the notion. Over time, strong sustainability came to be focused not only on the needs of human and other living things but also on their rights (Redclift 2004, 218). In a further development, the discourses on forms of sustainability have generally given way to a more ambiguous usage, in which the term “sustainability” functions to bring people into a debate rather than setting out a clear definition of the terms of the debate itself. As globalization leads to greater integration of world economies, the world after the Brundtland report has seen greater fragmentation among viewpoints, where critics of globalization have generally used the concept of sustainability in a plurality of different ways (Sneddon, Howarth and Norgaard 2006). Some have argued that “sustainability”, just like the word “nature” itself, has come to mean very different things, carrying different symbolic meanings for different groups, and reflecting very different interests (Redclift 2004, 220). For better or for worse, such ambiguity can on occasion allow different parties in negotiations to claim a measure of agreement. For example, commenting on the connections between agricultural systems, sustainability and climate change, one writer has argued that there is exciting scope for negotiation across different world views in working out the conditions for a future sustainable form of agriculture (Thompson 2017).

Meadows’ and Daly’s arguments about the need to recognize that planetary resources are limited have continued to resonate with thinkers, especially those working in ecological economics (Daly and Farley 2011). As one author puts it, “the overriding aim [of ecological economics] ... is to seek viable responses to the biggest dilemma of our times: reconciling our aspirations for the good life with the limitations and constraints of a finite planet” (Jackson 2017, 3). While economic growth is a central focus of neoclassical economic theory (see the entry on philosophy of economics ) a minority of thinkers have joined in supporting an agenda of “de-growth” (or “degrowth”) as an alternative to what is sometimes called “growthism” (for a popular overview see Hickel 2020). From small beginnings in the late 20th century, the idea of de-growth developed from “a political slogan with theoretical implications” to become a significant challenge to the idea of sustainable development considered as a kind of sustainable growth (Martinez-Alier et al . 2010). Advocates of de-growth advocate that the transition to sustainability will be aided by pursuing de-growth instead of economic growth (D’Alisa et al. 2015, Khamara and Kronenbeg 2020). At the same time some ecological economists argue for a rejection of the anthropocentrism they claim is central to neoclassical economics and support embracing a new ecological economics that explicitly incorporates an ecological ethic (Washington and Maloney 2020). Having drawn attention to the huge impact of the human ecological footprint, Rees has gone on to gloomily ponder the kind of economics needed to deal with a situation in which “we are currently ‘financing’ economic growth by liquidating the biophysical systems upon which humanity ultimately depends” (Rees 2020, 1). He concludes that “the mainstream fantasy…...this obsession with growth, cannot end well” ( ibid. , 6). Assuming that some forms of consumption are important to a satisfying human life, some writers have explored the idea that developing more modes of virtual consumption, while reducing physical forms of consumption, might be a significant contribution to sustainable lifestyles (Pike and DesRoches 2020).

The preservation of opportunities to live well, or at least to have a minimally acceptable level of well being, is at the heart of population ethics and many contemporary conceptions of sustainability. Many people believe such opportunities for the existing younger generations, and also for the yet to arrive future generations, to be under threat from continuing environmental destruction, including loss of fresh water resources, continued clearing of wild areas, decreasing biodiversity and a changing climate thus raising questions not only about sustainability but also about environmental justice (see Gonzalez, Atapattu, and Seck 2021). Of these, climate change has come to prominence as an area of intense policy and political debate, to which applied philosophers and ethicists were slow to contribute (Heath 2021). An early exploration of the topic by John Broome shows how the economics of climate change could not be divorced from considerations of intergenerational justice and ethics (Broome 1992), and this has set the scene for subsequent discussions and analyses (see the entry on climate justice ). More than a decade later, when Stephen Gardiner analyses the state of affairs surrounding climate change in an article entitled “A Perfect Moral Storm” (Gardiner 2006), his starting point is also that ethics plays a fundamental role in all discussions of climate policy. But he argues that even if difficult ethical and conceptual questions facing climate change (such as the so-called “ non-identity problem ” along with the notion of historic injustices ) could be answered, it would still be close to politically and socially impossible to formulate, let alone to enforce, policies and action plans to deal effectively with climate change. This is due to the multi-faceted nature of a problem that involves vast numbers of agents and players. At a global level, there is first of all the practical problem of motivating shared responsibilities (see the entry on moral motivation ) in part due to the dispersed nature of greenhouse gas emissions which makes the effects of increasing levels of atmospheric carbon and methane not always felt most strongly in the regions where they originate. Add to this the fact that there is an un-coordinated and also dispersed network of agents—both individual and corporate—responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, and that there are no effective institutions that can control and limit them. But this tangle of issues constitutes, Gardiner argues, only one strand in the skein of quandaries that confronts us. There is also the fact that by and large only the future (and perhaps the current younger) generations will carry the brunt of the impacts of climate change, explaining why so many people in the current generations seem not to have strong enough incentive to act. Finally, he argues it is evident that mainstream political, economic, and ethical models are not up to the task of reaching global consensus, and in many cases not even national consensus, on how best to design and implement fair climate policies. Some consequentialist theorists, however, have argued that a form of rule consequentialism can take account of the interests of future generations who may be inhabiting a "broken world" (Mulgan 2011, 2017). Mulgan argues that by imagining a broken world of limited resources and precarious human survival, it may be possible to devise an ideal moral ooutlook that differs from the ideal code of many rule consequentialists who usually presuppose that the future will be just like the present.

However, Gardiner takes a pessimistic view of the prospects for progress on climate issues. His view includes pessimism about technical solutions, such as geoengineering as the antidote to climate problems, echoing the concerns of others that large scale interventions in—and further domination of—nature may turn out to be an even worse climate catastrophe (Gardiner 2011, ch 11, Jamieson 1996 and see also the papers in Gardiner and McKinnon 2020). A key point in Gardiner’s analysis is that the problem of climate change involves a tangle of issues, the complexity of which conspires to encourage buck-passing, weakness of will, distraction and procrastination, “mak[ing] us extremely vulnerable to moral corruption” ( ibid ., 397; cf. Gardiner 2011; see also the concept of “wicked problem” in Brennan 2004). Because of the grave risk of serious harm to current and future generations of people and other living things, our failure to take timely mitigating actions on climate issues can be seen as a major moral failing, especially in the light of our current knowledge and understanding of the problem (IPCC 2021).

In a related reinterpretation of a classic study in psychology, Russell and Bolton re-examine Milgram’s classic “obedience studies” (see the entry on the concept of evil , section 4.5). In these experiments, Milgram explored the conditions under which ordinary people would be disposed to perform evil actions (such as administering electric shocks to strangers). Russell and Bolton argue that, when properly interpreted, Milgram’s studies show that political, administrative and bureaucratic structures can lead to a general and tacit agreement for those in an advantaged situation to harm the interests of those less powerful. In Russell and Bolton’s new interpretation of the Milgram experiments, those who are in the advantaged situation are those living comfortably in wealthy countries, while the powerless are distant strangers and members of future generations. Corporate structures and long organizational chains, Russell and Bolton argue, encourage inaction, denial and diffusion of responsibility that typifies both the common responses to climate change and also the behaviour of participants in Milgram’s experiments. They conjecture that Milgram’s work thus explains the phenomenon of what they call “responsibility ambiguity” that underlies hesitancy to take action on climate change (Russell and Bolton 2019, and see also Rees 2020). While they make no mention of the work of Hannah Arendt, their analysis recalls some of Arendt’s analysis of the banality of evil (see the entry on the concept of evil , section 2.3). There appears to be scope for more empirical research and interdisciplinary study on topics such as the diffusion of responsibility and denialism. A similar analysis might also apply to inaction in the face of declining biodiversity.

John Broome tries to show some of the ways that one form of climate denialism takes, when it uses ingenious but, Broome claims, flawed reasoning to depict individuals as making no significant contribution to climate change (Broome 2019, see also McKinnon 2014). A stronger form of denialism refuses to acknowledge the fact of anthropogenic climate change at all. A puzzle remains over why much ingenuity is expended on such denial in the face of the urgent problems that now confront the world (see the entry on science and pseudo-science ). In response, some argue that the persisting denialism over the reality of the environmental and climate crises may be a product of shame or guilt over the human treatment of natural things and systems (Aaltola 2021). These emotions may interfere with and block a much-needed and honest confrontation of a frightening situation—even if it is one humans have brought upon themselves. There is also a well-known psychological phenomenon of “knowing but not knowing” which can contribute, along with other factors, to denialism (Norgaard 2011, 404, and compare the classic studyof this in Cohen 2001, ch. 2). Many countries’ initial and ongoing response to the 2020s COVID-19 pandemic, for example, appears to show that denialism, typically accompanied by widespread misinformation and unfounded hypotheses about conspiracies, may be a very human way to react in the face of a global catastrophe. Using factor analysis studies, some psychologists have claimed to demonstrate that anti-scientific views have close association with beliefs in creationism and animism. Further, they conjecture that purposive or teleological thinking is the gateway to such associations (Wagner-Egger et al. 2018). Note that the role of teleological notions in biology remains contested and subject to further research. Other research claims to show that people simply reject scientific findings that make them uncomfortable and threaten their worldviews (see Lewandowsky and Oberauer 2016).

Writers have also tried to make sense of why so much misinformation about climate change and other catastrophes is so widespread. On the part of some theorists (see McIntyre 2018), the blame for the evils of a “post-truth” era has been laid at the feet of some postmodern thinkers who endorse social epistemology . But social constructionist writers have their own diagnosis of the social forces that have given rise to the “new climatic regime” (Latour 2017), which combines science denialism and what has be called “out-of-this-world”—fanciful and over-optimistic—thinking about the human prospects for escaping climate catastrophe. One suggested remedy for these cognitve failings is to encourage the recognition that natural systems respond to human action and are not merely the material resources for economic development. It has been proposed that awareness that humans and the natural systems that support them share a dwelling place might pave the way to a new kind of “terrestrial politics” (Lenton and Latour 2018, Latour 2018). The shape of such a politics is still under-theorized, and could take many forms (Mann and Wainwright 2018). Meanwhile, some animal ethicists blame “speciesist anthropocentrism” (see the entry on the moral status of animals ) for blinding humanity to the evils of its overpopulation and denialism (Almiron and Tafalla 2019). Whatever the future holds, many thinkers insist that solving the problem of climate change is an essential ingredient of sustainability and that the alternative to decisive action may result in the degrading not only of nature and natural systems, but also of human dignity itself (see Nanda (ed.) 2011, especially chapters by Heyd, Balafrej, Gutrich and Brennan and Lo, see also section 3.4 of the entry on human rights ). As humanity faces an uncertain future of declining biodiversity and increasing extreme weather events driven by escalating planetary heating—causing suffering and alienation for humans and non-humans alike—the moral challenges listed at the start of this entry seem more pressing than ever.

Supplementary Document: Pathologies of Environmental Crisis: Theories and Empirical Research

• Aaltola, Elisa, 2021. “Defensive over Climate Change? Climate Shame as a Method of Moral Cultivation”, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics , 34. doi:10.1007/s10806-021-09844-5
• Almiron, N. and Tafalla, M., 2019. “Rethinking the Ethical Challenge in the Climate Deadlock: Anthropocentrism, Ideological Denial and Animal Liberation”, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics , 32: 255–67.
• Abram, D., 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous, New York: Vintage Books.
• Agapow, P.M., Bininda-Emonds, O.R.P., Crandall, K.A., and Gittleman, J.L., Mac, G.M., Marshall, J.C. and Purvis, A. 2004. “The impact of species concept on biodiversity studies”, Quarterly Review of Biology , 79: 161–79.
• Agar, N., 2001. Life’s Intrinsic Value , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Aiken, W., 1984. “Ethical Issues in Agriculture”, in T. Regan (ed) Earthbound: New Introductory Essays in Environmental Ethics , New York: Random House, pp. 274–88.
• Akamani, K., 2020. “Integrating Deep Ecology and Adaptive Governance for Sustainable Development: Implications for Protected Areas Management”, Sustainability , 12: 5757; doi:10.3990/su12145757
• Allison, S. K., 2004. “What Do We Mean When We Talk About Ecological Restoration?” Ecological Restoration , 22: 281-286.
• Andersson, E., Barthel, S., Borgström, S., Colding, J., Elmqvist, T., Folke, C., Gren, Å., 2014. “Reconnecting cities to the biosphere: stewardship of green infrastructure and urban ecosystem services”. Ambio , 43: 445–453.
• Anker, P. 1999. “From Scepticism to Dogmatism and Back: Remarks on the History of Deep Ecology”, in Witoszek and Brennan 1999, pp. 431–43.
• Anker, P. and Witoszek, N., 1998. “The Dream of the Biocentric Community and the Structure of Utopias”, Worldviews , 2: 239–56.
• Aquinas, T., Summa Contra Gentiles , trans. V. J. Bourke, London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.
• Aristotle, Politics , trans. E. Barker, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948.
• Attfield, R., 1987. A Theory of Value and Obligation , London: Croom Helm.
• –––, 1998. “Saving Nature, Feeding People, and Ethics”, Environmental Values , 7: 291–304.
• Attfield, R., 2001. “Christianity”, Chapter 7 in D. Jamieson (ed.), A Companion to Environmental Philosophy , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Barry, J., 1999. Rethinking Green Politics , London: Sage.
• Beckerman, W., 1995. “How Would You Like Your Sustainability, Sir? Weak or Strong? A Reply to my Critics”, Environmental Values , 3: 160–79.
• Beeson, Mark, 2010. “The Coming of Enviromental Authoritarianism”, Environmental Politics , 19: 276–94.
• Bentham, J., 1789. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948.
• Benton, Ted, 1993. Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice , London: Verso.
• Bernstein, Jay, 2001. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Berry, R. J., 2018. Environmental Attitudes Through Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Biermann, F., and Kim, R.E., 2020. “The Boundaries of the Planetary Boundary Framework: A Critical Appraisal of Approaches to Define a ‘Safe Operating Space’ for Humanity”, Annual Review of Environment and Resources , 45: 497–521. doi:10.1146/annurevenviron-012320-080337
• Birch, T., 1990. “The Incarceration of Wilderness: Wilderness Areas as Prisons”, Environmental Ethics , 12: 3–26.
• Bookchin, M., 1980. Toward an Ecological Society , Montreal: Black Rose Books.
• –––, 1982. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy , Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books.
• –––, 1987. “Social Ecology Versus Deep Ecology”, Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project , numbers 4, 5; reprinted in Witoszek and Brennan 1999, pp. 281–301.
• –––, 1990. The Philosophy of Social Ecology , Montreal: Black Rose Books.
• Boyd, Heather, 1999. “Christianity and the environment in the American public”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion , 38: 36–44.
• Bradley, B., 2006. ‘Two Concepts of Intrinsic Value’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice , 9: 111–30
• Brady, E. and Phemister, P. (eds.), 2012. Human-Environment Relations: Transformative Values in Theory and Practice , Dordrecht: Springer.
• Brady, E., 2014. “Aesthetic Value, Ethics and Climate Change”, Environmental Values , 23: 551–70
• Brennan, A., 1984. “The Moral Standing of Natural Objects”, Environmental Ethics , 6: 35–56
• –––, 1995. “Ethics, Ecology and Economics”, Biodiversity and Conservation , 4: 798–811.
• –––, 1998a. “Poverty, Puritanism and Environmental Conflict”, Environmental Values , 7: 305–31.
• –––, 1998b. “Bioregionalism—a Misplaced Project?”, Worldviews , 2: 215–37.
• –––, 1999. “Comment: Pluralism and Deep Ecology”, in Witoszek and Brennan 1999.
• –––, 2004. “Biodiversity and Agricultural Landscapes: Can the Wicked Policy Problems Be Solved?”, Pacific Conservation Biology , 10: 124–44.
• –––, 2014 [1988]. Thinking About Nature , London Routledge.
• Brennan, A. and Lo, Y.S., 2007. “Two Conceptions of Dignity: Honour and Self-determination”, in N. Lickiss and J. Malpas (eds), Perspectives on Human Dignity , Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 43–58.
• –––, 2010. Understanding Environmental Philosophy , London: Routledge.
• Broome, J., 1992. Counting the Cost of Global Warming , Isle of Harris, UK: White Horse Press.
• –––, 2019. “Against Denialism”, The Monist , 102: 110–29.
• Callicott, J.B., 1980. “Animal Liberation, A Triangular Affair”, reprinted in Callicott 1989, pp. 15–38.
• –––, 1985. “Intrinsic Value, Quantum Theory, and Environmental Ethics”, reprinted in Callicott 1989, pp. 157–74.
• –––, 1988. “Animal liberation and Environmental Ethics: Back Together Again”, reprinted in Callicott 1989, pp. 49–59.
• –––, 1989. In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy , Albany: SUNY Press.
• –––, 1991. “The Wilderness Idea Revisited: The Sustainable Development Alternative”, in J. B. Callicott and M.P. Nelson (eds), The Great New Wilderness Debate , Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 337–66.
• –––, 1999. Beyond the Land Ethic: More Essays in Environmental Philosophy , Albany: SUNY Press.
• –––, 2013. Thinking Like a Planet: The Land Ethic and Earth Ethic , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Callicott, J. Baird, and Ames, Roger T., 1989. Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought , Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Carson, R., 1963. Silent Spring , London: Hamish Hamilton.
• Cheney, J., 1989. “Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative”, Environmental Ethics , 11: 117–34.
• Clark, J., 1997. “A Social Ecology”, Capitalism Nature Socialism , 8: 3–33; reprinted in M. Zimmerman et al., Environmental Philosophy , 2nd edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Clark, J. and Martin, C., 1996. Liberty, Equality, Geography: The Social Thought of Elisée Reclus , Littleton, CO: Aigis Publications.
• Clark, S.R.L., 1977. The Moral Status of Animals , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Cohen, M.P., 1984. The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness , Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
• Cohen S., 2001. States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering , New York: Wiley.
• Collins, S., 1974. A Different Heaven and Earth , Valley Forge: Judson Press.
• Crisp, R., 1998. “Animal Liberation is not an Environmental Ethic: A Response to Dale Jamieson”, Environmental Values , 7: 476–8.
• D’Alisa, G., Demaria, F and Kailis, G. (eds.), 2015. Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era , London: Routledge.
• Daly, H. E., 1991. Steady State Economics , Washington, DC: Island Press
• –––, and Farley, J., 2011 Ecological Economics , second edition, Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
• Dasgupta, P., 2001. Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment , New York: Oxford University Press
• d’Eaubonne, F., 1974. Le Feminisme ou la Mort , Paris: P. Horay
• de Shalit, A., 1994. Why Does Posterity Matter? , London: Routledge.
• –––, 1996. “Ruralism or Environmentalism?” Environmental Values , 5: 47–58.
• deLaplante, K. and Picasso, V., 2011. “The Biodiversity-Ecosystem Function Debate in Ecology”, in K. deLaplante, B. Brown and K.A. Peacock (eds.), Philosophy of Ecology , Amsterdam: Elsevier.
• Dereniowska, M., and Matzke, J., 2014. “Introduction: Interdisciplinary Foundations for Environmental and Sustainability Ethics”, Ethics in Progress , 5: 7–32.
• Devall, B., and Sessions, G., 1985. Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered , Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith.
• Diesendorf, M. and Hamilton, C., 1997. Human Ecology, Human Economy , St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin.
• Dixon, B., 2017. “Value Pluralism and Consistency Maximisation in the Writings of Aldo Leopold: Moving Beyond Callicott’s Interpretation of the Land Ethic”, Environmental Values , 26: 269–95.
• Dobson, A., 1990. Green Political Thought , London: Harper Collins.
• Dobson, A. (ed.), 1999. Fairness and Futurity: Essays on Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice , Oxford: Oxford University Press
• Dominick, R., 1998. “Capitalism, Communism and Environmental Protection: Lessons from the German Experience”, Environmental History , 3: 311–32.
• Dryzek, J.S., 1997. The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Dunlap, R.E, and van Liere, K.D., 1978. “The New Environmental Paradigm: a proposed measuring instrument and preliminary results”, Journal of Environmental Education , 9: 10–9.
• Dunlap, R.E., van Liere, K.D., Mertig, A. and Jones, R.E., 2000. “Measuring Endorsement of the New Ecological Paradigm: a Revised NEP Scale”, Journal of Social Issues , 56: 425–42.
• Du Toit, J.T., and Pettorelli, N., 2019. “The Differences Between Rewilding and Restoring an Ecologically Degraded Landscape”, Journal of Applied Ecology 56:2467–2471.
• Eckberg, D.L. and Blocker, T.J., 1996. “Christianity, environmentalism, and the theoretical problem of fundamentalism”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion , 35: 343–55.
• Eckersley, R., 1992. Environmentalism and Political Theory , London: UCL Press.
• Ehrlich, P.R., 1968. The Population Bomb , New York: Ballantine Books.
• Ehrlich, P.R. and Ehrlich, A.H., 2009. “The Population Bomb Revisited”, Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development , 1: 63–71.
• Elliot, R., 1982. “Faking Nature”, Inquiry 25: 81–93.
• –––, 1997. Faking Nature , London: Routledge.
• Elliot, R. and Gare, A. (eds.), 1983. Environmental Philosophy: A Collection of Readings , Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
• Feinberg, J., 1974. “The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations”, in W. T. Blackstone (ed.), Philosophy and Environmental Crisis , Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 43–68.
• Ferré, F., 1996. “Persons in Nature: Toward an Applicable and Unified Environmental Ethics”, Ethics and the Environment , 1: 15–25.
• Ferry, L., 1995. The New Ecological Order , trans. C. Volk, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
• Fox, W., 1984. “Deep Ecology: A New Philosophy of Our Time?” The Ecologist , 14: 194–200.
• –––, 1995. Toward a transpersonal ecology: Developing new foundations for environmentalism , Albany: State University Of New York Press.
• –––, 2007. A Theory of General Ethics: Human Relationships, Nature and the Built Environment , Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
• Fraser, C., 2009. Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution , New York: Metropolitan Books.
• Freudenstein, J.V., Broe, M.B., Folk, R.A., Sinn, B.T., 2017. “Biodiversity and the Species Concept—Lineages are not Enough”, Systematic Biology , 66: 644–656
• Gaard, G. (ed.), 1993. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature , Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
• Gardiner, S., 2006. “A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption”, Environmental Values , 15: 397–413.
• –––, 2011. A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change , Oxford; Oxford University Press.
• Gardiner, S., and McKinnon, C. (eds.), 2020. “The Justice and Legitimacy of Geoengineering”, Special Issue, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy , 23(5).
• Garrard, G. (ed.), 2014. The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Gonzalez, C.G., Atapattu, S., Seck, S.L. (eds.), 2021. The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Goodin, R.E., 1992. Green Political Theory , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Goulson, D., 2021. Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse , London: Jonathan Cape.
• Greeley, A.M., 1993. “Religion and attitudes toward the environment”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion , 32: 19–28.
• Green, K., 1994. “Freud, Wollstonecraft and Ecofeminism”, Environmental Ethics , 16: 117–34.
• Grey, W., 1993. “Anthropocentrism and Deep Ecology”, Australialasian Journal of Philosophy , 71: 463–75.
• Grosz, E., 1989. Sexual Subversions , London: Allen and Unwin.
• Gruen, L. and Jamieson, D. (eds.), 1994. Reflecting on Nature , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Guha, R., 1989. “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique”, Environmental Ethics , 11: 71–83.
• –––, 1996. “Lewis Mumford, the Forgotten American Environmentalist: An Essay in Rehabilitation”, in D. Macauley (ed.), Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology , New York: Guilford Press.
• –––, 1999. “Radical American Environmentalism Revisited”, in Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999, pp. 473–9
• Hardin, G., 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science , 162: 1243–48.
• Harvey, G., 2005. Animism: Respecting the Living World , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Hayward, T. and O’Neill, J. (eds.), 1997. Justice, Property and the Environment: Social and Legal Perspectives , Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Co., 1997.
• Heath, J., 2021. “The Failure of Traditional Environmental Philosophy”, Res Publica ; available online .
• Hettinger, N and Throop, B., 1999. “Refocusing Ecocentrism”, Environmental Ethics , 21: 3–21
• Hickel, J., 2020. Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World , Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• Hill, Thomas, 1983. “Ideals of Human Excellences and Preserving Natural Environments”, Environmental Ethics 5: 211–24.
• Horkheiner, M. and Adorno, T., 1969. Dialectic of Enlightenment , trans. J. Cumming, New York: Seabury Press 1972.
• Hume, D., 1751. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals , ed. T.L. Beauchamp, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M. I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T. K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, in press, IPCC 2021 available online
• Jackson, T., 2017. Prosperity without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow , second edition, London, Routledge.
• Jamieson, D., 1996. “Intentional Climate Change”, Climatic Change , 33: 326–36.
• –––, 1998. “Animal Liberation is an Environmental Ethic”, Environmental Values , 7: 41–57.
• –––, 2001. A Companion to Environmental Philosophy , Oxford: Blackwell 2001.
• –––, 2002. Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Kant, I., Lectures on Ethics , trans. P. Heath, eds. P. Heath and J.B. Schneewind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Karliner, J., 1997. The Corporate Planet , San Francisco: Sierra Club Books
• Katz, E., 1991. “Restoration and Redesign: The Ethical Significance of Human Intervention in Nature”, Restoration and Management Notes , 9: 90–6.
• –––, 1997. Nature as Subject , New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
• –––, 2012. “Further Adventures in the Case Against Restoration”, Environmental Ethics , 34: 67–97.
• –––, 2021. “The Holocaust as an Environmental Problem”, Journal of Genocide Research , first online 02 June 2021. doi:10.1080/14623528.2021.1924588
• Kheel, M., 1985. “The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair”, Environmental Ethics , 7: 135–49
• Khmara, Y., and Kronenberg, J., 2020. “Degrowth in the Context of Sustainability Transitions: In Search of Common Ground”, Journal of Cleaner Production ; doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.122072.
• Kimmerer, R. W., 2020. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants , Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• King, R., 2000. “Environmental Ethics and the Built Environment”, Environmental Ethics , 22: 115–31
• King, Y., 1989a. “The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology”, in J. Plant (ed.), Healing the Wounds , Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 18–28.
• –––, 1989b. “Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology, and Nature/Culture Dualism”, in A. M. Jaggar and S. R. Bordo (eds.) Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstruction of Being and Knowing , New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 115–41.
• Klein, Naomi, 2019. On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal , Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• Komonen, A., Halme, P., and Kotiaho, J.S., 2019. “Alarmist By Bad Design: Strongly Popularized Unsubstantiated Claims Undermine Credibility of Conservation Science”, Rethinking Ecology , 4: 17–19 doi:10.3897/rethinkingecology.4.34440
• Korten, D., 1999. The Post-CorporateWorld , Hartford: Kumarian Press
• Kramm, M., 2020. “When a River Becomes a Person”, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities , 21: 307–319.
• Ladkin, D., 2005. “Does ‘Restoration’ Necessarily Imply the Domination of Nature?”, Environmental Values , 14: 203–19.
• Lawton, G., 2019. “The rise of real eco-fascism”, New Scientist , 243(3243): 24. doi:10.1016/S0262-4079(19)31529-5
• Latour, Bruno, 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime , New York: John Wiley and Soins.
• –––, 2018. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime , Paris: Polity.
• Lenton, T. and Latour, B., 2018. “Gaia 2.0: Could humans add some level of self-awareness to Earth’s self-regulation?”, Science , 361: 1066–68
• Leopold, A., 1949. A Sand County Almanac , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., 2016. “Motivated Rejection of Science”, Current Directions in Psychological Science , 25: 217-222.
• Lewis, D.K., 1989. “Dispositional Theories of Value”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary Volume), 63: 113–37.
• Light, A., 1996. “Callicott and Næss on Pluralism”, Inquiry , 39: 273–294.
• –––, 2001. “The Urban Blindspot in Environmental Ethics”, Environmental Politics , 10: 7–35.
• Light, A. and Katz, E., 1996. Environmental Pragmatism , London: Routledge.
• Light, Andrew and Rolston, Holmes (eds.), 2003. Environmental Ethics: An Anthology , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Light, Andrew and de-Shalit, Avner (eds.), 2003. Moral and Political Reasoning in Environmental Practice , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• List, P. C., 1993. Radical Environmentalism , Belmont: Wadsworth.
• Lo, Y. S., 1999. “Natural and Artifactual: Restored Nature as Subject”, Environmental Ethics , 21: 247–66.
• –––, 2001. “The Land Ethic and Callicott’s Ethical System (1980–2001): An Overview and Critique”, Inquiry , 44: 331–58.
• –––, 2006. “Making and Finding Values in Nature”, Inquiry , 49: 123–47.
• Lo, Y S and Brennan, A., 2013. “The Last Man”, in J. Huss (ed.), Planet of the Apes and Philosophy , Chicago: Open Court, pp. 265–78.
• Luke, Timothy W., 1997. Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Maier, D.S., 2012. What’s So Good About Biodiversity? A Call For Better Reasoning About Nature’s Value , Dordrecht: Springer.
• Malm, Andreas, 2018. The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World , London: Verso Books.
• Mann, G., and Wainwright, J., 2018. Climate Leviathan: A political theory of our planetary future , London: Verso Books.
• Mason Dentinger, R.M., Woods, A., 2018. “Introduction to ‘Working Across Species’”, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences , 40(2): 30. doi: 10.1007/s40656-018-0197-y
• Martinez-Alier, J., 2002. The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation d,. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
• Martinez-Alier, J., Pascal, U., Vivien, F-D., and Zacca, E., 2010. “Sustainable de-growth: Mapping the context, criticisms and future prospects of an emergent paradigm”, Ecological Economics , 69: 1741–7
• Mathews, F., 2003. For Love of Matter , Albany: State University of New York Press.
• –––, 2005. Reinhabiting Reality: Towards a Recovery of Culture , Sydney: UNSW Press.
• –––, 2016. “From biodiversity-based conservation to an ethic of bio-proportionality”, Biological Conservation , 200: 140–48.
• McIntyre, L., 2018. Post-Truth , Cambridge: MIT Press.
• McKinnon, C., 2014. “Climate Change: Against Despair”, Ethics and the Environment , 19: 31-48
• McShane, K., 2014. “The Bearers of Value in Environmental Ethics”, in A. Hiller, R. Ilea and L. Kahn (eds.), Consequentialism and Environmental Ethics , New York: Routledge, pp. 17–34.
• Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J., and Behrens, W.W., 1972. The Limits to Growth , New York: New American Library. available online .
• Mies, M. and Shiva, V., 1993. Ecofeminism , London: Zed Books
• Milgate, M., and Stimson S. C., 2009. After Adam Smith: A Century of Transformation in Politics and Political Economy , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Mill, J.S., 1848. Principles of Political Economy , in J.M. Robson (ed.), Collected Works of John Stuart Mill , Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963ff, vol. 2–3; references by book, chapter, and section number.
• –––, 1874. “On Nature”, in Three Essays on Religion , in J.M. Robson (ed.), Collected Works of John Stuart Mill , Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963ff, vol. 10, pp. 369–489.
• Millstein, R., 2015. “Re-examining the Darwinian Basis of Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic”, Ethics, Policy and Environment , 18: 301–17.
• Minteer, B., 2015. “The Perils of De-extinction”, Minding Nature , 8: 11–17.
• Mittermeier, R.A., Mittermeier, C.G., Brooks, T.M., Pilgrim, J.D., Konstant, W.R., da Fonseca, G.A.B. and Kormos, C., 2003. “Wilderness and biodiversity conservation”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 100: 10309–13.
• Monbiot, G., 2013. Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding , London: Allen Lane.
• Montaigne, M. de, 1991. The Complete Essays , trans. M.A. Screech, Harmondworth: Penguin.
• Morris, James. D. K. and Ruru, Jacinta, 2010. “Giving Voice to Rivers: Legal Personality as a Vehicle for Recognising Indigenous Peoples’ Relationship to Water”, Australian Indigenous Law Review , 14: 49–62.
• Morton, T., 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics , Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
• Muir, J., 1916. A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf , Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Mulgan, T. 2011. Ethics for a Broken World: Reimagining Philosophy After Catastrophe , Durham: Acumen.
• –––, 2017. “How Should Utilitarians Think About the Future?”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 47: Special Issue: Ethics and Future Generations: 290–312; doi:10.1080/00455091.2017.1279517
• Mumford, L., 1934. Technics and Civilization , London: Secker and Warburg.
• –––, 1944. The Condition of Man , New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
• –––, 1961. The City in History , New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich
• Næss, A., 1973. “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement”, Inquiry , 16, reprinted in Sessions 1995, pp. 151–5.
• –––, 1989. Ecology, Community, Lifestyle , trans. and ed. D. Rothenberg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Nanda, V. P. (ed.), 2011. Climate Change and Environmental Ethics , New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
• Nash, R., 1989. The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics , Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
• ––– (ed.), 1990. American Environmentalism: Readings in Conservation History , New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Newman, J.A., Varner, G., and Linquist, S., 2017. Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Norgaard, K. M., 2011. “Ch. 27: Climate denial: emotion, psychology, culture and political economy”, in Dryzek, J.S., Norgaard, R.B. and Scholsberg, D. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Norgaard, R.B., 1994. Development Betrayed: The End of Progress and a Coevolutionary Revisioning of the Future , London: Routledge.
• Norton, B.G. (ed.), 1986. The Preservation of Species , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1987. Why Preserve Natural Variety , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1988. “Commodity, Amenity, and Morality: The Limits of Quantification in Valuing Biodiversity”, in E.O. Wilson (ed.), Biodiversity , Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Science Press, pp. 200–5.
• –––, 1991. Toward Unity Among Environmentalists , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2005. Sustainability: a Philosophy of Adaptive ecosystem Management , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Norton, B.G., Hutchins, M., Stevens, E. and Maple, T.L. (eds.), 1995. Ethics on the Ark , Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
• Novak, B.J., 2018. “De-extinction”, Genes , 9: 548. doi:10.3390/genes9110548
• O’Neill, J., 1992. “The Varieties of Intrinsic Value”, Monist , 75: 119–37.
• –––, 1993. Ecology, Policy and Politics , London: Routledge.
• O’Neill, J., Holland, A. and Light, A., 2008. Environmental Values , London: Routledge.
• Ouderkirk, W. and Hill, J. (eds.), 2002. Land, Value, Community: Callicott and Environmental , Albany: State University of New York.
• Palmer, C., 2003. “Placing Animals in Urban Environmental Ethics”, Journal of Social Philosophy , 34: 64–78.
• Passmore, J., 1974. Man’s Responsibility for Nature , London: Duckworth, 2nd edition, 1980.
• Pew 2018. Majorities See Government Efforts to Protect the Environment as Insufficient , Pew Research Center May 14, 2018; available online .
• Pike, K.R. and DesRoches, C.T., 2020. “Virtual Consumption, Sustainability, and Human Well-Being.” Environmental Values , 29(3): 361–378. doi:10.3197/096327119X15678473650938
• Plumwood, V., 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature , London: Routledge.
• –––, 1999. “Comments: Self-Realization and Man Apart? The Reed-Næss Debate”, in Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999, pp. 206–10.
• –––, 2002. Environmental Culture , London: Routledge
• Porter, G. and Brown, J.W., 1991. Global Environmental Politics , Boulder: Westview Press.
• Poushter, J, and Huang, C., 2019. “Climate Change Still Seen as the Top Global Threat, but Cyberattacks a Rising Concern”, Pew Research Center Report , February 2019; available online
• Redclift, M., 2005. “Sustainable Development (1987–2005): An Oxymoron Comes of Age”, Sustainable Development , 13: 212–27.
• Rees, W.E., 1992. “Ecological footprints and appropriated carrying capacity: What urban economics leaves out”, Environment and Urbanization , 4: 121–130.
• –––, 2020. “Ecological economics for humanity’s plague phase”, Ecological Economics 169: doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106519
• Regan, T., 1983. The Case for Animal Rights , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Regan, T. and Singer, P. (eds.), 1976. Animal Rights and Human Obligations , Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
• Richards, R., 2010. The Species Problem: A Philosophical Analysis , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å. et al ., 2009. “Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity”, Ecology and Society , 14: 32. Available Rockström et al. available online
• Rolston, H., 1975. “Is There an Ecological Ethic?”, Ethics , 85: 93–109.
• –––, 1988. Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World , Indiana: Temple University Press.
• –––, 1989. Philosophy Gone Wild , New York: Prometheus Books.
• –––, 1996. “Feeding People versus Saving Nature?”, in W. Aiken and H. LaFollette (eds.) World Hunger and Morality , Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, pp. 248–67
• Rousseau, J.J., 1782. Reveries of the Solitary Walker , trans. P. France, Penguin Books, 1979.
• Routley, R., 1973. “Is there a need for a new, an environmental ethic?” Proceedings of the 15th World congress of Philosophy , 1: 205–10, Sophia: Sophia Press (see also Sylvan, R.).
• Routley, R. and Routley, V., 1980. “Human Chauvinism and Environmental Ethics” in Mannison, D., McRobbie, M.A., and Routley, R. (eds.) Environmental Philosophy , Canberra: Australian National University, Research School of Social Sciences, pp. 96–189.
• Sagoff, M., 1984. “Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce”, Osgoode Hall Law Journal , 22: 297–307.
• –––, 1988. The Economy of the Earth , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2001. “Consumption”, in Jamieson 2001.
• Sánchez-Bayo, F., and Wyckhuys, K.A.G., 2019. “ Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers”, Biological Conservation , 232: 8–27.
• Sandler, R., 2007. Character and Environment: A Virtue-Oriented Approach to Environmental Ethics , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Sarkar, S., 2005. Biodiversity and Environmental Philosophy: An Introduction , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Schmidtz, D. and Willott, E., 2002. Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Sessions, G. (ed.), 1995. Deep Ecology for the 21st Century , Boston: Shambhala 1995.
• Shahar, D.C., 2015. “Rejecting Eco-Authoritarianism, Again”. Environmental Values , 24: 345-366
• Shaiko, R.G., 1987. “Religion, politics, and environmental concern: A powerful mix of passions”, Social Science Quarterly , 68: 244–262.
• Shrader-Frechette, K., 1984. Science Policy, Ethics and Economic Methodology , Dordrecht: D Reidel
• –––, 1987. “The real risks of risk-cost-benefit analysis”, in P.T. Durbin (ed.), Technology and Responsibility , Dordrecht: D Reidel, pp. 343–57.
• –––, 1996. “Individualism, Holism, and Environmental Ethics”, Ethics and the Environment , 1: 55–69.
• –––, 2002. Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Shue, H., 2001. “Climate”, in Jamieson 2001.
• Siipi, H., 2008. “Dimensions of Naturalness”, Ethics and the Environment , 13: 71–103.
• –––, 2011. “Non Backward-Looking Naturalness as an Environmental Value”, Ethics, Policy and the Environment , 14: 329–44.
• Siipi, H. and Finkelman, L., 2017. “The Extinction and De-extinction of Species”, Philosophy and Technology 30: 427-441.
• Singer, P., 1975. Animal Liberation , New York: Random House.
• –––, 1993. Practical Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition.
• Sneddon, C., Howarth , R. and Norgaard R. B., 2006. “Sustainable Development in a Post-Brundtland World”, Ecological Economics , 57: 253–68.
• Stone, A., 2006. “Adorno and the Disenchantment of Nature”, Philosophy and Social Criticism , 32: 231–253.
• Stone, C.D., 1972. “Should Trees Have Standing?”, Southern California Law Review , 45: 450–501; later published with a descriptive introduction as Should Trees Have Standing? , Los Angeles: Kaufmann, 1974, and reprinted in Schmidtz and Willott 2002.
• Stretton, H., 1976. Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Svoboda, T., 2019. Duties Regarding Nature: A Kantian Environmental Ethic , London, Routledge.
• Sylvan, R. and Bennett, D., 1994. The Greening of Ethics , Cambridge: White Horse Press.
• Taylor, B. and Zimmerman, M., 2005. “Deep Ecology”, in B. Taylor (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Nature , London: Continuum.
• Taylor, B., Van Wieren, G. and Zaleha, B. D., 2016. “Lynn White jr, and the greening-of-religion hypothesis”, Conservation Biology , 30: 1000-1009
• Taylor, P., 1981. “The Ethics of Respect for Nature”, Environmental Ethics , 3: 197–218.
• –––, 1986. Respect for Nature , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Thayer, Jr., R.L., 2003. LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Thompson, P., 2001. “Land and Water”, in Jamieson 2001.
• Tilman, D., 2000. “Causes, consequences and ethics of biodiversity”, Nature , 405: 208–11.
• UN, 1992. The Convention on Biological Diversity , United Nations. available online .
• Van der Sluijs, J.P., Vaage, N.S., 2016. “Pollinators and Global Food Security: the Need for Holistic Global Stewardship”, Food Ethics , 1: 75–91; doi:10.1007/s41055-016-0003-z
• Van Wyck, P.C., 1997. Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing Human Subject , New York: SUNY Press.
• Varner, G., 1998. In Nature’s Interests? Interests, Animal Rights, and Environmental Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press
• –––, 2000. “Sentientism”, in D. Jamieson (ed.) A Companion to Environmental Philosophy , Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 192–203.
• Vogel, S., 1996. Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory , Albany: State University of New York Press.
• –––, 2015. Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy After the End of Nature , Boston: MIT Press
• Wackernagel, M., Galli, A., Hanscom, L., Lin, D., Mailhes, L., Drummond, T., 2018. “Ecological Footprint Accounts: Principles”, in Routledge Handbook of Sustainability Indicators , Simon Bell and Stephen Morse (eds.), London: Routledge, ch. 16.
• Wagner-Egger, P, Delouvée, S., Gauvrit, N., Dieguez, S., 2018, “Creationism and conspiracism share a common teleological bias”, Current Biology , 28: R847–R870. available online
• Warren, K.J., 1987. “Feminism and Ecology: Making Connections”, Environmental Ethics , 9: 3–21.
• –––, 1990. “The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism”, Environmental Ethics , 12: 125–46.
• –––, 1999. “Ecofeminist Philosophy and Deep Ecology”, in Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999, pp. 255–69.
• Warren, K.J. (ed.), 1994. Ecological Feminism , London: Routledge.
• Washington, H., and Maloney, M., 2020. “The need for ecological ethics in a new ecological economics”, Ecological Economics , 169; doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106478
• WCED 1987. Our Common Future , United Nations General Assembly, Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. WCED 1987 available online .
• Wensveen, Louke van, 2000. Dirty Virtues: The Emergence of Ecological Virtue Ethics , Amherst, NY: Humanity.
• White, K., 2015. “How Similar Are Indigenous North American and Leopoldian Environmental Ethics?”, SSRN , revised version published online 3 Jun 2015. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2022038
• White, L., 1967. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”, Science , 155: 1203–7; reprinted in Schmidtz and Willott 2002.
• Whitney, E., 1993. “Lynn White, Ecotheology, and History.” Environmental Ethics , 15: 151–69.
• Williams, B., 1992. “Must a Concern for the Environment be Centred on Human Beings?”, reprinted in his Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995: 233–40.
• Wilson, E.O., 1992. The Diversity of Life , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Witoszek, N., 1997. “Arne Næss and the Norwegian Nature Tradition”, Worldviews , 1: 57–73.
• Witoszek, N. and Brennan, A. (eds.), 1999. Philosophical Dialogues: Arne Næss and the Progress of Eco-Philosophy , New York: Rowan and Littlefield.
• Woodrum, E. and Hoban, T., 1994. “Theology and religiosity effects on environmentalism”, Review of Religious Research , 35: 193–206.
• Zaheva, B.D. and Szasz, A., 2015. “Why conservative Christians don’t believe in climate change”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists . doi:10.1177/0096340215599789
• Zimmerman, M., 1994. Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• The International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE)
• International Association for Environmental Philosophy (IAEP)
• Center for Environmental Philosophy
• Centre for Applied Ethics
• Schwartz, P. and Randall, D., 2003. “ An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and its Implications for United States National Security , download from climate.org.

aesthetics: environmental | animals, moral status of | communitarianism | consequentialism | critical theory | ecology | ecology: biodiversity | ethics: virtue | feminist philosophy, interventions: ethics | globalization | justice: intergenerational | metaethics | panpsychism | respect | value: intrinsic vs. extrinsic

Acknowledgments

The authors are deeply grateful to the following people who gave generously of their time and advice to help shape the final structure of this entry: Clare Palmer, Mauro Grün, Lori Gruen, Gary Varner, William Throop, Patrick O’Donnell, Thomas Heyd, Dale Jamieson and Edward N. Zalta.

Copyright © 2021 by Andrew Brennan < A . Brennan @ latrobe . edu . au > Norva Y. S. Lo < norvayslo @ gmail . com >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Environmental Protection — Environmental Ethics

Essays on Environmental Ethics

Explore the profound relationship between humanity and the natural world with our engaging collection of essays on environmental ethics. This thought-provoking anthology navigates through the philosophical underpinnings, challenges, and moral responsibilities we bear towards our environment.

Complexities of Environmental Ethics

Our environmental ethics essays provide a deep dive into the ethical principles guiding our interaction with the Earth's ecosystems. From conservation and sustainability to the rights of non-human entities, these essays cover a broad spectrum of issues at the heart of contemporary environmental debates.

Environmental Ethics: A Call to Action

Amidst growing environmental crises, our essays underscore the urgent need for ethical considerations in our decisions and actions. Explore discussions on climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, all through the lens of ethical responsibility and stewardship.

Bridging Theory and Practice in Environmental Ethics

These essays not only ponder theoretical frameworks but also examine practical applications and case studies. Discover how environmental ethics shape policies, corporate practices, and individual behaviors towards achieving a more sustainable and just world.

Fostering a Global Ethical Dialogue

By bringing together diverse perspectives on environmental ethics, this collection aims to foster a global dialogue on how to live harmoniously with nature. It invites readers from all walks of life to reflect on their values, question prevailing norms, and contribute to a collective ethical response to environmental challenges.

The Importance of Keeping Exotic Animals

Land ethic summary, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences

+ experts online

Harmonie Water: Case Study

How the idea of preservation of nature can benefit from environmental ethics, review of the environmental protection act, green technology, let us write you an essay from scratch.

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Nanotechnology and Environment

Analysis on climate change and the deterioration of the environment, eco-friendly cleaning practices, the 'polluter pays' principle: an environmental policy perspective, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

Expert-written essays crafted with your exact needs in mind

Recycling in The Automotive Industry

The policy and ethics of the environmental protection agency (epa), stop plundering, start saving, joseph desjardins' perspective on the rapid growth of population and our responsibilities to future ancestors, assessing my ecological footprint: a journey towards sustainability, the impact of china's progress on the environment, the relation and controversy between american diet and environmental ethics, measures to counteract harmful effect of acid rain, the impact of industrialization to the atmosphere and nature, an analysis of the importance of environmental education and awareness, environmental awareness as the only key for our future existence, how to take care of the environment to save our cultures, recycling waste is the best way to improve our environment, what i learned in ethics class: environmental ethics, relevant topics.

• Wildlife Conservation
• Animal Ethics
• Waste Management
• Conservation
• Green Building
• Water Conservation
• Energy Efficiency
• Animal Welfare

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

10.2 Environmental Ethics

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the current environmental and climate crisis.
• Describe different philosophical positions pertaining to humanity’s relationships to the natural environment.
• Identify the circumstances that have led to marginalized groups being especially affected by climate disasters.

Before environmental ethics emerged as an academic discipline in the 1970s, some people were already questioning and rethinking our relationship to the natural world. Aldo Leopold ’s A Sand County Almanac , published in 1949, called upon humanity to expand our idea of community to include the entire natural world, grounding this approach in the belief that all of nature is connected and interdependent in important ways. Rachel Carson ’s Silent Spring (1962) drew attention to the dangers of what were then commonly used commercial pesticides. Carson’s essays drew attention to the far-reaching impacts of human activity and its potential to cause significant harm to the environment and to humanity in turn. These early works inspired the environmentalist movement and sparked debates about how to deal with emerging environmental challenges.

The Emerging Crisis

Humans directly and indirectly change and shape the natural world. Our reliance on fossil fuels to meet our energy needs, for example, releases a key greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), into the air as a result. Greenhouse gases trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere, resulting in changes in the planet’s climate. The two countries that produce the most CO 2 are the United States and China. The United States is the biggest gasoline consumer in the world, using approximately 338 million gallons of gasoline per day. China is the biggest coal consumer, burning approximately three billion tons of coal in 2020—more than half of the worldwide total consumption of coal. Our demand for the energy provided by fossil fuels to power our industries, heat our homes, and make possible travel between distant locations is the main factor that has contributed to increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Human activities have had and continue to have significant impacts on the natural world. The term anthropogenic climate change refers to changes in Earth’s climate caused or influenced by human activity. Severe weather and natural disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity because of the changing climate. As just one example, record-setting wildfires were experienced in recent years in both the United States and Australia. In a span of just five years (2017–2021), the United States experienced four of the most severe and deadliest wildfires in its history, all of which occurred in California: the 2017 Tubbs Fire, the 2018 Camp Fire, the 2020 Bay Area Fire, and the 2021 Dixie Fire. In 2020, Australia experienced its most catastrophic bushfire season when roughly 19 million hectares burned, destroying over three thousand homes and killing approximately 1.25 billion animals.

Environmental ethics is an area of applied ethics that attempts to identify right conduct in our relationship with the nonhuman world. For decades, scientists have expressed concern about the short- and long-term effects that human activities are having on the climate and Earth’s ecosystems. Many philosophers argue that in order to change our behaviors in ways that result in healing of the natural world, we need to change our thinking about the agency and value of the nonhuman elements (including plants, animals, and even entities such as rivers and mountains) that share the globe with us.

Political and Legal Dimensions

The environmental movement began with specific worries about air and water pollution and the effects of pesticides on food crops. Rachel Carson ’s Silent Spring was influential in the creation of nonprofit organizations and government agencies, such as the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), designed to protect human health and the environment. Agencies like the EPA can significantly affect national policy and aspects of the economy related to emissions from factories, use of and disposal of toxic chemicals, and nearly anything else that can adversely impact the environment or human health.

Legal approaches to protecting the environment vary from country to country. The economic drive to produce quickly and efficiently with little to no regulation pits many industrializing countries against the more established economies in Western Europe and North America. China, for example, which currently contributes 43 percent of the world’s annual carbon emissions, is attempting to enact policies that extend beyond mere cleanup to foster regeneration of ecological systems (Gardner 2019). With unaddressed environmental concerns, China is currently facing a loss of financial and intellectual capital as 60 percent of citizens with a net worth of $1.5 million or more have emigrated.

International efforts to address the climate crisis have met with mixed success. In 1985, after scientists discovered that some aerosol sprays were causing holes in the ozone layer in the atmosphere, 20 countries initiated the Montreal Protocol, which banned the use of these sprays. The international community rapidly adopted the agreement, and today 197 countries have signed the treaty. One major reason for this success, however, is that these sprays were relatively easy and inexpensive to replace. Such is not the case for global climate change. Currently, there is no single, viable alternative to the carbon economy—a term used to reference our current economic dependence on carbon-based fuels such as petroleum and coal. Renewable energy sources, such as solar panels, are available, but not at the scale needed to fuel high-energy and high-consumption lifestyles. More than 150 countries have signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which laid the groundwork for the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and the Paris Agreement (2015). With these agreements, most nations have committed to future goals for reducing fossil fuel emissions, but to date no nation has made significant progress toward these goals. Climate change is a complex problem, intrinsically tied to an economy that depends on access to inexpensive and abundant fuel sources. It is also a problem that cannot be addressed by one nation or group alone but rather calls attention to the shared nature of our planetary ecosystem and the impact that activities in one location have on every other life.

Philosophical Contributions to Environmental Ethics

Instrumental value of nature.

Traditional Western philosophies have been anthropocentric (human-centered), as discussed in the chapter on value theory . Humans are regarded as the sole possessors of intrinsic value , meaning that each human life is understood to possess value in itself and for its own sake. The natural world, on the other hand, has been viewed as having instrumental value , understood as having value solely as a means to satisfy human needs and desires. From ancient Greece to the Enlightenment, philosophers and scientists have studied the natural world with the goal of understanding how better to use it to achieve the goals of human societies.

Anthropocentric Obligations

Empiricism is often traced back to the work of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), whose experimental techniques led to the development of the scientific method and who advocated an inductive approach to scientific inquiry in his essay Novum Organum . According to Bacon, when nature becomes the object of study, it can be completely manipulated and used in accordance with God’s original plan for humanity on Earth. Bacon held the prevailing Christian view that God gave human beings dominion over the nonhuman world. Unlike an autonomous subject, an object can be treated without regard, manipulated for study, and exploited as a resource—all of which occurred as capitalism evolved in Western countries (Bacon 1878). Contemporary Western societies have viewed science and technology as an important vehicle for empowering humanity to manipulate and control nature, to force nature to bend to our will.

Early advocates of the environmental movement in the West associated this anthropocentric (human-centered) perspective with the environment crisis. In a well-known essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967), Lynn White argues that the way we think about the environment has its roots in Judeo-Christian thinking that maintains the superiority of humans over the nonhuman world and teaches that the natural world was created for human use. If nature only has instrumental value, then we do not violate morality when we manipulate, destroy, or otherwise harm nature.

Some philosophers, however, point out that this same anthropocentric approach has the potential to foster an ethics of environmental care. According to this perspective, moral obligations concerning our treatment of the natural world can be justified by appealing to human interests and the desire for self-preservation. For example, we might argue that all humans have an interest in having access to clean air and drinkable water and in ensuring the longevity of Earth for future generations to enjoy. These basic interests that all humans share can be used as a basis for establishing moral obligations to reduce pollution, create more sustainable practices, and take actions to diminish harm caused to the environment by human activity.

In People or Penguins: The Case for Optimal Pollution (1974), for example, William Baxter offers an unapologetically anthropocentric environmental ethic. Baxter adopts a traditional view that assigns intrinsic value only to persons. He proposes that the fact that some harm has come to certain aspects of the nonhuman world is, in itself, not enough to justify moral responsibility. “Damage to penguins, or sugar pines, or geological marvels is, without more, simply irrelevant” (Baxter 1974, 5). That acknowledged, Baxter goes on to state that a moral obligation to the nonhuman world does exist, because human interests are intrinsically tied to the natural world. When it comes to pollution, for example, Baxter argues that we have a moral obligation to balance the benefits we get from causing pollution with the harm caused by pollution to establish a level of pollution that is optimal.

One proposed solution to the environmental crisis, in line with an anthropocentric approach, is to levy taxes on people and corporations when their activities are deemed detrimental to society and/or to planetary health. Currently, in the United States, many states levy extra taxes on the purchase of cigarettes and alcohol, above and beyond the established sales tax. These extra taxes are justified by pointing out that these products are detrimental to human health and that their consumption puts an unnecessary burden on the state’s health care systems. Some economists recommend using a similar approach to control environmental impact. In this scenario, a tax cost or liability would be imposed on companies or individuals who cause harm to the environment. A carbon emissions tax is an example of a such a tax. Of course, rewarding positive behavior could also work, for example, by giving tax breaks or other types of rewards to organizations that are working toward environmental sustainability. These policies align with the anthropocentric approach in that they hold organizations accountable for the harm they are doing to human society and human interests.

Deep Ecology and the Intrinsic Value of Nature

In stark contrast to the anthropocentricism that has long dominated Western thinking about the environment, deep ecology , a term first coined by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1912–2009), assumes that all living things are valuable in their own right (Naess 1973). If all life has intrinsic value, then all life is deserving of respect. Deep ecology thus advocates a practice of restraint when it comes to the environment and to nonhuman life.

Deep ecology argues that we need to fundamentally change how we think about ourselves and our relationship to nature. This approach proposes that it is wrong to view ourselves as individual, separate entities. Instead, all of nature, including human beings, should be understood in terms of their relationships with everything else. This interrelatedness implies a responsibility to act in ways that respect the intrinsic value of all living things and promote life in the broadest sense. For deep ecologists, a first step in this approach is to become sensitive to and aware of the deep relationships that exist between everything in nature. Aware that we are more than this body and this mind, that we are members of a larger whole, we recognize that we have an obligation to promote and care for the natural world. Naess thought of deep ecology as a movement promoting a radical new worldview that contrasted sharply with the traditional view that valued nature only as a means to human ends.

Critics of deep ecology sometimes note that it is a position of privilege taken by people in developed nations and that less industrialized countries may not be in a position to respect the environment in the same way when their own survival is at risk. Environmental initiatives may be challenging for smaller, less industrialized countries to pursue. In these nations, the call to environmentalism may ring hollow to those who face a daily struggle for food or clean water.

Social Ecology

Social ecologists see environmental problems as stemming from the same faulty political and economic system that promotes inequity and is responsible for racism, sexism, and classism. In this view, capitalism has created a system of domination over both humanity and nature and has turned nature into just one more commodity. Murray Bookchin (1921–2006), an American political philosopher and a founder of social ecology, was highly influential in this line of thought. Bookchin believed that most, if not all, of the problems that make up our current environmental crisis are the result of long-standing social problems. He argued that the only way to address our ecological problems is to address our social problems. Bookchin proposed that we change society by rejecting large political structures and big business and empowering smaller, locally based groups that are more tied to their environments and thus more environmentally aware.

Concerns have also been raised about the unequal impact environmental problems have on different segments of society. Robert Bullard ’s 1990 book Dumping in Dixie argues that environmentalism is intertwined with issues of racial and socioeconomic equity. It is thus not just an issue of individual health but rather a concern about the health of communities. Historically marginalized communities in particular are statistically more likely to be exposed to environmental dangers. One egregious and well-publicized example of these types of dangers is the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. In 2014, it was realized that drinking water in Flint was contaminated with high levels of lead. This contamination was the result of a decision made by emergency managers appointed by the state government to switch Flint’s water supply from the Detroit water system to the Flint River, in order to save money. The Flint River water not only contained bacteria and carcinogens but also leached lead from the pipes that brought water to people’s homes. As a result, many suffered from rashes, hair loss, and elevated blood levels of lead (Denchak 2018). Another example can be seen in the South Bronx, in New York City. This area is sometimes referred to as an “island of pollution,” as it lies at the confluence of three major highways. The pollution from the traffic has resulted in an increase in asthma diagnoses and asthma-related hospitalizations in those living in this neighborhood, the majority of them Black Americans, Latinos, and new immigrants (Butini 2018).

Similar differences in environmental dangers can be observed on a global scale. A 2016 United Nations report reported that people in developing countries are more likely to live on land that has been exposed to contamination and chemical pollutants than those in wealthier nations (United Nations 2016).

Environmental Racism

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

This book may not be used in the training of large language models or otherwise be ingested into large language models or generative AI offerings without OpenStax's permission.

Want to cite, share, or modify this book? This book uses the Creative Commons Attribution License and you must attribute OpenStax.

Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-philosophy/pages/1-introduction

• Authors: Nathan Smith
• Publisher/website: OpenStax
• Book title: Introduction to Philosophy
• Publication date: Jun 15, 2022
• Location: Houston, Texas
• Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-philosophy/pages/1-introduction
• Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-philosophy/pages/10-2-environmental-ethics

© Dec 19, 2023 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.

180 Environmental Research Topics & Questions to Write about

Environment affects us all, whether we want it or not. Political leaders and students alike discuss ways to tackle environmental topics & issues. Some might argue about the role humans play in all this. The fact remains that our environment is a delicate matter. That’s why we must educate ourselves on the issues related to it.

Our specialists will write a custom essay specially for you!

In this article by custom writing experts, you’ll find a list of environmental research questions to scrutinize and write about. The environmental essay topics in the collection below are related to economics, health, sociology, law, and even psychology. These ideas might be helpful either for school or for college students.

• 🔝 Top 10 Topics
• 🌡️🌍 Climate Change Topics
• 🏭🌱 Sustainability
• 🔬🌻 Environmental Science
• 🌳⚖️ Environmental Law
• 🧑🌿 Environmentalism

🔬 Top 10 Environmental Research Topics

• 📖 Environmental Research Questions

🔝 Top 10 Environment Essay Topics

• The life cycle of tornados
• History of environmental studies
• Positive impact of birdwatching
• Drinking water and the environment
• Christianity’s impact on the climate crisis
• Climate’s effect on mountain ecosystems
• How aviation contributes to global warming
• Early commercial adaptation of thermal energy
• What does nuclear meteorology investigate?
• Fruitarianism’s benefits for the environment

🌡️🌍 Environmental Research Topics on Climate Change

Throughout history, the Earth’s climate always fluctuated. Ice ages were followed by warmer periods. However, the increase in temperature we perceive today is unusual. Because of this, climate change is one of today’s most pressing problems. Below we have compiled a list of 25 global warming topics. Have a look!

• What is the difference between climate change and global warming?
• Investigate how humans influence the climate.
• Which regions suffer the most due to the rising sea levels?
• How did the average weather in your region change over the past 20 years?
• Why are coral reefs endangered?
• How do melting glaciers impact the environment?
• Examine what natural disasters are linked to climate change.
• What does ocean acidification mean?
• What are the effects of global warming?
• Analyze the phenomenon of climate refugees.
• How does global warming affect biodiversity?
• Discuss the most significant causes of climate change.
• Why are hurricanes becoming more intense?

• What are the most significant agricultural problems caused by climate change?
• How does the excess of CO2 impact the environment?
• What actions lead to a CO2 increase in the atmosphere?
• Discuss how hydraulic fracturing affects nature.
• Explain how the greenhouse effect works.
• What can each of us do to stop global warming?
• How is ozone depletion related to climate change?
• What was the purpose of the Paris Agreement?
• Investigate how deforestation affects the climate.
• Can we reverse global warming?
• Examine why some people don’t believe in climate change.
• What is the correlation between tree planting and climate change?

🌲 Environmental Research Topics on Ecology

Ecology is a branch of biology that investigates how organisms coexist. The environment shapes the way different species interact with each other. Essential factors can be living, such as nutrition, or nonliving, like water. Here are 25 prompts for your ecology essay:

• Examine the ecological research methods.
• What defines the number of organisms living in a community?
• How does an ecosystem work?
• Why do plants and animals go extinct?
• Do non-native snakes threaten the U.S. ecosystem?
• Explain the elements of population growth.
• What would the world look like without bees?
• How do organisms adapt to their environment?
• Analyze how photosynthesis occurs.
• What different relationships can organisms form with their surroundings?
• Discuss the research methods of bird behavioral ecology.
• How do organisms survive under extreme conditions?
• Why do some birds migrate?

• Investigate why some animals benefit from living alone.
• What can humans do to prevent pandas from extinction?
• How do plants help combat climate change?
• What’s the correlation between water management and ecology issues?
• How does commercial fishing affect the oceans?
• What are the most prominent current environmental threats?
• How does the ecological footprint method work?
• What are the long-term consequences of plastic use?
• Analyze how nutrient cycles work.
• What impact does human waste have on marine ecosystems?
• Examine the different types of healthy bacteria.
• How do cacti grow in the desert?

🏭🌱 Sustainability Topics for an Essay

According to the UN World Commission , sustainable development “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Simply put, sustainability means fulfilling the demand without exhausting any resources. Today, it plays a vital role in protecting the environment.

• Give an example of sustainable practice.
• Analyze the process of recycling.
• Investigate what sustainability wants to achieve.
• Explore the history of the green movement.
• What can a country do to become greener?
• Why do we need the concept of sustainable development?
• Examine the ways of recycling water.
• How can you make food sources more sustainable?
• What does zero-waste mean?
• Talk about the issues related to eco-friendly packaging.
• Discuss ways of saving more energy.
• What are the greener alternatives to plastic?
• Examine the different sources of renewable energy.
• How can a person live more sustainably?
• Explain the three pillars of sustainability.

• How does green construction work?
• What’s the connection between sustainability and climate change?
• What can we do to reduce water pollution?
• Discuss the impact of globalization on sustainable agriculture.
• What is responsible consumption?
• Why should we not use plastic?
• Describe how wind turbines produce electricity.
• How can technology become green?
• What is social sustainability?
• What are the most critical sustainability issues today?

🔬🌻 Environmental Science Topics for an Essay

Environmental science combines various approaches to study nature. In doing so, it tries to find solutions for ecological issues. Research goes into areas such as pollution and alternative energy. If you want to write about it, have a look at our topics:

Just in 1 hour! We will write you a plagiarism-free paper in hardly more than 1 hour

• What are the environmental impacts of production and consumption?
• Examine ways of improving agriculture.
• What are the critical elements of environmental science?
• Discuss the advantages of green engineering.
• What are the different types of pollution?
• Determine the primary goals of environmental science.
• What are invasive species?
• Investigate the benefits of reforestation.
• Describe the Amazon rainforest and its role in the environment.
• Explore the various types of agriculture.
• Discuss the pros and cons of GMOs.
• What effects does a biodiversity loss have on humanity?
• How do dams and channels affect ecosystems?
• What is the connection between social and environmental sciences?
• Why is overpopulation a problem?
• Explain the process of desertification.
• How does mining cause environmental disasters?
• Investigate the Gaia Hypothesis.
• What are the causes of acid rain?
• How is our health affected by pollution?

• Explain the importance of energy efficiency.
• Explore the link between globalization and ecological problems.
• Why are fossil fuels harmful to the environment?
• What are ecological niches?
• Analyze the pros and cons of nuclear energy.

🌳⚖️ Environmental Law Topics for Papers

Environmental law aims to protect nature. It’s the legal foundation of human interaction with their surroundings. Besides, it formulates how we should utilize natural resources. Take a look at these compelling topics for your paper:

• How is waste regulated in your community?
• What laws address contaminant cleanup?
• Why do we need chemical safety regulations?
• Examine legal ways to curb hunting and fishing.
• Describe environmental protection in the US and in the Hawaii state.
• Discuss the Rio Declaration.
• Why can environmental laws be controversial?
• What are the advantages of emission certificates?
• Investigate the process of emissions trading.
• How does your country regulate air quality?
• What makes the laws concerning water quality vital?
• What are the general principles of environmental law?
• When can a piece of land be declared a natural reserve?
• Should there be a binding international environmental constitution?
• Explore the history of environmental law.
• What purposes do wildlife reserves serve?
• Discuss the legacy of Kyoto Protocol.
• Analyze the marine pollution prevention efforts in Australia.
• What are environmental assessment mandates?
• Investigate economic incentives for environmental protection.
• Discuss why ecotourism needs to be regulated.
• Why is it difficult for some countries to become green?
• Establish a connection between free trade agreements and ecological problems.
• Do businesses have to incorporate environmental law?
• Compare several international agreements on ecological issues.

🧑🌿 Environmentalism Topics to Write About

Movements aiming to protect nature are at the core of environmentalism. The idea first gained traction in the 1960s. Notable organizations include PETA and Greenpeace. If you’re interested in environmentalism, consult this topics list:

• Investigate the history of environmentalism.
• Discuss the negative impacts of urban sprawl.
• What is Earth Day?

• Describe the key concepts of environmentalism.
• What are the different types of green movements?
• Compare the goals of various NGOs.
• What does the WWF do?
• Describe the main achievements of nature activists.
• Explain what apocalyptic environmentalism is.
• Who is Greta Thunberg?
• Discuss the impact of the Fridays for Future movement.
• Explain emancipatory environmentalism.
• Investigate the Animal Liberation Front.
• Analyze the central concerns of ecofeminism.
• Why are environmental movements important?
• Who was John Muir?
• Explain what ecoterrorism is.
• Does going green equal saving the environment?
• Who were the first nature activists?
• Discuss the influence of green political parties.
• What is environmental justice?
• Explain how civic environmentalism works.
• Are the actions of Greenpeace always justified?
• What are some examples of good nature activism tactics?
• Analyze the effect environmentalist movements have on politics.
• Types of marine pollution
• Concepts of ecofeminism
• Causes of grassland degradation
• Advantages of hydroelectricity
• Organic farming support in the US
• Energy conservation in the US
• What does photochemical smog depend on?
• Seasonal behavior of urban heat island
• Nuclear and radiation accident categories
• Can baffle spray scrubbers control pollution?

📖 Top 10 Environmental Research Questions

• What are the causes and effects of air pollution?
• What are the most dangerous effects of climate change?
• What are the most severe diseases caused by water pollution?
• Is global warming real?
• How does deforestation affect people and animals?
• Do carbon offset programs work?
• How to prevent and control soil pollution?
• How does plastic pollution affect marine life?
• What are the most threatened biodiversity hotspots?
• What should we do about overpopulation?

We hope this article helped you decide what your paper will be about. If the topic you’ve chosen is still not perfect, feel free to customize it! Good luck, and have fun with your essay.

You might also be interested in:

• A List of 212 Brilliant Research Proposal Topics to Investigate
• 220 Interesting Biology Topics for Essays & Research Papers
• A List of 220 Physics Topics & Questions to Research
• 300 Interesting Chemistry Topics & Writing Tips
• 281 Best Health & Medical Research Topics

🔍 References

• Environmental Issues Guide: Giving Compass
• Climate Change: National Geographic
• Climate Change and Global Warming: NASA
• What Is Ecology?: Khan Academy
• Ecology: Encyclopedia Britannica
• What Is Sustainability and Why Is It Important?: Environmental Science
• Environmentalism: Learning to Give
• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to LinkedIn
• Share to email

Our code of ethics is derived from what we think is right or wrong. On top of that, we have to agree to the moral standards established by the society we live in. Conventional norms generally label theft, murder, or harassment as bad. However, there are many influences that impact...

A definition explains the meaning of a term or a concept. In a dictionary, you’ll find a definition in a single sentence. A definition paper, however, encompasses several paragraphs. Such an essay, amongst other things, can include personal experience and examples. To write a successful definition paper, you need to...

As simple as it is, the purpose of the descriptive essay is to explain or portray its subject. It can focus on any topic or issue you want to write about. Be sure that any middle school, high school, or college student can manage this type of creative writing assignment!...

Rhetorical analysis essay focuses on assessing the method used for delivering a message. This assignment isn’t about giving an opinion on the topic. The purpose is to analyze how the author presents the argument and whether or not they succeeded. Keep reading to find out more strategies and prompts for...

A narrative essay tells a story about a series of events. At the core of this kind of essay can be a personal experience or a fictional plot. Any story can be a basis for a narrative essay! Narratives can look similar to descriptions. Still, they are different. A descriptive...

Similar to the instructions in a recipe book, process essays convey information in a step-by-step format. In this type of paper, you follow a structured chronological process. You can also call it a how-to essay. A closely related type is a process analysis essay. Here you have to carefully consider...

In a classification essay, you divide the subject into categories. To create these categories, you single out certain attributes of things. You can classify them according to their characteristics, themes, or traits. Sounds complicated? Be sure that any high school or college student can manage this type of essay!

Throughout your high school years, you are likely to write many evaluative papers. In an evaluation essay you aim is to justify your point of view through evidence.

Immigration is a permanent move to a foreign country. It takes place all over the globe, including the United States. It played an important role in history, and it continues to influence society today. This article offers a variety of immigration essay topics. They are suitable for college-level works, as...

Should you buy a green or a red apple? Before making a decision, people often compare their options. In a compare and contrast essay, you analyze the similarities and differences between certain things. In this article, you’ll find interesting and easy compare and contrast essay topics for college, high school...

An opinion essay requires a student to present a point of view on a chosen subject and back it up with substantial evidence. Like in a debate, the writer has to give their opinion and defend it while using scholarly resources. This article will help you find a good opinion...

When you start studying philosophy, you may think it’s boring and has nothing to do with the real world. It couldn’t be further from the truth! The study of philosophy deals with the most exciting and mysterious aspects of reality. It is closely connected with science, psychology, art, and politics....

  Paper Assignment, Environmental Ethics, Fall 2007

The paper should be 5-7 pages (double space, typewritten) and explore the ethical and/or philosophical dimensions of an environmental issue. (Please use recycled paper or print your paper on the back side of already used paper, if at all possible.) The paper counts for 34% of your course grade and so it should be a significant effort. You choose the topic.

A one page paper proposal is due Friday, October 19, at 1pm, in my mailbox, 1 st floor 14 Glebe . It should include a title, characterization of your topic, the major lines of argument you intend to pursue, tentative thesis, and a brief review of one key philosophical article you will use in your paper (including how you will use it) The paper is due on Friday, November 16, 1pm, 1 st floor mailbox of 14 Glebe. Staple the paper description (with my comments) to the back of the final paper, and keep an extra copy of the final paper for yourself.

The paper can either focus on a specific issue (such as why preserve endangered species, the morality of hunting, or property rights and environmental regulations) or evaluate more general issues (such as anthropocentric environmental ethics, animal rights, or the tensions between an animal welfare ethics and environmental ethics). You could write a paper developing your own coherent environmental ethic, in response to those we have studied.

1.            This paper should be a philosophy paper in which you focus on normative, evaluative, or conceptual issues . For some topics, factual and scientific information will be necessary. But focus on the ethical and conceptual dimensions and on the questions of public policy involved. (Always ask: What should we do concerning this issue and why ? What are the philosophical, ethical, and conceptual questions which must be answered if this issue is to be resolved?)

2.            Tie your paper into the central themes of the course. The paper must show that it was written by someone who took this course. Someplace in your paper you should (probably) indicate how the various environmental ethics we have considered (e.g., anthropocentrism, sentience-centrism, individual biocentrism, holistic ecocentrism) bear on your topic. Which of these are you assuming (or rejecting) in your argument, if any, and why? In other words, what position(s) on the question of moral standing are you assuming (or rejecting) and what are your reasons? Are you accepting (or rejecting) individualism or holism, egalitarianism or inegalitarianism? If the issue you are discussing (and the position you are taking on it) would be illuminated by addressing these issues, you should do so. Additionally, if an assigned article has bearing on your topic, you must discuss what it says about it and your response .

3.            At least one outside (not assigned in the course) philosophical reading is required for this paper. (For example, you can use a philosophical article from our text that has not been assigned for the course.) Those who write on a topic not specifically covered on the schedule of assignments will have to do more library work. I suggest using the journals Environmental Ethics , Environmental Values , Ethics and the Environment , Ethics, Place and Environment, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics , and Between the Species (all are in the library and the second, third, and forth are available electronically). The library has excellent holdings in most areas of environmental philosophy; you should be able to find something on almost any topic you choose. I can help you find specific articles relevant to your subject if you are having trouble finding them. A tremendous Internet resource is available at the following web site: https://www.phil.unt.edu/bib/ . This bibliography (kept by the International Society for Environmental Ethics) summarizes articles in the field and can be searched by key word. Also, my own personal bibliography (containing mainly environmental material) will be on the class website. You can also use the reference (in the Library Reference section) called “Philosophers Index” which lists by subject, title, and author most philosophical articles that have been published. Don't get bogged down on this dimension of the paper . I want you to think for your self; the outside reading is meant only to help stimulate your own thinking. But I want every paper description to include such an article and a discussion of how you will use it.

Talk with each other (and me) about your ideas. Read ahead for topics on the syllabus we have not yet discussed. Make sure you write on an issue you want to spend some time thinking about. Use the College Skills Lab and the Philosophy Writing Lab (both in 216 Education Center). See the flier on the Philosophy Writing Lab.

Possible Paper Topics, Environmental Ethics

(These are suggestions only; their aim is to stimulate your own creative energies in choosing your topic. Consider topics in the second half of the course as well.)

1.                 Should we or should we not let nature take its course in national parks ?

2.                 The morality of field research on animals . Is it morally permissible to sedate, capture, radio collar, take blood samples from, etc. (say) grizzly bears? What sorts of ethical guidelines must field researchers follow in the interference with and handling of wild populations of animals? Is killing birds (and other animals) for museum specimens morally justifiable?

3.                 Discuss the aesthetic value of nature . How is the aesthetic appreciation of nature different from the aesthetic appreciation of art objects? Is nature always beautiful? Does nature's aesthetic value provide adequate support for strong environmental protection?

4.                 Moral issues concerning pets . The propriety of pet-keeping. Companion animals, paternalism, and community. Are pets degraded wild animals with less value than their wild counterparts? Should someone who believes in animal rights reject the institution of pet ownership? Is having a pet an anthropocentric way of relating to nonhuman nature? Describe and evaluate from your own perspective Gary Varner’s views on pets. Which animals may be kept as pets?

5.                 Animal/environmental ethics and zoos . Are zoos morally acceptable? Can we justify putting animals in "prisons" for our viewing pleasure (or even for educational purposes)? Are zoos an anthropocentric way of relating to other animals? More specifically, should we allow the confinement of marine mammals (or other mammals?) in "zoological parks?"

6.                 An analysis and critique/defense of Julian Simon’s views of the environmental crisis.

7.                 Consumerism and the environment (including issues raised by Peter Wenz and the Afluenza Video).

8.                 The use of animals in teaching (e.g., frog or cat dissection).

9.                 An ethical evaluation of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

10.               How ought animal activists think about and respond to predation in the wild? How do Sagoff, Everett and Hettinger answer this question?

11.               A moral evaluation of hunting in light of Brian Luke’s article.

12.               Compare and contrast the morality of fishing vis-a-vis the morality of hunting . Is fishing acceptable even though hunting is immoral? Do hunted animals feel pain while fish do not? Is fishing just as morally legitimate/illegitimate as hunting? Is catch and release fishing more legitimate (or less illegitimate) than fishing for one's dinner? How does fishing morally compare to other human uses of animals?

13.               The promise and limits of the movement to restore the environment. Is restoration a big lie, involving the further domination of nature?

14.               Environmental Justice and Environmental Racism : What is it? Does it exist? What are the moral issues involved? What should be done about it, if anything? (Use Peter Wenz’s article.)

15.               Property rights and the environment . Do environmental regulations unfairly "take" private property without just compensation? If government/community regulations which decrease property values require compensation to the property owners, then does government/community actions that increase property values require compensation from the property owner to the community? Why or why not? Are property rights natural or created by the community? Does a community's right to environmental integrity (or the environment's right to environmental integrity) outweigh an individual human's property rights? Does the right of an endangered species to exist outweigh a human's property right?

16.               Beachfront management : Morally evaluate the legitimacy of South Carolina's attempt to control construction on the beach. Include a discussion of the recent (Lucas) Supreme Court case and its implications on environmental regulations in general. This is a subset of the property rights and environmental regulations issue.

17.               Duties to Endangered Species : Would it matter if the spotted owl went extinct? Ought we to preserve all or only certain species? Do other species have inherent value independent of their usefulness to human beings? Do they have a right to exist? Is it worse to kill members of endangered species than to kill equally psychologically sophisticated members of common species? Why?

18.               Philosophical, ethical, and policy evaluation of the Endangered Species Act : Does the act need to be revised? Why or why not? If so, how should it be revised? What moral/ethical basis underlies your recommendations?

19.               Is environmentalism (and environmental ethics) an elitist concern of the rich and of the developed world--one that is irrelevant to the poor and the peoples of the developing world? Does the developing world have legitimate criticism of the environmentalism of the developed countries?

20.               Should we preserve wilderness ? Why or why not? Is the ideal of wilderness (as a place humans visit, but do not remain) flawed since it fails to realize that humans are a legitimate part of nature? Is the idea of wilderness flawed since it ignores that ancient humans (as well as modern society) has so affected the landscape that no pristine wilderness remains to be preserved? Isn't wilderness preservation simply adding recreational facilities for rich elitist college kids (and their professors) who have the time, money, and energy to backpack into it? Is putting the focus on wilderness to miss a more important focus on sustainable development, as Callicott suggests. What is Cronon’s critique of wilderness and what is Rolston’s response?

21.               Do we have duties to ecosystems and natural processes ? Do they have intrinsic value? Evaluate the possibility of seeing ecosystems and natural processes as morally considerable in their own right. Do we have duties to rain forests or to evolution (or only indirect duties regarding them)? Why or why not?

22.               The meaning and value of the natural : What does it mean for something to be natural? Is the natural better than the unnatural, artificial, cultural? Are humans part of--or separate from--nature? In what sense can or should humans follow nature? Does the fact that something is natural give us a reason to imitate it? Should we, as Aldo Leopold suggests, "reappraise things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free?"

23.               Should we manage nature ? Must we manage nature? Does managing nature destroy the value of nature? Must we manage nature to protect nature?

24.               What is the proper religious perspective toward the nature? What does religion have to say about environmental issues. What should it say? Are the new eco-theologies on the right track? Is Christianity responsible for the environmental crisis or does it provide a strong ethic for responsible treatment of the environment? Would other religious views (e.g., those of Native American's) foster a better environmental ethic? What view of moral standing does the proper religious approach to the environment take?

25.               What are the Native Americans attitudes toward nature? How are they different from the traditional Western European approach toward nature? What can we learn from the Native American's approach, if anything? What should we reject?

26.               What has moral standing (=is morally important in its own right)? Do (certain or all) animals? Do plants? Microbes? Do ecosystems? Land forms? Natural processes? In virtue of what does something have moral standing?

27.               Is egalitarianism in environmental ethics a preferable approach to various inegalitarian approaches (including moral hierarchies)?

28.               Are humans superior to other animals and to plants? Explain and evaluate Taylor's views on this issue.

29.               Environmental individualism versus holism : Is intrinsic value (and/or moral standing) located in organic individuals or in biological communities? What are some of the different practical implications of these styles of environmental ethics? Consider, for example, the morality of hunting, saving of endangered species, and the importance of human individuals.

30.               A critique or defense of anthropocentric environmental ethics . What are the different versions of anthropocentrism? Are some stronger than others? Is anthropocentrism the best environmental ethic?

31.               Do we have any duties to future generations of people? Why or why not? What are these duties? How much nature do we owe to future generations? How can we harm future generations by destroying the environment, if they wouldn't have existed but for this destruction?

32.               Can animals feel pain ? Why or why not? Which animals? Assuming they do feel pain, does their pain count morally? Does it count equally with the same pain of a human animal? Can animals feel the same sort of pain a human can feel? Discuss the implications of your views for our treatment of animals.

33.               What is speciesism ? Is it a morally acceptable or not? Is it morally analogous to racism and sexism? Why or why not?

34.               The morality of eating (e.g., meat eating versus a vegetarian diet or hunting for one's meat versus buying it in a grocery store). What do animal and environmental ethics suggest about ethically appropriate eating? (Compare and evaluate the views of Singer, Regan, Causey, Taylor, and Rolston)

35.               Should we constrain or eliminate factory farming of animals? Is "old McDonald" farming of animals a morally permissible use of them?

36.               Are wild animals more morally important than domesticated animals ? Are there any morally relevant differences between them? Why or why not?

37.               Describe, evaluate, and adjudicate the alleged incompatibility between animal liberation and environmental ethics . (Are Sagoff and Causey right that these movements are not compatible? Does Taylor manage to combine the two sorts of moral concerns?)

38.               Is human population (growth?) an environmental problem? Should government regulate population? Do we have an obligation to stop increasing the world's human biomass? Why or why not? What sorts of methods are morally allowable and practically feasible to control human population, if any?

39.               The moral justifiability (or unjustifiability) of civil disobedience for environmental causes (e.g., Greenpeace). The moral justifiability (or unjustifiability) of ecological sabotage : Spiking trees, putting sand in earth-movers, etc. to prevent destruction of natural areas (e.g., Earth First!).

40.               The justifiability of Animal Liberation Front activities.

41.               Deep ecology : What is it; how is it different from shallow ecology; what is to be said in its favor and against it; what changes in our lifestyle does it require?

42.               Ecofeminism : What is it and is it an important or necessary approach to environmental issues?

43.               Social ecology : Is the root cause of environmental problems the capitalist economic system in which businesses make decisions which effect public environmental quality on the basis of private economic self-interest?

44.               Biotechnology and genetic engineering ( The moral significance (if any) of genetic engineering or other biotechnology): What are the moral and environmental ethics issues pertaining to this technology?

Engaging Environmental Ethics Essay Topics That You Will Enjoy Writing On

Note: Only 'PhD' academic level option is available for Dissertation

24 Mar 2020

Being a hybrid of not only ancient but also most recent insights, environmental ethics is often called a discipline in progress. To a large extent, this statement is true because environmental science issues are gaining more weight every day. Now, it's entirely appropriate to say that all of our everyday choices – both minor and global – affect the environment. By gaining a clear understanding of the aftermath of our actions, we can obtain knowledge of how to save our planet and secure its future.

In this blog post, you’ll find some expert advice on writing a solid environmental ethics essay. Besides, we offer you a compilation of original environmental ethics ideas that will inspire you to craft a perfect essay. Moreover, if none of the above works, you can order a unique sample environmental essay crafted for you by a professional writer.

You can use it on one order over $

Bright Ideas for a Worthy Environmental Ethics Essay

Environmental ethics is a broad area of studies that offers a great variety of topics to explore. No matter what your current academic level is, you definitely can find a theme that will spark your curiosity. Choosing an issue that interests you is crucial as your passion for it will shine through the writing, and keep your audience engaged.

When preparing a paper on environmental ethics, you can opt for either of the following ways. Your essay can focus on one specific issue (for example, on the morality of hunting, preserving endangered species, or introducing new environmental regulations). Alternatively, you can evaluate a more general issue (such as animal rights, effects of pollution, anthropocentric environmental ethics, etc.).

In your paper you can develop your own logical and clear environmental ethic or refer and respond to the ones that you’ve studied during your class.

While for younger students it’s usually enough to show a general understanding of the subject and a chosen theme, college students might be required to conceptual, evaluative, and normative issues. In any case, extensive research and an all-round analysis of a question will help you to craft an outstanding essay that will impress your teacher.

Good Environmental Ethics Essay Topics for High School Students

• What are the most effective ways of waste utilization?
• What does the term “eco-anarchism” mean?
• The key environmental ethics ideas in the works of Confucius.
• The most important ideas depicted in A Sand County Almanac by Also Leopold.
• What everyday actions are the most effective to help people reduce their impact on the environment?
• Why does climate change raise the chances of global diseases spread?

Original Ideas on Environmental Ethics for College Students

• The importance and input of Aldo Leopold’s works into the sphere of environmental ethics.
• In what way can the idea of nature preservation benefit from environmental ethics?
• What is the role of adaption in responding to climate change?
• Can we morally justify killing animals and birds for museum specimens?
• Should those who believe in animal rights reject the institution of owning pet animals?
• Environmental/animal ethics and zoos: can we consider them morally acceptable?

Interesting Topics for an Environmental Ethics Essay

• Why or why not should we let nature take its course in the national parks and preservations?
• What ethical guidelines must be followed by field researchers when interfering with and handling populations of wild animals?
• Can owning a pet animal be considered an anthropocentric way in which we relate to nonhuman nature?
• Should we abandon the use of animals for teaching purposes (e.g., dissection of a frog)?
• Compare and contrast the morality of hunting VS the morality of fishing.
• Ought people preserve all or only particular endangered species?

Environmental ethics essays often require much time and attention, which makes many students wonder, “Is there anyone who will write my essay free ?” Although you'd hardly find someone to craft your paper for free, you can always consider applying to an affordable online writing service. For example, WePapers.com will craft a perfect environmental ethics essay upon your personal request for a very reasonable fee. Ask your friends’ advice, search online, read every single paper writing services review - and you'll see that WePapers.com is a reliable company that had helped thousands of students. Let us prove that our company is totally worth your time, money, and trust. Our experienced writers are here to meet your every need and help you get the top grade!

Related posts:

• Free Does Sitting In A Hot Tub Raise Your Blood Pressure Report Example
• Ebooks Essays
• Grand Essays
• Feed Essays
• Optimal Essays
• Fitness Essays
• Death Of A Salesman Essays
• Salesman Essays
• Arthur Miller Essays
• Hubris Essays
• Downfall Essays
• Recognition Essays
• Modernist Essays
• Wound Essays
• Cold War Essays
• Hamlet Essays
• Shakespeare Essays
• Reversal Essays
• Comedy Essays
• O Henry Essays
• Lifetime Essays
• Elizabethan Essays
• Ernest Hemingway Essays
• Game Essays
• Emotional Intelligence Essays
• Psychologist Essays
• Philosopher Essays
• Grounding Essays
• Intention Essays
• Motel Essays
• Fairness Essays
• Crime And Punishment Essays
• Suspect Essays
• Diet Essays
• Supplement Essays
• Metabolism Essays
• Requirement Essays
• Toxicity Essays
• Yeast Essays
• Liver Essays
• Acid Essays
• Symptom Essays
• Diabetes Essays
• Transport Essays
• Transfusion Essays
• Recipient Essays
• Anaglyph Essays
• Children Essays
• Dental Practice Essays
• Doughboy Essays
• Episiotomy Essays
• Exacerbate Essays
• Ferdinand Von Zeppelin Essays
• Historicity Essays
• Industrial Revolution Essays
• Industry Essays
• Intracranial Aneurysm Essays
• Jane Addams Essays
• Krishna Essays
• Mercantilism Essays
• Muslim Essays
• Nuclear Family Essays
• Ostracization Essays
• Phobias Essays
• Quarantine Essays
• Soap Powder Essays
• The Little Prince Essays
• Trigeminal Nerve Essays
• Trigonometry Essays
• Verticillium Essays

We use cookies to improve your experience with our site. Please accept before continuing or read our cookie policy here .

Wait, have you seen our prices?

• Advanced Search
• All new items
• Journal articles
• Manuscripts
• All Categories
• Metaphysics and Epistemology
• Epistemology
• Metaphilosophy
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Religion
• Value Theory
• Applied Ethics
• Meta-Ethics
• Normative Ethics
• Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality
• Philosophy of Law
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Value Theory, Miscellaneous
• Science, Logic, and Mathematics
• Logic and Philosophy of Logic
• Philosophy of Biology
• Philosophy of Cognitive Science
• Philosophy of Computing and Information
• Philosophy of Mathematics
• Philosophy of Physical Science
• Philosophy of Social Science
• Philosophy of Probability
• General Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Science, Misc
• History of Western Philosophy
• Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy
• Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy
• 17th/18th Century Philosophy
• 19th Century Philosophy
• 20th Century Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy, Misc
• Philosophical Traditions
• African/Africana Philosophy
• Asian Philosophy
• Continental Philosophy
• European Philosophy
• Philosophy of the Americas
• Philosophical Traditions, Miscellaneous
• Philosophy, Misc
• Philosophy, Introductions and Anthologies
• Philosophy, General Works
• Teaching Philosophy
• Philosophy, Miscellaneous
• Other Academic Areas
• Natural Sciences
• Social Sciences
• Cognitive Sciences
• Formal Sciences
• Arts and Humanities
• Professional Areas
• Other Academic Areas, Misc
• Submit a book or article
• Upload a bibliography
• Personal page tracking
• Archives we track
• Information for publishers
• Introduction
• Submitting to PhilPapers
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Subscriptions
• Editor's Guide
• The Categorization Project
• For Publishers
• For Archive Admins
• PhilPapers Surveys
• Bargain Finder
• About PhilPapers
• Create an account

Topics in Environmental Ethics, Misc

• Climate Change ( 1,862 )
• Ecology and Conservation Biology ( 2,603 | 1,410)
• Environmental Justice ( 367 )
• Future Generations ( 508 | 444)
• Nature ( 712 )
• Pollution ( 42 )
• Species ( 806 | 360)
• Sustainability ( 280 )
• Wilderness ( 236 )

Home / Essay Samples / Environment / Ecology / Environmental Ethics

Environmental Ethics Essay Examples

The fundamentals of ethics and morals in aviation.

In aviation people tend to obey the principle of ethics and morals. Ethics is more in some situation they tend to have more self-interest. The person mindset is either good or bad. There morals determine how they were raised and depict what is good and...

Three Arguments that Electric Vehicles Are Better for the Environment

Global warming and natural resource depletion are now being known as two of the greatest environmental concerns The reduction of greenhouse gases emissions such as CO2 and the development of new energy are therefore essential. Thus, electric vehicles are invented to solve these problems. However,...

Presenting an Idea of How to Make the World a Better Place

I strongly believe that the topic that I am writing about in “How to make the world a better place?” essay is the one you should mostly focus on. The topic I am writing about is the environment, the environment is the main source of...

Ecological Consciousness: Building a Sustainable Future

The aims and practices of traditional environmental education have evolved in the Australian curriculum in response to the growing concern of the global environmental predicaments of climate change, global dimming, species diversity loss and the impacts for future generations. The Cross-curriculum priority of Sustainability is...

Understanding Environmental Science: Principles and Applications

This is what is environmental science essay in which this topic will be considered. Environmental science includes more of social sciences for understanding human relationships,policies and their perception towards the environment.It is also defines as the study of effects of natural and and unnatural processes,and...

To Be a Thomasian Global Citizen

Each one of us may have a different perception of what it means to be a Thomasian Global Citizen. For me, it is being aware of our surroundings and taking an active part to be make our world a better place to live in for...

Analysing Environmental Justice and Victimization Perspectives

Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, colour, nationality, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. An understanding of this concept is paramount to understanding environmental crime and...

Humans Responsibility for Mass Extinction

The documentary “Racing Extinction” is proof that every species in the world is crying for help but we humans just don’t care. There may be some people who care but I personally some of us don’t want to face the truth because some truth or...

The Variety of Methods to Reduce the Level of Pollution in Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal is an enormous ivory-white mausoleum built of marble, that sits on the banks of the Yaruma river in Agra, India. It was constructed over 20 years in the 17th century by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to house the remains of his favorite...

Sony's Environmental Policy: Minimization of Pollution & Clean Technology

Sony is a Japanese multinational corporation by headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. The management approach of Sony is to get closer to people and the purpose is to fill the world with emotion through the core corporate responsibility to contribute and developing a sustainable society. According...

Trying to find an excellent essay sample but no results?

Don’t waste your time and get a professional writer to help!

You may also like

• Global Warming
• Water Pollution
• Sustainability
• Water Scarcity
• Solar Energy Essays
• Plastic Bags Essays
• Water Conservation Essays
• Environmental Protection Essays
• Energy Efficiency Essays
• Offshore Oil Drilling Essays
• Resource Management Essays
• Wind Energy Essays
• Water Sanitation Essays
• Alternative Energy Essays

samplius.com uses cookies to offer you the best service possible.By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .--> -->