Environmental Philosophy

Origin

Environmental philosophy is the systematic reflection on the moral and conceptual relationship between human beings and the natural world. As a distinct field it is a creation of the late twentieth century: the term "environmental ethics" came into general use only in the 1970s, in the wake of the environmental movement of the 1960s. Its origin lies in the convergence of three developments: the ecological crisis itself (pollution, extinction, climate change), the rise of ecology as a science that revealed the interdependence of all life, and a philosophical dissatisfaction with the assumption, inherited from the Western tradition, that nature has value only as a means to human ends. The field asks a question that the tradition had rarely asked: what do we owe to the nonhuman world?

History

The prehistory of environmental philosophy runs through the nineteenth century. The American transcendentalists, above all Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, developed a philosophy of nature as a source of spiritual and moral insight, and Thoreau's Walden (1854) is a founding text of the environmental imagination. The conservation movement — John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt — turned the concern for nature into public policy, though it divided between preservation (nature for its own sake) and conservation (nature for wise use). The decisive intellectual event was the publication of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (1949), whose "land ethic" extended the scope of ethics to the whole biotic community.

The field as an academic discipline crystallized in the 1970s. Arne Naess's essay "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement" (1973) introduced deep ecology and distinguished it from the merely managerial concern for resources. The journal Environmental Ethics was founded in 1979, and the following decades produced the debates that define the field: anthropocentrism versus non-anthropocentrism, individualism versus holism in the attribution of value, the place of animals, the critique of nature from feminist and postcolonial perspectives, and, most recently, the ethics of climate change, which has made environmental philosophy a matter of global policy rather than academic debate.

Core Principles

The core principles of environmental philosophy can be stated as a family of claims about value. The first is the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic value: something has instrumental value when it is valuable as a means, intrinsic value when it is valuable in itself. The central question of the field is whether nature has intrinsic value — whether a forest, a species, or an ecosystem is valuable independently of its usefulness to human beings. The second is the question of moral standing: who or what counts? The answers range from anthropocentrism (only humans count, but their interests include the environment), through sentientism (all beings capable of suffering count), through biocentrism (all living things count), to ecocentrism (ecosystems and the land community count as wholes). The third is the question of the good of nature: what does it mean to treat nature well, and is the standard human welfare, ecosystem health, or something else?

These principles ground a family of ethical positions. The land ethic of Leopold states the ecocentric view: "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." Deep ecology, in Naess's formulation, adds the demand for "biospheric egalitarianism" — the equal right of all life forms to flourish — and for a shift in self-understanding: human beings are part of nature, not its masters. Ecofeminism, developed by thinkers such as Val Plumwood and Karen Warren, argues that the domination of nature and the domination of women share a conceptual structure, and that the critique of one requires the critique of the other. Climate ethics, the most recent development, applies the tools of distributive and intergenerational justice to the question of who must reduce emissions and who bears the costs.

Important Figures

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) is the founding figure: a forester and ecologist whose Sand County Almanac transformed the conservation movement into a philosophical position. Arne Naess (1912–2009) systematized deep ecology and gave the movement its manifesto. Rachel Carson (1907–1964), whose Silent Spring (1962) exposed the dangers of pesticides, is the figure most responsible for creating the environmental movement itself. Holmes Rolston III made the case for intrinsic value in nature with philosophical rigor. Peter Singer extended utilitarian ethics to animals, forcing environmental philosophers to confront the question of animal suffering. And the contemporary field is defined by the work of ecofeminists, environmental pragmatists, and the philosophers of climate justice.

Modern Influence

Environmental philosophy has moved from the margins to the center of public life. Its concepts — intrinsic value, the land ethic, deep ecology, sustainability, the rights of nature, climate justice — now structure global policy debates. The recognition of the rights of nature in the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia, the legal standing granted to rivers in New Zealand and India, and the framework of climate justice in the Paris Agreement all bear the marks of environmental philosophy. In the academy, the field has reshaped ethics (by questioning the anthropocentric assumption), aesthetics (by the rediscovery of the sublime and of the beauty of nature), and political philosophy (by the demand for intergenerational justice). Its central achievement is the demonstration that the natural world is not a background to ethics but an object of it.

Criticism

Environmental philosophy has been criticized from several directions. Anthropocentrists argue that the concept of intrinsic value in nature is either obscure or unnecessary: human welfare, including the welfare of future generations, is sufficient to justify environmental protection. Critics of holism argue that the attribution of value to ecosystems as wholes can justify sacrificing individuals — including human beings — to the health of the system. Ecofeminism has been criticized for essentializing women's relation to nature, and postcolonial critics have argued that Western environmentalism can function as a new form of domination over the global South. And the critics of deep ecology question both its metaphysics (the "Self-realization" of the cosmos) and its politics (the alleged neglect of human suffering). These debates have not settled the field; they have made it one of the liveliest in contemporary philosophy.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Environmental Ethics" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-environmental)
• Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949.
• Naess, Arne. "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement." Inquiry 16 (1973).
• Warren, Karen. Ecofeminist Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.