Environmental Ethics Class (2008 summer intensive)

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Disclaimer Links. Books read recently. Best books read. Harry Potter books.

Break Through: from the death of environmentalism to the politics of possibility by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger Published Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Buy: Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis by Michael Williams. Review of Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis .

Environmental Ethics Class (UCSC 2008 summer intensive)
taught by Sandra Dreisbach

Topics

Two assigned texts

• Break through: the death of environmentalism and the politics of possibility by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger.
  I agree with one reviewer that they take "a stridently adversarial tone towards the very people who should be their allies - environmentalists and clean energy/global warming activists" [from Book Review "It's Getting Hot In Here: Dispatches from the Youth Climate Movement" Published by Jesse Jenkins, September 28th, 2007, at http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2007/09/28/attention-nordhaus-and-schellenberger-time-to-call-a-cease-fire; retrieved 25 June 2008.]

• The Abstract Wild by Jack Turner.
  This is terrific. A page-turner by a Deep Ecologist who advocates that we get out into the wild and be there ... versus what he calls "shallow ecologists" -- including Environmental Ethicists -- who make the Wild into an Abstraction.

Day intensive days

Day 1

• Ethics: what we ought and ought not to do.

• Philosophy: Careful investigation of what we think and believe; valid arguments and clarity are vital.

• Philosophy's three fields (environmental ethics sits in all three):
  • Ethics.
  • Epistemology: the study of thinking. (What counts as evidence? How do you resolve disputes? How can you use data from the past to predict the future? How does knowledge change over time? What beliefs are legitimate? Do beliefs count as knowledge?)
  • Ontology: the study of being. (What is time? space? reality?)

• Meta-ethics: questions about ethics.

• Environmental ethics: Ethics with respect to the environment. Obligations to other humans, to non-humans, and the natural environment. Distinguish between facts about the world and values (claims about the world).

• Ethical theory: a tool for having discussions about what is right and wrong.

• Utilitarianism: Jeremy Bentham; John Stuart Mill; "greatest good for the greatest number of people"

• Kanteanism; deontology, a study of duty. For Kant the intentions matter; the consequences do not.

• Ethics of care.

• Casuistry.

• Pragmatism.

Day 2

• Environmental ethical theory

• Moral considerabilility.

Day 3 (of 10)

• Land ethic:
  • Began with Sand County Almanac (1949) (by Aldo Leopold), which ends with "Land Ethic", Leopold's plan for conservation
  • The land has intrinsic value. [Note that Deep Ecology takes this further.] Instead of treating land as a commodity to be possessed, humans need respect for Earth, so they do not destroy it.
  • To experience freedom, humans need to experience wild spaces.
  • The rocks and the ground are part of the living system, whose interconnectedness is exemplified by energy flowing through soil.
  • Eco-centricism: ecosystem-oriented; wilderness is preserved for its own sake; values are based on the good of the community. Compare: biocentrism (life-oriented) and anthropocentrism (human-centered).
  • Wilderness is a normative (as opposed to descriptive) concept. Realities of wilderness management in the USA prohibit mechanized activity and little else; Sessions was referenced as saying it "does not live up to the normative concept".
  • Sessions proposed that land should be:
    • Only one-third human-controlled and managed.
    • One third "free nature", a buffer or transition zone that connects areas of wilderness to each other and/or separates them from human-controlled areas.
    • One third wilderness with no human intervention. Today only 3% of U.S. land is "wilderness" officially (though not freely as Leopold and Sessions propose).

Day 4 (of 10)

• Ecofeminism.
  • Feminism developed in three diverse waves:
    1. 1800s-1960s. Full civil rights for women: civic, voting, reproductive freedom.
    2. 1960s-1980s. Social equality; domestic life no longer being essential to fulfilling a woman's life.
    3. 1980s-present. Addresses shortcomings of the second wave. Distinguishes sex (physical body) from gender (social role); includes issues of sexual identity as well as gender roles; race and racial minorities; members of lower socio-economic classes. All targets of oppression are recognized as interrelated. Global post-colonial feminism: third wave is concerned with what women feel everywhere; criticizes lack of globalism in second wave feminism.

  • Ecofeminism:
    • Part of the third wave of feminism.
    • A philosophy and a political movement.
    • Focuses on the share characteristics of oppression of woman and the environment.

  • Victoria Davion: "Is Ecofeminism Feminist?" Beware of the idea that women are closer to nature than men, that women are 'essentially' connected to it. Argues this may be a patriarchal imposition. Women and nature are not essentially connected but are equally oppressed.

  • Karen J. Warren, "Feminism and Ecology: Making Connections", (Environmental Ethics 9 Spring 1987 pp. 3-20) and elsewhere. Ecofeminism at the intersection of feminism with science and technology with local (indigenous) social perspectives: the "other" as the individual or others in general; the capital-O-"Other" as a class or group.

  • Remove the Language and Logic of domination. No place for "ism's" of domination in ecofeminism. Otherwise one can construct arguments such as: "Humans and animals are superior to plants and rocks" and "superiority lets them dominate plants and rocks". There may be differences, but that does not justify different treatment. Other moral premises must be made to justify different treatments. Oppression: Systematic social laws and structures that institute dominances.

  • Chris Cuomo: The Eco/feminist Self: "Ethics and the Eco/Feminist Self", in Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology (eds. Michael E. Zimmerman, J. Baird Callicott, et al., Prentice Hall, 2003).

  • Compare the upper-case-"Self" for Ecofeminism with the Sophie-T Self of Deep Ecology. Ecofeminism recognizes that the self is in relationship with the Self; the self is separate from but influenced by the Self; only by being in a social context can we treat each others as strict individuals (this is useful socially) and recognize our interdependence. Deep ecology: the self and all other selfs together make the Self;

  • Overpopulation: while ecofeminists are concerned to solve over-population, Deep Ecology's 4th point is too bare for many; we need to be careful how this might affect women and indigenous populations as well as nature. See also Cuomo's "Ecofeminism, Deep Ecology, and Human Population".

  • Shiva

Day 5 (of 10)

Day 6 (of 10)

Day 7 (of 10)

Movie day:

• Grizzly Man

Day 8 (of 10)

Discussion day:

• Grizzly Man

• The Abstract Wild by Jack Turner

Day 9 (of 10)

• Discussion of Break through: the death of environmentalism and the politics of possibility by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger.

Day 10 (of 10)

• Recap.

• Final thoughts. Mine was to recommend that fellow students calculate their current ecology footprint and try to let it grow no larger in their coming years.

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