Environmental Ethics Today is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of the environment, our species, and species diversity. This wide-ranging introduction to major issues and questions in environmental ethics employs an accessible, journalistic style--featuring current facts, real controversies, individual stories, and a vivid narrative--that engages readers and gives meaning to abstract philosophical concepts. Topics discussed include pollution permits for corporations, medical experimentation on animals, genetic engineering, economic globalization, biodiversity, and much more. Theories and methods such as utilitarianism, contractarianism, and hermeneutics are introduced as needed to help readers understand and attempt to resolve environmental conflicts. The book considers the views of many thinkers including Father Thomas Berry, Wendell Berry, J. Baird Callicott, Jane Goodall, Garrett Hardin, David Korten, Aldo Leopold, Arne Naess, Val Plumwood, Daniel Quinn, Tom Regan, Holmes Rolston III, Vandana Shiva, Julian Simon, Peter Singer, and Karen Warren. An exceptional primary text for courses in environmental ethics and environmental values, Environmental Ethics Today is also excellent reading for general courses in moral problems, business ethics, environmental studies, and women's studies.

What is the environment, and how does it figure in an ethical life? This book is an introduction to the philosophical issues involved in this important question, focussing primarily on ethics but also encompassing questions in aesthetics and political philosophy. Topics discussed include the environment as an ethical question, human morality, meta-ethics, normative ethics, humans and other animals, the value of nature, and nature's future. The discussion is accessible and richly illustrated with examples. The book will be valuable for students taking courses in environmental philosophy, and also for a wider audience in courses in ethics, practical ethics, and environmental studies. It will also appeal to general readers who want a reliable and sophisticated introduction to the field.

A systematic account of values carried by the natural world.

In this book, the author examines the history of ideas that has produced the conflict between Western environmentalism and other Western traditions.

No one looking ahead at the middle of the last century could have foreseen the extent and the importance of the ensuing environmental crises. Now, more than a decade into the next century, no one can ignore it. A New Environmental Ethics: the Next Millennium for Life on Earth offers clear, powerful, and oftentimes moving thoughts from one of the first and most respected philosophers to write on the environment. Rolston, an early and leading pioneer in studying the moral relationship between humans and the earth, surveys the full spectrum of approaches in the field of environmental ethics. This book, however, is not simply a judicious overview. Instead, it offers critical assessments of contemporary academic accounts and draws on a lifetime of research and experience to suggest an outlook for the future. As a result, this focused, forward-looking analysis will be a necessary complement to any balanced textbook or anthology in environmental ethics, and will teach its readers to be responsible global citizens, and residents of their landscape, helping ensure that the future we have will be the one we wish for.

Environmental Ethics provides an accessible, lively, and up-to-date introduction to the central issues and controversies in environmental ethics. Requiring no previous knowledge of philosophy or ethical theory, the book will be of interest to students, environmental scientists, environmental policy makers, and anyone curious to know what philosophers are saying today about the urgent environmental challenges we face. The book is divided into two parts.Part One deals with theoretical issues in environmental philosophy, examining a variety of ethical and environmental theories that provide diverse and thought-provoking perspectives on critical ecological issues. Part Two turns to applied environmental ethics, addressing current debates on topics such as climate change, biodiversity loss, wilderness preservation, responsibilities to future generations, population growth, overconsumption, food ethics, and ecological activism. Features include: Clear explanations of key concepts and theories that lie at the heart of current debates in environmental ethics. A mix of theory of practice that permits readers to apply diverse theoretical perspectives to key environmental debates. A wealth of pedagogical aids, including chapter summaries, discussion questions, suggested readings, and a glossary of important terms.

Presents essays that cover topics in the fields of environmental philosophy and ethics, including green chemistry, urban environments, desertification, vegetarianism, animal ethics, and waste management.

The second edition of Environmental Ethics combines a strong theoretical foundation with applications to some of the most pressing environmental problems. Through a mix of classic and new essays, it discusses applied issues such as pollution, climate change, animal rights, biodiversity, and sustainability. Roughly half of the selections are original essays new to this edition. Accessible introduction for beginners, including important established essays and new essays commissioned especially for the volume Roughly half of the selections are original essays new to this edition, including an entirely new chapter on Pollution and climate change and a new section on Sustainability Includes new material on ethical theory as a grounding for understanding the ethical dimensions of the environment, our interactions with it, and our place in it The text incorporates helpful pedagogy, including extensive editorial material, cases, and study questions Includes key information on recent developments in the field Presents a carefully selected set of readings designed to progressively move the reader to competency in subject comprehension and essay writing

Doing Environmental Ethics faces our ecological crisis by drawing on environmental science, economic theory, international law, and religious teachings, as well as philosophical arguments. It engages students in constructing ethical presumptions based on arguments for duty, character, relationships, and rights, and then tests these moral presumptions by predicting the likely consequences of acting on them. Students apply what they learn to policy issues discussed in the final part of the book: sustainable consumption, environmental policy, clean air and water, agriculture, managing public lands, urban ecology, and climate change. Questions after each chapter and a worksheet aid readers in deciding how to live more responsibly. The second edition has been updated to reflect the latest developments in environmental ethics, including sustainable practices of corporations, environmental NGO actions, and rainforest certification programs. This edition also gives greater emphasis to environmental justice, Rawls, and ecofeminism. Revised study questions concern application and analysis, and new 'Decisions' inserts invite students to analyze evaluate current environmental issues.

There is one certainty regarding the human relationship with nature-there is no getting away from it. But while a relationship with nature is a given, the nature of that relationship is not. Environmental ethics is the attempt to determine how we ought and ought not relate to the natural environment. A complete environmental ethic requires both an ethic of action and an ethic of character. Environmental virtue ethics is the area of environmental ethics concerned with character. It has been an underappreciated and underdeveloped aspect of environmental ethics-until now. The selections in this collection, consisting of ten original and four reprinted essays by leading scholars in the field, discuss the role that virtue and character have traditional played in environmental discourse, and reflect upon the role that it should play in the future. The selections also discuss the substantive content of the environmental virtues and vices, and apply them to concrete environmental issues and problems. This collection establishes the indispensability of environmental virtue ethics to environmental ethics. It also enhances the breadth and quality of the ongoing discussion of environmental virtue and vice and the role they should play in an adequate environmental ethic.