Human Value Environmental Ethics And Sustainability

Should we care about the environment because it is economically valuable or because nature has intrinsic value? This book gives a clear overview of some of the main theoretical problems within environmental ethics and offers definitive solutions and alternatives.

Environmental issues raise crucial questions. What should we value? What is our place in nature? What kind of life should we live? How should we interact with other living things? Environmental management and policy-making is ultimately based on answers to these and similar questions, but do we need a new ethics to be able overcome the environmental crisis we face? This book addresses these important questions and explores the values that decision-makers often presuppose in their environmental policy-making. Examining the content of the ethics of sustainable development that the UN and the world’s governments want us to embrace, this book examines alternatives to this kind of ethics, and the differences in basic values that these make in practice. Offering a detailed analysis of the ethics that lie behind current policy-making as it is expressed in documents such as Agenda 21 and the Rio Declaration, this unique contribution to the field of environmental studies shows how different environmental ethical theories support different goals of environmental management and generate different policies when it comes to population growth, agriculture, and preservation and management of wilderness areas and endangered species. Mikael Stenmark concludes that policy-makers must take more seriously the value assumptions and conflicts connected to environmental issues, and state explicitly on what values their own proposals and decisions are based and why these should be accepted. Those studying environmental issues or environmental philosophy will find this accessible text invaluable in presenting a clear understanding of environmental ethics and contemporary applications and policies.

The environmental professional must be educated to be ethical, and more importantly, trained through frequent participatory workshops with real-world scenarios to be able to make the right choices when faced with environmental dilemmas. This book serves as a reference and a resource casebook, presenting current real-world situations and providing perspectives to numerous environmental ethics scenarios. It provides specific guidance as to what is ethical behavior, how to judge it, and the foundations of ethical behavior in facing and resolving environmental ethical dilemmas.

This publication, a joint initiative of the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST) and the UNESCO Division of Ethics of Science and Technology, contains essays written by eight leading international experts in this relatively new inter-disciplinary area of applied ethics. These papers consider the moral dimensions of environmental management issues and explores proposals for effective international policy-making to promote environmental objectives.

We live in a world confronted by mounting environmental problems; increasing global deforestation and desertification, loss of species diversity, pollution and global warming. In everyday life people mourn the loss of valued landscapes and urban spaces. Underlying these problems are conflicting priorities and values. Yet dominant approaches to policy-making seem ill-equipped to capture the various ways in which the environment matters to us. Environmental Values introduces readers to these issues by presenting, and then challenging, two dominant approaches to environmental decision-making, one from environmental economics, the other from environmental philosophy. The authors present a sustained case for questioning the underlying ethical theories of both of these traditions. They defend a pluralistic alternative rooted in the rich everyday relations of humans to the environments they inhabit, providing a path for integrating human needs with environmental protection through an understanding of the narrative and history of particular places. The book examines the implications of this approach for policy issues such as biodiversity conservation and sustainability. Written in a clear and accessible style for an interdisciplinary audience, this volume will be ideal for student use in environmental courses in geography, economics, philosophy, politics and sociology.

In this clear, concise, comprehensively revised and up-to-date introduction to environmental ethics, Robin Attfield guides the student through the key issues and debates in this field in ways that will also be of interest to a wide range of scholars and researchers. The book introduces environmental problems and environmental ethics and surveys theories of the sources of the problems. Attfield also puts forward his own original contribution to the debates, advocating biocentric consequentialism among theories of normative ethics and defending objectivism in meta-ethics. The possibilities of ethical consumerism and investment are discussed, and the nature and basis of responsibilities for future generations in such areas as sustainable development are given detailed consideration. Attfield adopts an inclusive, cosmopolitan perspective in discussions of global ethics and citizenship, and illustrates his argument with a discussion of global warming, mitigation, adaptation and global justice. The revised edition features a new chapter on climate change, new treatments of animal issues, ecofeminism, environmental aesthetics, invasion biology and virtue ethics, and new applications of the precautionary principle to fisheries, genetic engineering and synthetic biology. The glossary and bibliography have been updated to assist understanding of these themes. The text uses a range of devices to aid understanding, such as summaries of key issues, and guides to further reading and relevant websites. It has been written particularly with a view to the needs of students taking courses in environmental ethics, and will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy, ethics, geography, religion and environmental studies.

As the destructive consequences of environmental problems such as global warming, water scarcity and resource and biodiversity destruction have been felt ever more heavily, people are becoming more aware of the importance of and their responsibilities towards environmental protection. The causes of our problems are anthropogenic. The number of people working in what might be termed "environmental industries" or with environmental responsibilities in their day-to-day work has mushroomed. In many cases, however, individuals charged with protecting the environment have a set of empirical priorities: what *is* done, rather than moral priorities which consider what *should* be done. The need to harmonize environmental knowledge with ethical behaviour and thus achieve behavioural change and the internalization of environmentally ethical values has never been more urgent. This book, developed as part of an EU programme to diffuse the application of environmental ethics to decision-making on pollution control, is a response to the need for a restatement of environmental ethics and for a code of behaviour and set of values that can be internalised and adopted to guide the actions by individuals at the sharp end of protecting the environment: decision-makers and environmental experts/executives/staff working in municipalities and public/government organisations throughout the EU and Turkey. It is nothing short of an ethical training manual that will guide environmental experts/decision-makers in making sound judgements and decisions and will act as a bridge between environmental knowledge and environmental behaviour. The book will be essential reading for decision-makers and experts working in local authorities and governmental organisations with responsibility for environmental protection: for both graduate and postgraduate students in environment-related disciplines and for vocational education teachers with a focus on the environment.

Environmental Ethics and Sustainability: A Casebook for Environmental Professionals introduces a decision-making model constructed from the viewpoint that ethics are not about the way things are, but about the way things should be. The first part of the book covers natural human instincts, human attitude, treatment of other species and the natural world, and fundamental concepts in environmental decision making in the public policy arena. It also provides insight and specifics on how to develop an ethics culture in an organization as well as conduct an environmental ethics education program that trains leaders, professionals, and students. The second part of the book identifies and deals with numerous dilemmas in a case-study format, offers options, tests ethical values, and offers practice to the environmental professionals in making the right choice and evaluating the justification for those decisions. The authors of this book explore the notion that doing the right thing is not a natural human instinct, and that the techniques needed for resolving an ethical dilemma require training. The book defines ethics as "the difference between what a person has the right to do and the right thing to do!" It details a framework for understanding and resolving various ethical claims and concentrates on providing hands-on practical training for environmental practitioners and students aspiring to become environmental leaders and professionals.