This is an excellent resource text for an introductory course in environmental ethics. In their introduction, the authors understand ethics to be “any serious question about how we ought to live”, and environmental ethics as a “comprehensive, reasoned view about how we ought to be dealing with our nonhuman environment”.
The first section is an essay by the authors that gives an overview of traditional ethical theories such as egoism, divine command, rights theory, utilitarianism, natural law, and Kant (with a bit of Rawls). Although this section does not have primary sources and is a bit wordier than it needs to be, it is for the most part clearly written, explains the traditional kinds of ethical reasoning, and finishes with a brief summary of key questions in environmental justice such as anthropocentrism and the moral standing of nonhuman entities, and the acceptability of imposing risks on others without their consent. For a class in which it is important to bring students up to speed with ethical language relatively quickly, this material is useful-it helps to articulate unspoken assumptions that many students bring to class about how to determine what is “right”, and indicates some strengths and limitations of each way of thinking. It also clearly describes why environmental questions are no less ethical than more traditional topics such as abortion, euthanasia, and so on-each relies on underlying philosophies about value that need to be carefully thought through.
The second section then explores questions about religion and Western philosophy and their contribution to our understanding of value. It begins with a well-known essay by Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967), in which White tackled what he saw in Christianity as “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen” and launched a debate about the role of religion in the ecological crisis that has only intensified and broadened over the years. Subsequent essays defend Christian and Jewish texts and point to the idea of “stewardship” as a fundamentally ecological concept, while others attack the anthropocentric nature of a view that does not recognize that the world has existed far longer without its stewards than it has with them.
Later essays in the second section (by Sallie McFague, Jay McDaniel, and Nina Rosenstand) capture some of the rethinking that has been occurring within the Christian tradition in an effort to recast the “disembodied” ideal of the human that Christianity and most Western philosophy inherited from the Platonic tradition. Although no other world religions are discussed, the authors note that “new, extensive anthologies on religion and the environment made it inessential to explore in this volume other influential religions: Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and so on.” The section does include some discussion of a Native American (American Indian) environmental ethic as well as caveats (R.E. Johannes, Nina Rosenstand) about romanticizing indigenous cultures that at times carried their own body-spirit dualism.
Part V, titled “Economics, Ethics, and Ecology”, has a number of good essays dealing with the intersection of these three topics. Much though I like the point-counterpoint of two essays by Myrick Freeman and Mark Sagoff on “Letting the Market Decide”, the next two in the section on “Cost-Benefit Analysis” provide some of the same information and more directly tackle the main tool that economists recommend in order to make decisions on environmental questions. In this section Steven Kelman's “Cost-Benefit Analysis: an Ethical Critique” is excellent in its description of the differences between price and value, and the limits of utilitarianism. An essay by Leonard and Zeckhauser, “Cost-Benefit Analysis Defended”, provides a good counterpoint. As is often the case, comparing the two voices is useful for students. A 1992 article by Robert Repetto, “Earth in the Balance Sheet” provides a superb and readable analysis of how the GDP/GNP misreports the value of natural resources in such a way as to dangerously overlook the depletion of resources. He explains that in a developing country, for example, timber sales are recorded under UN guidelines as income for the GDP but no depreciation is listed for the declining resource of trees-hence, income goes up until the resource is exhausted, at which point the income source disappears. The section continues with Garrett Hardin's classic 1968 speech and article “The Tragedy of the Commons”, which raises important questions for students to wrestle with about private property and coercion, and is followed by a direct response to part of the speech by George Monbiot, highlighting an example of sustainable use of the commons. Again, the counterpoint is useful. John Locke's rather radical views on private property come next, along with a essay by Kristin Shrader-Frechette suggesting that we give Locke's “labor theory of property” more attention. She points out that Locke's philosophy contains an inherent sense of limit.
Population issues are also well covered in Section V, with another classic of Hardin's (Lifeboat Ethics) alongside one by Malthus, an example in Julian Simon of someone who argues resources are limitless (1981), and an excellent essay by Partha Dasgupta dealing with the relationship of population, environmental degradation, and poverty. The last part of Section V reviews definitions of sustainability (including Partridge's review of the moral basis for bothering with future generations),one economist's view of sustainability by Solow, and an great explanation by Robert Goodin of the discount rate as it appears in discussions by both economists and environmental ethicists (the last is highly recommended).
Finally-a brief mention of other topics in this text includes essays on animal rights, diversity, anthropomorphism and the land/marine ethic, deep ecology vs. social ecology, ecofeminism, food and agriculture, environmental racism, climate change, kinds of advocacy for the environment (including “monkey-wrenching” or, to others, “ecoterrorism”). For those interested in corporate responsibility I recommend the Pacific Lumber case study in Chapter VI-it zeroes in on the question of corporate raiding for profit and the effects on the community and the local environment. The text begins with a copy of the 1992 World Scientists' Warning to Humanity and has a useful bibliography.
Overall, the editors have tried to include a fairly wide range of views, which I find generally helpful with secondary school students who don't like to be spoon-fed and who always need (like the rest of us) to have their assumptions challenged in order to really understand them. But there is plenty of depth here on environmental questions and one is not left with a feeling of evenhandedness to the point of theoretical mush. The issues retain their urgency.
©2004 by RSiSS and Kathy Brownback
Phillips Exeter Academy
