An Environmental Ethic for the End of the World PDF Download

Author: Scott C. Powell
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527535967
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Is there a place for religious texts in today’s global environmental conversation? Some have claimed over the centuries that the Bible has given humans license to devastate the world of nature. Can those same texts be a source of ecological healing? This book investigates Romans 8:19-22, Paul’s enigmatic passage about “creation groaning out in travail”, which comes at the conclusion of his long Christological discourse. His inclusion of nature in the Christ event is both unprecedented and has baffled scholars for centuries. Could Genesis provide the explanation? Four relationships shape the creation stories. Prior to the fall of Adam and Eve, human beings are said to live in harmony with God, with themselves, with one another, and with the world of nature. As humans disobey God, each of these relationships unravels, climaxing with the cursing of nature itself. Is this paradigm in the background of Paul’s Christology? Read this way, Paul’s midrash on the story of creation in light of the Christ event provides deep insight into the biblical role of humans and their instrumentality in bringing both harm and healing to the world of nature.

Author: Deane Curtin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742578488
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Deane Curtin puts today's most important social and environmental ethical issues into their historical, political, and philosophical contexts, and offers deep insights into the nature of our freedom and its relation to justice in our globalized, commercialized culture. Using familiar literary and historical icons to make surprising points about colonial attitudes and practices, he also demonstrates the unique linkages between colonialism and environmentalism. Using an array of well-documented cases from around the world, Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World is an accessible and very readable book ideal for students of environmental ethics, globalization, environmental politics, or environmental political theory, as well as for anyone interested in policy and practical options for change.

Author: Steven Vogel
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262029103
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
A provocative argument that environmental thinking would be better off if it dropped the concept of “nature” altogether and spoke instead of the built environment. Environmentalism, in theory and practice, is concerned with protecting nature. But if we have now reached “the end of nature,” as Bill McKibben and other environmental thinkers have declared, what is there left to protect? In Thinking like a Mall, Steven Vogel argues that environmental thinking would be better off if it dropped the concept of “nature” altogether and spoke instead of the “environment”—that is, the world that actually surrounds us, which is always a built world, the only one that we inhabit. We need to think not so much like a mountain (as Aldo Leopold urged) as like a mall. Shopping malls, too, are part of the environment and deserve as much serious consideration from environmental thinkers as do mountains. Vogel argues provocatively that environmental philosophy, in its ethics, should no longer draw a distinction between the natural and the artificial and, in its politics, should abandon the idea that something beyond human practices (such as “nature”) can serve as a standard determining what those practices ought to be. The appeal to nature distinct from the built environment, he contends, may be not merely unhelpful to environmental thinking but in itself harmful to that thinking. The question for environmental philosophy is not “how can we save nature?” but rather “what environment should we inhabit, and what practices should we engage in to help build it?”

Author: Bryan E. Bannon
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821444697
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
From Mastery to Mystery is an original and provocative contribution to the burgeoningfield of ecophenomenology. Informed by current debates in environmental philosophy, Bannon critiques the conception of nature as u200a“substance” that he finds tacitly assumed by the major environmental theorists. Instead, this book reconsiders the basic goals of an environmental ethic by questioning the most basic presupposition that most environmentalists accept: that nature is in need of preservation. Beginning with Bruno Latour’s idea that continuing to speak of nature in the way we popularly conceive of it is ethically and politically disastrous, this book describes a way in which the concept of nature can retain its importance in our discussion of the contemporary state of the environment. Based upon insights from the phenomenological tradition, specifically the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the concept of nature developed in the book preserves the best antihumanistic intuitions of environmentalists without relying on either a reductionistic understanding of nature and the sciences or dualistic metaphysical constructions.

Author: Max Oelschlaeger
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438414935
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This book explains the role of language in causing and in resolving the ecocrisis, showing that ecologically adaptive behavior can be facilitated through language. The authors explore the discourses of deep ecology, ecofeminism, Judeo-Christianity, quantum theory, and Native American world views, all to the end of empowering ecosocial change.

Author: Patrick Curry
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745651267
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
In this thoroughly revised and updated second edition of the highly successful Ecological Ethics, Patrick Curry shows that a new and truly ecological ethic is both possible and urgently needed. With this distinctive proposition in mind, Curry introduces and discusses all the major concepts needed to understand the full range of ecological ethics. He discusses light green or anthropocentric ethics with the examples of stewardship, lifeboat ethics, and social ecology; the mid-green or intermediate ethics of animal liberation/rights; and dark or deep green ecocentric ethics. Particular attention is given to the Land Ethic, the Gaia Hypothesis and Deep Ecology and its offshoots: Deep Green Theory, Left Biocentrism and the Earth Manifesto. Ecofeminism is also considered and attention is paid to the close relationship between ecocentrism and virtue ethics. Other chapters discuss green ethics as post-secular, moral pluralism and pragmatism, green citizenship, and human population in the light of ecological ethics. In this new edition, all these have been updated and joined by discussions of climate change, sustainable economies, education, and food from an ecocentric perspective. This comprehensive and wide-ranging textbook offers a radical but critical introduction to the subject which puts ecocentrism and the critique of anthropocentrism back at the top of the ethical, intellectual and political agenda. It will be of great interest to students and activists, and to a wider public.

Author: Ricardo Rozzi
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319121332
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
This book advances Earth Stewardship toward a planetary scale, presenting a range of ecological worldviews, practices, and institutions in different parts of the world and to use them as the basis for considering what we could learn from one another, and what we could do together. Today, inter-hemispheric, intercultural, and transdisciplinary collaborations for Earth Stewardship are an imperative. Chapters document pathways that are being forged by socio-ecological research networks, religious alliances, policy actions, environmental citizenship and participation, and new forms of conservation, based on both traditional and contemporary ecological knowledge and values. “The Earth Stewardship Initiative of the Ecological Society of America fosters practices to provide a stable basis for civilization in the future. Biocultural ethic emphasizes that we are co-inhabitants in the natural world; no matter how complex our inventions may become” (Peter Raven).

Author: Francisco J. Benzoni
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Caroline Beer's new book explores the consequences of democratic politics in Mexico. Focusing on struggles at the subnational level, she assesses how increased electoral competition alters the long-term distribution of power across political institutions in ways that shift power away from established elites and into the hands of ordinary citizens. Electoral Competition and Institutional Change in Mexico includes compelling case study comparisons of three states with very different experiences with electoral democracy: Guanajuato, Hidalgo, and San Luis Potos . These cases are then situated within a broader quantitative analysis of all thirty-one Mexican states. Beer's research reverses the causal arrow of many standard studies by focusing on the causes of institutional change rather than the consequences of institutional design. Her analysis reveals that the process of increasing electoral competition has unleashed new forces that have slowly eroded the power of centralized, authoritarian elites in Mexico. Utilizing a theoretical framework that draws on insights from classic democratic theory, new institutionalist literature, and current critiques of contemporary Latin American democracy, Beer's important work represents the first comparative study of state legislatures and governors in Mexico and offers compelling insight into the bottom-up dynamics of Mexico's transition to democracy.

Author: J. Baird Callicott
Publisher: Macmillan Library Reference
ISBN: 9780028661377
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 1127

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Book Description
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.

Author: Robin Attfield
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820340251
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
First published in 1983, The Ethics of Environmental Concern has become a classic in the relatively new field of environmental ethics. Examining traditional attitudes toward nature, and the degree to which these attitudes enable us to cope with modern ecological problems, Robin Attfield looks particularly at the Judeo-Christian heritage of belief in humankind's dominion, the tradition of stewardship, and the more recent belief in progress to determine the extent to which these attitudes underlie ecological problems and how far they embody resources adequate for combating such problems. He then examines concerns of applied ethics and considers our obligations to future generations, the value of life, and the moral standing and significance of nonhumans. Simultaneously, he offers and defends a theory of moral principles appropriate for dealing with such concerns as pollution, scarce natural resources, population growth, and the conservation and preservation of the environment. The second edition includes a new preface and introduction, as well as a bibliographic essay and an updated list of references incorporating relevant scholarship since the publication of the first edition.