Situating Environmental Philosophy in Canada

The volume includes topics from political philosophy and normative ethics on the one hand to philosophy of science and the philosophical underpinnings of water management policy on the other. It contains reflections on ecological nationalism, the legacy of Grey Owl, the meaning of ‘outside’ to Canadians, the paradigm shift from mechanism to ecology in our understanding of nature, the meaning of the concept of the Anthropocene, the importance of humans self-identifying as ‘earthlings’, the challenges of biodiversity protection and the status of cross-bred species, how to ground the moral considerability of ecosystems, the collapse of the Newfoundland and Labrador cod fishery, and much more. It covers metaphysics, ontology, ethics, political philosophy, critical history, and environmental policy. The range of topics and frames is as diverse and challenging as the land itself

Divided but together: variation in 18th-century Labrador Inuit housing as seen in House 3 at Double Mer Point (GbBo-2)

The sod winter house has been a source relied upon heavily by archaeologists who study the Labrador Inuit past. Research has focused on how the size and construction of houses have changed through time and used those changes as evidence of larger social changes in Labrador Inuit society (Jordan 1978; Jordan and Kaplan 1980; Kaplan 1983, 1985; Kaplan and Woollett 2000; Murphy 2011, 2012; Murphy and Rankin 2014; Richling 1993; Schledermann 1976a, 1976b; Taylor 1976; Whitridge 2008; Woollett 1999, 2003, 2007). However, there are also differences in the design of houses that reflect variation in Inuit housing at certain points in the past. Recently, those designs present during the Communal House Phase of Labrador have been highlighted (Kaplan 2012; Murphy 2011, 2012; Murphy and Rankin 2014), but little work has focused on explaining the reasons for the many different house designs. This thesis offers an explanation for the design of House 3, a house occupied at the winter community of Double Mer Point during the latter half of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century

Diversity in Labrador Inuit sled dog diets: Insights from δ13C and δ15N analysis of dog bone and dentine collagen

Sled dogs were an integral part of Labrador Inuit life from the initial expansion and settlement of northeastern Canada to the present day. Tasked with pulling sleds and assisting people with other subsistence activities in the winter, dogs required regular provisioning with protein and fat. In this paper, we conduct stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratio analysis of the skeletal remains of dogs (n=35) and wild fauna (n=68) from sites located on the north and south coasts of Labrador to characterize dog provisioning between the 15th to early 19th centuries. In addition, we analyse bone (n=20) and dentine (n=4) collagen from dogs from Double Mer Point, a communal house site in Hamilton Inlet to investigate how dog diets intersected with Inuit subsistence and trade activities at a local level. We find that dog diets were largely composed of marine mammal protein, but that dogs on the north coast consumed more caribou and fish relative to dogs from the central and south coast sites. The diets of dogs from Double Mer Point were the most heterogenous of any site, suggesting long-distance movement of people and/or animals along the coast

Rethinking Environment: The Ethics of a Constructionist View of Our Relation to Nature

In this thesis I argue that the constructionist theory of the relation between organism and environment has several important implications for ethics. Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for later chapters by elucidating the concepts and terms used in later discussions and providing the motivation for the project. In Chapter 2 I introduce the constructionist theory of the relation between organism and environment. In Chapter 3 I argue that the constructionist theory can be used to criticize exemplars of individualism and holism in ethics and to criticize the idea that individualism and holism are incompatible. In Chapter 4 I turn to climate change and geoengineering, arguing that a class of objection to geoengineering cannot be sustained in light of the theory of the constructed niche. In Chapter 5 I argue that the constructionist theory provides reason to recognize moral obligations to environments, providing a convincing answer to a central theoretical problem in environmental ethics