Natural environment: an annotated bibliography on attitudes and values - review

The compilers make serious effort to include different perspectives, and this edition is more adequate to environmental ethics and values than an earlier edition. For both the editors, now retired librarians, this is largely a labor of love

Why study environmental ethics?

Study environmental ethics to figure out who you are, where you are, and what you ought to do. "The unexamined life is not worth living." But Socrates avoided nature, thinking it profitless. The country places and trees won't teach me anything. Socrates was wrong. I found that out in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Life in an unexamined world is not worthy living either. Become a three-dimensional person. One needs experience of the urban, and the rural, and the wild. You don't want to live a denatured life. Study environmental ethics to get put in your place

Critical notice of Environmental ethics: values in and duties to the natural world

Critical notice of citations of Rolston's published book Environmental Ethics: Values in and Duties to the Natural World

Science, religion, and the future

Includes bibliographical references (pages 81-82).Physics, especially cosmology, is compatible with monotheism, discovering a universe "fine-tuned" for the subsequent construction of stars, planets, life, and mind. In evolutionary biology, by contrast, the process is more disorderly, with constant struggle to survive. Biologists do discover richness, biodiversity. Earth is a planet with promise, and a promising turn for the millennium is that science and religion will increasingly become partners in caring for the Earth

Religion: naturalized, socialized, evaluated

Includes bibliographical references.Evolutionary history on the prolific Earth, resulting in nature producing spirit (Geist). The origins of evil and sin in the genesis of human life. The necessity of suffering in evolutionary creation. Religion evolving to increase human fertility. Religion generating altruism, interpreted as both pseudoaltruism and as genuine altruism. The survival value of religion. Testing religions socially and cognitively. Creativity in actual and possible natural history as the genesis of information, the genesis of value, in which theists can detect transcendent divine presence

Antarctica

Includes bibliographical references (page 58).Antarctica, the seventh continent, is anomalous, compared with the six inhabited continents. The usual concerns of environmental ethics on other continents fail without sustainable development, or ecosystems for a "land ethic," or even familiar terrestrial fauna and flora. A political Antarctic regime developed policy with a deepening ethical sensitivity over the second half of the last century remarkably exemplified in the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (Madrid Protocol) at the end of the century, protecting "the intrinsic value of Antarctica," though puzzles remain about how to value Antarctica

Science

Includes bibliographical references (page 1497).Nature is both a scientific and a religious challenge. Nature must be evaluated within cultures, classically by their religions, currently also by the sciences so eminent in Western culture. Religious persons often find something "beyond," discovering that neither nature nor culture are self-explanatory as phenomena; both point to deeper forces, such as divine presence, or Brahman or Emptiness (sunyata) or Tao underlying. Religions often detect supernature immanent in or transcendent to nature, perhaps even more so in human culture, though some religions prefer to think of a deeper account of Nature, perhaps enchanted, perhaps sacred

Environmental ethics and environmental anthropology

Includes bibliographical references (pages 286-287).Is there a particular angle that environmental anthropology offers environmental ethics? Local peoples find that both their natural and their social systems are jeopardized by global forces, requiring concerns for environmental justice. They are challenged to re-interpret outdated customs. Further, the encounter with these premodern systems may expose the metaphysics that drives modern science, epitomized in plans to re-engineer the Earth in an Anthropocene Epoch. Traditional views can serve as a catalyst. Somewhat to our surprise, we may conclude that our science-based, consumer driven, ever more exploitative cultures also need a revised environmental ethics

Human uniqueness and human dignity: persons in nature and the nature of persons

Includes bibliographical references (pages 151-153).Also published in: Pellegrino, Edmund D., Adam Schulman, and Thomas W. Merrill, eds. Human Dignity and Bioethics, 129-153. Norte Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.The gulf separating humans from all other species can sensitize us to our potential for dignity. Only humans have linguistic capacities capable of sustaining cumulative transmissible cultures. Ideas pass from mind to mind. Our ideas and deliberated practices re-configure our brain structures. The human brain, the most complex thing known in the universe, can generate ideals. Humans become existential and ethical persons, embodied "spirit.

Naturalizing and systematizing evil

Includes bibliographical references (pages 85-86).Negative evils (disvalues) in natural systems, though real enough to fauna and flora adversely affected, must be fitted into an ecosystemic and evolutionary framework, with both conservation of life and generating and testing of novel life forms. Struggle and stress are as essential as life support. Such genesis is always by conflict and resolution. Life is perpetually renewed in the midst of its perpetual perishing