This page surveys related fields of environmental study that my courses, "Environmental Ethics," and "The Earth: Ethics, Politics & Economics" will not mainly focus on. By doing this, we better understand what the course does focus on, and also how it connects with the related fields. This survey should help students proceed to other inquiries beyond the course. It should also help them better understand the problems treated in our course.
First, this will not mainly be a course in environmental ethics as usually understood. Like this course, environmental ethics scrutinizes the concepts, clashes of values, and presuppositions that shape our thinking about how to value the natural world. But unlike this course, environmental ethics as usually understood cares first and foremost about what really, fundamentally, matters. It chiefly aims to articulate the basis for our concern with the environment. So it emphasizes rival accounts of that basis: biocentrism, anthropocentrism, ecocentrism, deep ecology, the land ethic, Heidegger's critique of the standing-reserve attitude, etc.* Articulating that basis is not the main goal of this course, though we shall discuss such articulations. Second, this will not mainly be a course on environmental ideologies. Ideologies provide their holders with four things: a conception of the human condition, a map to understand the most important features of society as it presently exists, a blueprint of an ideal society, and a set of policy recommendations about how best to get from the second to the third, given the first. A course on environmental ideologies would focus on studying ideologies as they relate to the environment: so it would examine, on the one hand, ideologies that put environmental concern at the center: ecologism, ecofeminism, ecosocialism, and ecoanarchism, for example.** On the other hand, it would examine how environmental questions are treated by other ideologies: liberalism, socialism, conservatism, republicanism, feminism, fascism, nationalism, libertarianism, anarchism, etc.*** While this course will discuss such ideologies, and will examine one--green ideology--in some detail, our focus is not on ideologies. Third, this will not mainly be a course on environmental political theories. Environmental political theories present explicit and rationally-argued-for theories of what we should do, politically, about the environment, and how we should organize and regulate the way our social institutions deal with the environment. Such theories focus on questions of social justice, the state, domination, democracy, nationalism, civil disobedience, human rights, rights-vs.-growth, etc.**** While this course will spend a good deal of time discussing such theories and such questions, they are not our main focus. Fourth, this is not mainly a course in environmental economics. Environmental economics investigates the consequences of economic activity for the environment and environmental activity, and vice versa. It also examines the economic costs and benefits of various environmental schemes, and which alternative environmental schemes can most efficiently give us what we want.***** While this course will frequently discuss the relation between environmental concerns and economic phenomena, that relation is not our main focus. Fifth, this is not mainly a course in environmental policy or environmental institutional design. Environmental policy studies what policies toward the environment should be adopted by large organizations like the state, government, business corporations, and non-profit organizations. It also studies why those organizations should choose particular policy packages over others.****** Environmental institutional design studies which institutions dealing with the environment policy-makers should create, how the environment shapes the design of institutions, and how environmental institutions shape the environment and society.******* While this course will consider the grounds and presuppositions that should drive such policy choices, we will not consider the merits and demerits of alternative policy packages currently being considered by such organizations. Sixth, this will not mainly be a course in empirical-explanatory theories of environmental politics and society. Such theories make claims about why political and social variation cause variations in environmental policy, or variations in the environment itself.******** They also examine how environmental variation causes variation in politics and society.********* Seventh, this will not mainly be a course in the environmental limits to growth. Theories of the environmental limits to growth ask whether or not we can continue to make economic growth a high priority, or whether the environmental costs of continued growth are so high as to be unacceptable. For both sides, the truth or falsity of the precautionary principle is a central issue.********** While this course will discuss such theories and their moral presuppositions, as well as the precautionary principle, they will not be our main focus. Finally, this will not mainly be a course in environmental philosophy generally. Environmental philosophy examines how our most fundamental concepts and world-views shape, are shaped by, and should be shaped by the environment and how we affect it. Courses in environmental philosophy might consider philosophical systems driven by concern for the environment, or critiques of fundamental concepts like reason, driven by such concern.*********** They might also consider accounts of how different cultural traditions have philosophized about the environment.************ And they might consider theories about which views of the human-nature relationship are fundamental to the currently hegemonic attitude toward the environment.*************
All of these fields deserve study and reflection. Moreover, all the questions they put have implications for the questions put in this course, and vice versa. But our questions are not reducible to those of any one of those fields. Our questions concern the clashes of values, the differing interpretations of facts, and the clashing theories and attitudes that form the first level of presuppositions driving current political and policy debates about the environment. In particular, we will focus on how the ethical, political, and economic presuppositions at this level do and should inform each other. In doing so, a major aim is to give you concepts and techniques that will allow you to quickly familiarize yourself with any and all of the fields described above.
* =Three examples, besides the Light and Rolston anthology recommended for this course, are Holmes Rolston, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Temple UP, 1989), Paul Taylor, Respect for Nature (Princeton UP, 1986), and Environmental Ethics: Intercultural Perspectives, ed. King-Tap Ip (Rodopi, 2009)
**= For a survey of such ideologies, see John Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses (Oxford UP, 2013). For an account of ecologism as an ideology, see Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought (Routledge, 2007). For accounts of ecosocialism and ecoanarchism as ideologies, see Chapters 6 and 7 of Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory (SUNY Press, 1992)
***= For some examples, see Part I, "Modern Political Ideologies and the Ecological Challenge," Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge, ed. Andrew Dobson and Robyn Eckersley (Cambridge UP, 2006)
****= Three examples, besides Goodin's book, are Alan Carter, A Radical Green Political Theory (Routledge 1999); Robyn Eckersley, The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2004); and Roger Scruton, How To Think Seriously about the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (Oxford UP 2012)
***** = Nicholas Stern's book and Lomborg's Cool It! are references for this course on the economics of global warming. For environmental economics more generally, an example is Partha Dasgupta, Human Well-being and the Natural Environment (Oxford UP 2001), which is mostly about how to integrate the natural environment into measures of quality of life. Important articles are collected in Economics of the Environment, ed. Robert Stavins (WW Norton, 2012). An influential theory that repudiates mainstream economics' claim that eternal growth is possible is the ecological economics foreshadowed in Kenneth Boulding's "The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth," (1966) and by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's biophysical economics, and then developed by Herman E. Daly, among others. A good collection surveying the key claims of ecological economics is Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics, ed. Herman E. Daly and Kenneth Townsend (MIT Press, 1993)
******= Two contrasting examples are Kristin Shrader-Frechette, What Will Work: Fighting Climate Change with Renewable Energy, Not Nuclear Power (Oxford UP, 2012) and Michael H. Fox, Why We Need Nuclear Power: The Environmental Case (Oxford UP, 2014)
*******= A distinguished example is Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge UP 1990). For a survey of current global political institutions dealing with the environment, see Elizabeth DeSombre, Global Environmental Institutions (Routledge, 2006)
******** = Two examples are Oran Young, Institutional Dynamics: Emergent Patterns in International Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2010), and Kenneth A. Gould and Tammy L. Lewis, Twenty Lessons in Environmental Sociology (Oxford UP, 2008).
*********= A history of such theories is Franklin Thomas, The Environmental Basis of Society: A Study in the History of Sociological Theory (The Century Co., 1925)
**********= On the limits side, the first major cry of concern is George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864). Contemporary versions are Donella Meadows et al. The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Chelsea Green, 2004), and Herman E. Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Beacon Press, 1997). On the no-need-to-greatly-limit-growth-because-of-environmental-limits side are Wilfred Beckerman, In Defence of Economic Growth (Duckworth, 1974); Julian L. Simon and Herman Kahn, The Resourceful Earth: A Response to Global 2000 (Blackwell, 1984); W. Beckerman, Small Is Stupid: Blowing the Whistle on the Greens (Duckworth, 1995); Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton UP, 1998); and Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist (Oxford UP, 2001)
***********=Four examples are Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy (Cambridge UP, 1993); Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Critique of Reason (Routledge, 2001); Andrew Brennan, Thinking about Nature: An Investigation of Nature, Value, and Ecology (Routledge Revivals, 2014); and Lorraine Code, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location (Oxford UP, 2006)
************ = Four examples are Kimberly K. Smith, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations (University of Kansas Press, 2007); Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (UCalifornia Press, 1967); John Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (Duckworth 1974); and Environmental Philosophy in Asian Traditions of Thought, ed. J. Baird Callicott and James McRae (SUNY Press, 2014)
************* = An example is John M. Meyer, Political Nature: Environmentalism and the Interpretation of Western Thought (MIT Press, 2001)