Des Environmental Values

[Basa Benejan]

Welive in a world confronted by mounting environmental problems; increasing global deforestation and desertification, loss of species diversity, pollution and global warming. In everyday life people mourn the loss of valued landscapes and urban spaces. Underlying these problems are conflicting priorities and values. Yet dominant approaches to policy-making seem ill-equipped to capture the various ways in which the environment matters to us.

Environmental Values introduces readers to these issues by presenting, and then challenging, two dominant approaches to environmental decision-making, one from environmental economics, the other from environmental philosophy. The authors present a sustained case for questioning the underlying ethical theories of both of these traditions. They defend a pluralistic alternative rooted in the rich everyday relations of humans to the environments they inhabit, providing a path for integrating human needs with environmental protection through an understanding of the narrative and history of particular places. The book examines the implications of this approach for policy issues such as biodiversity conservation and sustainability.

Written in a clear and accessible style for an interdisciplinary audience, this volume will be ideal for student use in environmental courses in geography, economics, philosophy, politics and sociology.

Chapter 1 Values and the Environment 1. Environments and values 1.1. Living from the world 1.2. Living in the world 1.3 Living with the world 2. Addressing Value Conflicts 2.1 Value conflicts 2.2 The distribution of goods and harms 2.3 Addressing conflicts

Part One: Utilitarian approaches to environmental decision making Chapter 2: Human well-being and the natural world 1. Introduction 2. Welfare: Hedonism, preferences and objective lists 2.1 The Hedonistic account of well-being 2.2 Preference utilitarianism 2.3 Objectivist accounts of welfare 3. Whose well-being counts? 4. Making comparisons: utilitarianism, economics and efficiency Chapter 3: Consequentialism and its critics 1. Introduction 2. Consequentialism permits too much 2.1 What is the problem with consequentialism? The moral standing of individuals 2.2 Rights, conflicts and community 3. Consequentialism demands too much 3.1 What is the problem with consequentialism? Agent-based restrictions on action 3.2 Virtues and environmental concern 4. Consequentialist responses 4.1. Indirect utilitarianism 4.2 Extending the account of the good 5. Ethical pluralism and the limits of theory Chapter 4 Equality, justice and environment 1. Utilitarianism and distribution 1.1. Equality in moral standing 1.2. Indirect utilitarian arguments for distributive equality 1.3 Economics, efficiency and equality 1.3.1 Willingness to pay 1.3.2 The Kaldor-Hicks compensation test 1.3.3. Discounting the future 2. Egalitarian ethics 2.1. Consequentialism without maximisation 2.1.1. The priority view 2.1.2. Telic egalitarianism 2.2. Deontological responses 2.3. Community, character and equality 3. Equality of what? Chapter 5 Value Pluralism, value commensurability and environmental choice 1. Value monism 2. Value pluralism 2.1 Trading-off values 2.2 Constitutive incommensurabilities 3. Value-pluralism, consequentialism, and the alternatives 4. Structural pluralism 5. Choice without commensurability 6. What can we expect from a theory of rational choice?

Part 3: The narratives of nature Chapter 9. Nature and narrative 1. Three walks 2. History and processes as sources of value 3. Going back to nature? 4. Old worlds and new 5. Narrative and nature Chapter 10. Biodiversity: biology as biography 1. The itemising approach to environmental values 1.1 The nature of biodiversity - conceptual clarifications 1.2 The attractions of itemisation 2. Biodiversity and environmental sustainability 3. Time, history and biodiversity 4. Environmental ethics and the dangers of moral trumps Chapter 11. Sustainability and human well-being 1. Sustainability: of what, for whom and why? 2. Economic accounts of sustainability 3. Sustainability: weak and strong 4. Human well-being and substitutability 5. From preferences to needs 6. Narrative, human-well being and sustainability 7. Sustainability without capital Chapter 12. Public decisions and environmental goods 1. Procedural rationality and deliberative institutions 2. Decisions in context 3. Responsibility and character 4. What makes for good decisions?

Environmental Values covers an extraordinary amount of ground with clarity and precision. It distils key ideas from leading thinkers in environmental philosophy into one tightly argued volume. It offers both careful, accurate summaries of existing positions and an original, stuimulating position of its own. I highly recommend it. Clare Palmer, Geographical Journal

How do Americans view environmental issues? From EarthFirst! members to sawmill workers, this study by a team of cognitive anthropologists offers both good and bad news for those addressing environmental issues in the public arena. On the one hand it reveals surprising similarities in the way different groups of Americans view long-term global environmental change, and on the other it shows that Americans have serious misunderstandings about these issues, which skews public support for policies. Using research techniques developed in the study of other cultures, Environmental Values in American Culture explores the reasons for the recent increase in environmental sentiments among Americans, and shows that current views attributing public environmentalism to a single cause are greatly oversimplified. It investigates the components of public environmentalism: beliefs (what people think the world is like), values (what is moral or desirable), and cultural models (the organization of beliefs or values into explanations or justifications). The authors document how scientific information on such issues as global warming, ozone depletion, and species extinctions is interpreted and transformed by the public, and how underlying beliefs and values influence preferences for or against environmental policies. The interviews with and surveys of groups such as EarthFirst!, Sierra Club members, the general public, congressional staff, coal miners, and sawmill workers yield rich insights about how people conceptualize - and misconceptualize - major environmental issues. They also reveal public beliefs and values that differ sharply from those of environmental scientists and economists, identify what is shared by Americans and what is idiosyncratic to extreme groups, and show that religious and spiritual values concerning the environment and concerns for one's descendants are as important as economic tradeoffs.

While the subject of framing has achieved considerable recognition recently among social scientists and policy analysts, less attention has been given to how societies arrive at stable, collective frames of meaning for environmental values and policy. This paper proposes four models of societal processes by which framing occurs: narration, modelling, canonisation and normalisation. These four models are developed, compared, and explored in detail through a case study of the framing of the impacts of climate change on human societies in US science policy from the 1960s through the 1990s. I conclude by offering a number of potentially fruitful avenues for further research into the dynamics of framing.

Examines development & influence of religious environmental values & their impact on environmental citizenship in America; Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist & Christian environmental perspectives; stewardship, eco-justice & creation spirituality. Prereq: Not open to students with credit for 347. GE cultures and ideas course. GE foundation historical and cultural studies course.

At an October 2 Environmental Values Project seminar, Michael Thompson argued that the key to environmental policy is to put the decision making power in the hands of "clumsy institutions": institutions that cultivate a plurality of views and approaches. For more details, see the seminar paper (PDF: 42.6 KB, 10 pages) using the link at the bottom of this page. Thompson, who directs the Musgrave Institute in London, has produced several major works on cultural theory. He recently took part in an exhaustive study applying cultural theory to human choice and climate change.

A major finding of the climate change study was that to move the environmental debate forward, we should focus not on the environment itself but on the institutions handling environmental policy. They need to be clumsy enough to "muddle through" environmental challenges.

Thompson told an anecdote about a Scot of the Victorian period who was well known for his wit, the Reverend Sidney Smith. Thompson said that Smith saw two women shouting at each other from houses on opposite sides of an Edinburgh street. He remarked, "They will never agree; they are arguing from different premises!"

Thompson said that the healthiest governments and organizations see nothing wrong with allowing all four of these approaches to flourish at once. One of the best examples of this occurred last decade when several villages in the Himalayas had to protect their forests from avalanches. The solution was to switch from a private ownership model to an egalitarian model emphasizing the need to take collective action. Later, when their forests were again under threat from booms in mining and tourism, the villagers adopted a hierarchical approach, imposing laws against deforestation.

The Environmental Values Project is a multisite, multiyear collaborative attempt to explain and compare the role of values in environmental policy making in China, India, Japan, and the United States. The project is co-sponsored by the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, the Research Center for Contemporary China (China), Center for the Study of Developing Societies (India), Lake Biwa Museum (Japan), and the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, University of Arizona (United States).

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