Lecture 2, Fall 2007
Environmental Ethics
Ethics ?
moral philosophy,
“doing what’s right”,
a code,
range of disciplines including law,
respect for other’s rights…….
1. From Last Lecture:
- What was significant about the Rio Declaration and Kyoto Protocol?
- What was the general conclusion of the Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment?
- What are the major controversies about the Greater Yellowstone
Ecosystem Management Plan?
- How are environmental conflicts resolved?
2. Ethics
- Most issues we will talk about this semester have ethical
dimensions
- Who’s Ethics? Not all cultures share the the same ethical
commitments
- Cultural relativism: acknowledges differences exist and shows
sensitivity to legitimate differences in ethical commitments.
- 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights: all have the rights
to life, liberty and security of person.
3. Read about it
Today’s lecture comes from Chapter 2, pages 14 - 25.
4. Conflict?
- Ethical issues are always complex
- Rarely black & white
- Environmental Ethics
- Good for people, but bad for the environment?
- Short-term good vs. long-term good
- Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY)
- Squeaky wheel: gets oiled?
5. Approaches to Environmental Ethics - Figure 2.2
6. Aldo Leopold
- Wrote: A Sand County Almanac
- Defined a new view: The Land Ethic
- Basically an ecocentrist view: the environment itself has
moral worth, not just the humans or animals within it.
- “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity,
stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when
it tends otherwise. .. We abuse land because we regard it as a
commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to
which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect”
7. Environmental Approaches/Attitudes
- Development: anthropocentric
- Preservation
- intact, most ecocentric
- John Muir: Nature not as a commodity but a companion
- Conservation
- Seeks for a balance between development and preservation
- Gifford Pinchot: how best to manage forests for human needs
- Sustainable development: use at levels to guarantee future
resource
8. Environmental Justice
- 1980’s protests to location of toxic waste facilities in minority
neighborhoods
- Environmental racism defined: taking advantage of the poorest and
least politically influential
- USGAO study showed that environmental enforcement slower and
fines lower in poor, minority neighborhoods - 3 of 4 landfills located
in minority communities
- Pollution on Native American reservations
- Related to civil rights: fairness issues
- 1998 EPA rules: no group of people should bear a disproportionate
share of negative environmental consequences
9. Is the aftermath of Katrina an example of environmental
justice gone bad?
10. Corporate Responsibility as it Relates to the Environment
(Fig. 2.5, 2.6)
11. Corporations have to make a profit
- Cheaper production = greater profit
- Ignoring ethics may give a better short-term profit
- Example: cheaper to dump wastes into a river than to invest in a
water treatment facility
- Externalize the cost: the public pays to clean up the
environment, not the corporation
- What happened at Great Wolf: a Pocono’s example.
12. PADEP Fined Great Wolf Lodge $833,349 for Water Quality and
Odor Violations - February 2, 2007 Great Wolf paid the civil
penalty for the violations.
13. For next class
- Compare and contrast the following environmental philosophies:
- Ecofeminism
- Social ecology
- Deep ecology
- Environmental pragmatism
- Environmental aesthetics
- Animal rights/welfare
- Search the web for information about the problems at Great Wolf
and their sewage treatment facilities