Environmental Humanism

What if wilderness is bad for wildlife? This question motivates the philosophical investigation in Wilderness, Morality, and Value. Environmentalists aim to protect wilderness, and for good reasons, but wilderness entails unremittent, incalculable suffering for its non-human habitants. Given that it will become increasingly possible to augment nature in ways that ameliorates some of this suffering, the morality of wilderness preservation is itself in question. Joshua S. Duclos argues that the technological and ethical reality of the Anthropocene warrants a fundamental reassessment (...) of the value of wilderness. After exposing the moral ambiguity of wilderness preservation, he explores the value of wilderness itself by engaging with anthropocentricism and nonanthropocentrism; sentientism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism; and instrumental value and intrinsic value. Duclos argues that the value of wilderness is a narrow form of anthropocentric intrinsic value, one with a religio-spiritual dimension. By integrating scholarship from bioethics on the norms of engineering human nature with debates in environmental ethics concerning the prospect of engineering non-human nature, Wilderness, Morality, and Value sets the stage for wilderness ethics—or wilderness faith—in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

The law confers rights on non-human entities, namely nature, machines (AI), and animals. While doing so, the law is either viewed as progressive or sometimes as abstract and ambiguous. Despite the critique, it is undeniable that many of the rights of non-humans have come to solidify in statutory and constitutional rules of different systems. In the context of these developments, the article sheds light on the core justifications for advancing the rights of non-human entities. In addition, it discusses the conditions (...) for the emergence of these rights and the non-binding normative statements adopted by different stakeholders for advocacy. These include the Charter on the Law of the Living (2021), the Toulon Declaration (2019), and the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism (2019), etc. The paper also discusses the relevant theoretical frames, namely post-humanism, digital humanism, and multi-species justice, followed by selective critical views on the subject. (shrink)

In this article, the idea of space colonization is critically examined by drawing from Martin Heidegger’s topological philosophy of technology and dwelling. Heidegger’s ideas from his 1966 interview with German journal Der Spiegel are examined in light of his relevant philosophical texts to interpret his claims concerning The Blue Marble image. This article defends the view that Heidegger does not take a moral stance against space colonization as such; rather, he elucidates the existential grounds of our relation to modern technology, (...) and the sense of unsettledness that stems from the lack of an appropriate relation to place. (shrink)

The article reviews on the technical attributes on current technologies deployed in outer space and those that are being developed and mass produced. The article refutes the Chinese state-controlled Xinhua News’ propaganda several years ago on objecting America’s deployment of nuclear technologies in outer space with rigorous scientific evidence. Furthermore, the article warns on the dangers of physical signals applied in outer space technologies that can threaten the solar system, especially the Mozi quantum satellite with photon beams. The article concludes (...) with the illicit practices by the Chinese state party with militant ambitions in the supposedly scientific institutions. It violates the spirit on the peaceful use of outer space, and goes against the 2222 (XXI) resolution adopted by the general assembly, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty banning the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in outer space. (shrink)

Environmental violence takes form of both ‘spectacular’ events, like ecological disasters usually recognised by the general public, and ‘slow violence’, a type of violence that occurs gradually, out of sight and on a long-term scale. Planetary seas and oceans, loaded with cultural meanings of that which ‘hides’ and ‘allows to forget’, are the spaces where such attritional violence unfolds unseen and ‘out of mind’. Simultaneously, conventional concepts of nature and culture, as dichotomous entities, become obsolete. We all inhabit and embody (...) the world differently, as variously situated people, divided by national, sexual, bodily and economic status, and as very variously situated nonhumans in an increasingly anthropogenic world. This chapter focuses on subtle ‘slow violence’ unfolding through the instances of submerged chemical weapons, so-called dead zones, invasive species and high- and low-trophic mariculture in the Baltic and North Sea regions. It zooms in on the select cases of such ‘environed bodies’, their stories of excruciating slow violence and yet also on unexpected encounters with care and hospitality. The aim is to unfold a low-trophic theory for the naturecultural research on violence and care within environmental humanities, and to engage a coexistential ethics of environmental adaptability informed by feminist posthumanities. (shrink)

Approaching the settlement of our Moon from a practical perspective, this book is well suited for space program planners. It addresses a variety of human factor topics involved in colonizing Earth's Moon, including: history, philosophy, science, engineering, agriculture, medicine, politics & policy, sociology, and anthropology. Each chapter identifies the complex, interdisciplinary issues of the human factor that arise in the early phases of settlement on the Moon. Besides practical issues, there is some emphasis placed on preserving, protecting, and experiencing the (...) lunar environment across a broad range of occupations, from scientists to soldiers and engineers to construction workers. The book identifies utilitarian and visionary factors that shape human lives on the Moon. It offers recommendations for program planners in the government and commercial sectors and serves as a helpful resource for academic researchers. Together, the coauthors ask and attempt to answer: “How will lunar society be different?”. (shrink)

Design for Values (DfV) philosophies are a series of design approaches that aim to incorporate human values into the early phases of technological design to direct innovation into beneficial outcomes. The difficulty and necessity of directing advantageous futures for transformative technologies through the application and adoption of value-based design approaches are apparent. However, questions of whose values to design are of critical importance. DfV philosophies typically aim to enrol the stakeholders who may be affected by the emergence of such a (...) technology. However, regardless of which design approach is adopted, all enrolled stakeholders are human ones who propose human values. Contemporary scholarship on metahumanisms, particularly those on posthumanism, have decentred the human from its traditionally privileged position among other forms of life. Arguments that the humanist position is not (and has never been) tenable are persuasive. As such, scholarship has begun to provide a more encompassing ontology for the investigation of nonhuman values. Given the potentially transformative nature of future technologies as relates to the earth and its many assemblages, it is clear that the value investigations of these design approaches fail to account for all relevant stakeholders (i.e., nonhuman animals). This paper has two primary objectives: (1) to argue for the cogency of a posthuman ethics in the design of technologies; and (2) to describe how existing DfV approaches can begin to envision principled and methodological ways of incorporating non-human values into design. To do this, the paper provides a rudimentary outline of what constitutes DfV approaches. It then takes up a unique design approach called Value Sensitive Design (VSD) as an illustrative example. Out of all the other DfV frameworks, VSD most clearly illustrates a principled approach to the integration of values in design. (shrink)

Thinking Nature is an essay in negative ecology, written in part to commemorate the deaths nature has died, pace Morton, Žižek, and even Latour. We have killed it; what now should we do? How to move forward? The path ahead will require eco-political action, to be sure. But brazen activism without the guidance of contemplative thought, McGrath argues, will not be sufficient to meet the demands of the present. Such a task demands discernment regarding the deeper roots of our ecological (...) crisis, and knowledge of the developments that make possible both the emergence and the collapse of modernity, with its advancements in science and technology. (shrink)

Defining posthumanism as a single, well-oriented philosophy is a difficult if not impossible endeavour. Part of the reason for this difficulty is accounted by posthumanism’s illusive origins and its perpetually changing hermeneutics. This short paper gives a brief account of the ecological trend in contemporary posthumanism and provides a short prescription for the future of posthumanist literature and potential research avenues.

Curren and Metzger’s work makes a bold, normative claim: The moral goal of sustainability is human flourishing. Their eudaimonic theory has as its summum bonum ‘living well’ according to the fundam...

What might a modern environmental or technological virtue or vice look like? That is, what virtues or vices might relate to our environmental place in the world, rather than our social place in the world? This question is particularly pressing in light of the unique chal­lenges presented by the current environmental and technological milieu. A recurring theme that arises in response to advances in certain technologies, particularly technologies that are seen in some way as “interfering in nature,” is that humans (...) are indulging in the vice of hubris, often referred to by the phrase “playing God.” Taking the notion of hubris as a starting point, the notion of “living in place” can be developed as a primary environmental and technological virtue, with reference to Heidegger’s analysis of the role of technology in human life. A pre-eminent environmental and technological virtue—living in place—can be understood in the light of Heidegger’s notion of “poetic dwelling,” where the role of human art and technology, rather than being primarily to dominate or manipulate nature, is to bring the natural world “into being.”. (shrink)

Modern rationalism transformed the modern homeland to a discursive space and time by means of institutes governing the modern society in all its walks. Based on the Newtonian and Kantian conception of space and time the discursive field is just a scene wherein any human individual adopts stewardship to create progress by reducing landscape and non-human life to auxiliary items for human’s benefit. In contrast, Aldo Leopold considered humans, non human life and the landscape as mutually influencing participants and enlarged (...) ethical care to all living participants and the landscape, called ´the land´. Integrity and autonomy of the homeland are the central topics of Leopold’s land ethics. Baird Callicott suggested to complete it with new metaphysical conceptions of space and time. -/- We formulated a metaphysical background for Leopold’s land ethics by phenomenology of space and time based on the Leibnizian conception of space-time. The latter is constructed by particular places and events called ´ecotopois´ embracing all human participants, locals and foreigners in a varying symbolic temporal and spatial field of dynamic process of identification and self consciousness. Adopting Warwick Fox´ transpersonal identification idea non-human life and landscape enriches these processes. Finally, it is not a matter of conquering the land, it is matter of making a community. -/- Though landscape and participants are particular, integrity and autonomy of the homeland claim the universal status of the land. Adopting Gadamer hermeneutical way of understanding, we reject mutual and equally understanding. Only acceptance of mutual prejudice makes room for asymmetric praxis between locals and foreigners as well as between humans and non-humans. What is more, Gadamer´s hermeneutics makes an ontological status of the foreigner possible and recognizes the interest of homeland’s particularity. This universal status is guaranteed as a priori space-time that links subject’s tradition and that of the land to actual contact with the foreigner. Transpersonal identification is a consequence of converging hermeneutical understanding of foreigner’s particularity and that of the landscape. Ethics of the land evolves from the ethical status of any foreigner in the own homeland. -/- . (shrink)

The twentieth century saw the rise of hermeneutics, the philosophical interpretation of texts, and eventually the application of its insights to metaphorical “texts” such as individual and group identities. It also saw the rise of modern environmentalism, which evolved through various stages in which it came to realize that many of its key concerns—“wilderness” and “nature” among them—are contested territory that are viewed differently by different people. Understanding nature requires science and ecology to be sure, but it also requires a (...) sensitivity to history, culture, and narrative. Thus, understanding nature is a fundamentally hermeneutic task. Interpreting Nature brings together leading voices at the intersection of these two increasingly important philosophical discussions: philosophical hermeneutics and environmental philosophy. The resulting field, environmental hermeneutics, provides the center of gravity for a collection of essays that grapple with one of the most compelling issues of our time: how do humans relate to nature? Adopting a broad and inclusive view of “the environment, Interpreting Nature takes up restoration and preservation, natural and built environments, the social construction of nature and nature as it imposes itself beyond our categories, and much more. The rich diversity of contributions illustrates the remarkable fecundity of hermeneutic resources applied to environmental issues. Taken together, the various contributions to this collection mark the arrival of environmental hermeneutics as a distinct field of study. (shrink)

Prisoners involved in the Attica rebellion and in the recent Georgia prison strike have protested their dehumanizing treatment as animals and as slaves. Their critique is crucial for tracing the connections between slavery, abolition, the racialization of crime, and the reinscription of racialized slavery within the US prison system. I argue that, in addition to the dehumanization of prisoners, inmates are further de-animalized when they are held in conditions of intensive confinement such as prolonged solitude or chronic overcrowding. To be (...) de-animalized is to be treated not as a living being who is sustained by its mutual relations with other living and nonliving beings, but rather as a thing to be warehoused and/or exchanged for a profit. The violence of de-animalization affects both human and nonhuman animals held in control prisons, factory farms, laboratories and other sites of intensive confinement. In order to make the connections between these sites, and to develop forms of solidarity appropriate to our shared animality, we need a post-humanist critique of intensive confinement that breaks with the logic of opposition between human and animal, and articulates our constitutive relationality as (inter)corporeal beings. (shrink)

Realization of permanent transformational transitions has brought to necessity to apprehend complex ontological issues of a new reality for development of a complex strategy for adequate opposition to challenges faced by the humanity. Understanding the role of education in the formation and development of a future human being ranks first among these issues. In this article I have analyzed modern directions of futuristic apprehension of a sense of transformational changes of a man (transhumanism, theory of androgyny), represented a key role (...) of the philosophy of education in development of an image of the future human being, and determined main characteristics of a personality of planetary-cosmic type, system of his personal, local and global interactions. (shrink)

Metaphysical dualities divorce humankind from its natural environment, dualities that can precipitate environmental disaster. Loyal Rue in Religion Is Not About God seeks to resolve the abstract modalities of religion and naturalism in a unified monistic ecocentric metaphysic characterized as religious naturalism. Rue puts forward proposals for a general naturalistic theory of religion, a theory that lays bare the structural and functional features of religious phenomena as the critical first step on the road to badly needed religion- science realignment. Only (...) then will humanity be equipped to address the environmental imperative. (shrink)

La pregunta por la ética y la voluntad de vivir, frente a la racionalidad y la ecología utilitarista dan forma al texto de Enrique Leff. ¿Cómo se puede superar el estado actual de cosas sin recuperar una ética primigenia, la cual se hacía la pregunta por la buena vida, aquella que merece ser vivida? Siguiendo a Nietzsche, el rechazo por el sentimiento y las pulsiones están en el centro de la mirada racional e instrumental respecto de la naturaleza. La búsqueda (...) incesante del conocimiento objetivo nos ha llevado a olvidar las viejas preguntas acerca de cómo habitar el mundo; las mismas que la ilustración desechó en nombre del conocimiento científico y la dominación del mundo material. Este texto reflexiona sobre el señalado conflicto, y aporta elementos de análisis para su posible superación. (shrink)