Ethics & the Environment

In February 2007, fifteen environmental philosophers gathered for two days of meetings at the University of North Texas. Their purpose: to discuss the future of their field. Nearly four decades past the first Earth Day and the first philosophic discussions concerning our relationship to the Earth, environmental philosophy finds itself at a crossroads. While the field has made real progress over the last generation—and the environmental challenges we face have only grown in importance—environmental philosophy has struggled to find a real home and ready audience. On the one hand, despite its decades-long effort to construct a sound theoretical foundation, the field still lacks academic bona fides within the larger discipline of philosophy. For some within philosophy, environmental philosophy does not qualify as "real" philosophy: it is too topical, insufficiently theoretical in its deliberations, and tainted by an impulse toward advocacy. On the other hand, within the larger worlds of environmental science, engineering, and public policy, environmental philosophers are sometimes criticized as being too abstract and too distant from real world environmental challenges.

With these mixed signals in mind, the participants in this meeting came together to discuss: [End Page 117]

• • What constitutes the field of environmental ethics/philosophy? What counts as competence, its canon, and its central questions? What value does it add to other fields and disciplines? Is environmental philosophy even "philosophy"?

• • What is the role of environmental philosophy in various curricula (philosophy departments, environmental studies programs, general education, health sciences, natural resources)?

• • What is the role of environmental ethics in policy processes?

• • How can graduate education in environmental philosophy be strengthened, both at the MA and Ph.D. levels? What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and barriers of "stand alone" programs versus programs that are embedded in disciplinary degree programs?

• • What is the state of publishing in the field? How can the dedicated journals be improved? How can work in environmental philosophy be more widely disseminated?

• • Meetings: What is the state of conferencing?

• • Who should be the target audiences of environmental philosophy? How important is it for environmental philosophers to develop relationships with government agencies, policy-makers, scientists, and other communities and institutions? How can such relationships be fostered? And, how important is it for environmental philosophers to function as "public intellectuals?"

The essays collected here—limited to brief, succinct statements—seek to delimit the challenges faced by environmental philosophy, and to sketch out alternative paths into the future.