Environmental Ethics

Volume 22, Issue 2, Summer 2000

Environmental Ethics and the Built Environment

I defend the view that the design of the built environment should be a proper part of environmental ethics. An environmentally responsible culture should be one in which citizens take responsibility for the domesticated environments in which they live, as well as for their effects on wild nature. How we build our world reveals both the possibilities in nature and our own stance toward the world. Our constructions and contrivances also objectively constrain the possibilities for the development of a human way of life integrated with wild nature. An environmentally responsible culture should require a built world that reflects and projects care and respect toward nature.