We study the values on which managers of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) draw when constructing their personal and organizational-level engagement with environmental issues, particularly climate change. Values play an important mediating role in business environmental engagement, but relatively little research has been conducted on individual values in smaller organizations. Using the Schwartz Value System (SVS) as a framework for a qualitative analysis, we identify four “ideal-types” of SME managers and provide rich descriptions of the ways (...) in which values shape their constructions of environmental engagement. In contrast to previous research, which is framed around a binary divide between self-enhancing and self-transcending values, our typology distinguishes between individuals drawing primarily on Power or on Achievement values and indicates how a combination of Achievement and Benevolence values is particularly significant in shaping environmental engagement. This demonstrates the theoretical usefulness of focusing on a complete range of values. Implications for policy and practice are discussed. (shrink)

In her book Natural Saints: How People of Faith Are Working to Save God's Earth Mallory McDuff quotes a member of the religious environmental group Georgia Interfaith Power and Light as saying that:the science of climate change and the environmental crisis is the wakeup call. But faith in God provides the hope that gets us out of bed to do something about it. Faith gives us the hope, joy, and possibility of triumph to "let not our hearts be (...) troubled" but to move forward with action. And ultimately, this hope is what the religious community can offer that the secular environmental groups have not been able to provide.1At the end of her book McDuff revisits much the same theme, writing that "[the] God thing has the... (shrink)

This study examines the impact of non-executive employee stock ownership plans (ESOP) on corporate environmental engagement. We show that granting ESOPs to non-executive employees promotes greater corporate ecological engagement from the perspectives of environmental protection expenditures, environmental information disclosure quality, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings. ESOPs unite members in a common interest, empowering them to put pressure on management to reduce carbon emissions, which benefits their physical wellbeing and increases their residual interest (...) in long-term corporate wealth. Further, our analysis reveals that companies investing in environmental protection forgo short-term profit as a consequence of high initial costs, while increasing long-term firm value. These positive effects are attributable to ESOP schemes with higher employee subscription rates, those granted to a larger number of non-executive employees, and those with longer validity periods of ownership, whose incentive effect is sufficiently powerful to offset the free-rider problem. In addition, the impact of ESOPs is more pronounced in companies with greater media exposure, those confronting intense labor market competition, and those in heavily polluting industries. Fundamentally, our study provides novel evidence of the incentive effect of ESOPs on corporate environmental engagement and of stakeholder dynamics driving the implementation of carbon reduction strategies. (shrink)

This study investigates how abnormally hot temperatures affect firms’ environmental behaviors in China. We find that firms exposed to abnormally hot temperatures participate in more environmental engagement. We also find that this improvement effect is driven mainly by environmental concerns, including public concerns, CEOs, and governments. Our results remain intact after an array of robustness tests. Further analysis shows that the effect of abnormally hot temperatures on corporate environmental engagement is more pronounced in SOEs, (...) heavily polluting firms, and firms located closer to local environmental protection agencies. Based on the political pressure channel, our results indicate that the improvement effect is more prominent in politically connected firms, cities where local officials can wield more influence, local governments have larger financial slack, and local governments disclose their environmental targets. Moreover, the positive impact of environmental engagement on firm value is stronger when firms are exposed to abnormally hot temperatures. Overall, this study sheds light on the potential stimulation of firms’ environmental actions by global warming, which is yet to be fully understood. (shrink)

The engagement of firms in environmental collaborations has become a ubiquitous phenomenon in today’s business landscape. Yet much of the research to date is fragmented across multiple disciplines and lacks a clear framework to support future study. The authors consolidate and synthesize existing contributions into a conceptual map comprised of antecedents, consequences, and contingencies to better understand environmental collaborations. This map offers a perspective on how firms develop strategies, structures, and capabilities to manage and balance environmental (...) and economic performance and increasing demands for environmental sustainability from multiple stakeholders and society. The authors then highlight existing gaps in the extant literature and outline a future research agenda, including key questions and issues needing additional study. (shrink)

We explore how story has the potential to encourage environmental engagement and a sense of agency provided that critical discussion takes place. We illuminate this with reference to the philosophies of John Macmurray on personal agency and social relations; of John Dewey on the primacy of experience for philosophy; and of Paul Ricoeur on hermeneutics, dialogue, dialectics and narrative. We view the use of fiction for environmental understanding as hermeneutic, a form of conceptualising place which interprets experience (...) and perception. The four writers for young people discussed are Ernest Thompson Seton, Kenneth Grahame, Michelle Paver and Philip Pullman. We develop the concept of critical dialogue, and link this to Crick's demand for active democratic citizenship. We illustrate the educational potential for environmental discussions based on literature leading to deeper understanding of place and environment, encouraging the belief in young people that they can be and become agents for change. We develop from Zimbardo the key concept of heroic resister to encourage young people to overcome peer pressure. We conclude with a call to develop a greater awareness of the potential of fiction for learning, and for writers to produce more focused stories engaging with environmental responsibility and activism. (shrink)

Urban environmental stewardship and civic engagement -- Several million trees : how planting trees is changing our civic landscape -- Digging together : understanding environmental stewardship in New York City -- Seriously digging : why engaged stewards are different and why it matters -- Tangled roots : how volunteer stewards intertwine local environmental stewardship and democratic citizenship -- Implications for urban environmentalism, the environmental movement, and civic engagement in America.

Contemporary architecture is increasingly grounded in science and mathematics. Architectural discourse has shifted radically from the sometimes disorienting Derridean deconstruction, to engaging scientific terms such as fractals, chaos, complexity, nonlinearity, and evolving systems. That's where the architectural action is -- at least for cutting-edge architects and thinkers -- and every practicing architect and student needs to become conversant with these terms and know what they mean. Unfortunately, the vast majority of architecture faculty are unprepared to explain them to students, not (...) having had a scientific education themselves. Here is an architecture book by an architect/scientist, just in time to help architects in the new millennium. Alexander discusses many of the scientific terms arising in cutting-edge architecture, and explains them to those who don't have scientific training or advanced mathematical knowledge. We find discussions of the evolution of forms; the importance of process in design; iteration; genetic algorithms; sequences of transformations; different levels of scale (i.e. fractals); etc. They are explained here by an architect who is also a scientist, because he wants to change the way architects think and build. Alexander is not merely popularizing other scientists' results and making them accessible to architects: he is in fact presenting new and original scientific work that ties many of these concepts together in a way that will be useful to architects. (shrink)

The United Kingdom’s approach to encouraging environmentally positive behaviour has been three-pronged, through voluntarism, incentives and regulation, and the balance between the approaches has fluctuated over time. Whilst financial incentives and regulatory approaches have been effective in achieving some environmental management behavioural change amongst farmers, ultimately these can be viewed as transient drivers without long-term sustainability. Increasingly, there is interest in ‘nudging’ managers towards voluntary environmentally friendly actions. This approach requires a good understanding of farmers’ willingness and ability to (...) take up environmental activities and the influences on farmer behavioural change. The paper aims to provide insights from 60 qualitative farmer interviews undertaken for a research project into farmers’ willingness and ability to undertake environmental management, particularly focusing on social psychological insights. Furthermore, it explores farmers’ level of engagement with advice and support networks that foster a genuine interest, responsibility and a sense of personal and social norm to sustain high quality environmental outcomes. Two conceptual frameworks are presented for usefully exploring the complex set of inter-relationships that can influence farmers’ willingness to undertake environmental management practices. The research findings show how an in-depth understanding of farmer’s willingness and ability to adopt environmental management practices and their existing level of engagement with advice and support are necessary to develop appropriate engagement approaches to achieve sustained and durable environmental management. (shrink)

We study behind-the-scenes investor activism promoting environmental, social, and governance improvements by means of a proprietary dataset of a large international, socially responsible activist fund. We examine the activist’s target selection, forms of engagement, impact on ESG performance, drivers of success, and effects on the targets’ operations and value creation. Target firms are typically large and visible, perform well, and have high liquidity and low ESG performance. Engagement induces ESG rating adjustments: firms with poor ex ante ESG (...) ratings experience a ratings increase after complying with the activist’s demands, whereas firms with high ex ante ESG ratings experience a ratings decrease following the revelation of their ESG problems. Activism that is focused on environmental and social issues is more likely to succeed if targets are ESG-sensitive. Successful engagements boost targets’ sales. Risk-adjusted excess stock returns of successful engagements outperform those of unsuccessful engagements by 2.7%. Results are especially strong for firms with low ex ante ESG scores. Specifically, targeted firms in the lowest ex ante ESG quartile outperform matched peers by 7.5% in the year after the end of the engagement. Our results thus suggest that the activism regarding corporate social responsibility generally improves ESG practices and corporate sales and is profitable to the activist. Taken together, we provide direct evidence that ethical investing and strong financial performance, both from the activist’s and the targeted firm’s perspective, can go hand-in-hand together. (shrink)

The transition to a low carbon economy demands new strategies to enable organizations to take advantage of the potential for “green” growth. An organization's environmental stakeholders can provide opportunities for growth and support the success of its low carbon strategies, as well as potentially acting as a constraint on new initiatives. Building environmental capabilities through engagement with environmental stakeholders is conceptualized as an important aspect for the success of organizational low carbon strategies. We examine capability building (...) across a range of sectors affected by the sustainability agenda, including construction, rail, water, and health care. We identify a number of emergent environmental stakeholders and explore their engagement with the development of environmental capabilities in the context of the transition toward a low carbon economy. Our conceptual framework offers a categorization of environmental stakeholders based on their position in relation to a focal organization and the potential for the development of environmental capabilities. (shrink)

An important question in the business ethics literature concerns organizational response in the aftermath of an unethical business practice. This study examines factors affecting firms’ decision to take reparative action in the aftermath of an environmental violation. Specifically, we investigate environmental violators’ decision to undertake a Supplemental Environmental Project (SEP), which is an initiative that promotes restorative justice. To settle an environmental violation, the United States’ environmental regulator allows offenders the option of either paying the (...) full penalty or a reduced sum while spending additional effort and engaging in an environmental project. As predicted, we find that firms with poorer past environmental performance and greater shareholder environmental activism are more likely to engage and invest in a SEP. Additionally, there is a stronger association between shareholder activism and SEP investment when firms have poorer past environmental performance. Our findings inform regulators, stakeholders, and business ethics researchers on the factors that lead firms to undertake reparative action following unethical business practices. (shrink)

Waste is a major global environmental issue that assembles socio-cultural and bio-geological processes in complex indeterminate relationships. Drawing on three case studies, this article explores the shifting environmental politics concerned with waste’s material, economic, political, and cultural ‘management’. The Canadian case studies – determining a new waste management technology in a mid-sized city in central Ontario, an open dump in a remote Nunavut community, and an abandoned gold mine in the Northwest Territories – suggest waste occasions particular material (...) and political mobilizations. Landfill leachate, colonialism, disinterested publics, freezing arsenic, global corporate investments, country food, land claims, neoliberal governance, permafrost, ravens, and a host of other socio-material forces both empower and thwart ‘management’ politics. Through these case studies, this article explores Isabelle Stengers’s assertion that participating citizenship is an ‘Empty Great Idea’, and a provocation to consider the contexts in which waste may generate acquiescent or objecting publics. (shrink)

This research paper shares findings related to our use of Engaged Philosophical Inquiry with a group of young children as a pedagogical method taken up to extend young children’s thinking about human use of forest parkland and to determine the children’s ontological positions related to environmental sustainability. The study was conducted in a forested area adjoining a ‘living building’ childcare centre. Here researchers, along with a core group of 9-13 children, their teachers, and a Philosopher-in-Residence visited the forest environment (...) on a fortnightly basis over a four-month period from January to May 2016 to explore the forested area, play games and discuss issues related to forest use and human habitation. Video records of the EPI sessions were transcribed and analysed to determine the children’s propositions and related ontological stance across sessions. Findings from this study include: evidence that young children’s views on stewardship are situated within socio-material manifestations of belonging, ownership, and entitlement within the forest; and that absurdities, along with other more traditional EPI and P4C strategies, can be used successfully to playfully challenge young children’s thinking about the rigour of their propositions and to provoke deeper thoughts related to belonging and care. (shrink)

This paper explores the potential of 'new nature writing' - a literary genre currently popular in the UK - as a kind of arts activism, in particular in terms of how it might engage with the environmental crisis and lead to a kind of collective politics. We note the limitations of the genre, notably the reproduction of class, gender and ethnic hierarchies, the emphasis on nostalgia and loss, and the stress on individual responses rather than collective politics. But we (...) also take seriously the claims of art to enable us to imagine other futures, suggesting that new nature writing has the potential to play a role in collective forms of environmental justice and capabilities. (shrink)

This study focuses on the prediction of the engagement of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in environmental management practices, based on a random sample of 689 SMEs. The study finds that several endogenous factors, including tangibility of sector, firm size, innovative orientation, family influence and perceived financial benefits from energy conservation, predict an SME’s level of engagement in selected environmental management practices. For family influence, this effect is found only in interaction with the number of owners. (...) In addition to empirical research on SMEs’ environmental behavior, this article draws on the ecological modernization literature as well as the theory of planned behavior. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers of science have taken renewed interest in pursuing scholarship that is “socially engaged.” As a result, this scholarship has become increasingly relevant to public policy. In order to illustrate the ways in which the philosophy of science can inform public policy, this chapter focuses specifically on environmental research and policy. It shows how philosophy can assist with environmental policy making in three ways: clarifying the roles of values in policy-relevant science; addressing scientific dissent, especially (...) in response to “hot-button” policy issues; and responding thoughtfully to scientific uncertainty. (shrink)

Parsa-Parsi et al bring attention to the World Medical Association (WMA) and transparency to its International Code of Medical Ethics (ICoME) revisions.1 We value their report and the revised ICoME but explain here that the ICoME cannot reflect consensus among all WMA members, or the wider medical profession, given structural and epistemic injustices that restrain low-income and middle-income country (LMIC) physicians from participating in activities such as WMA revisions. Such injustices overlook experiences and contributions of those from LMICs and marginalised (...) groups, hindering their access to and influence within medicine.2 They also undermine access to information about, and from, the WMA. Recruiting new members from, and better engaging members in, LMICs would strengthen the WMA and its influence across the medical profession, and better elevate environmental sustainability as a biomedical and bioethical concern. This would be beneficial because there is controversy among physicians, bioethicists and other stakeholders about the relevance of environmental sustainability to medicine.3 4 That its addition to the ICoME was ‘uncontentious’ hints at structural and epistemic injustices in the revision process and homogeneity of those most involved in the revisions. Based on our observations as medical educators, it appears that few medical students and physicians at our institution, and few across the Caribbean and …. (shrink)

Preventing firms from engaging in greenwashing is a topic of significant theoretical and practical interest. This study examines the impact of penalties for environmental violations (PEVs) on mitigating greenwashing using a dataset of firms listed on China's A-share market operating in heavily polluting industries from 2014 to 2020. We also examine how firm-level characteristics moderate the relationship between PEVs and greenwashing. Our results demonstrate that PEVs can deter firms from engaging in greenwashing and that this negative effect is more (...) pronounced for firms with greater financial slack, effective internal controls and political connections. Additional analysis indicates that PEVs have a negative effect on greenwashing for firms in the growth and mature stages but not for firms in the ‘shake-out’ stage, and that there is a deterrence effect. Our findings have important implications for mitigating greenwashing behaviours through collaboration between governments and firms. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020 has changed the conventional learning mode for most students at schools all over the world, and the e-learning at home has become a new trend. Taking Chinese college students as the research subject and drawing on the stimulus–organism–response model, this paper examines the relationship between the peer referent, perceived closeness, and perceived control and the learning engagement. Using data from 377 college students who have used e-learning, this study shows that perceived (...) closeness, perceived control, and peer referents in e-learning have a positive effect on the self-efficacy and well-being of students, thus improving students’ enthusiasm for learning. Our intent is to assist researchers, instructors, designers, and others in identifying effective methods to conceptualize and measure student engagement in e-learning. (shrink)

Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 50, Issue 1, Page 147-166, March 2022.

Scholarly interest in employees’ voluntary pro-environmental behavior has begun to emerge. While this research is beginning to shed light on the predictors of workplace pro-environmental behavior, our understanding of the psychological mechanisms linking the various antecedents to employees’ environmentally responsible behavior and the circumstances under which any such effects are enhanced and/or attenuated is incomplete. The current study seeks to fill this gap by examining: the effects of perceived corporate social responsibility on employees’ voluntary pro-environment behavior; an underlying (...) mechanism that links CSR perceptions to these behaviors; and a boundary condition to these relationships. Data from 183 supervisor-subordinate dyads employed in large- and medium-sized casinos and hotels in Guangdong China and Macau revealed that employees’ corporate social responsibility perceptions indirectly affect their engagement in voluntary pro-environmental behavior through organizational identification, and these effects are stronger for employees high in empathy. (shrink)

A provocative argument that environmental thinking would be better off if it dropped the concept of “nature” altogether and spoke instead of the built environment. -/- Environmentalism, in theory and practice, is concerned with protecting nature. But if we have now reached “the end of nature,” as Bill McKibben and other environmental thinkers have declared, what is there left to protect? In Thinking like a Mall, Steven Vogel argues that environmental thinking would be better off if it (...) dropped the concept of “nature” altogether and spoke instead of the “environment”—that is, the world that actually surrounds us, which is always a built world, the only one that we inhabit. We need to think not so much like a mountain (as Aldo Leopold urged) as like a mall. Shopping malls, too, are part of the environment and deserve as much serious consideration from environmental thinkers as do mountains. -/- Vogel argues provocatively that environmental philosophy, in its ethics, should no longer draw a distinction between the natural and the artificial and, in its politics, should abandon the idea that something beyond human practices (such as “nature”) can serve as a standard determining what those practices ought to be. The appeal to nature distinct from the built environment, he contends, may be not merely unhelpful to environmental thinking but in itself harmful to that thinking. The question for environmental philosophy is not “how can we save nature?” but rather “what environment should we inhabit, and what practices should we engage in to help build it?”. (shrink)

Today it is widely recognized that we face urgent and serious environmental problems and we know much about them, yet we do very little. What explains this lack of motivation and change? Why is it so hard to change our lives? This book addresses this question by means of a philosophical inquiry into the conditions of possibility for environmental change. It discusses how we can become more motivated to do environmental good and what kind of knowledge we (...) need for this, and explores the relations between motivation, knowledge, and modernity. After reviewing a broad range of possible philosophical and psychological responses to environmental apathy and inertia, the author argues for moving away from a modern focus on either detached reason and control or the natural, the sentiments, and the authentic, both of which make possible disengaging and alienating modes of relating to our environment. Instead he develops the notion of environmental skill: a concept that bridges the gap between knowledge and action, re-interprets environmental virtue, and suggests an environmental ethics centered on experience, know-how and skillful engagement with our environment. The author then explores the implications of this ethics for our lives: it changes the way we think about, and deal with, health, food, animals, energy, climate change, politics, and technology. (shrink)

Among the infinitude of nature’s various forms, precisely what should we aesthetically appreciate? And supposing we come to achieve such discernment, how should we properly appreciate the aesthetic qualities we thereby find? To address these questions, Carlson has argued that the aesthetic appreciation of nature ought to be guided by scientific insight. In response, non-cognitivists have levelled criticism and suggested alternatives, yet Carlson’s (2009) scientific cognitivism remains the best-argued approach to nature appreciation in the field. One non-cognitivist position that Carlson (...) rejects—although much too quickly—is Berleant’s (1985) engagement model. The purpose of this paper is to modify and revive that model. Specifically, I will argue that genuine engagement requires a particular form of disinterest. The result is a non-cognitivist approach to the aesthetic appreciation of nature, stronger than the extant alternatives. (shrink)

This paper presents the contribution of the pragmatic sociology of critical capacities to the understanding of environmental conflicts. In the field of 'environmental valuation', nowadays colonised by economics, the approach of plural modes (or 'regimes') of engagement provides a sociological understanding of the unequal power of conflicting 'languages of valuation'. This frame entails a shift from 'values' to 'modes of valuation', and links modes of valuation to modes of practical engagement and coordination with the surrounding environment. (...) Different social sources of incommensurability are thus detected and reframed as critical tension within and among modes of human coordination with the environment. (shrink)

Environmental Law, Ethics and Governance draws attention to the necessity for inter-disciplinarity in research focused on achieving good environmental governance, be it of a physical area, an environmental problem or a natural resource. Law and ethics each have an important role to play in this regard and the chapters in this volume consider these issues from a number of different perspectives. Included in this book is the academic research and professional experiences of a diversity of authors, including (...) those engaged in research into substantive governance issues, which arise at all levels from the global to the local. The case studies explored in this book provide excellent examples from across this range. In addition, contributions are included from those involved in process and procedural matters, including the complex issues of how new law ought to be drafted, the implementation of that law and environmental legal education. This volume is both thought provoking and instructive and aims to inspire further research regarding the ethical dimensions of environmental law and legal governance. It is clear that these topics remain of great significance if law and policy is to be effective and therefore this volume is a valuable and timely contribution to the discourse in this area. (shrink)

Stakeholder engagement has grown into a widely used yet often unclear construct in business and society research. The literature lacks a unified understanding of the essentials of stakeholder engagement, and the fragmented use of the stakeholder engagement construct challenges its development and legitimacy. The purpose of this article is to clarify the construct of stakeholder engagement to unfold the full potential of stakeholder engagement research. We conduct a literature review on 90 articles in leading academic (...) journals focusing on stakeholder engagement in the business and society, management and strategy, and environmental management and environmental policy literatures. We present a descriptive analysis of stakeholder engagement research for a 15-year period, and we identify the moral, strategic, and pragmatic components of stakeholder engagement as well as its aims, activities, and impacts. Moreover, we offer an inclusive stakeholder engagement definition and provide a guide to organizing the research. Finally, we complement the current understanding with a largely overlooked dark side of stakeholder engagement. We conclude with future research avenues for stakeholder engagement research. (shrink)

We aim to investigate the effect of corporate environmental responsibility (CER) engagement on investors' reactions. We also explore heterogeneity of this impact among different types of companies and different company's market performance. We use panel data models and quantile regression based on data related to firms listed on the A-share China security market and the final sample consists of 3,776 firm-year observations. The results show that CER engagement has a significant positive impact on investors' investment decisions. Further, (...) investors are more sensitive to CER engagement of high energy-consumption companies and no matter the company is a state-owned or a non-state-owned, CER engagement has a significant positive impact on investors' reactions. CER engagement has a significant positive impact on investors' reactions in all quantiles except one and the promoting effect increases first and then decreases with the growth of corporate market value from lower to upper quantiles. (shrink)

Environmental Ethics and Behavioural Change takes a practical approach to environmental ethics with a focus on its transformative potential for students, professionals, policy makers, activists, and concerned citizens. Proposed solutions to issues such as climate change, resource depletion and accelerating extinctions have included technological fixes, national and international regulation and social marketing. This volume examines the ethical features of a range of communication strategies and technological, political and economic methods for promoting ecologically responsible practice in the face of (...) these crises. The central concern of the book is environmental behaviour change: inspiring, informing and catalysing reflective change in the reader, and in their ability to influence others. By making clear the forms of environmental ethics that exist, and what each implies in terms of individual and social change, the reader will be better able to formulate, commit to, articulate and promote a coherent position on how to understand and engage with environmental issues. (shrink)

Social movements often impose nontrivial costs on others against their wills. Civil disobedience is no exception. How can social movements in general, and civil disobedience in particular, be justifiable despite this apparent wrong-making feature? We examine an intuitively plausible account—it is fair that everyone should bear the burdens of tackling injustice. We extend this fairness-based argument for civil disobedience to defend some acts of uncivil disobedience. Focusing on uncivil environmental activism—such as ecotage (sabotage with the aim of protecting the (...) environment)—we argue that some acts of uncivil disobedience can be morally superior to their civil counterparts, when and because such acts target people who are responsible for environmental threats. Indeed, insofar as some acts of uncivil disobedience can more accurately target responsible people, they can better satisfy the demands of fairness compared to their civil counterparts. In some circumstances, our argument may require activists to engage in uncivil disobedienceeven whencivil disobedience is available. (shrink)

Environmental Ethics is a systematic account of values carried by the natural world, coupled with an inquiry into duties toward animals, plants, species, and ecosystems. A comprehensive philosophy of nature is illustrated by and integrated with numerous actual examples of ethical decisions made in encounters with fauna and flora, endangered species, and threatened ecosystems. The ethics developed is informed throughout by ecological science and evolutionary biology, with attention to the logic of moving from what is in nature to what (...) ought to be. The ethical theory is applied in detail to social, public, and business policy. Written in an engaging style, using diagrams and figures as well as numerous case studies, Environmental Ethics prods the reader into concrete application and invites reader participation in the ethical discussions. The ethics concludes by exploring the historical experiences of personal residence in a surrounding environment. Here is an adventure into what it means to live as responsible human beings in the community of life on Earth. In the series Ethics and Action, edited by Tom Regan. (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)

The challenge of convincing people to change their eating habits towards more environmentally sustainable food consumption (ESFC) patterns is becoming increasingly pressing. Food preferences, choices and eating habits are notoriously hard to change as they are a central aspect of people’s lifestyles and their socio-cultural environment. Many people already hold positive attitudes towards sustainable food, but the notable gap between favorable attitudes and actual purchase and consumption of more sustainable food products remains to be bridged. The current work aims to (...) 1) present a comprehensive theoretical framework for future research on ESFC, and 2) highlight behavioral solutions for environmental challenges in the food domain from an interdisciplinary perspective. First, starting from the premise that food consumption is deliberately or unintentionally directed at attaining goals, a goal-directed framework for understanding and influencing ESFC is built. To engage in goal-directed behavior, people typically go through a series of sequential steps. The proposed theoretical framework makes explicit the sequential steps or hurdles that need to be taken for consumers to engage in ESFC. Consumers need to positively value the environment, discern a discrepancy between the desired versus the actual state of the environment, opt for action to reduce the experienced discrepancy, intend to engage in behavior that is expected to bring them closer to the desired end state, and act in accordance with their intention. Second, a critical review of the literature on mechanisms that underlie and explain ESFC (or the lack thereof) in high-income countries is presented and integrated into the goal-directed framework. This contribution thus combines a top-down conceptualization with a bottom-up literature review; it identifies and discusses factors that might hold people back from ESFC and interventions that might promote ESFC; and it reveals knowledge gaps as well as insights on how to encourage both short- and long-term ESFC by confronting extant literature with the theoretical framework. Altogether, the analysis yields a set of 33 future research questions in the interdisciplinary food domain that deserve to be addressed with the aim of fostering ESFC in the short and long term. (shrink)

Knowledge produced by environmental scientists is often inaccessible, intractable, or otherwise in need of reconfiguration for use in environmental regulation. Similarly, policy knowledge undergoes decontextualization in its address to the community of researchers and data curators whose findings are fundamental to its operation. This paper addresses the development of the total maximum daily load measurement as a means of decontextualizing both scientific and regulatory processes to render the practical results of those processes available as a means of collaboration, (...) coordination, and development of watershed management and regulation. The TMDL measurement serves as a specific type of boundary object, a provisional boundary figure. A provisional boundary figure is a complex, model-derived system that is not fixed but rather an object of ongoing work that enables coordination between policy and research. Thus, the TMDL is deployed to explore the relationship between environmental management and the knowledge workers that enable and support it. (shrink)

A plethora of ethical issues in livestock agriculture has emerged to public attention in recent decades, of which environmental and animal welfare concerns are but two, albeit prominent, themes. For livestock agriculture to be considered sustainable, somehow these interconnected themes need to be addressed. Ethical debate on these issues has been extensive, but mostly started from and focused on single issues. The views of farmers in these debates have been largely absent, or merely figured as interests, instead of being (...) considered morally worthwhile themselves. In this paper the relevance for ethical debates of the ways farmers discuss and engage with moral concerns is explored. The variety of norms that figure in contemporary farming practices is sketched in its multifarious complexity, illustrated by ethnographic fieldwork, and systematized in terms of “orders of worth.” Reviewing the practical arguments and commitments of farmers within this framework reveals that farming practices are subject to mixed motives, in which an amalgam of types of concerns play a role. Recognition of the peculiarly entangled nature of the ethics of farming practices could counter the tendency in policy making, technological innovation, and ethical thought to compartmentalize our moral landscape. Understanding farming practice as the integration of a mosaic of concerns in the light of a variety of moral experiences would foster public appreciation of positions of farmers in debates on improving the sustainability and societal acceptability of livestock agriculture. (shrink)

As incoming Editor and Deputy Editor we describe our impression of the current situation that those committed to understanding and upholding environmental values find themselves in. We consider some of the factors that make enviornmental concern difficult to maintain, including conditions that affect us as academics, publishers, global citizens and activists. We describe some of the emerging trends that have appeared in Environmental Values in recent years, in philosophy, ecological economics, critical social science and widening interdisciplinarity in the (...) environmental humanities. We highlight the journal's commitment to engaged, plural and open investigation of environmental values and consider what we might expect and hope for in the coming years. (shrink)

Environmental pragmatism is routinely characterised as an environmental philosophy that rejects the traditional values questions within environmental ethics. Critics of environmental pragmatism, in turn, complain that it cannot be characterised as an environmental philosophy, since it evades precisely the philosophical issues with which environmental philosophers are supposed to engage. This essay works to defend environmental pragmatism against the charge that it necessarily evades the central questions of environmental ethics. I argue that (...) class='Hi'>environmental pragmatism need not reject foundational questions regarding values and nature; however, I contend that the meaningfulness of such questions to a pragmatist depends firstly on reframing them in terms of a valuing relation, and secondly on a turn to the insights of moral psychology. (shrink)

Technological development plays a critical role in society’s ability to address environmental issues. Building on Teece’s profiting from innovation framework, we articulate how a double-externality problem weakens the appropriability regime surrounding pollution reduction technology (PRT). We then develop a theoretical framework articulating how weak appropriability induces firms to modify their innovation strategies for PRT development by increasing the extent to which they engage in organizational exploration (rather than exploitation) and emphasizing incremental (rather than radical) technologies. Noting that the effects (...) of weak appropriability are unlikely to be static, we detail how the accumulation of organizational capabilities for reducing pollution diminishes the extent to which firms modify their innovation strategies for PRT. That is, firms become less exploratory and less focused on incremental technology as they gain experience with pollution reduction. Results of broad-sample empirical analyses of 206,277 patents held by 203 U.S. manufacturing firms over a 20-year period provide support for our framework. (shrink)

Science communication in online media is a discursive domain where science-related content is often expressed through styles characteristic of popular journalism. This article aims to characterize some dominant stylistic patterns in magazine articles devoted to environmental issues by identifying the devices used to enhance newsworthiness, given the fact that for some readers environmental topics may no longer seem engaging. The analytic perspective is an adaptation of the newsworthiness framework that has been applied in news discourse studies. The material (...) is a sample of the 38 most-read environment-oriented articles in the online version of the international science magazine New Scientist collected between late 2013 and late 2014. The articles are analysed qualitatively to show the instantiations of such newsworthiness criteria as novelty and superlativeness, timeliness and impact, negativity and positivity as well as other strategies aimed at engaging the readers: rationalization and speculation, direct address and conversational style. The analysis reveals how, in this case study, science communication is turned into infotainment and considers the implications of this discursive shift for the public understanding of environmental science. (shrink)

Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words is an incisive and imaginative look at the international environmental sound art movement, which emerged in the late 1960s. The term environmental sound art is generally applied to the work of sound artists who incorporate processes in which the artist actively engages with the environment. While the field of environmental sound art is diverse and includes a variety of approaches, the art form diverges from traditional contemporary music by the (...) conscious and strategic integration of environmental impulses and natural processes. This book presents a current perspective on the environmental sound art movement through a collection of personal writings by important environmental sound artists. Dismayed by the limitations and gradual breakdown of contemporary compositional strategies, environmental sound artists have sought alternate venues, genres, technologies, and delivery methods for their creative expression. Environmental sound art is especially relevant because it addresses political, social, economic, scientific, and aesthetic issues. As a result, it has attracted the participation of artists internationally. Awareness and concern for the environment has connected and unified artists across the globe and has achieved a solidarity and clarity of purpose that is singularly unique and optimistic. The environmental sound art movement is borderless and thriving. (shrink)

Doing Environmental Ethics offers a way to face our ecological crisis that draws on environmental science, economic theory, international law, and religious teachings, as well as philosophical arguments. It engages readers in constructing ethical presumptions based on our duty, our character, our relationships, and our rights. Then it tests these moral presumptions by predicting the likely consequences of acting on them. Readers apply what they have learned to specific policy issues discussed in the final part of the book: (...) sustainable consumption, environmental policy, clean air and water, agriculture, managing public lands, urban ecology, and climate change. Questions after each chapter and a worksheet aid readers in deciding how to live more responsibly as consumers and as citizens. “What you do matters,” Robert Traer writes, “and the person you are also matters. In ethics we look for reasons to explain why this is so.”. (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)