A traditional and multicultural approach to environmental ethics at primary and secondary school levels

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 30, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 263-271

  Hargrove, Eugene C ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 57749093332     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics200830332     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (25)

1. Famous examples include David Harmon, "Cultural Diversity, Human Subsistence, and the National Park Ideal," Environmental Ethics 9 (1987): 147-58,
2. and Ramachandra Guha, "Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique," Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71-83.
3. See, for example, James Davison Hunter, The Death of Character in an Age without Good or Evil (New York: Basic Books, 2000)
4. and James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
5. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, bk. 1, chap. 3. See also bk. 10, chap. 9.
6. Wilderness Act, Public Law 88-577 (3 September 1964), sec. 2;
7. Environmental Policy Act of 1969, Public Law 91-190 (1 January 1970), sec. 101;
8. Endangered Species Act of 1973, Public Law 93-205 (28 December 1973), sec. 2.
9. Yukon Environment Act, Yukon Territory, 1991, first paragraph.
10. Rights developed historically as a protection of the interests of individuals in the nation-states created in Europe in the late Middle Ages. Although such rights can easily be extended to individual organisms, an extension to ecosystems and species is more difficult. The interests of individual organisms as members of an ecosystem or species are not necessarily compatible with the good of that ecosystem or species. In a natural system, ecosystem health depends upon animals eating other animals and plants and predators keeping prey populations under control so that they do not destroy the carrying capacity of the system. Likewise, the death of individual members of a species is generally believed to promote the good of that species through evolution. Even the idea that ecosystems and species have interests is problematic since ecosystems and species are not individuals. How such interests might be determined and how they might relate to the interests of individual animals, plants, and nonliving natural objects remains unclear. Most likely, rights if developed for ecosystems and species would consciously or unconsciously reflect the anthropocentric interests, aesthetic or commercial, of those authorized to determine the interests of particular ecosystems or species. Environmentalists continue to call for the rights of nature because of the emotive force of rights talk and because it reflects their intuitions that nature should be valued for its own sake and not simply for human use, but they have no idea how they would operationalize such rights if they ever came to be accepted legally or morally. For a glimpse of the struggle of environmental philosophers to deal with the rights issue and incorporate it into an environmental ethic, see Eugene C. Hargrove, ed., The Animal Rights/Environmental Ethics Debate: The Environmental Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
11. See Eugene C. Hargrove, "Scientific and Aesthetic Attitudes," Foundations of Environmental Ethics (Denton, Tex.: Environmental Ethics Books, 1996),
12. and Eugene C. Hargrove, "Why We Think Nature is Beautiful," http://www.cep.unt.edu/show.
13. George Orwell, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: Texts, Sources, Criticism, ed. Irving Howe (New York and Burlingame: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), p. 24.
14. Yukon Wolf Management Team, The Yukon Wolf Conservation and Management Plan (Yukon: Government of Yukon, 1992).
15. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, bk. 1, chap. 2.
16. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 223-25.
17. Mark Sagoff, The Economy of the Earth. Philosophy, Law, and the Environment, 1st ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
18. See Eugene C. Hargrove, "The Role of Socially Evolved Ideals in Environmental Ethics Education in Canada and the Yukon: A Historical Approach involving the Humanities," in Bob Jickling, ed., A Colloquium on Environment, Ethics, and Education (Whitehorse, Yukon: Yukon College, 1996), pp. 20-31.
19. Kurt Heidinger and Ricardo Rozzi, Francisca Massardo, Christopher Anderson, Steven McGehee, George Clark, Guillermo Egli, Eduardo Ramilo, Úrsula Calderón, Cristina Calderón, Lorenzo Aillapan, and Cristina Zárraga., eds., Multi-Ethnic Bird Guide of the Austral Temperate Forests of South America, trans. Christopher Anderson (Punta Arenas, Chile: Fantático Sur and Universidad de Magallanes, 2003);
20. Francisca Massardo and Ricardo Rozzi, The World's Southernmost Ethnoecology: Yahgan Craftsmanship and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (Punta Arenas, Chile: Fantático Sur and Universidad de Magallenes, 2006);
21. and Cristina Zárraga, Francisca Massardo, and Ricardo Rozzi, Learning, Listening, the Yahgan World (Punta Arenas, Chile: La Prensa Austral Impresos Ediciones and Universidad de Magallanes, 2006).
22. Twenty Winged Poems from the Native Forests of Southern Chile, ed. Ricardo Rozzi, two compact-disc set (Plaza y Valdés, 2001).
23. Francisca Massardo and Ricardo Rozzi, "Etno-ornitología Yagán y Lafkensche en los Bosques Templados de Subamerica Austral," supplementary volume, Ornitolgia Neotropical 15 (2004): 395-407;
24. Lorenzo Aillapan and Ricardo Rozzi, "Una Etno-ornitología Mapuche Contemporánea: Poemas Alados de los Bosques Nativois de Chile," supp. vol., Ornitolgia Neotropical 15 (2004): 419-34;
25. and Ricardo Rozzi, "Implicaciones Éticas de Narrativas Yaganes y Mapuches Sobres las Aves de los Bosques Templados de Sudamerica Austral," supp. vol., Ornitolgia Neotropical 15 (2004): 435-44.