Environmental ethics as environmental etiquette: Toward an ethics-based epistemology

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 115-134

  Cheney, Jim ^a   Weston, Anthony ^b  

^a Milwaukee College of General Studies Waukesha Campus   (United States)

^b 2159 CB ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 7444229929     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics199921226     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. It is almost impossible to give citations for this model in general, since it is the common assumption of nearly all contemporary philosophical work recognized as ethics, and consequently is almost never explicitly articulated. It is both immediately familiar and never spelled out. J. Baird Callicott's recent Earth's Insights: A Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) can perhaps be cited in this connection, particularly as his emphatically epistemology-based ethics does considerable disservice to the ethics-based epistemologies typical of indigenous philosophies that we examine below.
2. See Thomas H. Birch, "Moral Considerability and Universal Consideration," Environmental Ethics 15 (1993): 313-32.
3. See Anthony Weston, Back to Earth: Tomorrow's Environmentalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), chaps. 2 and 3.
4. Henry Beston, The Outermost House (New York: Viking, 1976), p. 25.
5. Birch, "Moral Considerability," p. 328.
6. This discussion is, of course, only the briefest sketch, and leaves many questions unaddressed. Could ethics-based epistemology and epistemology-based ethics each be appropriate at different times or in different spheres, for example? (Maybe.) Is "care" ethics closer to an ethics-based epistemology than traditional ethics? (Again, maybe: this strand does emerge in some care ethicists, although there is a strong strand of epistemology-based care ethics as well.) These are questions for another place.
7. The indigenous ideas on which we draw are filtered - indeed, double-filtered in cases where we work from secondary sources - through the conceptual lens of the Western-defined problematics in environmental ethics that we address in this paper. We do not claim to understand indigenous thought as that thought lives in indigenous worlds. The only real authorities on indigenous thought are indigenous peoples themselves. We only claim that this thought as we understand it sheds light on current problems in environmental ethics.
8. Leroy N. Meyer and Tony Ramirez, "'Wakinyan Hotan' ('TheThunderbeings call out'): The Inscrutability of Lakota/Dakota Metaphysics," in Sylvia O'Meara and Douglas A. West, eds., From Our Eyes: Learning from Indigenous People (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1996), p. 104.
9. Walter J. Ong, S.J., "World as View and World as Event," American Anthropologist 71 (1969): 63-67.
10. Sam Gill, "Holy Book in Nonliterate Traditions: Toward the Reinvention of Religion," in Sam Gill, Native American Religious Action: A Performance Approach to Religion (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 139-410.
11. Sam Gill, "One, Two, Three: The Interpretation of Religious Action," in Gill, Native American Religious Action, pp. 162-63, 151.
12. Ibid., p. 162.
13. These examples make it clear, we hope, that the term ceremonial worlds is not intended to refer to ceremonies such as baptisms and sun dances that occur within cultures.
14. Diamond Jenness, "The Carrier Indians of the Bulkley River," Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, no. 133 (1943): 540.
15. N. Scott Momaday, "The Man Made of Words," in Sam Gill, Native American Traditions: Sources and Interpretations (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1983), p. 44.
16. Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982), pp. 6 and 9.
17. Henry S. Sharp, The Transformation of Bigfoot: Maleness, Power, and Belief among the Chipewyan (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), p. 144.
18. Robert Bringhurst, "Everywhere Being is Dancing, Knowing is Known," Chicago Review 39 (1993): 138.
19. Irene Klaver (personal communication).
20. This term is from David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996). The term, as used here, has primary reference to the wider biological dimensions in which we are embedded (see note 38).
21. This point is well-argued in Birch, "Moral Considerability."
22. Carol Geddes, panel discussion by Yukon First Nations people on the topic "What is a good way to teach children and young adults to respect the land?" transcript in Bob Jickling, ed., Environment, Ethics, and Education: A Colloquium (Whitehorse: Yukon College, 1996), p. 46.
23. See Anthony Western, "Self-Validating Reduction: Toward a Theory of the Devaluation of Nature," Environmental Ethics 18 (1996): 115-32.
24. Vicki Hearne, Adam's Task (New York: Knopf, 1986), pp. 229-30.
25. Jim Nollman, Dolphin Dreamtime (New York: Bantam Books, 1987).
26. Conversations with those involved in the Native Philosophy Project bear this out. See Geddes, panel discussion, in Jickling, Environment, Ethics, and Education, pp. 32-33.
27. Ibid.
28. In conversation at the Native Philosophy Project.
29. With this admission, we acknowledge that we speak of indigenous worlds from the quite different world of academic philosophy. One reviewer worried quite rightly about what he or she called "performative contradiction" in this regard. Fair enough. We are indeed trying to cross a formidable boundary here, to speak of things in an academic voice that truly calls for the voice of ceremony and song, a personal stance more than an intellectual attitude. We accept the awkwardness and clumsiness (indigenous people might see it as irony) of the attempt. Better this than the (at present) only alternative: silence. May those who come later find the way easier.
30. Sam Gill, "The Trees Stood Deep Rooted," in Native American Religions Action, p. 17.
31. Peter Nabokov, "Present Memories, Past History," in Calvin Martin, ed., The American Indian and the Problem of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 147.
32. Sean Kane, Wisdom of the Mythtellers (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1994), p. 36.
33. Jeannette Armstrong, "Keepers of the Earth," in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, ed. Theodore Roszak et al. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995), p. 323.
34. Conrad Aiken, quoted in Edith Cobb, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 67.
35. N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), p. 113.
36. Barry Lopez, "Landscape and Narrative," in Crossing Open Ground (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 66.
37. Elaine Jahner, "The Spiritual Landscape," in D. M. Dooling and Paul Jordan-Smith, eds., I Become Part of It: Sacred Dimensions in Native American Life (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 193.
38. This is a sense of the sacred that resonates well with Rolston's view that "there comes a point in environmental ethics when we ask about our sources, not just our resources. The natural environment is discovered to be the womb in which we are generated and which we really never leave. That is the original meaning of nature, from the Latin natans, giving birth, Mother Earth." Holmes Rolston, III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 197-98. See also Jim Cheney, "Naturalizing the Problem of Evil," Environmental Ethics 19 (1997): 299-313.
39. This is a sense of the sacred that resonates well with Rolston's view that "there comes a point in environmental ethics when we ask about our sources, not just our resources. The natural environment is discovered to be the womb in which we are generated and which we really never leave. That is the original meaning of nature, from the Latin natans, giving birth, Mother Earth." Holmes Rolston, III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 197-98. See also Jim Cheney, "Naturalizing the Problem of Evil," Environmental Ethics 19 (1997): 299-313.
40. Simon Ortiz, A Good Journey, collected in Woven Stone (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), pp. 167-68 and 202.
41. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), pp. 101-03.
42. Personal communication.
43. Sharp, Transformation of Bigfoot, pp. 144-65.