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"In 2007 when I was a senior research fellow at The Center for American Progress, a progressive policy think tank in Washington, D.C., I spent some time on the Environmental Policy Team. This team had as it's goal the creation of various papers that would be listed on the Center's website and distributed to appropriate committees in Congress to influence public policy. At the time it did seem like the country and the world was on the way to combatting the causes of global warming: CO2 and other chemical emissions that were creating a "greenhouse" effect that was moving us to climate disaster. In 2009 there was the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in which plans were laid for creating a cooperative international structure for implementing some of the policy recommendations of the Kyoto Protocol (1997). Progress was made to identify options for various countries to play their part in this project (the details to be negotiated later) and a goal was set to respond to climate change in the short and long term. To this end, a "red line" was established to avoid allowing the average global temperature to rise 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Procedurally, developed countries like the United States promised certain levels of funding so that the goals might

Includes bibliographical references. ; The concerns of environmental ethics on other continents fail in Antarctica, which is without sustainable development, or ecosystems for a "land ethic," or even familiar terrestrial fauna and flora. An Antarctic regime, developing politically, has been developing an ethics, underrunning the politics, remarkably exemplified in the Madrid Protocol, protecting "the intrinsic value of Antarctica." Without inhabitants, claims of sovereignty are problematic. Antarctica is a continent for scientists and, more recently, tourists. Both focus on wild nature. Life is driven to extremes; these extremes can intensify an ethic. Antarctica as common heritage transforms into wilderness, sanctuary, wonderland. An appropriate ethics for the seventh continent differs radically from that for the other six.

Doing Environmental Ethics explains how we may transform our fossil-fuel-burning economy, which continues to intensify our ecological crisis, into a circular and ecological economy. The text resists political corruption and personal greed by gleaning ethical insights from our philosophical and religious cultures and by embracing the scientific Gaia hypothesis for the Earth. Its reasoning ascribes intrinsic worth to uplifting duties and rights as well as inspiring virtues and relationships, and tests applying these values by predicting the likely consequences of acting on them. It affirms all life has value for itself, and that human life also values reasoning and feelings and being ethical. The third edition examines US and international environmental policies through 2018. It analyzes the Trump administration's repudiation of the environmental policies of the Obama administration and its new rules slashing the social costs of climate change. The text reviews a draft UN treaty that would impose human rights and environmental constraints on transnational corporations, but it also highlights outstanding examples of corporate upcycling and low-carbon innovation. Finally, the third edition explains why food security requires protecting the food sovereignty of farming communities and cooperatives, as well as public policies ensuring fair profits for farmers practicing agro-ecology

This Note poses the question of whether—and how—lawmaking can create a platform for promoting an environmental ethic. There is a body of scholarship about how values or virtue ethics impact lawmaking, but this Note also explores the opposite—how lawmaking impacts the values or virtue ethics of the public. Environmental ethicists disagree about the very origins of environmental ethics. Some thinkers believe that environmental ethics stem from "core values" that are inherent to human nature. Others posit a set of "green virtues" that can be learned. But there is agreement that education through exposure to the natural world is fundamental to ethical development. Ideally, people develop green virtues that guide their everyday actions but, to encourage a true love of the natural world, their core values must be awakened; this is done locally, via connections to wild spaces. Through the creation of national parks and through public land-granting, law creates a platform that can contribute to the formation of environmental consciousness, from materializing the "wilderness" ideal to demonstrating the value of "otherness." The relationship between environmental law and environmental ethics creates a virtuous circle—in both senses of the word—as virtue drives enriched environmental law as much as environmental law has the capacity to create green virtues. The virtuous circle concept risks the implied instrumentalization of virtues, robbing them of intrinsic realization by using them as policy tools. However, this is a false dichotomy; environmental law is a tool that can be used by a democracy to change itself by creating a different set of experiences to make concrete the values that we hold in abstraction or as aspiration. This Note draws on Aristotle's virtue ethics to posit that lawmaking can create a holistic platform for people to learn how to practice an environmental ethic, which in turn promotes the passage of new regulatory and protective environmental laws.

Preliminary Material /King-Tak Ip -- ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: INTRODUCTION /King-Tak Ip -- THE NORMATIVE SIDE OF NATURE /Robert Elliot -- JE SUIS LE GRAND TOUT: RESPECT FOR NATURE IN THE AGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBILITY /Gerhold K. Becker -- ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: AN AESTHETIC APPROACH /Ingmar Persson -- EMPIRICAL ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS /Y. S. Lo -- PERILS AND DANGERS: CLIMATE CHANGE AND THEOLOGICAL ETHICS /Michael S. Northcott -- GLOBAL ETHICS, ENVIRONMENTALLY APPLIED: AN ISLAMIC VIEW /Anis Ahmad -- IN SEARCH OF AN ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS IN EARLY BUDDHISM /Pragati Sahni -- ECOSYSTEM SUSTAINABILITY: A DAOIST PERSPECTIVE /Jonathan Chan -- HEALING AND THE EARTH: DAOIST CULTIVATION IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE /Livia Kohn -- ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS /King-Tak Ip -- INDEX /King-Tak Ip -- VIBS /King-Tak Ip.

The kinds of specifically ethical questions we can meaningfully ask about the environment are rapidly becoming fewer as the climate emergency intensifies. The article argues that there is something fundamentally inadequate about the traditional conceptions of ethics regarding the climate crisis because they all tend to presuppose that we can somehow get it right. The problem is that we got it wrong and must start dealing with the consequences.

Preface: the design of this book and how to get the most out of it -- A philosophical framework for environmental ethics -- The worldviews of the Abrahamic religions and the environment -- Asian, Native American, and western secular worldviews and the environment -- Valuing nature -- Deep ecology & biocentrism -- Ecofeminism -- Social ecology and environmental justice -- Environmental ethics and areas of environmental concern -- Air pollution and climate change -- Waste -- Land degradation -- Water resources and water pollution -- Biodiversity -- Animal liberation and animal rights -- Global population expansion -- Sustainability, consumption, business and energy