In the early 20th century, after hundreds of years of gradual decline, the California condor emerged as an object of intensive scientific study, an important conservation target, and a cultural icon of the American wilderness preservation movement. Early condor researchers generally believed that the species' survival depended upon the preservation of its wilderness habitat. However, beginning in the 1970s, a new generation of scientists argued that no amount of wilderness could prevent the condor's decline and that only intensive scientific management (...) - including captive breeding - could save the species from certain extinction. A bitter and highly politicized battle soon developed over how to best preserve the condor. For 5 years the condor was extinct in the wild; however, by the time that officials released the first captive-bred birds the condor recovery program had garnered widespread public support, even among its former critics. Today, condor advocates from the scientific and activist communities work together to manage the species and protect its habitat. The condor's story illustrates some of the tensions, problems, and successes that have accompanied the rise of conservation biology as a scientific field and environmental movement in the United States. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Some fear the Anthropocene heralds the end of nature, while others argue that nature will persist throughout the Anthropocene. Still others worry that acknowledging the Anthropocene grants humanity broad license to further inject itself into nature. We propose that this debate rests on a conflation between naturalness and wildness. Where naturalness is best understood as fundamentally a metaphysical category, wildness can be better understood as an inter-relational category. The raccoons in cities, the deer in suburban yards, the coyotes hunting (...) cats and dogs: these all return wildness, where naturalness may have been lost. (shrink)

It is fashionable to argue that nature and society are obsolete categories. The two, we are told, can no longer be distinguished from one another; continuing loyalty to the ‘binary’ of the natural and the social blinds us to the logic of current ecological crises. This article outlines an argument for the opposite position: now more than ever – particularly in our rapidly warming world – we need to sift out the social components from the natural, if we wish to (...) understand the crises and retain the possibility of intervening in them. Tracing the current of hybridism to the writings of Bruno Latour, this article ends with a critique of the foremost proponent of a hybridism in Marxist garb: Jason W. Moore. Against his theories, it suggests that historical materialism is a form of property dualism that distinguishes between social and natural relations while considering them equally material in substance. That is also the analytical premise of ecological class hatred, the flames of which ecological Marxism seeks to fan. (shrink)

This dissertation is based around conceptual conflicts introduced by the notion of rewilding and the challenges rewilding poses to place and cultural landscapes. Rewilding is a recent conservation strategy interested in the return of wilder, less human-managed environments. Often presented as an antidote to increasingly homogenized, organized, and managed environments, rewilding deliberately opens up space for the return of wild nature, typically by removing human elements that have obstructed or diminished its free reign or by reintroducing locally extinct species to (...) re-activate trophic cascades. There is, however, an increasing awareness that rewilding in many places will threaten cultural landscapes that are prized for their human meanings and histories. This dissertation does not attempt to resolve this conflict but instead takes a hermeneutic interest in it and tries to understand better what is at stake in such a conflict. This is attempted by means of a hermeneutic detour through the concepts of place and of wilderness, and ultimately the dissertation argues that instead of understanding rewilding simply as undermining notions of place, we should understand rewilding itself as placemaking. This conceptual work is informed by actual cases of rewilding and an examination of the conflicts arising out of the various modes of placemaking rewilding performs. Three modes of placemaking are demonstrated: wilderness placemaking, experimental placemaking, and place-regenerative placemaking. Taken in total, these reveal ways in which rewilding confronts us with relations with nonhuman others and with questions of belonging and not belonging that are increasingly at issue. (shrink)

Leave No Trace (LNT) has become the official education and outreach policy for managing recreational use in parks and wilderness areas throughout the United States. It is based on seven core principles that seek to minimize impacts from backcountry recreational activities such as hiking, climbing, and camping. In this paper, we review the history and current practice of Leave No Trace in the United States, including its complex role in the global political economy of outdoor recreation. We conclude by suggesting (...) a new framework for building on the successes of Leave No Trace, while moving beyond its self-imposed limitations, and recapturing wilderness recreation as a more collaborative, participatory, productive, democratic, and radical form of political action. (shrink)

This paper argues against the view that a single environmental ethic can be formulated that could be universally applied in all geographic settings and across cultures. The paper specifically criticizes Callicott's proposal that Leopold's land ethic be adopted as a global environment ethic, and develops an alternative bioregional perspective which suggests that while there can be a great deal of variety in how different cultures think about and interact with their local environments, there is nonetheless the need for cross-cultural dialogue (...) on how specific problems that transcend cultural boundaries can be successfully resolved. (shrink)

Recent studies in conservation biology have provided the wilderness preservation movement with a spark. Wilderness, we are told, can no longer be seen as a scenic playground for weary humans - it is, rather, an ecological necessity for the conservation of biodiversity. This paper traces the science and political ideologies that inspire and inform this reinvigorated cadre of environmentalists. Through empirical investigations of one prominent conservation group and one conservation campaign, the author finds that this environmentalism offers simplistic and purportedly (...) self-evident solutions to the complex problems of biodiversity and wilderness conservation. (shrink)

Grounding Knowledge is written partly out of a sense of celebration and partly out of a sense of consternation. The celebration is generated by the feeling that epistemology has started to explore...

Urbanization and development of green spaces is continuing worldwide. Such development frequently engulfs the habitats of native animals, with a variety of effects on their existence, location and ways of living. This paper attempts to theorize about some of these effects, drawing on aspects of Foucault's discussions of power and using a metaphor of human colonization, where colonization is understood as an "ongoing process of dispossession, negotiation, transformation, and resistance." It argues that a variety of different kinds of human/animal power (...) relations can exist in urban areas, not all of which are examples of human domination. The paper concludes by raising a number of questions about the implications of these human/animal relations. (shrink)

: Holmes Rolston III has argued that in some situations where the needs of starving people come into conflict with the protection of natural values, "we" ought to prioritize the latter. Focusing on the threat to pristine ecosystems and endangered species posed by overpopulation in developing countries, Rolston advocates the exclusion of human settlement and activity from the most fragile and valuable wild areas—a strategy sometimes termed "fortress conservation." This approach suffers from at least three serious faults. First, fortress conservation (...) is regarded as an illegitimate imposition by many of the local people on whose cooperation the success of conservation initiatives depends, often leading to failure in terms of conservation objectives. Second, the assumption that conservation and the satisfaction of basic human needs are largely incompatible ignores evidence of widespread environmentally sustainable patterns of resource use. Finally, Rolston's appeal to "us," referring variously to concerned North Americans and to humanity as a whole, implicitly universalizes the preservationist value system of a Northern minority while excluding the values and voices of the people directly affected by the proposed conservation measures. (shrink)

The term moral considerability refers to the question of whether a being or set of beings is worthy of moral consideration. Moral considerability is most readily afforded to those beings that demonstrate the clearest relationship to rational humans, though many have also argued for and against the moral considerability of species, ecosystems, and “lesser” animals. Among these arguments there are at least two positions: “environmentalist” positions that tend to emphasize the systemic relations between species, and “liberationist” positions that tend to (...) emphasize the attributes or welfare of a particular individual organism. Already, this classic conflict provides for some challenging theoretical clashes between environmentalists and animal liberationists. The question of moral considerability is complicated, however, by recent developments in genetic engineering. Some animals, like pigs and fish, have been genetically modified by humans to grow organs that can then be transplanted into humans. If environmental arguments for the moral consideration of species are correct, then we are released from our obligations to morally consider those animals that we have genetically modified, since they are by their nature always an “invader species.” If, instead, the welfare of the animal is of penultimate importance, then there is a case for strengthening the moral considerability of GM animals over “naturally-occurring” animals, since they bear a closer relationship to humans. This would appear to be an intractable problem, a “bad marriage,” as Mark Sagoff once proposed. This paper argues that the case of invasive transgenic animals exposes weaknesses in this classic conflict, and particularly, in the framing of this conflict. To remedy this framing problem, this paper argues for a reconceptualization of the term “moral considerability,” instead urging a strong distinction between moral considerability, moral relevance, and moral significance. (shrink)

: Recently a number of influential academic environmentalists have spoken out against wilderness, most prominently William Cronon and J. Baird Callicott. This is odd, given that these writers seem to support two cornerstone positions of environmentalism as it has developed over the past twenty years: first, the view articulated within environmental ethics that wild, nonhuman nature, or at least some parts of it, has intrinsic or inherent value; second, the understanding developed within conservation biology that we have entered a period (...) of massive anthropogenic biodiversity loss and that landscape-level habitat preservation is essential for combating this. I argue here that Cronon and Callicott are wrong. In fact, an ethics of respect for nonhuman nature and an informed, scientific understanding of what is necessary to preserve it do strongly support increased wilderness preservation. (shrink)

In most rewilding projects, humans are still the agents in control: it is us who decide to no longer want to fully control nature. Spontaneous rewilding changes the nature of this game. Once we are confronted with species that have their own agency, that cannot fully be controlled, and that behave in ways that we do not always like, then it proves hard to co-exist and tolerate nature’s autonomy. Nowhere is this more clearly visible than with the resurging wolf, whose (...) return to parts of western Europe challenges our existing ideas about ourselves and our place in the landscape. (shrink)

Olfaction offers unique entry into the non‐human world, but Western culture constrains such opportunities because of the dominance of the visual mode of perception. We begin by briefly reviewing philosophical arguments against olfaction as a reliable cognitive input. We then build a biological case for the similarity of non‐human and human olfaction. Subsequently, we argue that some contemporary societies still make use of olfaction for organizing themselves in space and time. We end by suggesting that olfaction offers promise for advancing (...) inquiry into the human‐nature relationship that is so important to many environmental philosophers, scientists and activists. (shrink)

Olfaction offers unique entry into the non-human world, but Western culture constrains such opportunities because of the dominance of the visual mode of perception. We begin by briefly reviewing philosophical arguments against olfaction as a reliable cognitive input. We then build a biological case for the similarity of non-human and human olfaction. Subsequently, we argue that some contemporary societies still make use of olfaction for organizing themselves in space and time. We end by suggesting that olfaction offers promise for advancing (...) inquiry into the human-nature relationship that is so important to many environmental philosophers, scientists and activists. (shrink)

In the last decades of the twentieth century nature writing lost some of its enchantment with the idea of wilderness. It was criticized for its remoteness, separating the natural world from human life, for being out of step with the interests of Indigenous peoples, and for holding an otherwise dynamic natural world, static. Recently, however, writers have begun to rehabilitate the idea of wilderness, and call for increased wilderness conservation. The period of critique was helpful in clarifying both the nature (...) and need for wilderness conservation, as well as for other stewardship practices. I trace some of the disagreements, particularly between the traditional conservationist and those advocating bolder stewardship practices that do not so much conserve the natural world as they remake it. I doubt that we either do or must live in an exclusively post-wild engineered world, and find a place also for natural heritage and its conservation. (shrink)

Chris Armstrong argues that attempts at justifying special claims over natural resources generally take one of two forms: arguments from improvement and arguments from attachment. We argue that Armstrong fails to establish that the distinction between natural resources and improved resources has no normative significance. He succeeds only in showing that ‘improvers’ are not necessarily entitled to the full exchange value of the improvement. It can still be argued that the value of natural and improved resources should be distributed on (...) different grounds, but that the value of improvements should be conceived differently. (shrink)

In this piece, I extend a transformative power account to the conservation of dark (and starry) night skies. More specifically, I argue that the transformative power that dark nights bear warrants their conservation and is best understood in terms of the important intellectual, cultural, aesthetic, and (psycho-physiologically) restorative effects that they afford. This gives us a pressing set of reasons to combat the growing, global phenomenon of light pollution. To do so, I argue, we ought to preserve the few remaining (...) dark refuges that we have left (what I term wildness regions) and synergistically re-wild (i.e. re-darken) urban and suburban environments. Synergistic re-darkening, I propose, can be achieved by (i) establishing interpretive (educational) ‘dark zones’, (ii) implementing bioluminescent lighting technologies, and (iii) strategically employing lighting design. Finally, and in order to enact a degree of epistemic justice, I argue that we ought to implement multi-cultural ‘co-learning’ initiatives, which promote education pertaining to both Western, scientific and indigenous, North American astronomies. (shrink)

"Nature" and "wilderness" are central normative categories of environmentalism. Appeal to those categories has been subject to two lines of criticism: from constructivists who deny there is something called "nature" to be defended; from the environmental justice movement who point to the role of appeals to "nature" and "wilderness" in the appropriation of land of socially marginal populations. While these arguments often come together they are independent. This paper develops the second line of argument by placing recent appeals to "wilderness" (...) in the context of historical uses of the concept to justify the appropriation of land. However, it argues that the constructivist line is less defensible. The paper finishes by placing the debates around wilderness in the context of more general tensions between philosophical perspectives on the environment and the particular cultural perspectives of disciplines like anthropology, in particular the prima facie conflict between the aspirations of many philosophers for thin and cosmopolitan moral language that transcends local culture, and the aspirations of disciplines like anthropology to uncover a thick moral vocabulary that is local to particular cultures. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 231-237, June 2011.

In this paper I seek to reconsider wilderness against recent critiques that portray it as necessarily contributing to a separation between nature and society. By examining the historical and contemporary contexts for designating wilderness areas in the United States, I propose that these wilderness lands and their particular constraints on the use of certain technologies may in fact present integrative, open spaces for considering how to live ethical, technological lives in contemporary society. An examination of actual wilderness practices illustrates how (...) wilderness regulations may support a more democratic politics of technology and help develop an ethic grounded in fairness, humility, and restraint. (shrink)

Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott (eds): Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s10806-010-9258-2 Authors Nathaniel Barrett, Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion 1711 Massachusetts Ave NW #308 Washington DC 20036 USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863.