Biocentric and ecocentric ethics offer a rich discourse on protecting biotic communities – defending conservation with inherent value tied to life. A problem ar...

Restoration seeks to heal the environment and make amends for damages done by human interference. Preservationists, however, claim that restoration is anthropocentric, hubristic, and ultimately misguided. I defend restoration against these criticisms, and examine narratives from Karl Marx and Lynn White, Jr. to explain human alienation from nature. I use a synthesis of lessons from Marx and White to favor a restoration paradigm over a preservationist model.

According to the dominant account of harming, to harm an agent is to cause her to occupy a harmed state. Matthew Hanser rejects this “state-based” account, arguing that each version of it faces counterexamples. Instead, Hanser argues, to harm an agent is to cause her to suffer harm, where suffering harm is undergoing an event: in particular, it is losing or being prevented from receiving a basic good. In this thesis, I argue that this “event-based” account is, at best, a (...) version of the state-based account. The identity of any event as the suffering of a harm, I argue, derives from the fact that it causes the agent to occupy a harmed state. I then defend the “counterfactual comparative” version of the state-based account against three prominent objections. The intended upshot of my arguments is that the state-based account of harming is superior to its event-based counterpart. (shrink)

This article explores the use of islands as tools of geographical and intellectual containment - or what we call “islanding” - in the scientific and policy literature about gene drive technologies in conservation. In the first part of the article, we explore the narrative of contained gene drive use on islands and discuss how it juggles notions of localness and localization of gene drives and their (test) releases. We question the possibility and narrative of containing the spread of gene drives (...) technologically or geographically, and argue that the gene drives for conservation literature strategically combines contradictory and reductive understandings of islands and containment. The second part of the article is devoted to reflection on nonlocal concerns about gene drives and the possibility of local gene drive decisions. We argue that attempts to legitimize local gene drives through local decision-making evade normative concerns about their nonlocalizability and risk instrumentalizing local communities for nonlocal agendas. Our overarching conceptual aim is therefore to open up a domain of thinking around the possibility of demarcation in our world – of our political, normative decisions, and of our reality – and to argue for the vital importance of reflection on this possibility in technological decision-making. (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)

Ecological restoration and native landscaping are increasing, particularly in the American Midwest, where they form part of the area's history and culture of conservation. But practitioners rarely pause to ask philosophical questions related to categories of native and invasive or human control and harmony with nature. This article brings philosophy into conversation with practice, using members of Wild Ones Native Landscaping, a non-profit headquartered in Neenah, WI, as a case study. Philosophers and ethicists who are studying Ecological Restoration and Native (...) Landscaping can learn valuable lessons – in practicality, aesthetics and flexibility – from practitioners such as the Wild Ones. (shrink)