While citizens often use non-instrumental arguments to support environmental protection, most governmental policies are justified by instrumental arguments. This paper explores some of the reasons. We interviewed senior policy advisors to four European governments active in global climate change negotiations and the UNCED (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development) process. In response to our questions, a majority of these advisors articulated deeply held personal environmental values. They told us that they normally keep these values separate from their professional environmental (...) policy activities. We interpret these findings within the context of the literature on environmental ethics and values. We suggest that environmental policy could be improved if widely held environmental values were articulated, validated, and admitted into the process of policy analysis and deliberation. (shrink)

Bryan Norton 's convergence hypothesis, which predicts that nonanthropocentric and human-based philosophical positions will actually converge on long-sighted, multi-value environmental policy, has drawn a number of criticisms from within environmental philosophy. In particular, nonanthropocentric theorists like J. Baird Callicott and Laura Westra have rejected the accuracy of Norton 's thesis, refusing to believe that his model's contextual appeals to a plurality of human and environmental values will be able adequately to provide for the protection of ecological integrity. These theoretical criticisms (...) of convergence, however, have made no real attempt to engage the empirical validity of the hypothesis, the dimension that Norton clearly takes to be the centerpiece of his project. Accordingly, the present paper attempts to provide an empirical analysis of the convergence argument, by means of a study of the Vermont public's environmental commitments and their attitudes toward national forest policy. Our findings support a generalized version of Norton 's thesis, and lead us to suggest that environmental philosophers should try to be more inclusive and empirically minded in their discussions about public moral claims regarding nature. (shrink)

Native American land ethics are not well understood by many governmental natural resource managers. This article presents the results of interviews with selected tribal elders, tribal land managers, and tribal content experts concerning traditional beliefs and values forming a land ethic and how these influence tribal land management practices. The Native American land ethic that emerged from this study includes four belief areas: “All Is Sacred”; ; “Right Action”; ; “All Is Interrelated”; ; and “Mother Earth”;. Traditional Native American beliefs (...) concerning the environment appear to spring from a spiritual context rather than the scientific‐utilitarian context more prevalent in the dominant Euro‐American culture. (shrink)

This study measures environmental values and ethics and explores their relation ships to attitudes toward national forest management. The principal research methods were literature review and a survey of Vermont residents concerning man agement of the Green Mountain National Forest. Descriptive findings suggest respondents (1) favor nonmaterial values of national forests, (2) subscribe to a diversity of environmental ethics, including anthropocentric and bio-/ecocentric, and (3) support emerging concepts of ecosystem management. Environmental values and ethics explain approximately 60% of the variation (...) in attitudes toward national forest management. (shrink)

Although aesthetics and ecological sustainability are two highly regarded values of forest landscapes, practices developed to manage forests for these values can sometimes conflict with one another. In this paper I argue that such conflicts are rooted in our conception of forest aesthetics as scenery, and propose that a normative, "ecological aesthetic" based on the writings of Aldo Leopold and others could help resolve conflicts between aesthetic and sustainability values. I then offer suggestions on how we might advance an ecological (...) aesthetic in policy and planning programs, on-the-ground management, and research and theory development in landscape aesthetics. (shrink)

This paper recognises the many contributions to work on environmental values while arguing that some reconsideration of elicitation practices is warranted. It argues that speaking and thinking about certain environmental values, particularly ethical expressions, are ill-matched with the affectively neutral, direct question-answer formats standard to willingness-to-pay and survey methods. Several indirect, narrated, and affectively resonant elicitation tasks were used to provide study participants with new opportunities to express their values. Coded results demonstrate that morally resonant, image- based, and narrative-style elicitation (...) tasks help respondents articulate a broader range of noncost and nonutilitarian environmental values. However, it was found that elicitations of this kind are most useful when presented in a affectively subtle and noncontroversial form. Several suggestions for synthesising these methods with more structured forms are offered. (shrink)

Federal forest land in the Pacific Northwest has become the focus of a regional and national debate concerning the protection of natural environmental systems and the economic and cultural vitality of local communities. At the heart of this debate are different values about forests and human relationships to forests. This study examines the degree to which the public embraces differing values about federal forests nationally and regionally. Findings suggest strong biocentric value orientations toward forests among the public in both cases. (...) It is further suggested that the value orientations of citizens are strongly related to policy preferences for federal forest lands. (shrink)

The South's forests are both important to and at the same time in the path of the region's growth. Research on social change for the Southern Forest Resource Assessment shows that rapid population growth and changing demographics are fueling growth of recreation demands and adding stresses on public and private forests. Concurrent with population and demand growth have been significant value and attitudinal changes among both land-owning and non-owning residents of the region. Southerners are clearly becoming greener. An opportunity to (...) mitigate stresses on southern forests may lie in tapping Southerners' growing environmentalism to form effective cooperatives involving public and private interests and forestry professionals. (shrink)