Wilderness has been a central value in the development of the American environmental tradition and has been established in our laws and institutions, first in the National Park System and then more extensively through the Wilderness Act. Some have suggested that valuing wilderness, understood as nature without people or culture, is a peculiarly modern sentiment and that it is internally inconsistent, pathological, and a hindrance to solving real environmental problems. Contrary to this approach, I defend a richer conception of wilderness that undermines each of these claims. Beginning with an etymology of wilderness and a history of the development of wilderness appreciation, I argue that wilderness is not essentially an absence of people or culture but the flourishing of natural purposes: land characterized by untamed animals and plants in untamed relations. This interpretation of wilderness allows for a more cogent reading of the wilderness preservation tradition and the Wilderness Act. It also elucidates philosophical difficulties surrounding the practices of wilderness management and ecological restoration.

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This thesis aims to show that Martin Heidegger’s notion of fundamental ontology can serve as the foundation for a new approach to environmental ethics. The thesis begins with a brief introduction to the traditional approaches of environmental thought and a description of how Heidegger’s interpretation of human existence as Dasein provides a new perspective from which to approach questions of the fitting relation between human beings and the nonhuman world. While traditional environmental thought approaches nature primarily as the object of modern science and technology, Heidegger’s thought allows nature to become meaningful for human beings as an important part of their everyday lives. The first chapter begins with an examination of the wilderness and environmental justice debates and argues that Anglo-American environmental thought has yet to understand and define the natural environment in a way that encompasses the needs of both human and nonhuman life. Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein describes human existence in a way that demonstrates its interconnectedness with the nonhuman world and can be used to rethink the fitting place of human existence within the natural environment. The second chapter demonstrates that Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysical foundations of modern science and technology clears the way for a renewed understanding of the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman life. Heidegger’s critique demonstrates that an authentic understanding of human existence necessarily entails a new approach to interpreting being. The final chapter of the thesis analyses Heidegger’s retrieval of the early Greek understanding of being as phusis together with Heidegger’s notion of poetic dwelling in order to provide a new perspective for interpreting the scope of a fitting relation between human beings and natural environment. Heidegger’s thought demonstrates that the natural environment must be understood as an essential condition of human existence and can thereby allow human beings to interpret the nonhuman world in a way that would encompass the needs of both human and nonhuman life.

The aim of this thesis is to examine process theology in the light of questions raised by environmental issues. To facilitate this study, different approaches to the nonhuman natural world developed in environmental philosophy - in particular in environmental ethics - are compared with the work of process theologians. The primary focus is on the systems of A.N.Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, but John Cobb, Jay McDaniel and Daniel Dombrowski are also considered. In Chapter 1, the derivation of value and the formation of ethics in process thinking is examined, and its ethical methodology and content compared with classical utilitarianism and more recent consequentialist approaches to the nonhuman natural world. Ensuing problems including justice, replaceability, the identification of value with experience and the subjectivity of value judgments are considered. In Chapter 2, process ethics is compared with deontological approaches to environmental ethics which focus on the value of individual organisms and natural objects: in particular, the work of Paul Taylor. Problems generated by egalitarianism, individualism and the inability to affirm environmental restitution are examined. The capacity of process thinking to resist such criticisms is assessed. Collective consequentialist ethical approaches to the environment, characterized by Aldo Leopold and J.Baird Callicott, are laid alongside process ethics in Chapter 3. This raises questions concerning the nature of species and ecosystems, and the use of metaphors such as organism, community and society to describe them. The focus moves in Chapter 4 onto a comparison of the metaphysics and ethics of the Deep Ecology movement with that of process theology. This comparison concentrates on two main themes: attitudes to 'holism' and to the 'extension and realization of the self'. Finally, the question whether process theology should reform itself as a better response to environmental ethics is examined. Some suggestions about possible reformation are proffered, but it is tentatively concluded that process thinking is an inappropriate basis for environmental philosophy.

Thesis (M. Env. Sc.)--University of Adelaide, Mawson Graduate Centre for Environmental Studies, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references.

Defined by the excess of abstracted production, the exploitation of natural resources and the continued impoverishment of the excluded, the Anthropocene is both a narcissistic prophecy of doom and a call to examine the roots of the environmental crisis. Against the death of "the human" in the contemporary theory unveils the violence of a global healthcare crisis, the persistence of illness, pain and pollution as the dominant sensory and political regimes, as well as the desire to become post-and trans-human, and to do justice to the plight of nonhumans under the reign of the anthropos. While the era interpellates the whole species as its subject, the continual presence of racism, colonialism and capitalism points to the specific roots of climate change, environmental pollution, and interspecies violence. As such, both realist and activist approaches should consider the inclusion of the nonhuman into the political as the a priori condition of resistance or change. In this dissertation, I face up to this proposal, seeking to include nonhumans into the political and ethical sphere. In dialogue with animism, feminist materialism as well as decolonial and critical theory, I consider artistic and activist practices as communal, adaptive and programmatic. Rather than relying on a set of frameworks or the oeuvre of a thinker, I theorise the framework of "animorphism," which accounts for activist art that does not present us with ideas and representations of nonhumans as damaged and vulnerable persons, but lets them manifest as such. Animorphic art practice lends a new visibility to small and slow violences that might otherwise seem imperceptible within the grand narrative of the Anthropocene. Rather than testifying to the changing nature of our global species-being, these practices are a form of tactical and geo-ontological activism, which unravels the world in a futurist gesture. Against the dominant trends in post-humanist theory and environmental ethics, I criticize theorising nonhumans as "agency," "matter" or "flow," instead arguing for a personalization of those often excluded by "green" art and activism. This is not a purely aesthetic coalescence but an assertion of animorphism's suitability for developing adaptive practices in nonhuman communities in an era that necessitates and arises from damage, toxicity, predation and violence. The framework of animorphism pays attention to this condition and its resulting community. As such, its progressivism is no less than taking-into-account of the excluded. Through a theoretical inquiry as well as detailed case study analysis, I examine the practices of artists who intervene as designers, engineers and climate activists in order to resist the literal figurations of the anthropos but nevertheless remain attuned to the specificity of those, who struggle under the apocalyptic conditions of the world

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.

Early literature in the field of environmental ethics suggests that environmental problems are not technological problems requiring technological solutions, but rather are problems deeply rooted in Western value systems calling for a reorientation of our values. This dissertation examines what resources are available to us in reorienting our values if this starting point is correct. Three positions can be observed in the environmental ethics literature on this issue: 1. We can go back and reinterpret our Western canonical texts and figures to determine if they can be useful in providing fresh insight on today's environmental challenges; 2. We abandon the traditional approaches, since these are what led to the crisis in the first place, and we seek to establish entirely new approaches and new environmental identities to face the environmental challenges of the 21st century; 3. We look outside of the Western tradition for guidance from other cultures to see how they inhabit and interact with the natural world. This dissertation presents and evaluates these three options and ultimately argues for an approach similar to the third option, suggesting that dialogue with indigenous cultures and traditions can help us to reorient our values and assist in developing more sustainable environmental identities.

Includes bibliographical references.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the distributional side of environmental risks and burdens and, more particularly, to explain the significance of including intergenerational and intragenerational equity concerns within the fashioning of a legal regime governing the transboundary movement of radioactive waste. The thesis focuses on fairness and equity considerations between generations (intergenerational equity) and within contemporary generations (intragenerational equity) in the context of transboundary movements of radioactive wastes. First, a detailed exploration of the emergence of intergenerational and intragenerational equity principles is conducted. Then, the implementing principles of intergenerational and intragenerational equity with regard to environmental risk and burden distribution are put forward. Further, sensitive to the equity dimensions of the transboundary movement of radioactive waste, the thesis explains transboundary movement within a broader political and economic framework, and illustrates the potential transboundary and transgenerational externalities arising from transboundary movement. Management strategies available to help prevent or reduce transboundary and transgenerational externalities are examined. In addition, the evolution of the legal regime governing transboundary movements is reviewed and proposals for reform of the current regime are presented. Finally, the thesis concludes with concrete observations and recommendations. Through the lens of intergenerational and intragenerational equity, the thesis evaluates the fairness of environmental risk and burden distribution, spatially and intertemporally, in the context of transboundary movements of radioactive wastes.