Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Zürich, 2001/2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [229]-242).

Thesis (M.A.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2002. / Bibliography: leaves 125-133.

René Descartes’ 1637 “bête machine” characterization of nonhuman animals has assisted in the strengthening of the Genesis 1:26 and 1: 28 disparate categorization of nonhuman animals and human animals. That characterization appeared in Descartes’ first important published writing, the Discourse on the Method, and can be summarized as including the ideas that nonhuman animals are like machines; do not have thoughts, reason or souls like human animals; and thus, cannot be categorized with humans; and, as a result, do not experience pain or certain other feelings. This characterization has impeded the primary objective of environmental ethics - the extension of ethical consideration beyond human animals - and has supported the argument that not only the nonhuman animal but also the rest of nature has only instrumental worth/value. As is universally recognized, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, just a few decades after Descartes’ death, took issue with Descartes’ dualism by arguing that the Leibnizian monad, with its active power, was the foundation of, at least, all of life. This argument must result in the conclusion that nonhuman and human animals are necessarily categorized collectively, just as Charles Darwin later argued. In fact, when the writings of Descartes and Michel de Montaigne are reviewed, it becomes apparent that Descartes never believed his bête machine characterization but embraced it to achieve not only his philosophical objectives but also his anatomical and physiological objectives. Philosophically, Descartes was answering Montaigne’s skepticism and his use of nonhuman animal examples to discredit human reason. Also, Descartes spent a major part of, at least, the last twenty-two years of his fifty-four year life dissecting nonhuman animals. Finally, the role that the politics and policies of the Christian institutions played in these matters is of primary importance. Similar politics and policies of the Christian institutions have since played, and still play, an important role in the continuing, unreasonable, disparate categorization of human animals and nonhuman animals. Philosophy seems to be the only discipline that can, if it will, take issue with that characterization.

Education is supposed to advance humans towards the common good and a better future, but the present environmental education in trend has largely failed to inculcate a social perception of nature as is required in education for sustainability. The world is facing an ecological crisis as a result of unrestrained exploitation of natural resources and pollution; while the sustainability movement remains sluggish as prevailing citizenship education in the national context continues to serve dominant values through the top-down approach and fall behind actual needs in reforming societies. Outdated thinking of citizenship and the absence of civil society involvement are argued to be the main factors slowing down education for sustainability. Ecological citizenship as an emerging concept to address world sustainability suggests a stronger role to be played by the civil society particularly in renewing the political obligations of citizens towards their unsustainable relationship with nature. A paradigm shift in educational values towards critical pedagogy should encompass environmental justice and ecological footprint to reflect the global dynamics of environmental issues today. International environmental non-government organizations can capture opportunities of this rising role, as affirmed by the Hong Kong case analyzing the work of Greenpeace and WWF and views of local key stakeholders taking part in this movement. Through their usual environmental governance work in the forms of advocacy and stakeholder engagement, international environmental non-government organizations can foster more community-based sustainability education in formal, non-formal and informal settings through the more bottom-up tripartite approach of government-business-civil society. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

The purpose of this investigation is to examine the extent to which Swedish compulsory school tends to rely upon, and to further reinforce, ideologies that from a theoretical platform of deep ecology can be identified as “ecologically unsustainable conceptions of reality”. Mainly, this will purport to an examination of the (explicit as well as implicit) prevalence of anthropocenthrism, individualism, ethnocenthrism and rationalism in a) the Swedish National Curriculum; and in b) biology text books. Methodologically, the study makes use of Fairclough´s approach to, and method for, critical discourse analysis (CDA). The main results are that the National Curriculum indeed expresses a high level of individualism, as well as (although to a lesser extent) traces of rationalism and ethnocenthrism. Also, the environmental ethics that are supported in biology text books are interpreted to be heavily influenced by an anthropocentric world view. / Det övergripande syftet med denna studie är att undersöka i vilken utsträckning det svenska obligatoriska skolväsendet bygger på, och i förlängningen reproducerar, vad man utifrån ekofilosofisk analys kan identifiera som en ”ekologiskt ohållbar verklighetsuppfattning” – vilket i första hand innebär en närvaro av ideologier som antropocentrism, individualism, etnocentrism samt rationalism. Den centrala problemställningen syftar därmed till att undersöka i vilken grad dessa ideologier är implicit och/eller explicit närvarande i a) grundskolans lagstadgade värdegrund (som den uttrycks i läroplanen Lpo 94) samt i b) grundskolans läromedel i ämnet biologi. För att analysera dessa auktoritativa texter använder undersökningen sig av Faircloughs metod för kritisk diskursanalys (CDA). Resultatet av analysen anses ge stöd för tolkningen att a) grundskolans värdegrund, som den formuleras diskursivt i läroplanen Lpo 94, i hög grad genomsyras av en individualistisk ideologi; och i mindre grad även ger uttryck för rationalism och etnocentrism; samt b) att den miljöetik som läromedlen i biologi ger uttryck för huvudsakligen domineras av en antropocentrisk världsbild.

Achieving environmental s¬ustainability in human organization is the defining challenge of the modern era. In light of the inability of the existing economic paradigm to provide for sustainability objectives, novel approaches to understanding and managing economic activities are required. Towards this end, the emergent field of ecological economics provides an alternative paradigm that expressly prioritizes the development of the theory and tools necessary to operationalize environmental sustainability in economic activity, which is viewed as prerequisite to sustainability in any other sphere. Here, I advance an internally consistent framework for understanding and implementing the core ecological economic sustainability criteria: appropriate scale relative to biocapacity; distributive justice; and efficient allocation. This framework includes: (1) an ecological communitarian conception of distributive justice which recognizes environmental sustainability as the first principle of distributive justice; (2) the rationale for biophysically-consistent ecological economic modeling of human activities as a basis for environmentally-enlightened policy and management; and (3) an appeal for scale-oriented environmental governance as could potentially be operationalized by a strong, centralized World Environment Organization. I further apply this framework to evaluating the current and future status of livestock production systems at regional and global scales with respect to efficiency considerations as well as their relationships to sustainability boundary conditions for human activities as a whole. It is suggested that the current and projected scale of the livestock sector is fundamentally unsustainable, and that all leverage points must be exploited to rein in this sector in the interest of preventing irreversible ecological change. This must include, but cannot be limited to, strong eco-efficiency measures and changes in production technologies, species substitutions, and consumption patterns and volumes. Outcomes are interpreted in terms of their implications for environmental policy and governance oriented towards the sustainability objective.

This thesis argues that the environmental undertones of artists Edward Burtynsky’s and Olafur Eliasson’s work have clearly aligned them; however, the focus of my study is not an evaluation of the artists’ abilities to express environmental concerns, but rather an exploration of the effects of their representations on our understanding of the surrounding environment, and of the artists’ contributions toward a definition of Nature that now includes its own demise as a site of aesthetic pleasure. This study focuses on Olafur Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls and on Edward Burtynsky’s Nickel Tailings photographs. Burtynsky’s Nickel Tailings photographs, among them in particular, his well known Nickel Tailings No. 34, depict a barren grey and black landscape centered primarily around an intensely coloured red and orange river of molten metal. Eliasson’s recent New York City Waterfalls consists of four artist-constructed waterfalls, ranging from 90 to 120 feet tall, located within the waters of Lower Manhattan, Governs Island, and beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. In his monumental New York City Waterfalls, Eliasson has made an intervention into the landscape that effectively works to contaminate the established aesthetic upon which it is based. In his monumental photographs, in contrast, Burtynsky does the opposite; he aestheticizes the contaminated. Here I would add that both artists have carefully called upon the elemental in order to reference the idea of wilderness or a “pure” form of Nature. Reference to the elemental in Nature—to air, water, and fire— has allowed these artists to challenge the viewer’s perception and experience of the nonhuman world. These manufactured landscapes are undeniably owned by humanity, yet is this the type of landscape we are comfortable to claim as our own? / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2011-12-03 14:03:08.43

Chapter one introduces the topic and outlines chapters two, three, four and five. Chapter two discusses environmental ethics in the light of the three notions of the environment, namely, instrumental value, intrinsic value and the inherent worth. This chapter also discusses philosophical theories of ethics, viz. a consequence-based theory, which is, Utilitarianism, principle-based theories and a philosophical principle of stewardship. Chapter three discusses the trajectory of sustainable development with respect to selected international events. This chapter also shows how the paradigm of sustainable development has peen embraced in nation states, with a special reference to South Africa. Chapter four critically analyses South Africa's environmental law and its macroeconomic policy, GEAR, in the light of environmental ethics. Chapter five synthesises discussions raised in the preceding chapters and offers some insights as to how policy-making pertaining to environment and development can be improved by incorporating a holistic approach of environmental ethics. Chapter six summarises discussions that emerged in chapters one, two, three, four and five. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2002.

Moral judgments have tended to be made through the application of certain moral principles and it seems we think we need principles in order to make sound moral judgments. However, the theory of moral particularism, as put forward by Jonathan Dancy (2004), calls this into question and challenges the traditional principled approaches to moral reasoning. This challenge naturally began a debate between those who adhere to principled accounts of moral rationality, and those who advocate a particularist approach. The aim of this thesis is thus to assess the theory of moral particularism as recently put forward by Jonathan Dancy. In pursuing this project I initially set up a survey of the field of environmental ethics within which to explore traditional approaches to applied ethics. This survey suggests that applied ethical problems have traditionally been solved using various principled approaches and if we are inclined to take the particularist challenge seriously, this suggests a philosophical conundrum. On the one hand, increasingly important and pressing applied environmental ethical concerns suggest there is a practical need for ethical principles, whilst on the other hand, the particularist claim is that we do not need principles in order to make sound moral judgments. The survey of environmental ethics then establishes the first side of the philosophical conundrum. I then move to explore the second side of the conundrum; the theory of moral particularism, looking at why the challenge it presents to traditional principled approaches needs to be taken seriously. I then move to explore theoretical challenges to moral particularism; this is done to establish the current state of the theoretical debate between the particularist and the generalist. I conclude from this that the theoretical debate between the two has currently reached a stalemate; it is, at present, simply not clear which account is correct. As the main goal of this study is to evaluate particularism, this apparent stalemate led me to explore certain practical challenges to particularist theory as a means of advancing the debate. As particularism is a theory that challenges our traditional conception of how to make moral judgments, there will be important implications for applied ethics if particularism turns out to be correct, and 1 thus finally apply particularism to a practical environmental problem in order to assess the validity of practical challenges to particularism. In order to do this, a particularist ethic is applied to the question of whether or not to allow mining in Kakadu National Park in Australia. This provides a means of seeing what an applied particularist ethic could look like, as well as providing something of an answer to the practical challenge to particularism and achieving the goal of evaluating it within the applied context of environmental ethics. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.

The theory of intergenerational equity is closely linked to the notion of sustainable development. It is indeed considered to be one of its aspect. Intergenerational equity can be divided in two facets: the intergenerational component links the present generation to future generations, while the intragenerational aspect imposes, within the same generation, a duty for industrialized countries to help developing countries. The legal status of intergenerational equity appears to be limited because of its qualification as a concept. Therefore, this concept of intergenerational equity belongs to the realm of soft law. Nevertheless, legal implications can be drawn out from this theory. Different means of implementation can be envisioned, some belonging to the domain of soft law, other employing more classical tools, such as institutional mechanisms.