Freudian slip?

Freudian psychoanalysis may be passé in the early 21st century (especially among empiricists!), but who can resist a Freudian explanation for slips of the tongue?

In a conference presentation discussing the causes of environmental harms, the female (and feminist) speaker unwittingly referred to androgenic causes rather than anthropogenic causes. Need I mention that the social context of the conference was far from friendly to women (see post below)?

Ecofeminism and Treating Women Seriously

I just received another anthology of readings prepared for use in an environmental philosophy class--this one is Environmental Ethics: The Big Questions, David R. Keller, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

I'm going to pick on it. But don't get me wrong: the same points could apply to just about any environmental ethics text on the market. (And similar points go for philosophy of science. Just substitute "feminist approaches" for "ecofeminism.")

The first part of the book consists of short, approximately 1-page answers to the question "Why study environmental ethics?" by prominent writers in the field. This group includes journal editors, authors of important books in environmental ethics, and some of the people who shaped the field in its early days. In this group of 20 authors, 6 are women--and of those 6 women only one writes predominantly about ecofeminism.

The rest of the book consists of 72 selections. 72! Some are historical but the vast majority are contemporary. Out of those 72 selections, only four (4!) are written by women. Oh, but it's worse than it looks.

Of those four selections, three are filed under the heading "Ecofeminism." Ecofeminism is worth studying, and it's certainly worth including in such a collection, but there is a troublesome problem here.

First, there is the inexplicable erasure of what women have written in this field. In the first section of the book, the one that includes short commentaries written specifically for the book, a significant number of prominent women are included. But when it comes to examining the work that brought them to their position--they are not there.

Second, the inclusion of 75% of the women under the heading "ecofeminism" runs the risk of bringing a stereotype effect to bear. When a social group is perceived to be a minority and in a given setting they are vastly underrepresented, then they tend to be judged harsher and more in keeping with established stereotypes than when they are well-represented in the group.

Thus, the inclusion of women as authors of ecofeminism but not as authors in other areas of environmental philosophy makes it more likely that ecofeminism will be perceived as...well, as having all the harsh qualities that are (mis)understood to be part and parcel of feminism. Radical, shrill, marginal... It also indicates that women have no part in environmental philosophy except to speak about feminist issues, which is simply not the case. Thus, it characterizes women as working only in a tiny subfield, and a subfield that is easily read as marginal through stereotype effect.

So, if the goal of including ecofeminism is to be more gender inclusive, then this goal is probably ill-conceived. Within a broader context which is so extremely exclusive, the inclusion of ecofeminism may be more harmful to women and produce more unfair criticism of ecofeminism than should be the case. It tends to exacerbate and reproduce exclusionary gendered practices rather than remedy them.

Finally, I can't help but wonder how such an exclusionary edited text is produced. Even by chance, could I construct a list of 69 readings (not counting those that are ecofeminist) and come up with only one female author (Mary Midgley, in case you were wondering)?

Although the men that I meet in the field of environmental ethics (like the men in pragmatism) tend to have solid liberal values, and profess support for women and minorities, what's sinister about implicit bias is that it need not be intentional. It can be built out of habits and mental shortcuts that give preference to people most "like us." And in areas where "like us" means "white and male," it can take careful attention to counter these tendencies. Thus, I conclude that it is not coincidental that the male editor thanks the following people for their help (by first name):

Michael, James, Holmes, Andrew, Mark, Chip, Clark, Bryan, and Jeff. Plus editorial assistants: Tiffany and Sarah.

Legal Rights for Nature

Here is an article from yesterday's Boston Globe, "Sued by the forest: Should nature be able to take you to court?"

The idea of granting legal standing to natural entities is not a new one. In the case that spurred this article, a town in Maine passed an ordinance that grants rights to "natural communities and ecosystems" in order to try to protect their aquifers from taking by the Nestle corporation (which bottles the water under the Poland Spring label). What's interesting is that rights are granted to natural, non-human entities in order to protect them from another non-human entity, a corporation.

So the question that has to be raised is whether granting rights to ecosystems will solve the problem of mis-use by corporations. History would suggest that, instead, corporations (who can pay for very, very clever lawyers) are likely to find ways of subverting ordinances or even using them to their advantage. The real problem is that corporations are not accountable to all the moral considerations that human communities believe are worth accounting for. 

I've been reading about cases of indigenous populations who have been displaced directly or indirectly by conservation projects. These cases create moral dilemmas for environmentalists. Preserving ecosystems and species is a valuable goal, but at what human cost? A legal framework that gives rights to ecosystems could be used to justify protected areas that displace humans. It would, in some sense, be a simple solution that would settle the problem. But it would settle it in a way that is too easy because it would not work through the moral balancing of the needs of nature vs. the needs of humans.

Making Wise Choices About Environmental Goods

In my environmental philosophy class, this week we discussed preference utilitarianism, cost-benefit analysis, and whether we should trust people's stated preferences about how highly they value environmental goods.

I tend to be skeptical about economists' measurements of preference, though I don't know of a better and simpler tool that can be substituted.

Preferences can be discovered (only) by introspection, so it seems illogical to say that someone could be mistaken about what they prefer. The claim that someone can be mistaken rests on several observations:
1. Sometimes our actions do not follow our expressed beliefs. Which is the real preference: how we act or what we say?
2. People change their minds depending on how a choice is presented.
3. What we think will make us happy does not always, in fact, make us happy. Predictions of future happiness and unhappiness are wrong in systematic ways.

We talked about some of the mistakes that people make in estimating the value of their preferences and watched this video, from 6:00 to 12:54. I think Leroy's lottery ticket fallacy is particularly telling.

Local Economies and Ethics

In Deep Economy, Bill McKibben argues in support of local media and in support of distributed power generation. (This is my university's common text this year, and I'm teaching it in my ethics course.)

I’ve long believed that these are important and under-appreciated public problems (together with how recent expansions of intellectual property rights constrain creativity).

McKibben cleverly twins these issues as symptoms of a larger problem: the loss of local control over how we lead our lives. If local media were substituted for corporate nation-wide media, we would have the opportunity to develop our own tastes and ideas, not just swallowing what is mass-produced for everyone to consume. We might appreciate the diversity around us, learn more about our communities, and develop new tastes. If we had the ability to feed to as well as take from the electric grid, we might find pleasure in making this commodity for our neighbors to use:

Instead of something that you buy from far away, energy becomes something you help make and distribute to your neighbors. On a sunny day I can walk down to the electric meter under my porch and watch it spin the wrong way. As long as the sun stays out, the solar panels on my roof make me a utility. It’s a sweet feeling, knowing that my neighbor’s refrigerator is running off the panels above my head….Japan leads the world in building a decentralized solar-panel energy economy…[Perhaps] because people feel both an obligation to and an ability to trust one another… (p. 148)

But I’m left with the question: What is ethical about supporting local economies? Is this just a fancy twist on identifying and supporting what is in our own selfish interests? Sometimes McKibben presents localism as a way of keeping profits in the community: we support our neighbors’ businesses, and then they reciprocate and support us. We benefit by cutting out middlemen who drain profits out of the community.

This may be smart and it may be efficient, but is there any sense in which it could be ethical? Indeed, an emphasis on local communities over the universal public cuts against over 200 years of Kantian ethics and over 100 years of calculating “the greatest good for the greatest number.” I’ve been wondering how to fit this support for local economies into an ethics class. In an earlier post, I argued that virtue ethics can sometimes do the job, since virtue is aimed at guiding people to cultivate the virtues that we most admire in others, including virtues such as charity, friendliness, and living deliberately. Care ethics, in particular, prioritizes beneficence directed toward our circles of family, friends, and acquaintances over beneficence to strangers.

Without adopting a version of virtue/care ethics, it is impossible to say what drives a choice to consume local goods rather than imported ones (excluding, of course, the environmental cost of transportation). In utilitarian fashion, Peter Singer argues that buying food products grown in poverty-stricken areas directs our money to the people who benefit from it the most. He argues convincingly (in The Way We Eat) that this is true even when foreign growers are not participating in fair trade programs. Against this argument, McKibben’s plea to invest in local communities rather than poor communities seems to be supported by little more than self-interest? (Certainly, many of my students interpret it in that way.)

However, I think that support for local economies, local power generation, local media, and local agriculture can be justified in one more way. It can be justified on the grounds of the psychology of responsibility and on the limits of knowledge. Looking for justification from ethical theory is to look in the wrong toolbox. Instead, we should look to social epistemology and to moral psychology.

The greatest benefit of localism is that it functions to establish accountability. McKibben sells localism as a route to greater happiness—we are more likely to have friendly, meaningful conversations at the farmer’s market than the supermarket. But another benefit of localism is that it’s easier to know what’s going on in a limited sphere, and we are more likely to take an interest in it. “NIMBY” is a phrase that’s used to denigrate elites who would prefer exploitive, dangerous, unsightly, or polluting operations to be located out of sight, in other communities or overseas. But there’s a positive side to NIMBY movements, too. If something is so unpleasant or harmful that no one wants it, there is motivation to change our practices or improve our technologies or accept higher prices. When products and power come from under our noses, it's much more difficult to hide or externalize costs.

Perhaps McKibben's best example is of local, sustainable logging. In the forestry industry, it is efficient to clearcut an area and then replant it. One reason this is efficient is that it takes all of the value now, and thus hedges bets against an uncertain future. Another reason is that sustainable logging is more labor and equipment and time intensive. In fact, with the economy going the way it has been (barring global recession, that is), it is more economically efficient to harvest the value from forests now and to reinvest the profit. Any standard investment will reap a greater economic return over the time that it takes to regrow a forest than to actually regrow the forest. But this is a viable strategy only if you don't mind eradicating your forests, and forests have more than economic value. In McKibben's example, people are more willing to pay a higher price for sustainable forest products if those products come from woods that they know and enjoy.

The ethical aspect of McKibben’s localism is that it activates responsibility.

Ethical frameworks and sustainability

I'm teaching an Introduction to Ethics course with an emphasis on examining environmental sustainability. Although I've assigned a textbook that has some collected readings on ethical theories, the class is relying predominately on reading about environmental issues as they come up in non-philosophical venues.

I've had some difficulty illustrating the usefulness of Kantian ethics in the context of environmental problems. Any suggestions that readers have for how to apply Kantian ethics to such problems would be appreciated!

For instance, the class did work through the problem of overpopulation, achieving the insight that if everyone had large families, the human population would quickly exceed the earth's carrying capacity. But the implication that each and every one of us has a duty to limit family size to 2 children or fewer did little to guide recommendations for how that duty should be enforced or encouraged. Utilitarianism, by contrast, seems well suited to problems of global scope; increasingly, environmental and economic problems do have that scope.

Another problem that loomed was how to give theoretical ethical support to the lifestyle recommendations in Bill McKibben's Deep Economy. I happened across Peter Singer's recent book The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, which provides utilitarian support to some, but not all, of McKibben's views (a review here).

Singer, for instance, does not find an ethical justification for buying locally-grown foods. He acknowledges the environmental reasons to support buying foods grown nearby rather than those transported across the US. But he also believes that we are doing more good for others by buying foods imported from poverty-stricken countries than buying US-produced food, even when products are not the result of fair trade practices. Also, I find the utilitarian argument against speciesism to be, well, specious.

I think virtue ethics, though, is ideal for justifying the kinds of actions that McKibben endorses. Even its derivative, care ethics, can make sense of why people choose to buy local: people who have definable relationships to us, who live in our communities, have a greater claim on our consideration.

Peter Singer, by the way, is speaking at RIT tomorrow on "A Better, More Sustainable World" at 2:30 pm in Golisano Auditorium. All are invited.

Teaching Sustainability

In a few weeks I'll be teaching a lower-level Introduction to Ethics course, and one of the texts I'm using is Bill McKibben's Deep Economy. The book is not particularly philosophical, so I'll provide the classical ethics material separately--Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Mill.

I hope that what this book will provide are some concrete and pertinent questions that are still unanswered about how individuals should live and how societies can organize themselves around ethical goals. The book seems fairly (though not entirely) neutral as far as the American political spectrum goes. That is, conservative communitarians may find something attractive about McKibben's emphasis on communities, and some liberals may be squeamish about the nonchalance with which personal liberties and life goals take second place to community traditions.

One thing that reviewers have noted is the Vermontesque quaintness of so many of McKibben's examples and tropes. Farmer's markets, bike paths, eco-communes.

About those farmer's markets. McKibben uses Farmer's Markets as a unifying trope. When something works well and promotes sustainability, it's like a farmer's market. But how useful is this metaphor, even to those of us who do shop at a Public Market?

Even the Internet, McKibben says, is kind of like a Farmer's Market (p. 174).
This gets it backward!
What is more central to my experience, to my students' experience? the Internet? or the farmer's market?
Well, obviously.
And as much as I see the reason behind McKibben's fixation on farmer's markets to illustrate local exchange, it leads him to overlook the power of technological infrastructure in determining higher-level structures like economies. (Besides, it comes off as Ludditism.)

The Internet, with its redundant and open architecture, has taught us much about the qualities that make networks work. In particular, what has been innovative about the internet is how it is distributed and accessible. It has created networks where people exchange ideas and labor, not always for economic reasons (think of open source software, Flickr, blogs).

If farmer's markets are the model for the future, it is some of the features that they share with the internet which we should be noticing: low cost of entry, low investment in infrastructure, open to the public, personal, and offering a diversity of goods.

Likewise, it makes sense to think of distributed power generation as modeling the Internet: a flexible infrastructure that accepts multiple types of power inputs, can track microcosts, directs the commodity in the most efficient path, and is resilient against localized failures.

Teaching Ethics and Sustainability

I'm teaching a lower-level Introduction to Ethics course this year (4 or 5 times), and I have a grant to design it with a sustainability focus. A focus on sustainability fits well with RIT's recent (baby) steps toward energy conservation, and the school's "common book" this year is Bill McKibben's Deep Economy.

I'll use Deep Economy in the course alongside selections from classic primary texts (the usual suspects: Mill, Kant) and some recent but equally common selections on environmental ethics and lifeboat ethics.

I'm pleased with the university's pick of this common text because it provides a framework to bring a discussion of some of my long-time personal interests into the classroom--food ethics, media consolidation, and distributed power generation. There is a confluence, of course, between my pragmatic, pluralist, and empirical philosophical commitments and these issues. And the sustainability framework gives a reason to emphasize social/political philosophy as much as the standard ethical approaches (Aristotle, Kant, Mill). I also like having a unified problem-based framework rather than a grab-bag of issues, some of which seem outdated or distant from my (and my students') experience, such as euthanasia and capital punishment.

But designing the course is not without problems:
1. The problem of burn-out and closed-mindedness on environmental issues. Although I don't think these issues are strictly partisan, people who listen to conservative talk radio have been told that they are. And an Institute-wide emphasis on sustainability could make philosophy seem mainstream rather than exciting and subversive.

2. There are many special events coordinated by the university and related to the Deep Economy book and the topic of sustainability. Bill McKibben is coming to talk, and so is Peter Singer. There will be tours to local farms and to Ithaca's EcoVillage. I can't make these course requirements because of the time slots they are in. But the topic of the course lends itself well to experiential learning, and I can make that a requirement. However, I have large sections of this course--2 sections of 40 each--so I can't exercise the guidance that I do in an upper-level Environmental Philosophy course. How will self-guided experiential learning projects go over in a lower-level course? Does anyone have experience with this?

3. Of course, there are no ready-made textbooks. I'm putting together a coursepack and, even at this late date, would love to hear reading suggestions!

Conservation Biology and Intervention

Ecological restoration is usually thought of as preserving or recreating previous conditions that were changed as a result of human activity. An important part of this is being true to both time and space. Preserving Himalayan pines in a Rochester, NY arboretum is the vegetative equivalent of a zoo; it’s not restoration. But restoring tallgrass prairie in Illinois to its presettlement condition after most of our American prairies were converted to agriculture is considered restoration.

What is not usually considered either restoration or preservation is assembling species in new configurations. This week a policy article in Science proposes, though, that such new assemblages will be required in order to preserve the existence of certain species in the face of rapid climate change. The authors call the proposed policy action “assisted colonization.” The idea is that climate may be shifting too rapidly (due to human activity) for many species to migrate on their own. In addition, human development has fragmented habitats in ways that prevent migration.

What and how should we (environmental philosophers) think of this proposal? Is it still a means of preservation? Is it preservation in a robust sense, as opposed to the sort of last-ditch, pathetic rescue that zoos attempt for the last remaining exemplars of species? What considerations should be taken into account?

While there may be some essentialist objection to the intense intervention that assisted colonization would allow, I can only see it resting on contested understandings of the natural. Migration itself is natural. For example, in the west, pinyon pine is migrating northward, and in the east, white oak is slowly migrating northward following the last ice age, 15,000 years ago. On the other hand, this particular climate change and much habitat fragmentation is human-caused. And the consequences of the current mass extinction of species are dire.

Rather, appropriate objections revolve around gaps in our knowledge. When should we act, and how much risk can we take on, especially given humanity’s past mistakes? When weighing these questions, though, we should consider that many of those mistakes happened in pursuit of other goals—political and economic advantage.

Conservation biologists and environmentalists care about preserving species, and we care about natural associations. But if climate change predictions are correct, then we can’t have it both ways. One requirement, as we proceed, is to carefully collect and analyze information, including the success and failure of restoration projects. Habitat destruction remains the greatest single threat to biodiversity, over and above climate change, and will be the first priority for decades to come. But considering these questions is wise, while we still have the luxury of thinking about them.

CFP: An interdisciplinary conference on ecology and philosophy

Call for Papers

Recreate, Replace, Restore:
Exploring the Intersections between Meanings and Environments

A Conference at
Ohio Northern University

17-19 April 2009

Sponsored by the ONU Working Group on Religion, Ethics, and Nature

The natural world has been “humanized”—even areas thought to be wilderness bear the marks of human impact. Given the long reach of human influence, environmental thought in the humanities and the sciences have sought to understand how we can limit, change, or reverse the more disastrous effects that humans have had on the environment. Preservation is not the sole or primary strategy; restoration, sustainable design, and other creative responses to place have become part of the debate. Further, both the sciences and the humanities have increasingly realized the interconnection between human accounts of meaning and the more-than-human world. Thus, reflections on the proper approaches to natural and built environments increasingly include investigations into contested religious, philosophical, and ethical meanings of the
environments that surround us.

Possible themes include (though are not limited to):
• The philosophical, ethical, religious or spiritual dimensions of restoration in all its aspects
• Scientific assessments of restoration, the reintroduction of species, or the preservation of locales
• Built environments, nature, and the meaning of place
• Theological and philosophical reflections on human alterations of environments
• Architecture and green building as recreating places

More info here(pdf).

This is a call for papers (20 minutes reading time) and for poster presentations.
Deadline for proposals is Oct. 31, 2008.