Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Biodiversity and Environmental Philosophy
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Concern for the Environment
- 3 Intrinsic Values and Biocentrism
- 4 Tempered Anthropocentrism
- 5 Problems of Ecology
- 6 The Consensus View of Conservation Biology
- 7 Incommensurability and Uncertainty
- 8 In Conclusion: Issues for the Future
- References
- Index
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Biodiversity and Environmental Philosophy
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Concern for the Environment
- 3 Intrinsic Values and Biocentrism
- 4 Tempered Anthropocentrism
- 5 Problems of Ecology
- 6 The Consensus View of Conservation Biology
- 7 Incommensurability and Uncertainty
- 8 In Conclusion: Issues for the Future
- References
- Index
Summary
Some of us have the privilege to live with the type of affluence in which worries about food and shelter never impinge upon our subjective consciousnesses. We succumb to other sources of anxiety. Some, even in the highest echelons of the United States government, are concerned about the possibility of asteroids hitting Earth and the prospects for designing weapons to protect us from them. In recent years, many of us have been worrying about what we call the “environment.” Some of us worry about the extinction of species, some about the pollution of our physical surroundings, yet others about changes in our climate. These are all related problems: extinction is often a result of pollution; evidence is mounting that extinction can result from climate change; pollution is a major source of climate change, and so on. The general worry about all these problems constitutes worry about issues that may be broadly categorized as environmental. By and large, explicit worry about most issues in this category, though not about pollution, is confined to the privileged North. The situation is rather different with those for whom everyday life is a struggle for material existence, for instance, for the vast majority of those who live in the so-called Third World (or South) and for many of our own poor or underprivileged. They may never worry explicitly about the general category of the “environment.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Biodiversity and Environmental PhilosophyAn Introduction, pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005