Andrew Light

This chapter discusses the methods of studying the nature of time, particularly the story method. It presents a discussion of time as related to identity and tells the story of a person put on trial for committing a murder five years ago who puts forward an unorthodox defense. The accused person claims to remember committing the murder, but argues that “the murderer is not the same person as me, for I have changed. I am not the same person as that murderer of five years ago. Therefore you cannot punish me, for no one is guilty of a crime committed by someone else.” This defense, though not accepted by the court, raises the question of whether a person who changes over time, either physically or psychologically, remains the same person.

Robert Elliot's 1982 “Faking Nature,” represents one of the strongest philosophical rejections of the ground of restoration ecology ever offered.1 Here, and in a succession of papers defending the original essay, Elliot argued that ecological restoration, the practice of restoring damaged ecosystems, was akin to art forgery. Just as a copied art work could not reproduce the value of the original, restored nature could not reproduce the value of original nature, conceived as a form of nonanthropocentric and intrinsic, as opposed to merely instrumental, value.2 Eric Katz's 1992 “The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature,” extended this claim by further arguing that whatever was produced in a restored landscape it certainly could not count as having the original value of nature, particularly wild nature, and necessarily represented a form of disvalue and domination of nature.3 Elliot has continued to press his argument forward since the original publication of “Faking Nature,” augmenting and some would say softening his critique of restoration, in a book also called Faking Nature.4 Perhaps because both Elliot and Katz rest their claims on the defense of a strong nature-culture distinction, the two arguments are often lumped together as the Elliot-Katz rejection of the value of ecological restoration. Nonetheless, Elliot has made it clear in his recent book that his view is distinct from and even at odds with Katz’s views. In previous papers I have criticized Elliot and Katz’s work as an unhelpful philosophical contribution to the literature on restoration ecology. To my mind, restorationists are ultimately up to more good than harm, and whatever the..

T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2001), tells the story of Tyrone Tierwater, a one time monkeywrencher and environmental avenger for “E. F.!” (Earth Forever!) who we first meet in 2025 in his mid-seventies. Tierwater is now working for a character based on Michael Jackson, who in his semi-retirement has employed the elder eco-warrior to help save some of the last remnants of a few dying species – warthogs, peccaries, hyenas, jackals, lions and what is likely the last Patagoninan fox. The not too distant environmental future painted by Boyle is a disaster. Global warming has finally caught up to us with a vengeance and even the secure shores of the U.S. are wracked by unmitigated cycles of flooding and drought seriously degrading most semblances of life as we know it. To be sure, though, people, and some versions of progress, go on. While most affordable food and drink is limited to some combination of catfish and sake (very little else having survived decades of disastrous weather and a series of crop blights), and there are constant threats of new strains of life-threatening and highly contagious diseases, suburban development continues and new humans come into existence with the promise, at least in the developed world, of longer life spans. But Boyle does not give us anything like the overly optimistic views expressed by some conservative columnists who dismiss the need for global climate treaties; this is not an environmental future that is only felt with difficulty in the underdeveloped south requiring simpler economic readjustments for Americans without a substantial shift in lifestyle. The world..

The writings of William H. Whyte do not loom large in the literature of my field: environmental ethics, the branch of ethics devoted to consideration of whether and how there are moral reasons for protecting non-human animals and the larger natural environment. Environmental ethics is a very new field of inquiry, only found in academic philosophy departments since the early 1970s. While there is no accepted reading list of indispensable literature in environmental ethics, certainly any attempt to create such a list would begin with Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and a more recent handful of senior scholars who had been writing on these topics early on, such as J. Baird Callicott, Val Plumwood, Peter Singer, Richard Sylvan, Tom Regan, and Holmes Rolston III (for a review of contemporary environmental ethics, see Light 2002, Palmer 2003, and Wenz 2001).

It is an old wag among environmentalists that humans have become disconnected from nature. The culprits for this conundrum are various. If it is not our addiction to technological enticements then it is our life in big cities which alienate us from our “earthen elements.” The presumed result of this disconnection is that we do not respect the land anymore and turn a blind eye to the environmental consequences of our collective acts of consumption and pollution. Various bits of evidence are produced to prove this point – mostly anecdotal – such as the claim that many city-dwellers, when asked where their food comes from, will respond blankly, “from a grocery store.” What is the curative for this ailment? Surprisingly, it is not that we should send urbanites out to the factory farms, county-sized feed lots, or flavor factories in New Jersey, which actually put most of the food on the shelves of neighborhood markets. It is instead usually suggested that we should send people to wilderness areas, that we should become more connected with nature in the raw, as it were. E. O. Wilson’s “biophilia” hypothesis is a good case in point. Defending a sociobiological account of why humans are innately attracted to living things, Wilson suggests that this connection is best realized in the residual attachment of humans to wild nature. This grounds a claim that the most important task at hand is to focus on “the central questions of human origins in the wild environment” (Wilson 1992, 351). It is probably unfair to suggest that Wilson thinks that we should all go to the wilderness in order to be better connected with nature, and implicitly, to then..

There are many ways to describe cities. As a physical environment, more so than many other environments, they are at least an extension of our present intentions. But cities are not confined to the moment. Built spaces are also in conversation with the past and oriented toward the future as physical manifestations of our values and priorities. But even with all of the ways we have to describe cities we do not normally think of them as in any way akin to the “natural” environment. City and country, nature and culture, are opposed. We move through cities differently, with a different set of values, whether articulated or not. Consider just one small example: Even the most jaded urban dweller may hesitate to sully the environment around him when he perceives it to be something other than a product of the human community. Though we have all seen trash in a national park, we suspect (or at least hope) that there is a kind of hesitancy that occurs with a person wondering what to do with her candy wrappers on a trail in Yosemite. On the other hand, a visitor to my home, Greenwich Village, will usually not think twice about tossing his cigarette butts on the ground as he walks toward his next destination.

A growing literature testifies to the persistence of place as an incorrigible aspect of human experience, identity, and morality. Place is a common ground for thought and action, a community of experienced particulars that avoids solipsism and universalism. It draws us into the philosophy of the ordinary, into familiarity as a form of knowledge, into the wisdom of proximity. Each of these essays offers a philosophy of place, and reminds us that such philosophies ultimately decide how we make, use, and understand places, whether as accidents, instruments, or fields of care.

Traditional justifications for state-to-state development assistance include charity, basic rights and self-interest. Except in unusual cases such as war-reparations agreements, development assistance has typically been justified for reasons such as the above, without reference to any history of injury that holds between the states. We argue that climate change entails relationships of harm that can be cited to supplement and strengthen the traditional claims for development assistance. Finally, to demonstrate the utility of this analysis, we offer a brief application of our reasoning to the emerging conflict in the United Nations over the future post-2015 development agenda.