Andrew Light

Anthropogenic climate change poses a direct and imminent threat to the stability of modern society. Recent reports of the probable consequences of climate change paint a grim picture; they describe a world environmentally much less stable than the world to which we have become accustomed. As we begin to adapt to our changing climate, we will need to identify new sources for the stability necessary for a flourishing society. I suggest that this stability should come from the ideals of the good life we seek to promote when we focus on capabilities, on the substantial freedoms humans need to flourish. These ideals serve as a stable foundation for well-being in a time of great environmental and social instability; they should serve as guides for our policies, practices and institutions. I conclude by appealing to capabilities as a means of integrating well-being into our adaptation strategies, and show how doing so may well provide a way of formulating a powerful moral justification for adaptation strategies appropriate for both the developed and the developing world.

Discussion of ecological restoration in environmental ethics has tended to center on issues about the nature and character of the values that may or may not be produced by restored landscapes. In this paper we shift the philosophical discussion to another set of issues: the social and political context in which restorations are performed. We offer first an evaluation of the political issues in the practice of restoration in general and second an assessment of the political context into which restoration is moving. The former focuses on the inherent participatory capacity at the heart of restoration; the latter is concerned with the commodified (primarily in the United States) and nationalized (primarily in Canada) uses to which restoration is being put. By comparing these two areas of inquiry we provide a foundation for a critical assessment of the politics of restoration based on the politics in restoration.

Is environmentalism a form of identity politics like feminism, race‐based politics, and other political orientations at the core of the new social movements? It is argued that it can be, but that this claim to political identity has so far only been clearly available to a narrow set of environmentalists, notably deep ecologists and essentialist ecofeminists. But if it is plausible that broader forms of environmentalism can represent a political identity, then political objections to the content of environmentalism become much more salient than they might at first appear. If environmentalists decide to articulate their environmentalism as a kind of ‘ecological identity’, then this identity will encounter serious hurdles that deserve attention.

I examine a puzzle concerning the role of humans in the appreciation of place that arises in Christoph Rehmann-Sutter's paper in this volume, specifically the problem of the irreplaceability of place. If places are designated as valuable in part because they are irreplaceable, and if any human can appreciate any place, then how can humans ever be part of a place if they are ultimately substitutable as agents who appreciate places? After identifying the puzzle I briefly discuss two possible ways to answer this problem though the literature on bioregionalism. Two kinds of bioregionalism, liberal bioregionalism (LB) and communitarian bioregionalism (CB) are identified and distinguished. A brief appeal is made to embrace LB for now (which entails avoiding the irreplaceability problem by jettisoning the need to focus on the special qualities of a particular place) and to hold off on CB as a goal down the road which would re-establish the importance of specificity in the value of place.

Foremost in importance among these changes has been a transition in many governments' attitudes to fulfilling their role as caretaker of environmental quality. A question remains, however, concerning the propriety of managing a publicly provided good, such as the regulation of water and air quality, through market mechanisms such as optimal taxes and transferable quotas. There are a number of options open to us if we wish to object to the privatization of the regulation of environmental quality from an ethical perspective. This chapter suggests that the shift to privatization of environmental regulation can be challenged closer to its own economic ground, a move considered somewhat unusual by many environmental ethicists. It argues that inside the economic definition of a "pure public good" resources already exist for challenging the privatization of environmental regulation. Publicly provided goods are goods that may not be traded as commodities, as determined by a public policy.

We live in a world confronted by mounting environmental problems; increasing global deforestation and desertification, loss of species diversity, pollution and global warming. In everyday life people mourn the loss of valued landscapes and urban spaces. Underlying these problems are conflicting priorities and values. Yet dominant approaches to policy-making seem ill-equipped to capture the various ways in which the environment matters to us. Environmental Values introduces readers to these issues by presenting, and then challenging, two dominant approaches to environmental decision-making, one from environmental economics, the other from environmental philosophy. The authors present a sustained case for questioning the underlying ethical theories of both of these traditions. They defend a pluralistic alternative rooted in the rich everyday relations of humans to the environments they inhabit, providing a path for integrating human needs with environmental protection through an understanding of the narrative and history of particular places. The book examines the implications of this approach for policy issues such as biodiversity conservation and sustainability. Written in a clear and accessible style for an interdisciplinary audience, this volume will be ideal for student use in environmental courses in geography, economics, philosophy, politics and sociology.

Robert Elliot's "Faking Nature," represents one of the strongest philosophical rejections of the ground of restoration ecology ever offered. Here, and in a succession of papers defending the original essay, Elliot argued that ecological restoration 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 nature. I reject Elliot's art forgery analogy, and argue that his paper provides grounds for distinguishing between two forms of restoration that must be given separate normative consideration: malicious restorations, those undertaken as a means of justifying harm to nature, and benevolent restorations, or, those which are akin to art restorations and which cannot serve as justifications for the conditions which would warrant their engagement. This argument will require an investigation of Mark Sagoff's arguments concerning the normative status of art restorations.