Bryan Norton

Abstract:German Romanticism plays a central role in Gilbert Simondon's writings. In Mode of Existence, Simondon draws on Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann to illustrate the tragic consequences of failing to attend to the individuated relationship between landscape and tool. While Novalis is only mentioned in passing, his work presents the most radical form of what might be called Romantic mechanology. With the stated aim of achieving the ideal of perpetual motion, Novalis's poetics highlight the central role literary experimentation plays in technological thinking, revealing how Simondon may shed new light on several key aspects of romantic poetry and philosophy.

The volume documents, and makes an original contribution to, an astonishing period in twentieth-century philosophy—the progress of Arne Naess's ecophilosophy from its inception to the present. It includes Naess's most crucial polemics with leading thinkers, drawn from sources as diverse as scholarly articles, correspondence, TV interviews and unpublished exchanges. The book testifies to the skeptical and self-correcting aspects of Naess's vision, which has deepened and broadened to include third world and feminist perspectives. Philosophical Dialogues is an essential addition to the literature on environmental philosophy

Ethics on the Ark presents a passionate, multivocal discussion—among zoo professionals, activists, conservation biologists, and philosophers—about the future of zoos and aquariums, the treatment of animals in captivity, and the question of whether the individual, the species, or the ecosystem is the most important focus in conservation efforts. Contributors represent all sides of the issues. Moving from the fundamental to the practical, from biodiversity to population regulation, from animal research to captive breeding, Ethics on the Ark represents an important gathering of the many fervent and contentious viewpoints shaping the wildlife conservation debate.

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

The pragmatic conception of truth, anticipated by Henry David Thoreau and developed by C.S. Peirce and subsequent pragmatists, is proposed as a useful analogy for characterising 'sustainability.' Peirce's definitions of 'truth' provides an attractive approach to sustainability because (a) it re-focuses discussions of truth and objectivity from a search for 'correspondence' to an 'external world' (the 'conform' approach) to a more forward-looking ('transform') approach; and (b) it emphasises the crucial role of an evolving, questioning community in the conduct of inquiry. Any successful definition of sustainability must share these characteristics with Peircean truth. While Peirce and John Dewey never reconciled their disagreements regarding the nature and task of 'inquiry', a pragmatist resolution of their differences is offered, arguing that we need both a logic of management sciences (logica utens) and a logic of pure science (logica docens), which (perhaps among other differences) respond very differently to uncertainty. It is shown that adaptive management – can be understood as a first approximation of a logica utens for social learning in pursuit of solutions to environmental problems, and it is suggested that a pragmatist, transform approach to inquiry such as Dewey's may provide a way around the 'fact-value' gulf

The trend in environmental management toward more adaptive, community-based, and holistic approaches will require new approaches to environmental valuation. In this paper, we offer a new valuation approach, one that embodies the core principles of adaptive management, which is experimental, multi-scalar, and place-based. In addition, we use hierarchy theory to incorporate spatial and temporal variability of natural systems into a multi-scalar management model. Our approach results in the consideration of multiple values within community-based ecosystem management, rather than an attempt to maximise a single variable such as economic efficiency. We then offer two heuristics – one procedural and one evaluative – to guide a community toward shared goals, and to develop indicators to measure progress toward these goals. We illustrate our approach by application to environmental and developmental decisions in the Southern Appalachians

Philosophers have paid little attention to the distinction between conservation and preservation, apparently because they have accepted John Passmore’s suggestion that conservationism is an expression of anthropocentric motives and that “true” preservationism is an expression of nonanthropocentric motives. Philosophers have therefore concentrated their efforts on this distinction in motives. This reduction,however, is insensitive to important nuances of environmentalist objectives: there are a wide variety of human reasons for preserving natural ecosystems and wild species. Preservationist policies represent a concem to protect biological diversity from the simplifying effects of human management and are motivated by the full range of values (consumptive, aesthetic, scientific, and moral) attached to a diverse biota.Conservationists and preservationists differ mainly in their emphasis on resilience measures versus predictability measures of stability, respectively. The distinction between anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric motives loses importance as emphasis is placed on the longest term values humans place on the proteetion of biological diversity.

Issues of interest, identity and values intertwine in environmental conflicts, creating challenges that cannot generally be overcome using rationalities grounded in generalised argumentation and abstraction. To address the growing need to engage interests and identities along with plural values in the conservation of biodiversity and ecological systems, we introduce the concept of ‘appropriateness of actions’ and ground it in a relational understanding of environmental ethics. A determination of appropriateness for actions comes from combining outputs from value elicitation with those of interest and identity negotiation in ways that are salient to specific people and their relationships to specific places. Drawing on the Blue Mountain Forest Partnership in the Pacific Northwest, we propose factors of success for supporting appropriate actions: 1) understanding context and identifying key stakeholders; 2) surfacing a diversity of interests and building system-level trust; 3) building empathy for different identities grounded in specific places; 4) eliciting diverse values and seeking to understand their links to worldviews and knowledge systems and; 5) seeking out appropriate actions.

While environmental ethics has flourished and contributed to the discussion of environmental policy, other areas of philosophy (epistemology, for example), have been less in evidence in these discussions. In this paper, we explore a role for these neglected areas: they are best viewed as meta-level discussions of the conceptual and linguistic problems that arise as scientists develop models at the edges of scientific fields relevant to our understanding of environmental problems and possible solutions. The relevant fields, which might differ depending on the specific environmental problem being addressed, can be thought of as a collection of “philosophies of ____” where the blank stands for one of the relevant disciplines, such as biology, ecology, or economics. We eschew the typical arguments regarding which models are correct in favor of a pragmatic/pluralistic approach to understanding scientific models. This pragmatic approach softens interdisciplinary conflicts as Rudolf Carnap’s Principle of Tolerance (linguistic conventionalism) urges an experimental approach to developing linguistic frameworks for differing situations. This approach is illustrated by an examination of the models proposed by ecologists and economists.

the number three has played a remarkably active role in many theories, philosophical and otherwise, from the Holy Trinity of Christianity to Aristotle’s golden mean, and to the dialectical thinking of Hegel and Marx. Given the variety of roles the number has played, it might seem an over-reach to find important similarities between two thinkers—one a forester and land manager of the last century, and the other a contemporary architect—based on a shared use of the number. Nevertheless, I will note that Brook Muller and Aldo Leopold have similarly articulated a three-layered understanding of human habitation in the larger world. Clearly, the null hypothesis is, in this case, plausible: Why would anyone claim that..

La suposición de que una ética ambiental adecuada debe ser no-antropocéntrica es errónea. Hay dos formas de antropocentrismo: débil y fuerte, y el primero es suficiente para mantener una ética ambien¬tal. Sin embargo, la ética ambiental sí difiere de los sistemas éticos británicos y norteamericanos en la medida en que, para ser adecuada, debe ser no-individualista. La ética ambiental contiene dos niveles de decisión: el primero refiere a las decisiones usuales que afectan la equidad individual, el segundo no tiene esta perspectiva individual. Este segundo nivel, llamado decisiones de asignación, no es reducible al primero y gobierna el uso de recursos a través del tiempo. El antropocentrismo débil provee una base para criticar las necesidades individuales de consumo y puede ser la base para juzgar entre estos niveles. Así, permite un fundamento adecuado para la ética ambiental sin necesidad de recurrir a los cuestionables compromisos ontológicos que adoptan los no-antropocentristas al atribuir valor intrínseco a la naturaleza.

There has been a recent spate of publications on how we should evaluate change to ecological systems, some of which have introduced the concept of 'relational values'. Environmental ethicists have, with a few exceptions, not engaged with this debate. We survey the literature on relational values, noting that most advocates of the concept introduce relational values as an additional type of value, in addition to 'instrumental' and 'intrinsic' values. In this paper, we explore the idea that all environmental values are ultimately relational. We explore how such an approach can be articulated, and discuss the implications of this concept for the future of environmental ethics and value studies. One key implication is to suggest a stronger role for empirical ethnography.

This book examines from a multidisciplinary viewpoint the question of what we mean - what we should mean - by setting sustainability as a goal for environmental management. The author, trained as a philosopher of science and language, explores ways to break down the disciplinary barriers to communication and deliberation about environment policy, and to integrate science and evaluations into a more comprehensive environmental policy. Choosing sustainability as the keystone concept of environmental policy, the author explores what we can learn about sustainable living from the philosophy of pragmatism, from ecology, from economics, from planning, from conservation biology and from related disciplines. The idea of adaptive, or experimental, management provides the context, while insights from various disciplines are integrated into a comprehensive philosophy of environmental management. The book will appeal to students and professionals in the fields of environmental policy and ethics, conservation biology, and philosophy of science.

Critics of my book, Sustainability, have raised many objections which are addressed. In general, I emphasize that the book is an integrative work; it must be long and complex beause it attempts a comprehensive treatment of problems of communication, of evaluation, and of management action in environmental discourse. I explain that I depend upon the pragmatists and on work in the pragmatics of language because the current language of environmental policy discourse is inadequate to allow deliberative processes that can reach consensus and cooperative actions. I revise my account of risk analysis somewhat, and defend my broad approach to the concept of sustainability. Finally, I discuss applications of my book to the current situation in environmental policy discourse.

Kevin Elliott has argued that I defend two “conceptions” of adaptive management processes in my book, Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management, calling the conceptions “political” and “metaphysical,” respectively. Elliott claims that I must choose between them. Elliott has not sufficiently explained how he proceeds from the claim that I provide two separable arguments for my adaptive management process to his conclusion that I have two conceptions of this process. Once this confusion is clarified, it becomes clear that adapting a pragmatist grounding for the process (which Elliott refers to as my “metaphysical” conception) is compatible with an open and inclusionary process. Pragmatism, in other words, does not exclude those who adopt ideological approaches to value from the adaptive process; it merely urges them, once in the process, to propose testable hypotheses rather than resort to ideological rhetoric.