•  658
    Historical Environmental Values
    Environmental Ethics 35 (1): 7-25. 2013.
    John O’Neill, Alan Holland, and Andrew Light usefully distinguish two ways of thinking about environmental values, namely, end-state and historical views. To value nature in an end-state way is to value it because it instantiates certain properties, such as complexity or diversity. In contrast, a historical view says that nature’s value is (partly) determined by its particular history. Three contemporary defenses of a historical view are explored in order to clarify: (1) the normatively relevant…Read more
  •  382
    Framing Food Justice
    In Jill Dieterle (ed.), Just Food: Philosophy, Justice and Food, Rowman & Littlefield International. pp. 3-20. 2015.
    Articulating an account of food justice in isolation from broader questions about sustainability would leave many important normative issues unaddressed. This chapter explores the reasons for thinking that questions of food justice need to be framed within the context of the broader set of social and environmental goals that comprise sustainability. An initial difficulty faced by this proposal is that many philosophers (among others) have viewed the concept and norm of sustainability with suspic…Read more
  •  197
    A Defense of Integrity as a Conservation Concept
    Ethics and the Environment 21 (2): 79-117. 2016.
    An environmental ethic needs to have an answer to two basic questions: what nature should we care about, and why? A number of proposals have been made about how to answer these questions. In this paper, I consider in detail one such proposal, namely, biological or ecological integrity. Different characterizations of integrity can be found in the literature, but I will treat the following one as paradigmatic. Integrity refers to a property of landscapes that are relatively unmodified by human act…Read more
  •  97
    On the Concept of Independent Nature
    Environmental Philosophy 20 (2): 237-265. 2023.
    Multiple concepts of nature are at play in environmental theory and practice. One that has gripped several theorists is the idea of nature as referring to that which is independent of humans and human activity. This concept has been subject to forceful criticism, notably in the recent work of Steven Vogel. After clarifying problematic and promising ways of charac­terizing independent nature, I engage Vogel’s critique. While the critique is compelling in certain respects, I argue that it fails to…Read more