Kimberly Dill

In this piece, I argue that the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the Big Island of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea constitutes both an ethical and epistemic – that is, knowledge-based – harm to Native Hawaiian (Kanaka ‘Ōiwi) communities. It is epistemically problematic, for its mandated construction is a public and material declaration of the primacy and privileged epistemic status afforded to Western scientific inquiry and analysis (including astronomy) over Traditional (Hawaiian) Ways of Knowing. It is a matter of ethics and social justice, for its construction further perpetuates an ongoing set of eco-cultural harms to the Kanaka ‘Ōiwi people.

In this piece, I develop a philosophical account of environmental reverence, as induced by more-than-human entities and environments. Utilizing a relational ethical framework, I conceive of environmental reverence as a moral emotion, which through habituation and cultivation–carries the potential to grow into a fully fledged environmental virtue. By reference to the empirical, psychological literature, I show that environmental reverence is positively affective (i.e., induces subjective wellbeing), inherently motivating, and promotes efficacious conservation behaviors. So conceived, reverence is constrained by a set of both internal and external success conditions; its proper implementation thus requires on-the-ground relationship building between communities and the local, biodiverse spaces near which they dwell. I focus on the important role that reverence plays in motivating the efficacious conservation of sylvan ecosystems, drawing on eco-anthropological research into the high concentrations of biodiversity found in residentially managed ‘sacred groves’. Altogether, I recommend a few first-order, ethical prescriptions: first, mass environmental discourse ought to highlight the motivational efficacy of cultivating cultural narratives that center environmental reverence and the key, carbon-sequestering role that forests play in climate-change mitigation. Finally, it is imperative for environmental ethicists to elevate the epistemic status afforded to traditional ecological and residential land managers.

In this piece, I argue that we Homo sapiens have an ethical duty to restore natural darkness to biodiverse, forested ecosystems. Historically, human beings have relied on forests for material sustenance and psychophysiological wellbeing. Utilizing the philosophical concepts of wildness and relational value, I argue that we are thereby bound by reciprocity to (in return) mitigate forestadjacent light pollution. After all, a variety of forest-dwelling species are negatively impacted by dwindling natural darkness, including (but not limited to): insectivorous and frugivorous bats, various plant (including tree) species, fungi, and a variety of nocturnal pollinators. In addition, the loss of natural darkness precludes human subjects from undergoing a variety of transformative experiences that are uniquely associated with immersion in dark, biodiverse forests. Finally, as oldgrowth groves disproportionately sequester carbon and are negatively impacted by light pollution, increasing artificial light at night indirectly (and worryingly) serves as a driver of global climate change.

Broadly, I endorse the view that biodiverse species and spaces warrant conservation (partially) in virtue of their power to induce epistemic (Paul 2015; Sarkar 2011), relational, and positive, psycho-physiological transformation. However, if we are (in the not-so-distant future) able to construct cross-modally replete simulations of biodiverse environments, then what reason would we have to conserve genuine, biodiverse ecosystems? In order to address this “Simulation Problem,” I argue that the authenticity of biodiverse environments matters, both in itself and insofar as authenticity plays an important psychological, cultural, personal, and epistemic role in the lives of human agents.

In this piece, I extend a transformative power account to the conservation of dark (and starry) night skies. More specifically, I argue that the transformative power that dark nights bear warrants their conservation and is best understood in terms of the important intellectual, cultural, aesthetic, and (psycho-physiologically) restorative effects that they afford. This gives us a pressing set of reasons to combat the growing, global phenomenon of light pollution. To do so, I argue, we ought to preserve the few remaining dark refuges that we have left (what I term wildness regions) and synergistically re-wild (i.e. re-darken) urban and suburban environments. Synergistic re-darkening, I propose, can be achieved by (i) establishing interpretive (educational) ‘dark zones’, (ii) implementing bioluminescent lighting technologies, and (iii) strategically employing lighting design. Finally, and in order to enact a degree of epistemic justice, I argue that we ought to implement multi-cultural ‘co-learning’ initiatives, which promote education pertaining to both Western, scientific and indigenous, North American astronomies.