•  85
    Biodiversity Loss, the Motivational Gap, and the Failure of Conservation Education
    Southwest Philosophy Review 26 (1): 119-130. 2010.
    While the precipitous decline of biodiversity threatens life-sustaining processes and vast segments of the human population, concern about its loss remains extremely shallow. Nearly all motivational campaigns falsely assume that upon appreciating the relevant information, people will be sufficiently motivated to do something. But rational argumentation is doomed to fail, for there exists a motivational gap between a comprehension of the crisis and action taken based upon such knowledge. The orig…Read more
  •  54
    Reply to Norton, re: Aldo Leopold and Pragmatism
    with J. Baird Callicott, Jennifer Rowland, Daniel Baskind, Robert Heath French, and Kerry Walker
    Environmental Values 20 (1). 2011.
    As a conservation policy advocate and practitioner, Leopold was a pragmatist (in the vernacular sense of the word). He was not, however, a member of the school of philosophy known as American Pragmatism, nor was his environmental philosophy informed by any members of that school. Leopold's environmental philosophy was radically non-anthropocentric; he was an intellectual revolutionary and aspired to transform social values and institutions
  •  149
    Should Endangered Species Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Listed Species
    with J. Baird Callicott
    Social Philosophy and Policy 26 (2): 317-352. 2009.
    The Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA) is America's strongest environmental law. Its citizen-suit provisionany personawards implicit intrinsic value, de facto standing, and operational legal rights (sensu Christopher D. Stone) to listed species. Accordingly, some cases had gone forward in the federal courts in the name of various listed species between 1979 (Palila v. Hawaii Dept. of Land & Natural Resources) and 2004 (Cetacean Community v. Bush), when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled …Read more
  •  52
    Was Aldo Leopold a Pragmatist? Rescuing Leopold from the Imagination of Bryan Norton
    with J. Baird Callicott, Jennifer Rowland, Daniel Baskind, Robert Heath French, and Kerry Walker
    Environmental Values 18 (4). 2009.
    Aldo Leopold was a pragmatist in the vernacular sense of the word. Bryan G. Norton claims that Leopold was also heavily influenced by American Pragmatism, a formal school of philosophy. As evidence, Norton offers Leopold's misquotation of a definition of right (as truth) by political economist, A.T. Hadley, who was an admirer of the philosophy of William James. A search of Leopold's digitised literary remains reveals no other evidence that Leopold was directly influenced by any actual American P…Read more