Environmental Values

To benefit an animal species as a group could mean to support its survival and functioning as a species or to promote the aggregate welfare of its members. This paper considers the pros and cons of these alternatives and defends a third possibility on which ‘group well-being’ is a form of value distinct from holistic and individual good. According to this third view, the group well-being of a species is what benefits individuals considered as part of the species and taken together as a group. This includes the welfare of animals of the species insofar as this draws on structural features of the species (such as, potentially, the species’ survival and reproduction, ecological role, and social organization) as well as these structures themselves insofar as they support the welfare of individuals of the species. This is group well-being as the ‘common good’ of a species and can serve alongside holistic and individual values as a focus for environmental concern.

Can we learn how to be better at attending from other animals? The paper argues that we can. While the call for attention to animals is increasingly heard, still few engage with attention by animals, and even fewer with animal attention, both individual and mutual, as an ethical lesson. Working with a concept of attention as inherently ethical, the paper considers four elements of attention which non-human animals can teach humans: unbiased objectivity, creativity, empathetic engagement, and shared/mutual attention. These elements will emerge through four case-studies, each illustrating an aspect of attention which a human can learn from a non-human animal. The first, taken from Iris Murdoch, reports Rainer Maria Rilke's observations of animal attention as unbiased objectivity. The second, from Emmanuel Levinas, shows a dog attending in a way that is ethically responsive and creative, identifying value where no one else sees it. The third, with the horse known as ‘Clever Hans’, observes an empathetic mode of attention in which the horse was superior to humans. The fourth and final case-study describes a cat teaching a human how to engage in shared and mutual attention through touch.

One common strategy in climate communication is to appeal to one's fear of the frightening consequences of climate change. One common concern, however, is that fear can be counterproductive as it tends to lead to disengagement. Proponents of fear appeals typically respond by emphasising the importance of pairing fear with an efficacious recommended action. In this paper, I argue that, in the context of climate change, it is difficult to find a recommended action that is sufficiently efficacious. I suggest that one way to overcome this challenge is to appeal to our fear of moral corruption, rather than the negative physical consequences of climate change. I further argue that motivating right actions should not be the only goal in climate communication. Instead, getting the audience to feel fitting emotional responses, including fitting fear, is another goal that we can justifiably adopt. Thus, the counterproductivity of fear does not always necessitate refraining from using fear appeals.

This paper focuses on the permaculture movement and its ethos, as expressed in various permacultural books. It aims to reconstruct this ethos and assess its relation to the significatory dimension of modernity. We analyse the ethos vis-à-vis the works of Wagner, Castoriadis, Boltanski and Thévenot. Based on the empirical material we analysed through multi-stage thematic analysis, we argue that while permaculture certainly is a back-to-the-land movement, it advocates for a rationalising reorganisation rather than reversal of contemporary social organisation. As we show, permaculturists present the permanent sustainability they advocate for as necessary progress achieved through the rationalisation of the society-nature relationship with adherence to ideals of individual autonomy and rational mastery over the environmental impacts of human-made productive systems. In permaculture's self-portrait, the failures of contemporary agriculture do not stem from an excessive adherence to the core principles of modernity but from a lack of such adherence. We show that the permaculturists’ critique of industrial mass agriculture as wasteful and irrational and their call for a more holistic and permanently sustainable alternative does not present only a concrete utopia but also a call for modernising offensive made with adherence to these principles. Our paper thus contributes to the discussion of modernity and its alternatives, as well as to the more general question of the legitimacy of the latter: what makes alternative environmental movements legitimate, and what makes them appear modern or anti-modern? What are the mechanisms through which alternative environmental movements, such as permaculture, legitimise themselves?