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ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY
Judit Farkas
Introduction
In response to the environmental problems of the 1970s, a new generation of
trends specifically preoccupied with pertinent issues began to develop within
philosophy as one of the results of the green movement. Since already at that time
and increasingly in the 2000s, they had to reflect on ever more serious and urgent
concerns, it is not surprising that environmental philosophy identifies itself as
applied philosophy and several ecophilosophers are engaged in environmental
activism.
Environmental Humanities (hereafter EH) acknowledges ecophilosophy as a
fundamental contributor to its evolution and as one of its decisive actors with its
commitment to the more-than-human world and ecological justice. This chapter
reviews the basic issues of Western environmental philosophy and some of its
trends. The reason for this choice is that this worldview — owing to the economic
and power dominance of the West — largely influences the rest of the world. The
Eastern and other ecophilosophies will be introduced in a planned second volume.
What is environmental philosophy?
Before attempting to answer this question, let us examine two philosophers’
definitions of ecophilosophy. Michael Zimmerman holds that the goal of
ecophilosophy is to critically examine whether nature has inherent value, and to
explore the possibility that humans have moral obligations towards animals, plants
and ecosystems (Zimmermann 2001: 3). According to the Indian-American Sahotra
Sarkar ecophilosophy inquires into questions of biodiversity, climate change,
ecological integrity, sustainability, and issues of non-humans from the aspects of
moral responsibility, intrinsic value and human—nature reciprocity (Sarkar 2012:
2-4). What is conspicuous from these definitions by its absence, as pointed out
by Hubbell and Ryan (2022: 111), is the anthropocentric and utilitarian position
which registers climate change or a decline in biodiversity solely as a loss to humans.
Speaking of ecophilosophy, Robert Kirkman claims that its domain is fairly
diverse, and it is hard to typologise the different trends: at one end is deep ecology,
at the other a more traditional environmental ethics, and between the two ends
of the scale lies the diversity of ecofeminism, bioregionalism, social ecology, and
diverse phenomenological trends. However, they are united by a common thread
— and common difficulty: the ideology of connectedness (Kirkman 1997: 194),
the quality of the connection between the human being, the non-human world
and society.