Away MAVE

The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Block 5: Two Issues - The Wilderness and the Urban

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NB These materials do not represent the current (05/06) version of this module, and are offered here as only as an additional resource for students of environmental ethics.

	1. Wilderness		2.Wilderness: from negative to positive
	3. Wilderness and Environmental Ethics		4. The Urban Situation
	5. Urban Environmental Ethics		6. An Urban Environmental Issue: Car driving

Introduction to the Block

So far in this environmental ethics module, we've concentrated on different possible theoretical positions in environmental ethics. In this last block, I thought it would be useful to look at a couple of "issues" in environmental ethics. This approach helps to locate the theories, and also introduces a couple of important areas of environmental ethics in more detail.

I've chosen to look at debates about wilderness and debates about the urban in environmental ethics. Why these topics? Well, there are a number of reasons. First, debates about wilderness are an obvious choice. Wilderness lies at the heart of many forms of environmental ethics, and has been of particular significance in the US, and to deep ecology. But also in the last decade, wilderness has become an increasingly contentious subject, as we shall see: one of the "flashpoints" of debate in environmental ethics, for a variety of different reasons.

So much for the centrality of wilderness: how about the urban? Well, like wilderness, the urban is a space with its own significance - a space that contrasts vividly with the wilderness, whilst also sometimes being likened to it (for instance in the expression "urban jungle"). But urban spaces are spaces much neglected in environmental ethics until very recently. Whilst wilderness has been at the heart of environmental ethics since its very beginning, there have been barely any publications on urban environments. But, of course, urban environments are very important; and whilst huge amounts of time and thought across decades has gone into thinking about wilderness and environmental ethics, urban environmental ethics provides an opportunity for new thinking: for you to break into new territory!

So, let's start with the wilderness.

Wilderness

First must come the question: what is wilderness? Defining wilderness is difficult and controversial and it is widely understood and interpreted in different ways. Etymologically, the word "Wil" means will, self-willed, wilful and "Deor" is the old English for animal. "Wildeor" then meant wild animal - creatures not under human control, and technically "wilderness" is a
place where wild beasts live, not under human control. Dave Foreman, the founder of the radical environmental protection movement Earth First! calls it "self-willed land".

The most widely accepted definition is that found in Section 2c of the 1964 United States Wilderness Act:

'A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean …an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions, and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least 5000 acres, or if of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational or scenic value'.

This designation reflects a view that wildernesses are untouched, pristine parts of the natural world, formed without human agency and to be protected from permanent human presence. It is particularly significant because, as we shall see, debates about wilderness have primarily emerged from the US, and US understanding of wilderness has dominated international discussion.

Before moving on from definitions, it should be noted that wilderness has a number of powerful symbolic meanings. We might think of it as a "thick" concept rather than a "thin" one; it is not merely descriptive but also carries a kind of evaluative baggage along with it. This baggage varies, according to the context of use; it can mean a place of disorientation and confusion (including morally); it can mean a place where humans are absent, alien, not at home; or conversely, and positively, it can symbolise a kind of sanctuary, a place of refreshment, pure, "virgin", undefiled, an escape from civilisation.

Wilderness: from negative to positive

This mixture of positive/negative evaluations carried by the idea of wilderness is of very long standing. The hugely influential first English translation of the Latin Bible demonstrates this ambiguity. Wilderness meant the uninhabited, arid land, the "great and terrible wilderness" where people wander and where there is great thirst. It could be the place of God's curse. But it could also be a place of purification and communion with God - as when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness and subsequently angels ministered to him.

Popular medieval perceptions of wilderness were primarily negative - the wilderness as that against which humans struggle to live, a place swarming with demons, monsters, trolls, sprites and evil spirits needing taming, civilising and to be brought in harmony with the Divine Order. Many of the settlers in the New World took such views with them in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. They saw the wilderness as needing to be conquered and subdued; it was widely thought that this was what the Creator had intended humans to do. Puritan settlers on the East Coast of the US regarded the wilderness as evil, the indigenous people who lived in it as savages, and themselves as the civilised who should overcome the wilderness and make it productive. This "frontier tradition" - of rugged men pushing the frontier of wilderness ever further West in order to inhabit and work the land - forms one important strand of the US wilderness tradition.

But even as these views were growing amongst settlers in the US, other currents were stirring in Europe. Some Enlightenment thinkers began to argue that God as creator was revealed through nature - including wild nature. This lay the foundations for more positive views about wilderness and God. Could wilderness show the beauty and grandeur of God, rather than be home of devils?
Might sin be lodged in human hearts whilst the "wilderness" is unsullied and Edenic?

Such ideas were, of course, developed in the Romantic Movement in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. This complex and diverse movement emphasised the importance of mystery, solitude, spiritual awareness - and wild nature; the idea that nature should be viewed as an organism, not a machine; and that there was something "noble" about being a "savage". Native peoples could be viewed as untainted by the corruption of civilisation rather than as demonic denizens of the wild.

It was this more positive assessment of wilderness which led to the creation of the first National Park in the world at Yellowstone in the US in 1872. By this time the great American wilderness writers, Emerson, Thoreau and Muir were being widely read. Emerson's book Nature was published in 1834, and argued that nature was a human spiritual home, where it was possible for humans to get in touch with what is true about themselves. For Emerson, the wild acts as a vehicle for the divine/human relationship: and for this reason, it's been argued that although he valued wilderness highly, his valuation of it was instrumental, something humans use through which to access God.

Web tip

Much of Emerson's writing, including Nature, is available on the web at:
http://www.transcendentalists.com/emerson_essays.htm

Thoreau (1817-1862) spent more time actually in the wild, and built a log house in the semi-wilds where he retreated for two years. From this retreat emerged his famous book Walden, advocating a simple existence, where one could live without distraction and look beyond the "surface of things". Living in solitude in the wild, Thoreau maintained, leads to self understanding and the recognition of other species as kin. Living in the wild, for Thoreau, was truly living:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." (Thoreau (1854; 1965 ed) Walden (New York: Harper and Row)

 

Web Tip

Much of Thoreau's writing (including all of Walden) and pictures etc are available on the web at:
http://www.thoreau.niu.edu/

and another useful site is http://www.walden.org/

Perhaps the most important wilderness writer of all was John Muir (1838- 1914). Muir was born in Scotland and emigrated to the US with his family at 11. To avoid the Civil War draft, he moved to live in wilderness in Canada and later Yosemite, where he lived for 6 years, and wrote My First Summer in the Sierra. Muir was fundamental in developing the idea of National Parks in the US, and also founded the influential wilderness protection organisation, The Sierra Club. Muir regarded the wilderness as a sacred place, not threatening but a place for human self-discovery. In wilderness, humans become part of "the Lord's great animal family" - indeed, part of a great interlocking creation. As Muir famously said - pre-empting the later deep ecology movement - "when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is hitched to everything else in the Universe." He maintained, in some sense anyway, that non-human species had rights:

"The antipathies existing in the Lord's great animal family must be wisely planned, like balanced attraction and repulsion in the mineral kingdom. How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of the rest of creation! Although alligators, snakes etc naturally repel us, they are not mysterious evils. They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God's family, unfallen, undepraved and cared for" Muir (1992 ed.) 'A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf' in John Muir: The 8 Wilderness Discovery Books (London: Diadem Books) p.18

He also considered that in going to the wilderness people could find peace and security:

"… overcivilised people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life" Muir 'Our National Parks' op.cit. p. 459

(Statue of Muir as a boy in his Scottish home town)

 

Fundamental to Muir's view was the idea that although the wilderness was vital to human health and well-being, it also had intrinsic value independent of any usefulness to humans and deserved human protection.

Web Tip

Unsurprisingly, John Muir's work is all available on the web as well, in a comprehensive website run by the Sierra Club. See:
http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/

Muir's defence of wilderness, and his passionate writing about it, ignited a widespread and long lasting attachment to the idea of wilderness in the United States. The 1964 National Wilderness Act, from which the earlier definition derived, established a National Wilderness Preservation System, and gave Congress the power to designate wilderness. The Act also provided for the designation of 54 wilderness areas. In 1968, the wilderness system in the US was expanded, and by the end of 1994, there were 631 designated wildernesses in the US, covering 104 million acres of land in 44 states.

Despite this system of wilderness designation, wildernesses in the US remain under threat, as the recent controversies over oil pipelines in Alaska demonstrate. This has led to the growth of a variety of wilderness protection groups of different degrees of radicalness. These groups (often influenced by deep ecology) both emphasise the intrinsic value of wilderness, and have developed practices to protect it. More radical groups practice "ecotage" or "monkey-wrenching" damaging or destroying equipment being used to develop wilderness. Environmental ethics in the US has often had a close relationship to those involved with the defence of wilderness in one form or another.

Wilderness and Environmental Ethics

The idea of wilderness has always been important in environmental ethics. In the first volume of the journal Environmental Ethics, the philosopher William Godfrey-Smith published an article in which he argued that wildernesses are valuable for human beings in a variety of ways. Like Muir, he maintained that they provide places of spiritual refreshment and renewal. He also argued that wildernesses are important scientific resources; that they protect potentially useful biological diversity and that they provide areas for human recreation. Alongside these human values, Godfrey- Smith suggested that wildernesses have non-use or intrinsic values, and that they should be included as part of the human 'moral community'.

Most recently in environmental ethics, however, wilderness has been one of the most contentious issues. Indeed, there has been considerable debate about the very idea of wilderness.
We are going to spend most of the rest of this section looking at some of these claims and controversies, beginning with a notorious contribution by William Cronon.

Cronon's fundamental point in this article is that the idea of wilderness, and our experiences in wilderness, are not "natural" (meaning of non-human origin) but rather, culturally constructed.

Exercise

(You must have been wondering where all the exercises were for this block - they come now and it is a big one that will take some time)

1. How do you react to Cronon's claims that - in the US at least:

a) the modern environmental movement is the grandchild of romanticism
b) that wilderness has become "sacralised" and carries core cultural values
c) that wilderness is a fundamental part of a US myth of national identity
d) that wilderness is associated with a particular construction of rugged individualist manliness
e) that wilderness is part of a new quasi-religion of Nature

2.Cronon argues (p.384) that ideas about wilderness must be alienated, because "the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land." Is he right?

3.The problem we've already encountered several times in this module also rears its head again in Cronon's article. Are humans apart from, or part of nature? If true nature must be wild, the human presence must pollute it. But if humans pollute nature, they are set apart from it. (This is one of the issues raised by the 1964 definition of wilderness at the beginning of this block). On p. 487, Cronon suggests there is a misanthopic thought going on something like "if nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves". How does Cronon suggest tackling such a thought?

4. Cronon also argues (p.484-5) - an argument echoed by Callicott below - that concentrating on the idea of wilderness distracts from thinking about everyday life lived beyond wilderness - and its environmental consequences. Should we forget wilderness and think about sustainable lifestyles? On p.489, he talks about urban environments, arguing that if wild land is what is accorded supreme value, then urban and less wild land becomes devalued, and their problems passed over. Is he right?

5. This leads Cronon on to ask a social justice question: is it rich, middle class people who like to go into wilderness and ignore the environmental problems in the urban areas where they live? - problems which primarily face the poor and often ethnic minority groups? We will consider this further in the "urban" part of this block.

6. Does the idea of wilderness "privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others"? (p.491). Is this bad?

7. Do you think (as some critics have argued) that Cronon wavers about whether there actually is "a wild" or not? If he does think so, how does he characterize it?

8. How far do you think Cronon's analysis extends beyond the United States to the UK? Does his analysis hit home here, too?

When you have sketchy answers to each of these questions choose one to place on the discussion site - one you think is persuasive or one to which you could find no satisfactory answer or indeed any that you want to share with other students.

Some of Cronon's arguments against the idea of wilderness - as well as some new ones - also emerge in a debate between the environmental ethicists J.Baird Callicott and Holmes Rolston in The Environmental Professional in 1991. (The full debate is reproduced in Callicott and Nelson (eds.) The Great New Wilderness Debate University of Georgia Press 1998 pp.337-393.)

Callicott presented three key arguments against the idea of wilderness.
First, he argued that the idea of wilderness in the US is fundamentally ethnocentric, because it ignores the fact that the land had been occupied and managed by native Americans for thousands of years before the arrival of European settlers.

Second, he argues that the idea of wilderness is an ecologically static, unchanging one, as it were, 'pickling the land in aspic'.

Third, he argues that the idea of wilderness presupposes an undesirable fundamental separation of human beings from the land, resting on the belief that all human alteration of pristine nature degrades it, with the practical result that wildernesses become small 'temples' to nature, whilst outside wildernesses the destruction of the environment continues. The idea of wilderness, he argues, 'avoids facing up to the fact that the ways and means of industrial civilization lie at the root of the current global environmental crisis'. These objections to the wilderness idea, as Callicott tries to make clear, does not mean that wilderness areas in practice should be opened to development; particular wildernesses may in practice be important wildlife sanctuaries. Rather, Callicott, like Cronon, argues, humans should focus on sustainable development where humans live in harmony with ecosystems, instead of on the idea of wilderness.

However, Rolston fundamentally rejected this analysis. He maintains that many parts of the US landmass currently thought of as wilderness were very little used by native Americans, as they are 'high, cold, arid, and difficult to traverse on foot' so it cannot be said that native Americans fundamentally changed their nature. He also argues that humans are not excluded from wilderness areas, they are merely prevented from making particular kinds of uses of wilderness, which would destroy the natural systems present there. Underpinning Rolston's arguments is a profound awareness of the values present in wilderness areas. Like Godfrey-Smith, Rolston argues that these include values for human beings including the culturally symbolic value of wilderness to Americans. But, also like Godfrey-Smith, as we saw in Block 3, Rolston insists that ecological systems, species and individuals all carry intrinsic value, a value not created by human beings and not dependent on human use or appreciation. In wilderness, these values are manifested most fully; the presence of human beings in these areas would undermine the continued existence of such values. From this perspective, Rolston argues, the designation of wilderness areas is absolutely central to the protection of natural values: a view held by a number of environmental ethicists and wilderness campaigners. The wilderness defender Reed Noss, for instance, like Rolston, argues that that wildernesses carry intrinsic values, that huge wild areas are valuable for their own sake. Indeed, to operate healthily with ecosystems containing big predators like wolves, wildernesses may need to be very large: Noss recommends that about 50% of the US should be returned to a wilderness condition to enable the maintenance of biodiversity.

Whilst this debate has been continuing in the US, attacks on the wilderness idea have come from beyond the US. An important contribution came from India, by the writer Ramachandra Guha:

Guha's article offers a critique of the wilderness idea from the position of developing countries where the idea of wilderness is being imported from the US. He argues that the designation of wilderness areas in developing countries can be devastating to local communities, and that the wilderness idea is the latest in a series of colonial imports.

Questions:

1. What are Guha's main criticisms of Deep Ecology (as a series of bullet points)?

2. Guha considers that the wilderness protection movement when it appears outside the US is a form of imperialism - and that such imperialism is particularly displayed by the work of preservationist biologists. Do you agree? Could biologists operate without a desire to preserve what they are studying? Is this necessarily imperialist?

3. Is conservation really a fourth Western "crusade" along with Christianity, commerce and 'civilisation'?

4. How do you think Guha would respond to international "Debt for Nature" swap policy initiatives, where developing countries can have their debts cancelled if they agree to set aside biologically sensitive areas as nature reserves?

5. Guha is particularly sensitive to the "persistent evocation of Eastern philosophies by deep ecology". In what ways does he object to this? Do you accept his position? Can you think of arguments that might counter it?

6. Guha clearly considers the American wilderness preservation movement to be the product of, and to co-exist with a rich consumer culture. Are the two necessarily linked? Are there ways in which a wilderness preservation movement may threaten, rather than reinforce, a rich consumer culture?

7. Looking more closely at "Project Tiger" - How might each of these individuals articulate their views on the Project?

a) A representative of the Worldwide Fund for Nature
b) A person in Lancaster donating money to Project Tiger
c) A deep ecologist "representing" the tiger
d) An ecotourist, who has just paid several thousand pounds for a tiger-watching and conservation-experience holiday
e) A local person who has previously lived in the tiger reserve and now works intermittently in an urban slum
f) A local person who has turned to illegal tiger poaching for a market in Chinese medicine

8. A project such as Project Tiger highlights value clashes, and the ways in which the different interests of those (humans and non-humans) with and without power are represented. How might one weigh up such competing value-claims? Are there any ways of reconciling them?

Think about how Singer, Regan, Taylor and Leopold might react.
9. Guha describes himself as a "sympathetic outsider". Is he sympathetic? Is he an outsider?

Exercise

Please send your answer to question 8 to the discussion site

Summary of Wilderness

In this section, we have seen something of the complex nature of the term "wilderness" and debates about it in environmental ethics. We have considered:

1) the cultural history of the term wilderness, and the ambiguity of the symbolic world associated with it;
2) how wilderness was at the heart of the writing of the great c19 nature-writers, Emerson, Thoreau and Muir, and how they had an important effect in "sacralising" wilderness
3) how subsequently defence of wilderness became a popular cause in the US
4) that, more recently there have been a range of criticisms of the idea of wilderness as: ethnocentric, separating humans from nature, encouraging neglect of non-wilderness environments, colonial and imperialist, ecologically flawed and misanthropic
5) and also a range of defences of wilderness as a site of spiritual renewal, a place offering a huge range of values to all humans, and also the location of individual living things and ecosystems/species which carry intrinsic value, independent of their usefulness to humans.

The Urban Situation

As I pointed out at the beginning of this block, urban environmental ethics is a very new area of environmental ethics. There is little written about it to draw on, and no dominant theoretical perspectives or approaches. So this section is not going to be constructed in exactly the same way as those which preceded it. There is going to be much less exposition by me, and much more space for you to work on your own views and philosophical perspectives. This means that this section will have large numbers of unanswered questions for you to contemplate and get your teeth into. We have done enough environmental ethics by now that this should be a challenge you are well able to address!

The first collection in this area was Ethics and the Built Environment (2000) edited by Warwick Fox and it contains papers from a number of disciplines beginning to address the ways in which place, urban developments or buildings can issue in ethical concerns. There are obviously ways in which we can see ethical considerations having an impact on buildings from mainstream ethics or 'traditional' environmental ethics, e.g., do they allow access for the disabled, are they designed to make good use of energy, have they been built on pristine nature? and so on. However, the paper from the collection that we are going to read makes a more striking claim, that is, that a building can be ethically bad regardless of any concerns we might have or not have about it. This sounds a strong claim and in order to develop a case Fox has to begin to set out a new type of ethical theory. Apart from being relevant to the issue in hand - the urban environment - this is a good example of new problems driving new thinking with regard to ethical theory.

In this paper Fox makes a number of interesting moves that have come about from trying to deal with the very real problems that previous approaches to environmental ethics have failed, in his view, to solve. These problems are set out in his ‘A Critical Overview of Environmental Ethics’ (available in Chadwick, R. and Schroeder, D. eds. Applied Ethics: Critical Concepts in Philosophy vol.IV (Environment), London: Routledge, 2002 pp 23-47) and basically show that the animal welfare positions, the biocentric positions and the holistic integrity positions are all flawed in various ways. In trying to develop an alternative Fox moves away from addressing environmental ethics as it has become construed and develops the idea of an all encompassing ethics which would address everything: human ethics, ethical concerns about animals, concern about environmental destruction and concern about the built environment. This is a very different approach from taking a human ethical theory and trying to expand it outwards, what he is doing here is looking for some foundational value that we can then interpret everything in the light of.

Think
What is the foundational value he identifies? Have a go at giving your own example of something that exemplifies that value.

Fox’s example of the two buildings helps to demonstrate what he is getting at. Here the previous types of theories had, in a carefully balanced thought experiment, given no grounds for preferring one building over another, or the reasons beyond things like energy use and accessibility came down to what seemed like arbitrary preferences. What Fox needs to do is show that there is a judgement that can be made which is not arbitrary but born out of something fundamental to judgements. The idea of responsive cohesion can be seen to emerge from consideration of what it is that seems to apply when informed judges make decisions about good or bad things in a whole range of instances. Fox takes a number of realms where judgements are made and shows that there is a foundational quality that shines through those instances that informed judges have come to value. He also identifies two types of deviation from that quality: the overly rigid and the overly loose.

Think
Why do the judges need to be informed and does this raise any potential problems in any specific realm?

Fox shows that responsive cohesion should inform both the method and content of ethics and appeals to the idea of a very wide construal of ethics, but he does not claim that all matters are ethical just that all matters of judgement tend to have and should have (to reach the best judgements) an eye to the quality of responsive cohesion.

A second aspect to the theory of RS. was the ordering of contexts, basically this was external over internal (the symphony before the single note) and the background external contexts were ordered in a priority of ecological then social then built (concern for wider environmental situation that sustains everything first, then social situation -which is responsible for bringing about a built environment -then the context of the built environment, i.e., how the new building coheres with those around it. (see p. 220).

Exercise
When it comes to built environments the distinction between internal and external responsive cohesion is crucially important, something with internal RS. is not helpful if it doesn’t cohere with what is around it. However, given the dire state of some urban spaces where does this mean we start? Would a single iconic new building that started off a potentially new built context be allowed?

I guess one way of being able to go ahead with the new building that doesn’t fit in with the context, is to appeal to the lack of responsive cohesion in the wider built context. Therefore RS doesn’t mean that a ghastly sink estate or characterless shopping complex could only be changed by many small incremental steps. Also we could and indeed should appeal to the wider priority ordering of ecological and social contexts to inform our town planning and architectural design.

Urban Environmental Ethics

It is hard to know where even to begin in thinking about urban environmental ethics. Enormous problems of definition exist to start with.

For instance: what constitutes a city, or an urban area? How are suburbs to be taken into account? And might what counts as a city vary from place to place, according to general density of population?

Can one make any generalizations, ethical or otherwise, about cities? Is there going to be much in common between ancient cities and new ones, European cities and African ones, rich cities and poor ones?

Can one even make generalizations about single cities, since they are inevitably composed from diverse areas?

But can one talk about urban environmental ethics at all, without making generalizations?
(What do you think?)

In terms of urban environmental ethics itself, there are a number of possible, roughly sketched, overlapping and non-exhaustive areas which have been or might be explored.

1. Issue-based - focusing on problems such as urban air quality, car driving and so on
2. Justice-based- in particular concentrating on environmental health and environmental racism
3. Ecologically-based - looking at wild flora/fauna etc in cities
4. 'Relationship-based' - considering human relations with all plants/animals in cities, including pets, gardens etc
5. Architecturally-based - looking at aspects of the built environment
6. Sustainability-based - looking at ways of making cities less consuming (and more producing)
7. General arguments on the "goodness" or "badness" of cities and pro/anti urbanism

Further, more theoretical questions, appropriate to environmental ethics, are also raised:

1) How might one go about applying theories of environmental ethics (eg, Singer, Taylor, the land ethic) to the urban? Is this even a worthwhile exercise? Are there some areas above that might lend themselves more easily to 'applying' theories? (For instance, one could see how Paul Taylor's work might lend itself to ecologically-based issues, or ecofeminism to relationship-based issues).
2) Given that there is difficulty in making many of the existing theoretical approaches to environmental ethics work in the city, does this say something about their inadequacy? Or that they are fine in their own sphere, but something new is needed for the city? Does it suggest looking outside environmental ethics for help?
3) If so, where might one look? To ethics in general? Or to other work, for instance in cultural geography, where there is a huge amount of writing about cities? How might one go about integrating such work into urban environmental ethics?

Moving In on Urban Environmental Ethics

It's clearly impossible in a section like this to even begin to work through the 8 possible areas urban environmental ethics might explore, as outlined above. All that I am going to do in the rest of this block is just look at one of the possible issues - private car use in cities (a subsection, then, of 1, above.) You might want to follow the other areas up yourself, or think about the urban more generally. To assist you in this, here are some reading tips:

An Urban Environmental Issue: Car driving

Of course, problems caused by car driving are not limited to urban areas. But thinking about driving in the city is an important issue for environmental ethics. Car driving raises a number of problems:

Urban air quality has been problematic for many years, primarily due to emissions of sulphur dioxides, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, particulates from the burning of fossil fuels, and the formation of ground-level ozone. In recent years, the automobile has become the major single source of any of these emissions in urban areas. When released at high concentrations, these emissions can cause a variety of respiratory problems, especially in certain weather conditions. (In 1994, Los Angeles had 159 so- called 'unhealthy air days'). One of the major problems created (which may not be confined to urban areas) is tropospheric or low level ozone which is a main constituent of photochemical smog. This can cause damage not only to human health, but also to other animals, vegetation and buildings, and has been implicated in the declining health found in some European forests. Various measures have been introduced in an attempt to improve urban air quality, including: controls on the pollutant content of fuels; emission controls; traffic management schemes; public information and pollution alert systems.

Energy consumption: Road transport is the biggest consumer of energy of all transport modes. Private cars, for instance, account for 37% of US oil consumption. Driving in congested urban areas raises fuel consumption.

Accident and Injury: Urban areas see high levels of injury from private vehicles. The general statistics for the UK in 1998 of accidents on the road were: 3,421 Deaths, 40,834 Serious Injuries, 280,957 Slight Injuries. All the UK statistics emphasise that most accidents occur in built-up areas (unsurprisingly) - in 1998, 73% in urban areas; and 90% of all accidents involved a private car. And, of course, given that this is environmental ethics, we need to consider the members of other species killed and injured on urban roads.

Noise and Space: Private cars generate huge volumes of noise in urban areas, disturbing to both humans and non-humans. They also take up space (for instance in provision of new car-parking, roadside parking etc) which was once the space of other humans and non-humans.

Let's stop there, and think about some of the ethical questions which might be raised here. One way of thinking about this might be to consider the harms involved and the benefits gained.

For instance: atmospheric pollution causes harms to human health and to the health of other animals. It also harms vegetation. (Whether you think this matters, and how much, will depend on decisions made about the value of plants and ecosystems discussed in earlier blocks). But the processes which cause these harms also produce benefits. They provide people with freedom, mobility, choice about transport modes, independence, convenience and so on. How might one go about weighing these things up? Is it even appropriate to undertake "weighing?" of this kind?

And (to complicate matters still further) what counts as a "harm" here? Different philosophical theories, as we have seen, consider harms differently. A classical utilitarian, like Peter Singer, would want to add up the suffering caused by private car use in urban areas as opposed to the happiness it generated. This raises many of the standard problems about utilitarianism (how much driving happiness would outweigh one human death on the road?)

This, in turn, raises issues of justice. Before we start thinking about weighing here, we need to consider: who suffers the costs, and who reaps the benefits? Statistics consistently show that poorer and racial minority communities (especially children and the elderly) who have low rates of car ownership suffer disproportionately highly in pedestrian/car accidents, and live in areas where air pollution from heavy traffic close by damages health. (Wealthier car owners tend to live in areas with better air quality, like the suburbs). They also suffer more from another space effect: that high car ownership has led to the establishment of fringe-town shopping centres that it's difficult for them to access without a car. So their choice is limited, and their convenience is lost, even though the majority, who are car-owners, benefit. And what about animals? It's hard to see how the private car has caused them many benefits at all! Surely these justice issues have to factor into the thinking - even though, as you know, it's very hard for utilitarianism to take account of justice issues.

A rights philosopher on the other hand might maintain that say, urban air pollution infringed on peoples' (and animals') rights to live a healthy life, or at least to make their own decisions about how healthy their life is. In a sense, atmospheric pollution interferes with the wellbeing of those affected by it. For this reason it might be maintained that atmospheric pollution produced by car driving is wrong. However, this argument runs into difficulties too. For instance, having a right to something usually means that other individuals have a duty to protect that right (in this case, to a healthy life). But in this case, just who has the duty? Is it the individual polluter? But the individual whose right is being violated may be a polluter him or herself. And it is reasonable to argue that it is not that any one person's pollution is causing the violation of rights, but the combination of lots of individuals' pollution. The right to a healthy life seems to be being violated by a group, not an individual; so who then has the duty to protect the right? This difficult question has been discussed in a variety of contexts in ethical thinking, most prominently by the philosopher Joel Feinberg in his 1984 book The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law vol. 1: Harm to Others. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feinberg describes harms of this kind as accumulative harms. Andrew Kernohan (1995) in his article 'Rights against Polluters' in Environmental Ethics 17/3 245-259 summarizes accumulative harms as 'the kind of harm brought about by the actions of a group of people, when the actions of no single member of that group can be determined to have caused the harm, and when, as far as we know, no single action taken by itself has enough impact or is likely to have enough impact to be called harmful'. This concept of accumulative harm raises serious questions about understanding the problem of atmospheric pollution from private cars in terms of violating rights, due to the unresolved question concerning who is causing harm and who has duties to the rights-holder. And other theorists might argue that the rights of humans are being infringed if they are prevented from driving; the freedom to drive an automobile when and where one chooses is a personal right which should not be interfered with. This ethical argument based on individual freedom, it could be maintained, outweighs any ethical argument based on harms to humans and/or non-humans and to the environment in general.

Already, the intensely complex ethical issues around private cars in urban areas are raised: and we have considered them so far from a relatively anthropocentric point of view. You might want to consider how Paul Taylor, for instance, might react to this question. However, I want to conclude this section by looking at an article on private cars (not confined to urban areas, but obviously applicable to them) published in 1996.

These authors address this framework from the perspective of John Stuart Mill (not Mill with his utilitarian hat on, but Mill with his personal freedom hat on, as in his important book On Liberty). They argue that even using the language of freedom and choice, often where the ethical defence of private car use is located, private car use cannot be ethically justified.

Clarifying the argument - check that you understand:

a) How "self-regarding" and "other-regarding" actions are being used (including the qualification to this later in the article)
b) How these terms might specifically relate to driving cars
c) The use of the term "informed choice"
d) What is meant by "self-harm"

Meaton and Morrice's article is clearly ethically opposed to private car use. They argue that human societies do not generally allow freedom of action where substantial harms are caused to other people (for instance we are not free to murder). Yet freedom to use automobiles does cause harm to humans in a variety of ways including directly killing them in accidents. Restrictions on the use of private automobiles, therefore, would not be an unusual control on human freedom, and could prevent substantial harm to humans - as well as to other animals and to the environment.

There are lots of contentious claims in this article: what do you think of:

a) "the automobile-oriented society has, therefore, loaded the dice in favour of automobile use by restricting out choice of alternatives"

b)"our ignorance of the full consequences of our actions…" (where driving is concerned) - do we ever know the full consequences of our actions? What exactly is being got at here?>

c) "The morally significant concept is harm, not consent. There seems to be no moral problem about doing good to others without their consent. What right can individuals have to do wrong, to whosoever, including themselves?" But isn't consent a moral concept?

General questions:

1)Is restricting automobile use the same kind of thing as making motorcyclists wear helmets?

2)What do you think of the recommendation of moving towards a total ban on the private car?

3) There's a rather lame sentence near the end which says that the motor industry is an "infringement on the health and welfare of us all and our planet". The concerns in this article have been wholly "anthropocentric". It is environmental ethics inasmuch as the article partly at least concerns how some aspects of the human environment (eg air pollution) impact on humans. What, if anything, might change about the conclusions in this article if it had been written from a non-anthropocentric perspective, or at least added some non-anthropocentric concerns in?

4)Are you a private car driver? Does "knowledge of the consequences" change your view?

Summary of Urban Environmental Ethics

This half of the block:

1) Introduced urban environmental ethics as a new and little studied area, and pointed out that much of this part of the block would be questions, not answers!

2) Discussed some of the possible reasons for this "urban blindspot" with reference to a paper by Andrew Light

3) Outlined definitional questions, some of the different areas urban environmental ethics might cover, and a number of other key questions

4) Considered the complications of just one possible ethical issue, private car use in urban areas.

Here ends this section, block and module! So I want to conclude with a very brief summary of the main things we have covered in this course:

Block 1: possible meanings of environment; what environmental ethics might be; a brief history of environmental ethics; the meaning of ethics and axiology; intrinsic/instrumental value; subjective/objective value; anthopocentrism and non-anthropocentrism; some anthropocentric approaches to environmental ethics.

Block 2: non-anthropocentric individualist approaches to environmental ethics; significance of axes consequentialist/deontological, sentience-centred/life centred, egalitarian/hierarchical; Singer's utilitarianism; Regan's rights theory; Paul Taylor's respect for nature; hierarchical individualist accounts, where life is a baseline for moral considerability, but extra capacities add value.

Block 3: holistic environmental ethics; Aldo Leopold's land ethic; the dispute between ethical individualists and holists; Callicott's construction of the land ethic; Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis; ways of reconciling different approaches, including systems which take individuals and systems into account (like that of Holmes Rolston) and different interpretations of moral pluralism.

Block 4: The diversity of deep ecology and ecofeminism; Deep ecology as a movement with metaphysical, ethical and political faces; the 8-point deep ecology platform; the writing of Arne Naess; ecofeminism as emphasizing the "twin oppression" of women and nature; criticisms of "mainstream" environmental ethics by ecofeminists, especially Plumwood; ecofeminist ethics emphasizing care and context; Karen Warren's account of ecofeminism.

Block 5>: Why wilderness and urban ethics; cultural history of wilderness; great US nature writers; wilderness protection in US; criticisms of idea of wilderness and defences of wilderness; the wilderness bias and urban blackspot in environmental ethics; ways of approaching urban environmental ethics; the ethics of private car use in urban areas.

To complete this block make sure that you have responded to some of your peer's contributions to the discussion site

Notes by Clare Palmer with updates and amendments by Isis Brook