Abstract
The purpose of the paper is to examine the roots of our obligation to preserve the land and its resources, to address in some systematic way the “So what?” response to the massive documentation of environmental deterioration and the accompanying environmentalist imperatives. We will begin with an exercise in deconstruction—the parsing of an event, just one event, to extract from its account some of the problems that environmentalism has got itself into, especially in dealing with the multiple faces of American business. From that point we will be in a position to address the central project of the paper, an elaboration of an ethic for the appreciation and protection of the natural environment, ‘the land’, for short, meaning the earth, all its life, all its resources.
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Notes
- 1.
It is estimated that the dioxin production from a few dozen trash burn barrels in normal use equals the output of a 200-ton-a-day modern incinerator.
- 2.
See “Pollution Prevention,” http://www.bsdglobal.com/tools/bt_pp.asp 3M was not the last company to do this; between 1988 and 1991 Nortel eliminated the use of a million kg. of CFC-113, saved $ 4 million for an investment of $ 1 million, and saved the ozone layer at the same time.
- 3.
Apparently his theory of the stages of moral development had been worked out about 10 years earlier.
- 4.
“The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.”
- 5.
For short summary and interesting commentaries, see the UNESCO website: http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/theme_a/mod02.
- 6.
See, for an inspirational set of possibilities, the home page of Rocky Mountain Institute: www.rmi.org.
- 7.
See the literature on biomimicry, most famously, Benyus (1997).
- 8.
For the background of the hypothesis, see Lovelock (1979).
- 9.
Plato, Republic, many editions.
- 10.
Aristotle, Politics, Book II Chap. 4.
- 11.
The interpretation of Leopold’s land ethic is taken from Callicott (1987).
- 12.
- 13.
Leopold, cited in Callicott (1987, p. 204).
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Newton, L. (2014). Greening, Root and Branch: The Forms and Limits of Environmentalism. In: Sandhu, S., McKenzie, S., Harris, H. (eds) Linking Local and Global Sustainability. The International Society of Business, Economics, and Ethics Book Series, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9008-6_10
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