This article explores how lived experience can be communicated through narrative to evoke embodied and affective understanding. Focusing on industrial tree planting in British Columbia, it combines self-observation and research-creation to examine how storytelling conveys experiential knowledge often overlooked in forest management. A vivid personal narrative highlights the sensory, emotional, and relational dimensions of planting work. Drawing on narratology, phenomenology, and affect theory, we analyze how narrative form can trigger embodied simulation in readers. We argue that such stories provide more than anecdote; they offer situated, emotionally rich insights that foster empathy and challenge dominant assumptions in forest policy. Narrative, particularly in research-creation, complements scientific knowledge by attuning readers to the visceral dimensions of environmental labor.
Feral cat management in Australia highlights tensions between traditional conservation and compassionate conservation. Drawing on 19 interviews and ethnographic research with practitioners involved in feral cat management, we examine how ethical complexities are navigated in practice and explore the potential to bridge the gap between these approaches. The article demonstrates that protecting biodiversity is reinforced as the default goal through institutional norms and appeals to scientific objectivity, while ethical disagreements are shifted into technical debates. Although practitioners share concerns about limited evidence and support less harmful measures, sustainable collaboration requires explicit normative deliberation about objectives, trade-offs, and acceptable harms.
This paper examines J. Baird Callicott's attempt to extend Leopold's Land Ethic into a global 'Earth Ethic' capable of addressing climate change and other planetary-scale environmental problems. Callicott argues that the Earth Ethic supplements rather than replaces the Land Ethic, and he proposes a set of conflict-resolution principles intended to arbitrate between local and global obligations. I argue that these principles fail in cases of local - global scalar conflict, where what benefits global human civilization may harm local biotic communities. Using the example of renewable energy development and its impacts on endangered species and ecosystems, I show that Callicott's framework faces a dilemma: either the conflict-resolution principles provide no substantive normative guidance, or they systematically subordinate the Land Ethic to the Earth Ethic by prioritizing global human interests over local ecological integrity. In this way, the Earth Ethic risks functioning not as an accretion to the Land Ethic, but as its replacement. I conclude by suggesting several conditions for a future holistic environmental ethic capable of addressing global climate change without permitting the routine sacrifice of local human and biotic communities.
In 'Offsetting and Risk Imposition,' we argued that when carbon emissions are accompanied by offsetting, this can result in a set of actions that worsens no one's prospect, and therefore imposes no risk. We argued that this is true for some forms of offsetting but not others. Here, we reply to the criticisms of that argument that Scott Hill makes in 'No Special Morality for Carbon Emitting,' and examine more closely the relationship between risk-imposition and the worsening of prospects.
Pet-keeping is one of the most widespread human-animal relationships in the world. Despite its prevalence, this practice frequently results in animal welfare violations, including neglect, abuse, and abandonment. Pet-keepers often fail to adequately understand how to care for and interact with their pet. This article defends a novel proposal to regulate pet-keeping: a scheme of state licensing. On this proposal, prospective pet-keepers would be required to obtain a license by demonstrating competence in caring for a domesticated animal before acquiring one. The article makes two significant contributions. First, it provides a robust theoretical defense of pet-keeping licenses. Second, it defends the feasibility of licensing, details the requirements it would impose, and suggests guidelines for plausible implementation. By extending regulation into the private sphere and setting enforceable standards for care, licensing can significantly reduce preventable harms to domesticated animals and better protect their interests.
The worsening climate crisis amid lagging action has renewed ethical debate over solar geoengineering. We argue that this debate, however substantive, insufficiently addresses the principle behind much of the opposition: consent. Critics consistently maintain that solar geoengineering must not proceed without consent from states and their citizens. In this note, we hold that consent is not absolute. It can be overridden when those withholding it are primary contributors to the emissions driving the crisis the intervention seeks to address.
Killing and preserving nonhuman animals is indispensable for addressing many scientific questions. This scientific collecting is heavily regulated, with precise limits on species and numbers of individuals to be collected. I review scientific collecting with reference to ethics of individual animals and collectives such as species, the philosophical problem of incomparability, and concerns of stakeholders for animal suffering and species extinction. I conclude that, in spite of the best intentions of individuals at regulatory bodies such as university animal care committees and government permitting agencies, regulations that restrict scientific collecting have little basis in ethics, ecological theory, or empirical evidence.
Distributive energy justice is considered a tool of equality. However, there is a need to analyze the meaning, elements, goals, and intentions of this so-called justice. The overwhelming literature on distributive justice in respect of energy tends to draw on Western individualist and anthropocentric principles, which begs the question of what alternative, under-considered views might offer. In this conceptual paper, I show what it would look like if Ubuntu, which roughly means humanness, were to serve as a notion of African distributive energy justice. I pay particular attention to its focus on the principles of humanness, relationships, and interconnectedness. Beyond conventional understandings of distributive energy justice, I show how an Ubuntu-informed perspective can reshape energy policy evaluation and advance environmental protection for its own sake. I do not conclusively show that Ubuntu-informed distributive justice is more justified than Western-interpreted views of energy justice, but I defend the claim that it is an alternative to them that should be taken seriously.
This article contributes to literatures on local governments and just transitions by presenting a human rights-grounded framework for just transition and applying it to local governments. The framework holds that individuals have justified claims to protection of their most essential interests when those interests are threatened by climate policies, and it identifies four core responsibilities for local governments in ensuring a just transition: (1) identify transitional injustices, (2) critically scrutinize their moral grounds, (3) take suitable remedial actions when human rights are at risk, and (4) press for external political reforms when necessary powers lie beyond their authority.
Negative effects of anthropogenic climate change are accelerating. The threat climate change poses has prompted research into radical technological responses, including forms of solar radiation management (SRM). While there has been some consideration of the ethical challenges SRM technologies present, to date, these have almost exclusively concerned humans. Here, we take one leading form of SRM, stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), and examine the ethical questions its deployment might present for wild animals. We map this terrain by investigating two overarching ethical questions: a) whether deploying stratospheric aerosol injection should be seen as in-principle wrong from animal ethics perspectives, and b) if not, or where it is not, what ethicists need to consider to morally evaluate SAI in the context of wild animals. To address the second question, we explore existing research gaps regarding empirical information on the effects of SAI on animals, the possible impacts of SAI on animal welfare, and its potential implications for justice issues when animals are included in theories of justice.
This paper explores relational environmental ethics, focusing on interdependence as a basis for moral duty. Interdependence is here understood as causal interactions, and I argue that it is not a necessary condition for environmental moral duty. I demonstrate this through a 'dwarven world' thought experiment, showing that ethical duties can persist even when human-nature interdependence is minimal. I further propose a spectatorial-sentimentalist framework for relational moral duty of care. This framework, grounded in impartial spectator approval, reconciles universal moral demands with subjective sentiments. This analysis provides a more robust and adaptable theoretical foundation for relational environmental ethics.
Climate change is widely recognized as a paradigmatic case of structural injustice. Yet, the role of the polluter elite - wealthy individuals embedded in carbon-intensive industries - is rarely discussed. Critically building on Iris Marion Young's theory, this article argues that such individuals are not merely politically responsible, but liable and blameworthy for reproducing unjust structures through their investments, career choices and lifestyles. To ground this liability, the article introduces the concept of super-privilege, denoting a uniquely advantageous position that enables agents to easily minimize their reproductions. It offers a normative framework useful for those theorizing about and pursuing structural transformation.
In this comment, we argue for a more structured dialogue between animal ethics and technology ethics to advance ethical discussion in both fields. The rationale for such engagement is twofold: the growing impact of technologies on animals grounds an ethical imperative, while thematic overlaps and the prospect of cross-disciplinary insight provide an intellectual incentive. To support this conversation, we reflect on factors that have kept these fields apart and highlight key themes where their concerns intersect, outlining promising entry points for a sustained conversation.
Those who have asked who should compensate for harm due to solar geoengineering have been preoccupied with a version of the Polluter Pays Principle according to which compensatory obligations befall deployers of the technology. But there is an alternative (but not mutually exclusive) interpretation. According to it, non-deploying greenhouse gas emitters are liable to compensate for harm due to solar geoengineering since they have contributed to the circumstances rendering it an understandable response to the threat of climate change. Such an Emitter Pays Principle is normatively attractive, especially in cases where deployment is a venial act of self-defense.
