Taming the Unruly Side of Ethics: Overcoming Challenges of a Bottom-Up Approach to Ethics in the Areas of Food Policy and Climate Change

Here, I investigate the challenges involved in addressing ethical questions related to food policy, food security, and climate change in a public engagement atmosphere where “experts” (e.g., scientists and scholars), policy-makers and laypersons interact. My focus is on the intersection between food and climate in the state of Alaska, located in the circumpolar north. The intersection of food security and climate represents a “wicked problem.” This wicked problem is plagued by “unruliness,” characterized by disruptive mechanisms that can impede how ethical issues in policy-making are broached. Unruliness is exacerbated by conditions of engagement that can be characterized as occurring in a “fog.” In this fog, interlocutors encounter both moral and epistemological conundrums. In considering how to mitigate unruliness, a bottom-up approach is recommended. I discuss “taming” strategies for addressing these ethical concerns; modest suggestions on what should be taken into count when confronting issues of science and ethics within the context of promoting greater deliberative discourse regarding food security issues at more local levels. My recommendations are made in light of developments in food policy in Alaska and may be instructive for other regions pursuing cold climate agricultural expansion, for example.     

The Importance of Participatory Virtues in the Future of Environmental Education

Participatory approaches to environmental decision making and assessment continue to grow in academic and policy circles. Improving how we understand the structure of deliberative activities is especially important for addressing problems in natural resources, climate change, and food systems that have wicked dimensions, such as deep value disagreements, high degrees of uncertainty, catastrophic risks, and high costs associated with errors. Yet getting the structure right is not the only important task at hand. Indeed, participatory activities can break down and fail to achieve their specific goals when some of the deliberators lack what we will call participatory virtues. We will argue for the importance of future research on how environmental education can incorporate participatory virtues to equip future citizens with the virtues they will need to deliberate about wicked, environmental problems. What is the role of education for deliberative skills and virtues relative to other aspects of environmental education, such as facts and values education? How important is it relative to careful design of the deliberative process? What virtues really matter?     

Bridging conceptual “silos”: bringing together health promotion and sustainability governance for practitioners at the landscape scale

Environmental health issues are examples of “wicked problems” that require cross-sectoral collaboration at the community level, yet health practitioners and environmental stakeholders find it challenging to see how and why they could be working together. Supportive organisations have been identified as the most vital enabler for individual professionals to participate actively in cross-sectoral initiatives. Ability to justify inter-professional cooperation makes it easier for practitioners to gain the necessary approvals within their institutional mandates. This paper introduces a new conceptual framework that bridges health promotion and sustainability governance to facilitate practical cross-sectoral collaboration that targets complex health-related environmental and social-ecological challenges. The proposed framework integrates six concrete overlapping themes linking health promotion and sustainability governance. The framework also highlights examples of areas where the fields could benefit from one another. Moreover, children's environmental health is proposed as a desirable overall outcome and an attractive venue for potential collaboration, because of its critical role in the public health and well-being of future generations. As a determinant of adult health, children's environmental health emphasises the vital interdependencies between health and the environment.     

Environmentalism and Public Virtue

Much of the literature addressing environmental virtue tends to focus on what might be called “personal virtue”—individual actions, characteristics, or dispositions that benefit the individual actor. There has, in contrast, been relatively little interest in either “virtue politics”—collective actions, characteristics, or dispositions—or in what might be called “public virtues,” actions, characteristics, or dispositions that benefit the community rather than the individual. This focus, however, is problematic, especially in a society that valorizes individuality. This paper examines public virtue and its role in environmental virtue ethics. First, I outline different types of virtue in order to frame the discussion of public virtues and, in particular, a subclass of virtues I will refer to as political virtue. Second, I focus on practical problems and address the inadequacy of personal virtue for effecting social change and, therefore, for addressing most environmental crises. Finally, I argue that public and political virtues are necessary, if under emphasized, conditions for the flourishing of the individual, and that they are important complements to more traditional environmental virtues.     

What Happens to Environmental Philosophy in a Wicked World?

What is the significance of the wicked problems framework for environmental philosophy? In response to wicked problems, environmental scientists are starting to welcome the participation of social scientists, humanists, and the creative arts. We argue that the need for interdisciplinary approaches to wicked problems opens up a number of tasks that environmental philosophers have every right to undertake. The first task is for philosophers to explore new and promising ways of initiating philosophical research through conducting collaborative learning processes on environmental issues. The second task is for philosophers to recognize the value of philosophical skills in their engagements with members of other disciplines and walks of life in addressing wicked problems. The wicked problems framework should be seen as an important guide for facilitating philosophical research that is of relevance to problems like climate change and sustainable agriculture.     

Environmental Ethics Beyond Principle? The Case for a Pragmatic Contextualism

Many nonanthropocentric environmental ethicists subscribe to a ``principle-ist' approach to moral argument, whereby specific natural resource and environmental policy judgments are deduced from the prior articulation of a general moral principle. More often than not, this principle is one requiring the promotion of the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature. Yet there are several problems with this method of moral reasoning, including the short-circuiting of reflective inquiry and the disregard of the complex nature of specific environmental problems and policy arguments. In the present paper, we advance an alternative, pragmatic contextualist approach to environmental ethics, one grounded in the moral theory of John Dewey. We present the results of an empirical study of public environmental ethics and natural resource management attitudes to support our position, and we conclude with a few recommendations for future inquiry in the field of environmental ethics.     

The Politics of Participation in Watershed Modeling

While researchers and decision-makers increasingly recognize the importance of public participation in environmental decision-making, there is less agreement about how to involve the public. One of the most controversial issues is how to involve citizens in producing scientific information. Although this question is relevant to many areas of environmental policy, it has come to the fore in watershed management. Increasingly, the public is becoming involved in the sophisticated computer modeling efforts that have been developed to inform watershed management decisions. These models typically have been treated as technical inputs to the policy process. However, model-building itself involves numerous assumptions, judgments, and decisions that are relevant to the public. This paper examines the politics of public involvement in watershed modeling efforts and proposes five guidelines for good practice for such efforts. Using these guidelines, I analyze four cases in which different approaches to public involvement in the modeling process have been attempted and make recommendations for future efforts to involve communities in watershed modeling.     

Learning for sustainability through CIDA's “Community-based pest management in Central American agriculture” project: a deliberative,experiential and iterative process

Community-based approaches to environmental management provide opportunities for public engagement in local decision-making processes. This qualitative case study examines learning as resulted from participation in CIDA's “Community-based pest management in Central American agriculture” project. Outcomes include learning about alternative farming practices, human and natural environments, and safer pesticide use. Many participants learnt how to work more effectively with rural communities. For some, this changed their perspective about life and their role in society. Activities that fostered learning outcomes, including sustainability-related outcomes, were: planning and implementing project activities, experimenting on farm demonstration plots, participating in outreach workshops, and students doing rural practica. The learning process, involving international university collaborators and rural participants, is analyzed particularly as it relates to cultural context, collective action, and sustainability. Findings affirm that how the public participates in environmental management decisions influences the breadth and depth of learning outcomes; practical and policy implications are discussed.     

Urban sustainability and environmental justice: evaluating the linkages in public planning/policy discourse

Many cities' municipal governments have made some version of “sustainability” an explicit policy goal over the past two decades. Previous research has documented how the operationalisation and conceptualisation of sustainability in urban sustainability plans vary greatly among cities, particularly with respect to environmental justice. This article reports on whether and how large American cities incorporate environmental justice into their urban sustainability indicator projects. Our findings suggest that while there has been an increase in the number of cities incorporating environmental justice elements into sustainability plans since the early 2000s, their conceptualizations and implementations of sustainability remain highly constrained. The paucity of evaluative tools suggests that environmental justice efforts are potentially losing traction in public debate over macro-scale sustainability concerns (e.g. climate change) or the need for regionally competitive environmental amenities (e.g. parks). This paper concludes with suggestions for revising existing sustainability plans to better reflect environmental justice concerns.     

ISO 14000 and information systems—where's the link?

Two of the most frequently heard questions from environmental managers are “What should my company do about ISO 14000?” and “How can I use computer systems to reduce my staff's paperwork burden?” There are experts available to answer each of these questions, but thus far there has been little attention paid to how the two intersect and reinforce each other. This article explores this intersection and helps environmental managers implement information systems that have lasting value and, at the same time, support the ISO 14000 effort.     

Making sense of public values: Environmental controversies for corporate decision makers

Every year I try to choose the “word of the year”—that is, the word that will be the most topical and overused in the news, politics, and business. Past “words of the year” were leadership, excellence, quality, and so on. This year's, without a doubt, must be values. Just listen to any political speech and you'll be sure to hear it! Magazine article after magazine article makes reference to values—family values, social values, public values, personal values, etc. Business is beginning to experience first-hand the power of this word and the controversy it engenders, especially in the area of environmental issues. Corporations already heavily scrutinized by the public on operational issues like facility expansion, pollution, emissions, product acceptance, etc., are struggling to assess how best to manage competing public values. What do we do when the public has one value and business has another? Or, how can choices be made between two operating needs that compete for the same budget? It is the dilemma posed by values in conflict that this article explores. Once the domain of scholars and philosophers, this timely topic is now demanding the consideration and awareness of everyone in the business world.     

The Ethics of Food for Tomorrow: On the Viability of Agrarianism—How Far can it Go? Comments on Paul Thompson’s Agrarian Vision

I consider Paul Thompson’s Agrarian Vision from the perspective of the philosophy of technology, especially as it relates to certain questions about public engagement and deliberative democracy around food issues. Is it able to promote an attitudinal shift or reorientation in values to overcome the view of “food as device” so that conscientious engagement in the food system by consumers can become more the norm? Next, I consider briefly, some questions to which it must face up in order to move closer in dismantling the barriers that inhibit the capacity for virtuous caretaking of the food system at various levels. Lastly, and more deeply, how successful might agrarianism be in inculcating citizenship values (ones that go beyond food ethics as a private affair), for the democratization of agricultural technologies? Might the Jeffersonian foundation to which the agrarianism (a la) Thompson appeals need something like a contemporary theory of justice in order to facilitate the reconstitution of our politico-moral selves? How can it help guide appropriate ruminations on the intra and intergenerational question, “What do we want the shape of our current and future social and political institutions to look like in relation to food?”     

Dissent and descent: tracing Canada’s environmental governance from regulatory beginnings to dismissal and reversals by the Harper government

Since Confederation in 1867, official Canadian settler government policy on the environment has sought to simultaneously preserve “wilderness” and exploit natural resources for market gain. In the 1960s, the nascent North American modern environmental movement pushed for stronger regulation on pollution and toxics – and a more institutionalised state-led response to environmental problems emerged. Throughout the last five decades, three principal “eras” of federal government reaction have emerged in response to mounting scientific evidence and public pressure to act on environmental issues. The first, from the late-1960s to mid-1980s, saw the development and implementation of early environmental policy and programmes. The second era, from the mid-1980s to mid-2000s co-occurred alongside the rise of the sustainable development paradigm, and is marked by the Canadian government’s attempt at leadership on the global stage. The third era, from the mid-2000s to 2015, demonstrates a shift from environmental regime-building and multilateral collaboration toward rollbacks and obstructionism. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the government of Canada reversed decades of progress and cooperation on the environment and sustainable development through its muzzling of government scientists, superficial co-optation of climate policy, rollbacks of environmental legislation and disparagement of environmental activists. In total, by shifting the federal government from a position of ineffective benevolence on environmental issues to one of contention and antagonism, the Harper government’s approach represents a departure from Canadian environmental governance norms and sought to remake the identity of Canada as an energy superpower inextricably tied to its oil and gas industry.     

Pragmatic ethics and the new consultant

Ethical, social, and environmental concerns are beginning to take hold in many businesses, often as an extension of total quality management. Many professional firms have eluded the global trend, but social and ecological realities are catching up. What will the new professional firm look like? This article looks at how firms are finding competitive advantage in old-fashioned integrity, combined with management techniques and a new scientific understanding of what it takes to successfully adapt in a world of limited resources. “Ethics is awareness of interdependence…” Aldo Leopold.     

Whose lawn is it anyway? Redefining problems and the implementation of municipal stormwater policies

Research of problem definitions typically centres on agenda setting and formulation with less attention given to implementation. In recognition of this gap, this analysis examines the relationship between issue definition, issue redefinition and policy implementation by reviewing two municipal stormwater plans. The results suggest that in larger issue contexts replete with ambiguity and uncertainty, problem definitions are often “tweaked” and adapted during the implementation process. In short, street-level bureaucrats craft “genetically related” but idiosyncratic problem definitions – that fit their own policy-making context. In the case of stormwater, “solutions”; are best described as dynamic policies built upon the values associated with technical expertise, public participation and environmental sustainability.     

Freebies,freedom and fundamental change: resistance to neoliberal environmentalism in large “green” corporations

Despite the professed concern of many governments, businesses and individuals – and the recent publication of another alarming report from the IPCC – inaction on climate change remains a significant concern. For many, the problem is rooted in a neoliberal account of social change. Neoliberal environmentalism is the dominant approach to environmental issues but it is often blamed for the continuing failure of climate change policy in general and behaviour change initiatives in particular. This paper explores the dynamics of this dominant discourse through an examination of environmentalism in the large “green” corporation. Specifically, it uses discourse analysis to investigate so-called “climate champion” schemes and considers examples of resistance to the dominant neoliberal discourse. The paper finds that many of the champions did resist the basic components of neoliberal environmentalism. They challenged the principles of self-interest, self-rule and incremental change, and they talked about the possibility of enforced action. However, this resistance was limited in a number of different ways. The paper suggests that the workplace does play a role in restricting resistance but that there are more fundamental issues that need to be addressed if we hope to pursue an alternative approach to environmental problems such as climate change.     

激活我国环保产业发展的内在机制探讨

党的十八大提出了"美丽中国"的新理念,并把生态文明建设放在突出地位,节能环保受到社会各界的广泛关注。但是,目前我国环保产业还存在诸多的问题,突出表现为环保技术创新不足。文章从激活环保产业发展的内在机制的角度出发,分析了企业家精神、科研队伍建设以及资金投入对环保技术创新的影响,并在此基础上提出了相应的对策建议。     

“The Moral Difference between Intragenic and Transgenic Modification of Plants”

Public policy on the development and use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has mainly been concerned with defining proper strategies of risk management. However, surveys and focus group interviews show that although lay people are concerned with risks, they also emphasize that genetic modification is ethically questionable in itself. Many people feel that this technology “tampers with nature” in an unacceptable manner. This is often identified as an objection to the crossing of species borders in producing transgenic organisms. Most scientists reject these opinions as based on insufficient knowledge about biotechnology, the concept of species, and nature in general. Some recent projects of genetic modification aim to accommodate the above mentioned concerns by altering the expression of endogenous genes rather than introducing genes from other species. There can be good scientific reasons for this approach, in addition to strategic reasons related to greater public acceptability. But are there also moral reasons for choosing intragenic rather than transgenic modification? I suggest three interrelated moral reasons for giving priority to intragenic modification. First, we should respect the opinions of lay people even when their view is contrary to scientific consensus; they express an alternative world-view, not scientific ignorance. Second, staying within species borders by strengthening endogenous traits reduces the risks and scientific uncertainty. Third, we should show respect for nature as a complex system of laws and interconnections that we cannot fully control. The main moral reason for intragenic modification, in our view, is the need to respect the “otherness” of nature.     

An analysis of the effect of public policy on community garden organisations in Edinburgh

Several community gardens have been developed in Edinburgh over the past five years, which reflects renewed interest in “grow your own” projects, and the recognition of the associated environmental and social health benefits they provide. Community gardens have been included in a range of policy documents at national and local levels, acknowledging their contribution to sustainable food systems, health and well-being and environment and biodiversity. This research explores how public policy influences community garden practice and, reflexively, how organisations running community gardens in the third sector are represented in public policy frameworks. A mixed methodology of desk-based research of policy documents, associated reports and academic literature; and informal interviews with community gardens staff and organisers was utilised. It was found that while community gardens are represented in policy, at a national level the framing of community gardens and related food growing projects as “alternative” hinders their full potential. Community gardens fulfil a wide range of policy goals, particularly in the health, social capital and well-being sectors which can minimise their capacity to contribute to local food production in a substantial way. It is proposed that community gardens could be normalised by promoting gardens in visible locations in neighbourhoods and within local plans; and through reflexive strategic and community action utilising a reasoning backwards approach to planning and funding.     

Sense and Influence: Environmental Monitoring Tools and the Power of Citizen Science

Automated monitoring devices are useful technologies for communities seeking to document and solve environmental problems. However, without deeper scrutiny of their design and deployment, there is a risk that they will fail to have the impact that many of their promoters intend. We develop a rubric for analysing how different kinds of monitoring devices help environmental advocates influence public debates. We apply this rubric in a study of environmental organizations in Pennsylvania that are choosing between recruiting volunteer citizen scientists and using automated sensor-based devices to gather water quality data in streams threatened by hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. Many organizations rely on volunteers using simple monitoring tools because they are affordable and produce easily managed data sets. An argument for this method of monitoring is that volunteering in the field also fosters citizen engagement in environmental debates. By comparison, we find the increased use of automated devices tends to reinforce hierarchies of expertise and constrains the agendas of nonprofessionals who participate in monitoring projects. We argue that these findings suggest that automated technologies, however effective they may be in gathering data on environmental quality, are not well designed to support broad public participation in environmental science and politics.