From Environmental Ethics to Nature Conservation Policy: Natura 2000 and the Burden of Proof

Natura 2000 is a network of natural sites whose aim is to preserve species and habitats of relevance in the European Union. The policy underlying Natura 2000 has faced widespread opposition from land users and received extensive support from environmentalists. This paper addresses the ethical framework for Natura 2000 and the probable moral assumptions of its main stakeholders. Arguments for and against Natura 2000 were analyzed and classified according to “strong” or “weak” versions of the three main theories of environmental ethics – anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism. Weak (intergenerational) anthropocentrism was found to underlie the Natura 2000 network itself and the positions of environmentalists, while strong (traditional) anthropocentrism pervaded the positions of economic developers. Land users seemed to fall somewhere between weak and strong anthropocentrism. The paper discusses the relation between ethics and different attitudes towards Natura 2000, highlighting some of the implications for the network’s ongoing implementation. It is shown that Natura 2000 achieves a strong reversal of the burden of proof from conservation to economic development and land use change under anthropocentrism. It is argued that the alleged theoretical divide between anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism in relation to the burden of proof does not seem to hold in practice. Finally, it is predicted that the weak versions of anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism, are likely to converge extensively in respect to nature conservation policy measures.“Charting the depths of law and policy disputes yield an understanding of ethical differences.” Paul B. Thompson (2002, p. 189).     

Biofuels: Efficiency,Ethics, and Limits to Human Appropriation of Ecosystem Services

Biofuels have lately been indicated as a promising source of cheap and sustainable energy. In this paper we argue that some important ethical and environmental issues have also to be addressed: (1) the conflict between biofuels production and global food security, particularly in developing countries, and (2) the limits of the Human Appropriation of ecosystem services and Net Primary Productivity. We warn that large scale conversion of crops, grasslands, natural and semi-natural ecosystem, (such as the conversion of grasslands to cellulosic ethanol production, or plantation of sugar cane and palm oil), may have detrimental social and ecological consequences. Social effects may concern: (1) food security, especially in developing countries, leading to an increase of the price of staple food, (2) transnational corporations and big landowners establishing larger and larger landholdings in conflict with indigenous areas and the subsistence of small farmers. Ecological effects may concern: (1) competition with grazing wild and domesticated animals (e.g., millions of grazing livestock in USA prairies), (2) an excessive appropriation of Net Primary Production from ecosystems, (3) threatening biodiversity preservation and soil fertility. We claim that is it well known how ecological and social issues are strictly interwoven and that large scale biofuels production, by putting high pressure on both fronts, may trigger dangerous feedbacks, also considering the critical fact that 9 billion people are expected to inhabit the planet by 2050. There is a need to conduct serious and deep analysis on the environmental and social impact of large scale biofuels production before important energy policies are launched at global level. Biofuels will not represent an energetic panacea and their role in the overall energy consumption will remain marginal in our present highly energivorous society, while their effect on food security and environment preservation may have detrimental results. We should also have the courage to face two key issues: (1) we cannot keep increasing resources consumption at present pace, and have to change our life style accordingly, and (2) we have to deal with population growth; we cannot expect to have 9–10 billions people inhabiting the earth by 2050, without this representing a major impact on its support system.     

从无到有,站办擎起环保半边天

叶竹,安徽省作家协会会员,安徽环保系统中唯一的县级诗人环保局长。他去年从肥西县高刘镇党委书记一职调任肥西县环保局局长时,肥西县经济水平已在全国展露锋芒:2010年GDP实现276.1亿元、财政收入30亿元,今年有望突破330亿元和50亿元,实力为     

水生态环境保护回顾与展望：从污染防治到三水统筹

水生态环境保护事关美丽中国目标的实现。本文阐释了我国从水污染防治向水环境、水生态、水资源“三水”统筹转变的新时代水生态环境保护内涵，从国内视角梳理我国水污染防治实践取得的成效，识别美丽中国水生态环境保护面临的制约性问题，首次在全国层面与欧美发达国家的水环境质量、水生态保护和水资源保障情况进行国际对标分析，提出以水生态系统保护目标为指引、以流域生态环境空间管控为基础、以“三水”统筹系统治理为路径、以治理体系和治理能力现代化为保障的水生态环境保护战略建议。     

Fish Welfare in Aquaculture: Explicating the Chain of Interactions Between Science and Ethics

Aquaculture is the fastest growing animal-production sector in the world. This leads to the question how we should guarantee fish welfare. Implementing welfare standards presupposes that we know how to weigh, define, and measure welfare. While at first glance these seem empirical questions, they cannot be answered without ethical reflection. Normative assumptions are made when weighing, defining, and measuring welfare. Moreover, the focus on welfare presupposes that welfare is a morally important concept. This in turn presupposes that we can define the capacities of fish, which is an empirical undertaking that informs and is informed by ethical theories about the moral status of animals. In this article we want to illustrate the need for a constant interaction between empirical scientific research and ethics, in which both fields of research make their own contribution. This is not a novel claim. However, the case of fish sheds new light on this claim, because regarding fish there is still much empirical uncertainty and there is a plurality of moral views on all levels. Therefore, we do not only want to show the necessity of this interaction, but also the added value of a cooperation between ethicists and empirical scientists, such as biologists, physiologists, and ethologists. We demonstrate this by considering the different steps in the process of reflection about and implementation of fish welfare.     

Exploring the Links Between Science, Risk, Uncertainty, and Ethics in Regulatory Controversies About Genetically Modified Crops

Just as a stream of genetically modifiedcrops looked set to be approved for commercialproduction in the European Union, the approvalprocedure appears to have become bogged down onceagain by disagreements among and within member states.Old controversies have resurfaced in new forms. Theintractability of the issues suggests that theregulatory procedure has had too narrow a focus,leaving outside its boundary many of the morefundamental aspects that cause people in the EuropeanUnion most concern. Regulators have come underconsiderable pressure to ensure their risk assessmentdecisions are soundly science-based. Ethical issueshave been deemed to lie beyond the scope of theregulatory procedure, as a matter to be consideredseparately by professional ethicists. Yet it has beensuggested that all environmental controversies at rootinvolve disputes about fundamental ethical principles.This paper examines how the ethical issues arecurrently suppressed or sidelined. It discusses how anappreciation of systems thinking and a check on thevalues that underpin decisions, using boundary testingquestions, might contribute to a more constructiveregulatory dialogue, with ethical issues considered asintegral in a way that takes better account ofpeople's concerns.     

Flood Protection: Highlighting an Investment Trap Between Built and Natural Capital

We present a simulation model developed to communicate a potential investment trap associated with using man‐made river engineering to protect built infrastructure. A small system dynamics model in STELLA? was constructed following a collaborative model‐building process to increase understanding among stakeholders of the role natural capital plays in wealth creation. We set out to explore the dynamic relationship between investing tax revenue in natural capital (specifically forested headwaters and low land wetlands) rather than built capital (specifically stopbanks) for flood protection in the Manawatū watershed, New Zealand. Significant investment is currently required to maintain and enhance river engineering infrastructure and keep pace with changes in the river's geomorphology. Viewed from a systems perspective, we suggest diversion of a proportion of existing funding into restoration of forested headwaters on steep slopes and restoration of functioning wetlands on floodplains could in the longer term provide an effective approach to flood protection. Co‐benefits of increased natural capital include the ecosystem services nutrient cycling, sediment capture, water purification, biodiversity, pollination, and cultural and recreational values. Overcoming an investment trap requires a longer term perspective. This simple model consisting of two feedback loops and two delays aims to contribute to an ongoing stakeholder dialogue concerning the Manawatū River watershed in New Zealand.     

从损害控制到风险预防：野生动物保护公益诉讼的优化进路

当前野生动物保护公益诉讼主要呈现损害控制型司法模式的特性,该模式以刑事附带民事公益诉讼为常规渠道,救济对象是既成公益损害,救济方式是损害赔偿、修复及专项整治。诉讼方式谦抑性、因果关系推定规则以及案件线索发现机制事后性,为此模式的合理运行提供了理据。本文运用风险预防原则的理论框架,认为野生动物保护公益诉讼的救济客体不应局限于生态环境损害,公共卫生安全的风险预防等关联性客体也应纳入其中,而损害控制模式这种事后治理方法存在短板。基于此,应将公益诉讼的视角回溯至事前,大力倡导风险预防型司法模式。风险预防模式与损害控制模式属于二元协同关系,前者对后者发挥补强与优化功能。根据风险预防模式的救济观,可探索野生动物保护的预防性行政公益诉讼制度,并全方位构建程序规则,以实现公益诉讼的前瞻性价值。     

Consumer Food Ethics: Considerations of Vulnerability,Suffering, and Harm

Over the past years, various accounts of ethical consumption have been produced which identify certain concepts as central to mediating the ethical relationship between the consumer and the consumed. Scholars across disciplinary fields have explored how individuals construe their ethical consumption responsibilities and commitments through the notions of identity, taking care and doing good, proximity and distance, suggesting the centrality of these themes to consumer engagement in ethical practices. This paper contributes to the body of research concerned with unravelling consumers’ conceptually mediated relationship to moral and ethical issues in the sphere of consumption by revealing a new set of ideas through which people interpret and relate to consumption ethics. Drawing upon findings from an empirical study on self-perceived ethical food consumers, I demonstrate that people’s perceptions and views of ethical problems around consumption are bound up with notions of vulnerability, suffering, and harm, and that these notions permeate and impact all aspects of ethical consumer behaviour. The paper concludes by arguing that we need to further explore the conceptual underpinnings of ethical consumer commitments and practices, and expand the conceptual toolkit of research on ethical consumption to account for a wider range of ideas and notions that shape individual as well as collective motivations, intentions, and actions throughout the process of becoming and being an ethical consumer. Finally, the paper suggests a specific analytical framework to facilitate such research.     

Method to Partition Between Attached and Unattached E. coli in Runoff From Agricultural Lands1

Abstract: Remediation of waters impaired by bacterial indicators is usually dictated by total maximum daily load plans, which are heavily dependent on fate and transport modeling of bacterial indicators. Nonpoint source pollution models are most frequently used to assess bacterial transport to surface waters and most models typically simulate bacterial transport as a dissolved pollutant. Previous studies have found that cells preferentially attach to sediments; however, a variety of techniques have been used to assess attachment including filtration, fractional filtration, and centrifugation. In addition, a variety of chemical and physical dispersion techniques are used to release attached and bioflocculated cells from particulates. Here we developed and validated an easy‐to‐replicate laboratory procedure for separation of unattached from attached E. coli which will also identify particle sizes to which E. coli preferentially attach. Physical and chemical dispersion techniques were evaluated and a combined hand shaker treatment for 10 min followed by dilutions in 1,000 mg/l of Tween 85 significantly increased total E. coli concentrations by 31% when compared with a control. In order to separate unattached from attached fractions, two commonly used techniques, fractional filtration, and centrifugation were combined. The filtration and centrifugation treatments did not reduce E. coli concentrations when compared with a control (p > 0.05), indicating that damage was not inflicted upon the E. coli cells during the separation procedure.     

Ethics,Narrative, and Agriculture: Transforming Agricultural Practice through Ecological Imagination

The environmental degradation caused by industrial agriculture, as well as the resulting social and health consequences, creates an urgency to rethink food production by expanding the moral imagination to include agricultural practices. Agricultural practices presume human use of the earth and acknowledge human dependence on the biotic community, and these relations mean that agriculture presents a separate set of considerations in the broader field of environmental ethics. Many scholars and activists have argued persuasively that we need new stories to rethink agricultural practice, however, the link—the story that does and can shape agricultural practice—has not yet been fully articulated in environmental discourse. My analysis explores how language has shaped existing agricultural models and, more important, the potential of story to influence agricultural practice. To do this, I draw upon cognitive theory to illustrate how metaphoric and narrative language structures thought and influences practice, beginning with my contention that industrial agriculture relies on a discourse of mechanistic relations between humans and a passive earth, language that has naturalized the chemically intensive monocultures prevalent in much of the American Midwest. However, alternative agricultures, including organic agriculture, agro-ecology, and ecological agriculture, emphasize qualities such as interdependence and reciprocity and do so as a deliberate response to the perceived inadequacies of industrial agriculture and its governing narrative. Exploring the different discourses of agricultural systems can help us think through different modalities for human relations with the biotic community and demonstrate story’s potential role in altering practice.     

“十四五”时期污染物总量控制的挑战、需求与应对研究

"十四五"时期是进一步巩固和提升环境质量改善成果、切实改善人民群众生存环境的关键时期。展望"十四五",应从发展的视角看总量控制与环境质量控制所面临的问题与困难,在考虑历史因素的基础上兼顾地区间的公平与效率,切实发挥环境管理对高质量发展的推动作用,迈向"环境质量导向的总量控制"。要落实改进总量控制和质量控制效果的新举措,进一步推动建立环境质量与总量控制的量化联动关系,推动城市—单元—行业的精细化总量控制管理,丰富总量控制要素,强化服务于总量控制的能力建设,建立总量控制目标下公平的环境责任划分制度。     

Environmental Ethics: Driving Factors Beneath Behavior,Discourse and Decision-Making

This paper tries to characterize the factors determining human relations with its environment and to identify the drives of those behavioral patterns and “praxis”. One scrutinizes the physiological and psychological factors that influence those drives, and tries to determine ways of overriding instinctive drives in favor of rational, sustainable ones. It focuses its attention on the way the different ecosystemic, economic and socio-cultural systems work, and pin-points the critical issues in view of the development of sustainable behavioral patterns. Also the values that must build the new behavioral paradigm, as well as the ways to ensure the evolutionary quantum-leap necessary to ensure this sustainable condition, and the fulfilment, at every level, the different needs of humans and human societies, are analyzed. In conclusion, it stresses the fact that any reliable and long lasting change towards a sustainable behavior must start at the individual and the close social groups levels, and of the development of new factors of self-fulfillment and gratification, able to support and foster that change. The proposed epistemological approach is particularly innovative, precisely because of this emphasis on the individual drives and the way they determine the global patterns of environmental use, as well as the way they can evolve into a more rational (human) character. In short, the paper focuses itself in the way man can evolve from its natural animal instincts and drives toward more rational ones, humanizing its behavior and turning, therefore, into an able actor of the process of sustainability building.     

Food Law,Ethics, and Food Safety Regulation: Roles,Justifications, and Expected Limits

Recent food emergencies throughout the world have raised some serious ethical and legal concerns for nations and health organizations. While the legal regulations addressing food risks and foodborne illnesses are considerably varied and variously effective, less is known about the ethical treatment of the subject. The purpose of this article is to discuss the roles, justifications, and limits of ethics of food safety as part of public health ethics and to argue for the development of this timely and emergent field of ethics. The article is divided into three parts. After a short introduction on public health ethics, all levels of food safety processes are described and the role that ethics play in each of these levels is then analyzed. In the second part, different models describing the function of food law are examined. The relationship between these models and the role of ethics of food safety is assessed and discussed in the final part, leading to some relevant comments on the limits of the role and effect of ethics of food safety.     

Bovine TB,Badger Culling and Applied Ethics: Utilitarianism,Animal Welfare and Rights

Applying competing ethical theories to the issue of bovine TB and badger culling can throw light on the validity of the policy options. Utilitarianism is, superficially at least, an attractive option. However, the aggregative principle is problematic and this is well illustrated in the case of bovine TB and badger culling. Such is the variety and strength of interests to be considered that it is not at all clear which course of action will maximise utility. In addition, it may be that the full range of consequences can never be known with any degree of accuracy. An alternative option is to revert to an animal welfare ethic. This has the effect of cutting down the moral complexities involved in a discussion of bovine TB and badger culling, since, providing it is done humanely, killing badgers is not an ethical issue, and even the infliction of suffering on them is permissible providing it serves a significant human benefit. The animal welfare ethic, however, is normatively inadequate because it exaggerates the ethical importance of personhood. Because of this, it allows us to justify killing badgers, and might even justify the infliction of considerable suffering if by so doing there is a good chance that economic benefits will accrue. As a result, a deontological position, where animals are accorded the protection of rights, seems a much more promising alternative to utilitarianism. The adoption of any variety of animal rights would render badger culling morally illegitimate.     

Virgil, Vigilance, and Voice: Agrifood Ethics in an Age of Globalization

Some 2000 years ago, Virgil wroteThe Georgics, a political tract on Romanagriculture in the form of a poem. Today, as aresult of rising global trade in food andagricultural products, growing economicconcentration, the merging of food andpharmacy, chronic obesity in the midst ofhunger, and new disease and pest vectors, weare in need of a new Georgics that addressesthe two key issues of our time: vigilance andvoice. On the one hand, vigilance must becentral to a new Georgics. Enforceablestandards for food safety, food quality,environmental protection, worker health andsafety, sanitary and phytosanitaryrequirements, animal welfare, and appellationsmust be addressed. On the other hand, a newGeorgics must increase the range of persons whohave voice in the democratic governance of anew global agrifood system. New organizationsand institutions will be needed to accomplishthis task.     

Food, Consumer Concerns, and Trust: Food Ethics for a Globalizing Market

The use of biotechnology in food productiongives rise to consumer concerns. The term ``consumerconcern' is often used as a container notion. Itincludes concerns about food safety, environmental andanimal welfare consequences of food productionsystems, and intrinsic moral objections againstgenetic modification. In order to create clarity adistinction between three different kinds of consumerconcern is proposed. Consumer concerns can be seen assigns of loss of trust. Maintaining consumer trustasks for governmental action. Towards consumerconcerns, governments seem to have limitedpossibilities for public policy. Under current WTOregulations designed to prevent trade disputes,governments can only limit their policies to 1) safetyregulation based upon sound scientific evidence and 2)the stimulation of a system of product labeling. Ananalysis of trust, however, can show that ifgovernments limit their efforts in this way, they willnot do enough to avoid the types of consumer concernsthat diminish trust. The establishment of a technicalbody for food safety – although perhaps necessary –is in itself not enough, because concerns that relatedirectly to food safety cannot be solved by ``pure'science alone. And labeling can only be a good way totake consumer concerns seriously if these concerns arerelated to consumer autonomy. For consumer concernsthat are linked to ideas about a good society,labeling can only provide a solution if it is seen asan addition to political action rather than as itssubstitution. Labeling can help consumers take uptheir political responsibility. As citizens, consumershave certain reasonable concerns that can justifiableinfluence the market. In a free-market society, theyare, as buyers, co-creators of the market, andsocietal steering is partly done by the market.Therefore, they need the information to co-create thatmarket. The basis of labeling in these cases, however,is not the good life of the individual but thepolitical responsibility people have in their role asparticipants in a free-market. Then, public concernsare taken seriously. Labeling in that case does nottake away the possibilities of reaching politicalgoals, but it adds a possibility.