Suchergebnisse

Focuses on the bombing of Libya, Apr. 1986. Interventionary and foreign policy objectives.

Over the past decade, scholars have begun to develop the discipline of global environmental ethics. In doing so, they have encountered two obstacles. First, much environmentalism cloaks itself in the discourse of prudence and security, and thus, ethical concerns are difficult to identify. Second, when scholars do recognize ethical issues, they explain them in terms of how people treat the nonhuman world and advance a biocentric or ecocentric moral sensibility. This is a problem to the degree that it neglects countless instances of environmental injustice that involve the way humans treat each other, using nature as a medium. This article illuminates the nonprudential dimensions of global environmental affairs and explains how a focus on the way humans mistreat each other can serve as a central ethical focus for understanding and addressing environmental injustice. Overall, it aims to provide a vocabulary for advancing an anthropocentric sensibility toward global environmental ethical concern.

Environmentalists argue that we need to reduce population and consumption to protect the environment, and that this is something we can all do by individually choosing to have smaller families and buying fewer products. This article questions the ecological effects of such choice. When people have fewer children or reduce their consumption, they save money. What they then do with this money is crucial to the consequences of their actions. If they place it in conventional financial mechanisms, such as banks or stocks, they merely shift the locale of environmental harm since these mechanisms, within a capitalist economy, redeploy savings into further investment and productivity. For individual lifestyle choices to make a difference, environmentalists must find ways of linking such choices to efforts aimed at changing the nature of capitalist economies. If we had effective public policies that redistributed income, forced polluters to pay for the harm they cause, mandated more environmentally friendly technologies, and reduced the workday in the richer parts of the world, we could alter the way we live our material lives.

Responding to climate change has become an industry. Governments, corporations, activist groups and others now devote billions of dollars to mitigation and adaptation, and their efforts represent one of the most significant policy measures ever dedicated to a global challenge. Despite its laudatory intent, the response industry, or 'Climate Inc.', is failing. 'Reimagining Climate Change' questions established categories, routines, and practices that presently constitute accepted solutions to tackling climate change and offers alternative routes forward. It does so by unleashing the political imagination. The chapters grasp the larger arc of collective experience, interpret its meaning for the choices we face, and creatively visualize alternative trajectories that can help us cognitively and emotionally enter into alternative climate futures. They probe the meaning and effectiveness of climate protection 'from below'-forms of community and practice that are emerging in various locales around the world and that hold promise for greater collective resonance.