Event Title
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Location
LAB 101
Start Date
25-1-2013 2:00 PM
Description
Aldo Leopold's "The Land Ethic" is the most important seminal text for the relatively new field of environmental ethics in philosophy: "A thing is right when it preserves the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it tends otherwise." But because the land ethic is ecologically scaled to biotic communities and ecosystem processes it is not equipped to meet the challenge of global climate change and its multi-century duration. Leopold also faintly sketched an Earth ethic that is of planetary spatial scale and millennial temporal scale. An Earth ethic has both non-anthropocentric and anthropocentric aspects, both of which require moving from an individualistic to a collective or "holistic" way of thinking about ethical duties and obligations and the beneficiaries thereof.
From the Land Ethic to the Earth Ethic
LAB 101
Aldo Leopold's "The Land Ethic" is the most important seminal text for the relatively new field of environmental ethics in philosophy: "A thing is right when it preserves the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it tends otherwise." But because the land ethic is ecologically scaled to biotic communities and ecosystem processes it is not equipped to meet the challenge of global climate change and its multi-century duration. Leopold also faintly sketched an Earth ethic that is of planetary spatial scale and millennial temporal scale. An Earth ethic has both non-anthropocentric and anthropocentric aspects, both of which require moving from an individualistic to a collective or "holistic" way of thinking about ethical duties and obligations and the beneficiaries thereof.
Comments
2012-2013 Fairchild Lecture
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