Foundations of environmental ethics [Paperback]

Eugene C Hargrove (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 229 pages
• Publisher: Environmental Ethics Books (1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0962680745
• ISBN-13: 978-0962680748
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #882,572 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Eugene (Gene) Hargrove was born in 1944 and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He received all of his college degrees in philosophy from the University of Missouri, Columbia. While working on his Ph.D., he became involved in saving a cave, Devil's Icebox, from residential water pollution as a representative of the National Speleological Society. At that time he was urged by other environmental activists to do something about environmental ethics, since he was then a front-line environmentalist and also an academic specialist in ethics. He eventually founded the first journal on the subject, Environmental Ethics (1979), which he has edited now for more than thirty years. During that time, he has taught at the University of New Mexico, the University of Georgia, and finally the University of North Texas, where he founded the first graduate program in environmental ethics (today offering both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in the field). He is the author of Foundations of Environmental Ethics (1989) and editor of Religion and Environmental Crisis (1986), Beyond Spaceship Earth: Environmental Ethics and the Solar System (1986), and the Animal Rights/Environmental Ethics Debate: The Environmental Perspective (1992). Foundations of Environmental Ethics has been translated into Korean, Italian, and Chinese. A Spanish translation will appear in the near future. As an environmental ethicist, he has been involved with restoration ecology and conservation biology as well as the NASA space program. He is currently working on ethical issues related to possible extraterrestrial life and the preservation of the Moon from untempered development. His main research, however, is devoted to exploring the teaching of environmental ethics at the elementary school level. He is editing a sequel to Beyond Spaceship Earth and writing a new single-author book to be called Environmental Ethics and the Culture War. He has also developed an interest in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and is considered a Tolkien scholar. He is best known for his essay "Who is Tom Bombadil?" (which originally appeared in the journal Mythlore in 1986), but he occasionally writes essays on Tolkien for a monthly publication called Beyond Bree. They have included "Invisibility in Middle-Earth: A Tentative Theory"(2003), "Music in Middle-Earth" (1995), "Choice and Providential Determinism in Middle-Earth" (2003), and "Lying, Being Mistaken, and Not Knowing in Middle-Earth" (2004). He has published two songbooks covering nearly all of the music and poetry in English contained in the Lord of the Rings: Music of Middle-Earth, Vol. 1: A Musical Journey from the Shire to Rivendell (2001) and Music of Middle-Earth, Vol. 2: A Musical Journey from the Khazad-dum to Gondor (2002). He has also made instrumental CDs for most of the music contained in the two books.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Major work in Environmental Philosophy, February 26, 2008

By 

Eric Katz (Bay Shore, New York, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Foundations of Environmental Ethics (Paperback)

Hargrove, as editor of the journal Environmental Ethics, is arguably the
most influential philosopher in the field---yet this is the first book
length statement of his position. The status of the author alone would be
enough to make this an important contribution to the field of environmental philosophy, but this is also a powerful argument concerning the roots of environmental ideals in the Western tradition. In part, the book answers John Passmore's contention that a philosophy of nature preservation is alien or marginal to Western culture. The rebuttal of Passmore involves a far-ranging investigation of the intellectual history of environmental attitudes, both those that have inhibited environmental thought (notably, the Western philosophical tradition of idealism, and the Anglo-Saxon conception of property rights) and those that have supported preservationist intuitions (primarily, scientific and aesthetic ideals). Based on the demonstrated existence of Western aesthetic intuitions, Hargrove presents a detailed argument for the ethical foundations of preservationist policy. He argues against the justification of preservation based on "therapeutic nihilism:" since we cannot know precisely how nature operates, we should let it alone. This prevalent ideal is expressed as Barry Commoner's "third law" of ecology: "nature knows best," a platitude which Hargrove convincingly rejects. The central problem with the preservationist argument based on therapeutic nihilism is that its force is contingent upon developments in the science of ecology and technological power. If we do learn more about nature, so that we may re-create it, then the preservationist position loses its support. Much better, argues Hargrove, to ground environmentalist policy
on the aesthetic values we discover in nature. Nature, even more than
human-created art, is beautiful and good; and moral agents have an
obligation to preserve and promote goodness in the world. Nature is
beautiful (and hence good) by its mere existence; Hargrove thus terms his
argument "an ontological argument" for environmental ethics. Central to this discussion is an excellent analysis of the attempted human domination of nature and how this destroys the beauty and autonomy of the natural world. "The authenticity of nature arises out of the fact that its existence precedes its essence" (p. 195). In sum, Hargrove attempts to create a middle position between an instrumental justification for environmental policy based on human interests and an intrinsic justification based on the direct consideration of non-human value. The aesthetic value for nature is an intrinsic value for humans; it thus is intrinsic and anthropocentric, with a secure place in Western traditions. The central problem for Hargrove's argument is the claim that aesthetic value is intrinsic and not instrumental. Although he is careful to distinguish higher level aesthetic experience from the mere "consumption" of natural beauty, the possibility remains that any human interest in aesthetic experience is primarily (and exclusively) an instrumental good.