New book on Land Ethics 7 Aug 20247 Aug 2024 A friend and colleague, Roberta L. Millstein, who is emerit at UC Davis, has published a new book: The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium, which is available from The University of Chicago Press here. She defends Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic. The publisher’s blurb: A contemporary defense of conservationist Aldo Leopold’s vision for human interaction with the environment. Informed by his experiences as a hunter, forester, wildlife manager, ecologist, conservationist, and professor, Aldo Leopold developed a view he called the land ethic. In a classic essay, published posthumously in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold advocated for an expansion of our ethical obligations beyond the purely human to include what he variously termed the “land community” or the “biotic community”—communities of interdependent humans, nonhuman animals, plants, soils, and waters, understood collectively. This philosophy has been extremely influential in environmental ethics as well as conservation biology and related fields. Using an approach grounded in environmental ethics and the history and philosophy of science, Roberta L. Millstein reexamines Leopold’s land ethic in light of contemporary ecology. Despite the enormous influence of the land ethic, it has sometimes been dismissed as either empirically out of date or ethically flawed. Millstein argues that these dismissals are based on problematic readings of Leopold’s ideas. In this book, she provides new interpretations of the central concepts underlying the land ethic: interdependence, land community, and land health. She also offers a fresh take on of his argument for extending our ethics to include land communities as well as Leopold-inspired guidelines for how the land ethic can steer conservation and restoration policy. Philosophy
Accommodationism Accommodating Science overview 13 Mar 2014 I have done quite a lot of blogging under this heading lately so I thought it might be useful to get all the posts used in order: On beliefs Why do believers believe silly things? The function of denialism Why do believers believe THOSE silly things? The “developmental hypothesis” of… Read More
Philosophy Farr on MRI 3 Aug 2009 Introducing an irregular series of quotes that catch my eye: Noise is principally due to the presence of the patient. [R. F. Farr] HT Omri Schwartz Read More
Biology Downward Causation 9 Aug 201122 Jun 2018 The final claim for there being an ontological sense to emergence is “downward causation“, a phrase coined by the evolutionary epistemologist Donald Campbell in the 1970s. The idea here is that emergence is real because higher-level (or bigger, composite) entities cause changes in the properties and dynamics of their parts…. Read More