Volume 23, Issue 1 - Special issue: Environmental Ethics; Issue editors: Nora Hämäläinen and Nina Janasik

Environmental problems are a legion, and of radically differing kinds. Yet the notion of a unified environmental crisis persists. Such unification has a solid basis, firstly because all areas of the world are interwoven into a global system of extraction, production, trade and consumption. Secondly, diverse environmental problems interact in many ways. However, too often this slips into problematic totalization, ignoring the important local socio-ecological specificities. The search for environmental master metrics, the attempt to find common units of measurement for diverse environmental impacts, is a consequential example of this. A path must be found between problematic master metrics that lack contextual understanding and can lead to perverse outcomes, and addressing environmental problems in a piecemeal fashion that overlooks a systemic view. One set of tools can never suffice when we are dealing with the complex and multifarious field of environmental issues.

As humans we are constantly engaging not only with other humans but with plants, animals, and matter. This article examines the way we view our engagement with the materiality of the world around us, by looking at the work of philosopher Jane Bennet on vibrant materiality and author Tove Jansson. Bennet presents an argument that matter can be analysed as active and vibrant. While Western philosophers are used to viewing matter as passive and dead, seeing it as active makes space for different engagement with matter. One of the ways we can start engaging with matter, once we stop thinking of it as passive and dead, is through the lens of ethics. Jansson in her children’s book Moominpappa at Sea shows a possibility for looking at the material world through this ethical lens. This article will put these works in conversation by reading both as philosophical works that have nuanced engagement with the topic of how we can be in community with the things that surround us. Jansson’s work provides a helpful addition to Vibrant Matter by showing how we are inextricably entangled in harm, and providing a possible way to live with this reality.

Recent discussions of “eco-anxiety” have brought attention to feelings of hopelessness and despair associated with climate change and ecological disaster. When we accept the claims made by science about climate change and realize that our near future is full of unprecedented ecological crisis it is difficult to avoid feelings of anxiety about the future of human life on our planet. While these discussions have largely taken place in the context of psychology and psychoanalysis, there is a need to engage in ethical deliberation about both “eco-anxiety” and “eco-trauma.” In this paper, I argue that an environmental virtue of wonder can help to articulate the intersection of environmental ethics and “eco-anxiety” by offering a mean between the excess of anxiety and the deficiency of boredom. I situate this discussion within trauma studies and make connections between the pre-trauma of climate change, wonder, and eco-cinema. More specifically, I argue for a weird environmental ethic that embraces fuzzy boundaries of entangled environments and show that the virtue of wonder allows for flourishing within this context. I use cinema, and specifically Eco-Weird cinema, to argue for a shift in narratives about our present and our future as it relates to climate change.

This paper has two main parts. First, it overviews the topic of environmental grief and related emotions. Specifically, it stresses the need to think of emotions in at least partly cognitive terms (as forms of understanding) and to consider an existential rather than medical account of environmental emotions (despite using terms such as anxiety). The second part is a reflection on the currently endemic worries about having children. I will argue that it is misplaced to analyse this attitude universally as an argument-based decision. Rather, if it relates to environment grief, the emotion may be providing a reason for this attitude, or be expressed as the attitude. The misleading ‘argument’ framing and the near-condescending responses to it may be related to a specifically generational failure of understanding.

This paper adopts justificatory moral pluralism (JMP) – a multilevel framework for justifying the choice by different agents of the most appropriate norms and values to guide their decisions and actions – to climate change. Its main objective is to investigate how ethics may effectively help achieve a better result in deciding how to mitigate, adapt, or compensate by enhancing the moral acceptability of the available policies or actions that are most likely to counter the effects of climate change. JMP presents agents – individuals, nonstate, and state – with a thorough yet flexible process of matching policies and actions with ethical theories, raising the robustness of moral reasons for politically efficient and individually motivating courses of action against climate change. JMP triggers climate responsibility and sensibility in agents, engaging them in discussing and finding out individually and collectively the most acceptable paths for the decarbonisation transition that is fast approaching.

This paper examines philosophical debates about concepts of biodiversity, making the case for conceptual pluralism. Taking a pragmatist perspective, I argue that normative concepts of biodiversity and eco-centric concepts of biodiversity can serve different purposes. The former would help stress the values of local communities, which have often been neglected by both early scientific approaches to conservation, and by policy makers prioritizing the political or economic interests of specific groups. The latter would help build local research programs independent of pressures from economic or political actors. I employ a case study on environmental research on walnut forests in Kyrgyzstan in support of my argument. Against tendencies to frame different understandings of biodiversity in terms of geographical areas, I propose an interpretation drawing on the philosophy of ecology. Adherence to environmental pragmatism enables a sufficiently complex picture of developing environmental research in the area, capturing issues about scientific framings and local understandings.

This article has a twofold aim. First it is shown, based on Joseph Christopher Greer’s earlier analysis, that there is a close historical, and to some extent substantial, affinity between deep ecology and esotericism. Greer’s findings will be corroborated by applying three different definitions of esotericism to the question at hand. Second, based on Sean McGrath’s ecophilosophy, it will be argued that utilizing esoteric influences systematically in deep ecological context can help deep ecology to avoid some problematic aspects it is often accused of. Especially the esoteric conception of living nature can help deep ecology to bridge the gulf between nature and the human being, and thereby to avoid both theoretical and practical anti-humanism.