ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a challenge to environmental virtue ethics, which is to show that virtue ethics provides a better approach to environmental problems than alternative normative theories. Environmental ethics is concerned with questions about the moral value and status of the environment, where "environment" is used broadly to include natural, agricultural, and urban ecosystems, as well as the individuals that populate and constitute those ecosystems. Various strategies have been used to try to identify environmental virtues. One strategy is the environmental exemplar approach, which involves reflecting on the lives and writings of the handful of people who are recognized as environmental role models. Philip Cafaro uses this approach, and focuses on the lives of Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson. As Ronald Sandler points out, many of the disagreements about which character traits are environmental virtues stem from different accounts of what makes a trait a virtue.
