ABSTRACT
Successful environmental partnerships, focused on resolving policy conflicts surrounding local issues, are forming among corporations, local communities, government agencies, and environmental organizations. Partnership ethics differs from the three major forms of environmental ethics that dominate human-environment relations—egocentric, homocentric, and ecocentric. Each ethic reflects a different discourse stemming from conflicts among underlying modernist institutions. A partnership ethic sees the human community and the biotic community in a mutual relationship with each other. A partnership ethic draws on the principles and advantages of both the homocentric social-interest ethic and the ecocentric environmental ethic, while rejecting the egocentric ethic associated with capitalist exploitation of people and nature. A partnership ethic calls for a new balance in which both humans and non-human nature are equal partners, neither having the upper hand, yet cooperating with each other. A partnership ethic relates work in the sciences of chaos and complexity to possibilities for non-dominating relationships between humans and non-human nature.
