ABSTRACT

This book offers a multidisciplinary environmental approach to ethics in response to the contemporary challenge of climate change caused by globalized economics and consumption. This book synthesizes the incredible complexity of the problem and the necessity of action in response, highlighting the unambiguous problem facing humanity in the 21st century, but arguing that it is essential to develop an ethics housed in ambiguity in response.

Environmental Ethics and Uncertainty is divided into theoretical and applied chapters, with the theoretical sections engaging in dialogue with scholars from a variety of disciplines, while the applied chapters offer insight from 20th century activists who demonstrate and/or illuminate the theory, including Martin Luther King, Rachel Carson, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

This book is written for scholars and students in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies and the environmental humanities, and will appeal to courses in religion, philosophy, ethics, politics, and social theory.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

1The problem with knowing the answer

chapter 2|16 pages

The depths of ambiguity

Ethical pluralism and wonder in Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Rachel Carson

chapter 4|20 pages

Complexity in action

The challenging uncertainties of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X

chapter 6|14 pages

The dangers of building without ambiguity

Spirituality and utopianism in Frank Lloyd Wright

chapter 8|14 pages

Concluding practices for an uncertain stand

Fracking, protesting, and engineering the climate