ABSTRACT

This Second Edition of A New Environmental Ethics: The Next Millennium for Life on Earth offers clear, powerful, and often moving thoughts from Holmes Rolston III, one of the first and most respected philosophers to write on the environment and often called the "father of environmental ethics." Rolston surveys the full spectrum of approaches in the field of environmental ethics and offers critical assessments of contemporary academic accounts. He draws on a lifetime of research and experience to suggest an outlook, and even hope, for the future. This forward-looking analysis, focused on the new millennium, will be a necessary complement to any balanced textbook or anthology in environmental ethics. The First Edition guaranteed "to put you in your place." Beyond that, the Second Edition asks whether you want to live a "de-natured life on a de-natured planet."

Key Updates in the Second Edition

  • Covers the worsening environmental situation due to actions of the Trump administration, including withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change
  • Includes information on legislation in key U.S. states (e.g., California and New York) aimed to ameliorate the damage done at the federal level
  • Increases coverage of group knowledge, group agreement and disagreement, and group action in collective environmental ethics, as distinguished from individual knowledge and action
  • Examines the deleterious effects of online consumer behavior
  • Explains how a loss of solidarity among a nation’s citizens and even a larger solidary among humanity leads to environmental degradation
  • Offers new analysis of the effects of epistemic bubbles, echo chambers, and fake news on the behavior of voters and consumers
  • Provides an extended critique of the Anthropocene Epoch, and the prospect of geo-engineering Earth to become a synthetic environment.

chapter 1|34 pages

The Environmental Turn

chapter 2|39 pages

Humans

People on Their Landscapes

chapter 3|31 pages

Animals

Beasts in Flesh and Blood

chapter 4|36 pages

Organisms

Respect for Life

chapter 5|36 pages

Species and Biodiversity

Lifelines in Jeopardy

chapter 6|39 pages

Ecosystems

The Land Ethic

chapter 7|36 pages

Earth

Ethics on the Home Planet