Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Searching for Sustainability
- General Introduction: An Interdisciplinary Experiment
- I PRAGMATISM AS AN ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY
- II SCIENCE, POLICY, AND POLICY SCIENCE
- III ECONOMICS AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
- IV SCALING SUSTAINABILITY: ECOLOGY AS IF HUMANS MATTERED
- V SOME ELEMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY OF SUSTAINABLE LIVING
- VI VALUING SUSTAINABILITY: TOWARD A MORE COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO ENVIRONMENTAL EVALUATION
- Index
IV - SCALING SUSTAINABILITY: ECOLOGY AS IF HUMANS MATTERED
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Searching for Sustainability
- General Introduction: An Interdisciplinary Experiment
- I PRAGMATISM AS AN ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY
- II SCIENCE, POLICY, AND POLICY SCIENCE
- III ECONOMICS AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
- IV SCALING SUSTAINABILITY: ECOLOGY AS IF HUMANS MATTERED
- V SOME ELEMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY OF SUSTAINABLE LIVING
- VI VALUING SUSTAINABILITY: TOWARD A MORE COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO ENVIRONMENTAL EVALUATION
- Index
Summary
While ecologists number many devoted conservation activists among their ranks – and many of these have contributed mightily to environmental causes – I have sensed a reluctance among ecological scientists to become too deeply involved in ethical issues or even to discuss, at least professionally, environmental values. Accordingly, I have tried to establish a dialogue with ecologists about how to make the evaluation of environmental goods, especially ecologically based goods, more ecologically sensitive. This effort is represented here by a series of papers on how to understand social values and associated political processes within a natural ecological context.
The related themes of scales and social values run throughout the papers – written for ecologists or dealing with ecological themes – that appear in this part. First, I argue that we need to rethink the boundaries of scientific and evaluative discourse because sciences such as conservation biology are, inevitably and unabashedly, mission oriented; they, like medicine, are normative sciences. Besides needing to abide by the methodological norms of their discipline, physicians – and conservation biologists – are obligated to seek relevant and important information. “Importance,” here, means social importance, so a science limited to mere description cannot tell us what is important to study. So, science must be value-laden at least to the extent that it can be responsive to demands for data and information needed to manage ecological systems.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Searching for SustainabilityInterdisciplinary Essays in the Philosophy of Conservation Biology, pp. 277 - 279Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002