The Endangered Species Act (ESA) can impose significant limitations on what landowners may do with their property, especially as it pertains to development. These restrictions imposed by the ESA are part of a larger controversy about the reach of the “Takings Clause” of the Fifth Amendment, which says that private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation. The question this paper addresses is whether these restrictions require compensation. The paper develops a position on the (...) general question of compensation for regulatory takings and applies it to the ESA. The main argument concludes that compensation should be paid. It is based on the proposition that the goods provided by regulatory takings are typically public goods, and on a principle of fairness, which holds that compensation should be paid when those who benefit from a regulatory taking pay virtually nothing and those who pay receive hardly any benefit. It is argued that this principle is implicit in many of the Court's rulings on regulatory takings. (shrink)

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is one of America’s most powerful statutes, not only in American domestic environmental law, but in American domestic law in general. The first part of the ESA gives us the ‘Findings, Purposes, and Policy’ that underlie the Act. In this prefratory language, it is explicit that the ESA is referring to instrumental aesthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific values. But J. Baird Callicott and Andrew Wetzler argued that the ESA is also (...) implicitly committed to endangered species having intrinsic value. I argue that the best explanation of the seeming tacit intrinsic value in the ESA is not that such value really is implicit in the ESA; rather, the best explanation is that the ESA is committed to instrumental value with a certain feature that has not been carefully considered in the environmental ethics/philosophy literature before, that of incalculable instrumental value, in this case held by endangered species. (shrink)

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA) is America's strongest environmental law. Its citizen-suit provision—permitting “any person” whomsoever to sue on behalf of a threatened or endangered species—awards implicit intrinsic value, de facto standing, and operational legal rights (sensu Christopher D. Stone) to listed species. Accordingly, some cases had gone forward in the federal courts in the name of various listed species between 1979 (Palila v. Hawaii Dept. of Land & Natural Resources) and 2004 (...) (Cetacean Community v. Bush), when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that animals could not sue in their own name. Because the Supreme Court has interpreted its habitat destruction as the “taking” of a listed species, some have argued that enforcement of the ESA's critical-habitat-protection provision is a “regulatory taking” of private property without just compensation, contrary to the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. The courts have not agreed. The ESA citizen-suit provision appears to waive federal-court standing requirements devolved from Article III of the U.S. Constitution, creating much confusion and mutually contradictory rulings. A series of cases (culminating with Bennett v. Spear) reconciles the ESA's citizen-suit provision with the particularized and concrete “injury-in-fact” standing requirements devolved from Article III. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In their recent efforts to protect the Southern Resident killer whale population in the Salish Sea and bring ‘Lolita’ home, the Lummi Nation exposed significant limitations to species and habitats as values in Western conservation models. Where Indigenous conservation falls outside this scope, it is often invisible to or actively suppressed by the settler state. The conservation practices of NOAA, in accordance with the federal policy of the ESA, have amounted to extractive colonial enterprises, treating the whales as (...) educational, economic, and environmental possessions while degrading the relationship of the Lummi to the whales as relatives and attacking Lummi sovereignty. (shrink)

During the mid-nineteenth century, the eminent British zoologist Alfred Newton recognized that some of the ideas embedded in Origin of Species provided new scientific rationales for the preservation of endangered species. He then embarked on a twenty-five-year-long campaign for law reforms and successfully lobbied Parliament to enact three new statutes for the preservation of endangered wild birds that gave priority to the scientific value of rare species. The account of Newton’s campaign presented in this article (...) helps to locate Newton in the nineteenth century conservation movement, while also shining a side light on the relationship between conservation science and policy-making more generally, including the variety of voices and approaches taken to conservation in the UK and US. Today, as we pursue new regulatory responses to critical environmental issues, such as biodiversity loss and climate change, the history of Newton’s campaign offers an early example of a successful approach to science-based law reform. It also shows how some of the issues that Newton and his contemporaries confronted at the science-policy interface in the nineteenth century are enduring and remain relevant today, including debates about; the role of scientist-advocates in policy-making, the criteria that make science advice effective, and whether the “democratization” of science leads to better policy decisions. (shrink)

Tragic moral conflicts are situations from within which whatever one does—including abstaining from action—will be seriously wrong; even the overall right decision involves violating a moral responsibility. This article offers an account of recovery predicaments, a particular kind of tragic conflict that characterizes the current extinction crisis. Recovery predicaments occur when the human-caused extinction of a species or population cannot be prevented without breaching moral responsibilities to animals by doing violence to or otherwise severely dominating them. Recognizing the harm (...) of acting from within recovery conflicts adds force to appeals for interrogating and dismantling the systems of thinking, valuing, and acting that bring species to the brink of extinction. (shrink)

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska, USA, conducted a species status assessment for a petition to list the Alexander Archipelago wolf (Canis lupus ligoni) under the Endangered Species Act in 2020-2022. This federal undertaking could not be adequately prepared without including the knowledge of Indigenous People who have a deep cultural connection with the subspecies. Our objective is to communicate the authoritative expertise and voice of the Indigenous People who partnered on the project by (...) demonstrating how their knowledge contributed to the species status assessment. The Indigenous knowledge applied in the assessment is the cultural and intellectual property of those who have shared it. We employed rapid appraisal research to expeditiously develop a preliminary and qualitative understanding of Indigenous People's cultural and ecological knowledge of Alexander Archipelago wolves. We used semi-directed interviewing and inductive coding from grounded theory for text analysis. Indigenous knowledge contributed to the agency's understanding of the Alexander Archipelago wolf in Southeast Alaska and helped the agency with their classification decision. Indigenous research partners explained the rich cultural significance and position of wolves in Tlingit society and described human–wolf relationships and ecological interactions. The agency used a single-species assessment approach based in species ecology and conservation biology, whereas the Indigenous wolf experts applied a multi-species, community ecology approach based in a sociocultural context of balance and respect. The Indigenous wolf experts successfully addressed knowledge gaps identified by the agency. The partners were challenged by a short regulatory timeframe that did not allow for comprehensive study of Indigenous knowledge and constrained review and feedback by Indigenous experts. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service learned that its assessment framework was not designed to account for an Indigenous worldview. To level the playing field, the agency and Indigenous experts should discuss how to co-develop an assessment framework that equitably applies both perspectives. (shrink)

In arecent article Christopher D. Stone has effectively withdrawn his proposal that natural objects be granted legal rights, in response to criticism from the Feinberg/McCloskey camp. Stone now favors a weaker proposal that natural objects be granted what he calls legal considerateness. I argue that Stone’s retreat is both unnecessary and undesirable. I develop the notion of a de facto legal right and argue that species already have legal rights as statutory beneflciaries of the Endangered Species Act (...) of 1973. I conclude that granting certain nonhuman natural entities legal rights is both more important and less costly than Stone and his critics have realized, and that it is not Stone’s original proposal which needs rethinking, but the concept of interests at work in the Feinberg/McCloskey position. (shrink)

Courts have determined that adaptive management does not satisfy the Endangered Species Act's requirement to use the ‘best available science’. This is due, in part, to the failure to recognise the role of non-epistemic values in science. We examine the role of values in the legal controversy over the scientific reports and adaptive management plans for endangered salmon in the Columbia River Basin. To do this, we employ philosophical concepts related to risk and uncertainty that demonstrate how (...) non-epistemic values are internal to science. We describe how, because adaptive management is a method for dealing with inductive risk, by remaining flexible, responsive and adaptive in those circumstances where the costs of making a mistake are very high, it requires special attention to ensure that it remains useful. We conclude that, because non-epistemic values will inevitably influence the ‘best available science’, it is critical that they are clarified in any adaptive management planning so that we can ensure the salmon conservation that the ESA mandates. Fortunately, because adaptive management is iterative in nature and includes opportunities for engagement between policymakers and scientists, it enables clarification of non-epistemic values through making standards of evidence transparent, acknowledging aims and goals and dealing with uncertainty at the institutional level. (shrink)

Efforts to protect endangered species by regulating the use of privately owned lands are routinely resisted by appeal to the private property rights of landowners. Recently, the 'wise-use' movement has emerged as a primary representative of these landowners' claims. In addressing the issues raised by the wise-use movement and others like them, legal scholars and philosophers have typically examined the scope of private property rights and the extent to which these rights should influence public policy decisions when weighed (...) against other moral considerations. Whether from an anthropocentric standpoint or from a perspective of moral extensionism, the key question seems to be the extent to which prima facie property rights are overridden by other moral interests, not whether such rights claims can reasonably be appealed to at all in public discussions of environmental justice. I argue, however, that a morally extensionist perspective not only introduces more potential defeaters of prima facie property rights, but actually strips appeals to private property rights of their moral significance. Hence, I argue on Rawlsian grounds that appealing to private property rights in the way that the wise-use movement does is unreasonable in a pluralistic society. In so doing, I show that a Rawlsian perspective may be more congenial to the interests of moral extensionists than is typically thought. (shrink)

This article examines how the authorization of scientific discourses in the US Endangered Species Act of 1973 has influenced the ways people make claims about culturally significant animals. In it, I focus on struggles over the management of two endangered fish species among a federally recognized Native American tribe, state resource managers, and other actors. I discuss how the requirements of the ESA, namely that decisions regarding the protection of endangered species must be made (...) based “solely on the basis of the best scientific…data available,” have pushed people to reframe their cultural claims about the environment as scientific claims in order to gain legal authority. I argue that these animals span the social worlds of indigenous hunters and fishers, regulators, and ecological scientists. As such, they offer the opportunity to interrogate the relationships among ways of knowing the environment. I suggest that strict divisions among “types” of knowledge as well as hard-and-fast bonds between groups and “their” knowledge become problematic. Instead, people assemble eclectic articulations of knowledge to make the most authoritative claim possible in a given context, contradicting the assumption that certain people know the world only, or primarily, in a particular way. (shrink)

In his recent article Should Trees Have Standing? Revisited" Christopher D. Stone has effectively withdrawn his proposal that natural objects be granted legal rights, in response to criticism from the Feinberg/McCloskey camp. Stone now favors a weaker proposal that natural objects be granted what he calls legal "considerateness". I argue that Stone's retreat is both unnecessary and undesirable. I develop the notion of a "de facto" legal right and argue that species already have de facto legal rights as statutory (...) beneficiaries of the "Endangered Species Act of 1973." I conclude that granting certain nonhuman natural entities legal rights is both more important and less costly that Stone and his critics have realized, and that it is not Stone's original proposal which needs rethinking, but the concept of interests at work in the Feinberg/McCloskey position. (shrink)

Drones deployed to monitor endangered species often crash. These crashes teach us that using drones for conservation is a contingent practice ensnaring humans, technologies, and animals. This article advances a crash theory in which pilots, conservation drones, and endangered megafauna are relata, or related actants, that intra-act, cocreating each other and a mutually constituted phenomena. These phenomena are entangled, with either reciprocal dependencies or erosive entrapments. The crashing of conservation drones and endangered species requires an (...) ethics of care, repair, or reworlding. Diffractions, disruptions that expose difference, result from crashes and reveal the precarious manner by which technologies, laws, and discourses bring nature and culture together. To support crash theory, this article presents three ethnographic cases. A drone crash in the United Kingdom near white rhinoceroses while building machine learning training data exhibits the involvement of the electromagnetic spectrum; the threat of crashes in the Pacific Northwest near Puget Sound orcas discloses the impacts of drone laws; and drone crashes in Sri Lanka among Asian elephants presents the problems of technoliberal ideals around programming natural worlds. Throughout the article, a methodology is developed, parallelism, which attends to the material similarities in lateral phenomena. (shrink)

Should environmental philosophers – or practical conservationists – focus their attentions on particular living creatures, or on the community of which they, and we, are part? The individualist ethos of the United States is reflected in legislation to protect endangered species in which particular species are portrayed as individuals with rights that must be protected. By contrast, the planning of environmental protection in Norway, exemplified by the Samla Plan for the management of water resources, emphasizes the importance (...) of community integrity, where 'community' includes the whole of nature. These differing approaches are considered in the light of moral monism and pluralism, with special reference to Christopher Stone's recent work. Despite their differences, and the reservation that each method inevitably takes a human perspective, it can be hoped that each may contribute to enabling people and political systems to consider nature more seriously. (shrink)

In their fine paper, Evans et al. discuss the proposition that invasive non-native species are harmful. The question to ask is, “Harmful to whom?” Pathogens that make people sick and pests that damage their property—crops, for example—cause harms of kinds long understood in common law and recognized by public agencies. The concept of “ harm to the environment,” in contrast, has no standing in common law or legislation, no meaning for any empirical science, and no basis in a political (...) consensus other than might be drawn from the Endangered Species Act. As a generalization, the proposition that INS cause “environmental harm ”—since this concept is empty of legal, scientific, and political meaning—must rest on definition, diktat, or diatribe. As Evans et al. suggest, however, the idea of “ harm to the environment” is not always and certainly need not be arbitrary; it might gather significance in the context of a particular place through a political process that weighs economic concerns with cultural, religious, aesthetic, and other relevant beliefs, practices, and commitments that people who care about that place present. It is not clear, however, that adaptive management, which Evens et al. propose, will provide that democratic political process. (shrink)

In the United States, the northern spotted owl has declined throughout the Pacific Northwest even though its habitat has been protected under the Endangered Species Act. The main culprit for this decline is the likely human-facilitated invasion of the barred owl. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service conducted an experiment in which they lethally removed the barred owls from selected areas in Washington, Oregon, and California. In those locations, the northern spotted owl populations have stabilized and increased. (...) Some have argued that we should kill the barred owl to protect the northern spotted owl. In this essay, I argue that the competitive displacement of northern spotted owls by the barred owl should not be addressed by killing the later to save the former. The most powerful objection to this conclusion is that we will lose old-growth temperate rainforest without an indicator species like the spotted owl protected under the Endangered Species Act. In response, I argue that we should directly conserve old-growth temperate rainforest independent of the northern spotted owl. In effect, we need legislation and policies that protects endangered ecosystems. (shrink)

Criticism of court decisions is a favored American pastime. Typically, such criticisms are grounded in extra-legal criteria such as common sense (or lack of it) and morality (or immorality). Thus Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill (1978) in which the Supreme Court halted the construction of the nearly completed Tellico Dam because it endangered the habitat of the snail darter, an action forbidden by the Endangered Species Act, was said to confound common sense; and many have called immoral (...) Roe v. Wade (1973) which said the right to abortion, at least through the first trimester, was constitutionally guaranteed. 1 However, even if such criticisms are justified, they do not address the legal issue, which is whether the court got the law wrong. (shrink)

In this chapter, I discuss the Endangered Species Act (ESA), along with explaining what the reader needs to know about species and about certain philosophical issues regarding species. I investigate how the late stalwart conservative Justice Antonin Scalia interpreted the fit between the Fish and Wildlife’s definition of harm in the Code of Federal Regulations and what the ESA implies about harm in a landmark Supreme Court case, Babbitt v. Sweet Home. Scalia argues that the FWS (...) definition of “harm” is inconsistent with the ESA. Here, I come to Scalia’s defense by responding to objections that have been made to his argument. In my response, I further fill out his argument and appeal to what I have written elsewhere about whether we harm individual nonhuman organisms or nonhuman species when we impair breeding behaviors in our various human-habitat expansion activities. This question is related to the following broader question prominent in the field of environmental ethics: whether it makes sense to say that we can harm populations or even species understood as meta-populations. (shrink)

Until recently, the history of environmentalism was primarily a history of attention to place. In the United States, environmentalists have gotten rather good at protecting and managing particular places such as mountains, forests, and watersheds and specific resources such as trees, soil, wildlife, air, and water. Environmentalism has become an enormously popular social movement, with, by some measures, more than 80 percent of Americans considering themselves environmentalists. Thousands of organizations, ranging from local volunteer groups to national nonprofits, address issues as (...) diverse as open space, air and water pollution, biological diversity, environmental justice, and environmental effects on human health. The successes of this movement have been striking. Our National Parks, National Forests, and wilderness areas are touted as models for the world and are well complemented by state, municipal, and private protected areas. The Endangered Species Act successfully resolves many conflicts between rare creatures and development. Rivers have been cleaned up, and once-spurned urban waterfronts now draw real estate and tourism development. Americans drink cleaner water and breathe cleaner air than much of the rest of the world, and attempts to weaken regulatory frameworks are consistently met with public disapproval. (shrink)

The endangered species Tokudaia osimensis has the unique chromosome constitution of 2n = 25, with an XO/XO sex chromosome configuration (2n = 25; XO). There is urgency to preserve this species and to elucidate the regulator(s) that can discriminate the males and females arising from the indistinguishable sex chromosome constitution. However, it is not realistic to examine this rare animal species by sacrificing individuals. Recently, true naïve induced pluripotent stem cells were successfully generated from a female (...) T. osimensis, and the sexual plasticity of its germ cells was elucidated. This achievement constitutes the basis of an attractive research area, including embryonic fate determination, sex determination, and factor(s) that can replace the Y chromosome. In this essay, concrete strategies to conserve rare animal species and to reveal their specific characteristics using other compatible and abundant animals are proposed. -/- . (shrink)

Assuming that both humans and nonhuman organisms have intrinsic value, the concept of a “death with dignity” should extend to the natural world. Recently, an effort has been undertaken to save the razorback sucker, an endangered species of fish in the Colorado River. Razorback are bred and raised in captivity and transferred to the river only when large enough to survive predation by nonnative fish. While this effort is well-intentioned, there is little chance that the razorback will again (...) live unassisted in the Colorado River. There may be human-centered reasons for saving the razorback. However, just as respecting a person sometimes requires limiting his or her life-sustaining medical treatment, so too respecting the razorback may require removing human assistance with its reproductive cycle. (shrink)

Why save endangered species without clear aesthetic, economic, or ecosystemic value? This book takes on this challenging question through an account of the intrinsic goods of species. Ian A. Smith argues that a species’ intrinsic value stems from its ability to flourish—its organisms continuing to reproduce successfully and it avoiding extinction—which helps to demonstrate a further claim, that humans ought to preserve species that we have endangered. He shows our need to exercise humility in (...) our relations with endangered species through the preservation of their intrinsic goods, which in turn rectifies our degradation of their importance. Unique in its appeal to virtue ethics and to species concepts, _The Intrinsic Value of Endangered Species_ is an important resource for scholars working in environmental ethics and the philosophy of biology. (shrink)

Some environmental ethicists and economists argue that attributing infinite value to the environment is a good way to represent an absolute obligation to protect it. Others argue against modelling the value of the environment in this way: the assignment of infinite value leads to immense technical and philosophical difficulties that undermine the environmentalist project. First, there is a problem of discrimination: saving a large region of habitat is better than saving a small region; yet if both outcomes have infinite value, (...) then decision theory prescribes indifference. Second, there is a problem of swamping probabilities: an act with a small but positive probability of saving an endangered species appears to be on par with an act that has a high probability of achieving this outcome, since both have infinite expected value. Our paper shows that a relative concept of infinite value can be meaningfully defined, and provides a good model for securing the priority of the natural environment while avoiding the failures noted by sceptics about infinite value. Our claim is not that the relative infinity utility model gets every detail correct, but rather that it provides a rigorous philosophical framework for thinking about decisions affecting the environment. (shrink)

I argue against several extant views (Rolston, etc) about the value of endangered species. I argue that the best way to defend a non-anthropocentric view about the value of endangered species is to appeal to the intrinsic value of biological diversity.

As a collaboratively edited and open-access knowledge archive, Wikipedia offers a vast dataset for training artificial intelligence (AI) applications and models, enhancing data accessibility and access to information. However, reliance on the crowd-sourced encyclopedia raises ethical issues related to data provenance, knowledge production, curation, and digital labor. Drawing on critical data studies, feminist posthumanism, and recent research at the intersection of Wikimedia and AI, this study employs problem-centered expert interviews to investigate the relationship between Wikipedia and large language models (LLMs). (...) Key findings include the unclear role of Wikipedia in LLM training, ethical issues, and potential solutions for systemic biases and sustainability challenges. By foregrounding these concerns, this study contributes to ongoing discourses on the responsible use of AI in digital knowledge production and information management. Ultimately, this article calls for greater transparency and accountability in how big tech entities use open-access datasets like Wikipedia, advocating for collaborative frameworks prioritizing ethical considerations and equitable representation. (shrink)

Biologists are often placed in the difficult position of defending a threatened habitat or animal with vague reasoning and faulty logic simply because they have no better rationale at their immediate disposal. This places them at a distinct disadvantage and literally at the mercy of resource exploiters and their easily assignable dollar values. Although the initial dollar cost of delaying or precluding “development” may be sigriificant, the long-term benefits of saving the biological entities which might otherwise be destroyed are likewise (...) great and are measurable in concrete terms which society is only now beginning to appreciate. Case histories are presented, a more profound rationale is explained, and the environmentalist is challenged to make his case sufficiently effective to reverse the current exploitive trends which threaten so many of Earth’s life forms. (shrink)

China's environmental problems are well known, but recently its record in the area of wildlife conservation, particularly with regard to endangered species, has come under scrutiny. Environmental values colour how we in the West view both China's past experience with wildlife and what strategies it should adopt to foster better conservation. Chinese have long taken a utilitarian view of wildlife, valuing species primarily as resources for man's use and only secondarily for other reasons. However, China has not (...) developed institutions capable of sustaining the desired use of wildlife in the face of ever-growing demands. I suggest that Western criticisms of Chinese utilitarian attitudes are inappropriate, ineffective, and possibly counter-productive: deep-seated cultural mores change slowly. Instead, Westerners concerned with the fate of China's wildlife should assist the development of systems that act to channel demand for wildlife's material benefits toward investment in conservation. Such systems will likely require devolution of considerable control to local levels, strengthening incentives to favour long- over short-term benefits, and – notwithstanding common Western attitudes – substantial consumptive use of wildlife. (shrink)

Herein we examine the theory and practical limits of designing a voluntary incentive scheme to protect endangered species on private land. We consider both an ay-ante scheme, in which a contract to the landholder depends only on what the landholder reports, and an ay-post scheme, in which a contract to the landholder depends on reports from all landowners. Except in special cases, the ex-ante scheme never implements the full information allocation, and can actually set aside too much land. (...) In contrast, expected habitat size under the ex-post scheme is smaller than both the ex-ante and full information allocations. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science (USA). (shrink)

After all, ever since the abandonment of the classical curriculum in the mid-nineteenth century, the courses of studies in American colleges have been characterized by ever-increasing diversity, responses to highly particular social and individual demands, spin-offs from traditional disciplines, specializations breeding subspecializations, and the like. Stringent counterrevolutions, such as the one undertaken in the College of the University of Chicago some thirty years ago, have been infrequent and brief. What, then, is so special about the present seductive disarray in literary (...) studies. Chiefly, I think, the importance of this compartmentation lies in the way we are encouraged to think of literary works and to respond to them. If we persuade ourselves that novels and plays and poems are written by members of an identifiable subgroup—whether that group be defined in national, ethnic, sexual, class, or special interest terms—and can be properly understood, and appreciated only by those who know the code of the same subgroup, we should be prepared to accept the implications of the position we are espousing. If, to cite a specific example, what is called the Black Aesthetic points to a mode of artistic apprehension that is not available to non-Blacks, it casts the rest of us, however curious and interested, in the roles of voyeurs and eavesdroppers. Here, as so often, our best writers anticipate and dramatize notions which become solemn critical propositions later on. In Saul Bellow's second novel, The Victim, published thirty years ago, the protagonist, Leventhal, recalls a party at which two of his friends, both Jewish, were singing spirituals and old ballads. They were being needled by a drunken New England WASP named Kirby Albee. "Why do you sing such songs?" he said. "You can't sing them.""Why not, I'd like to know?" said the girl."Oh, you, too," said Albee with his one cornered smile. "it isn't right for you to sing them. You have to be born to them, it's no use trying to sing them." Robert E. Streeter served for many years as Dean of the College and later as Dean of the Humanities at the University of Chicago where he is now Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor. He is one of the editors of Critical Inquiry. "WASPs and Other Endangered Species" was presented as the Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago on 5 April 1977. (shrink)

The following lines aim at two goals: firstly, connecting the three blind spots that Katrin Becker's article has identified in the analysis of society promoted by advocates of blockchain technology; secondly, reflecting on the possible hybridization between classical and digital forms of legal procedures. What we are witnessing is a transfer of legality from a spatial and linguistic order to a non-spatial, non-linguistic one which is based on out-of-space lines of written code. The interpretation of what space means for justice (...) becomes therefore a crucial social stake in the possible hybridization of classical and digital procedures. (shrink)

Indonesia consists of more than 17,000 islands separated for hundreds of thousands of years making both the biodiversity and culture diverse. Strong connection between people and biodiversity form a vast array of traditional knowledges retaliated to the conservation and use of biological diversity. During the last 3 decades, tremendous advancement on science and technology has been able to uncover the intrinsic value of biodiversity. Many lead chemical compounds have been isolated and identified, and has opened up huge opportunities in developing (...) new business based on biodiversity. International cooperation between Japan and Indonesia successfully isolated more than 1,000 species of actinomycetes from diverse ecosystems and more than 30% are new species. This group of microbe is important for future pharmaceutical industries. The consciousness on intrinsic value of biodiversity is, however, only being understood by countries having high science and technology capacity. The intrinsic value of biodiversity remains abstract to most of the people in the developing and less developed nations. The Convention on Biological Diversity (UN-CBD), Cartagena and Nagoya Protocol are legal documents to ensure conservation, sustainable use and sharing of the benefit from the utilization of biodiversity and its components. There is a high demand for the developed nations on access to biodiversity to uncover its benefit. The mechanism on access, fair and equitable sharing of the benefit from the utilization of biodiversity and its component are certainly full of ethical dilemma. For this, there is a great need for the developing country having rich biodiversity find the most appropriate way to manage biodiversity and traditional knowledge for their prosperity. Trust between countries rich in biodiversity and countries having high science and technology capacity is a crucial factor. Greater transparency and the recognition on comprehensive rights of people providing biodiversity is a key element in maintaining trust. Ethical standards cannot depend solely on rules or guidelines. (shrink)

This paper aims to establish that time travel into the past is, at best, highly improbable. It does this by first establishing the causal dependency of identity relations for a person or object travelling into the past. The paper then goes on to show how hard it is to avoid a closed causal loop in time travel experiments, and the inherently contradictory nature of said loops. It then raises the question of how such loops could be avoided without affecting the (...) identity requirements of the traveller, thus drawing the conclusion that while, strictly speaking, time travel has not been proved impossible, the combination of circumstance required to avoid contradiction is so unlikely as to render such activity highly improbable. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is on normative ethical theories and endangered species. To be exact, I examine two theories: the theory of obligation and care ethics, and ask which is better-suited in the case of endangered species. I argue that the aretic, feminist-inspired ethics of care is well-suited in the case of companion animals, but ill-suited in the case of endangered species, especially in the case of “unlovable” species. My argument presupposes that (...) we now live an era where human disturbances to planetary ecosystems are triggering a sixth mass species extinction, and widespread interventions will be needed to save many species from extinction. (shrink)

Environmental groups have worked tirelessly to save several species of endangered fish along the Colorado River, including the humpback chub (Gila cypha). The humpback chub does not seem to have any significant instrumental goods, but these environmentalists have championed its cause nonetheless. If the humpback chub has no instrumental goods, then appealing to another kind of goods is needed to show that it should be preserved. Some environmental ethicists have suggested appealing to the intrinsic goods of a (...) class='Hi'>species (or, alternatively, its intrinsic value or inherent value). Drawing on and going beyond John O’Neill’s work, it can be argued that all currently existing (biological) species have their own goods, or intrinsic goods. In terms of the notion of flourishing, the intrinsic goods of a species consist in its abilities to flourish. These goods can be used to construct a defense of the view that a species, even a species such as the humpback chub, ought to be preserved. One way to construct this defense is to appeal to virtue ethics, specifically the virtue of humility. Exercising the virtue of humility in our relations with species that we human beings have endangered involves preserving them along with preserving their intrinsic goods. (shrink)

Abstract:The focus of this paper is on managed relocations and endangered wild species. The main argument is that managed relocations should be a viable policy option in the toolbox of conservation management despite any ecological risks. This argument is defended on the basis of recent research that demonstrates that not all alien species are invasive species, and that not all invasive species have negative ecological impacts. In other words, a nuanced case-by-case approach is needed. This (...) argument is presented within the context of the Bramble Cay Melomys, a rat-like creature and the first mammal to become extinct as a result of anthropogenic climate change. A secondary objective of this paper is to explore some of the future economic and policy challenges likely to face managed relocations. (shrink)

In wildlife conservation work, rewilding - to make wild once again - refers to the creation of corridors between preserved lands that allow declining populations to rebound. Marc Bekoff, one of our most engaging animal experts and activists, here applies the concept to human attitudes. He argues that unless we rewild ourselves, becoming profoundly reconnected to nature and fundamentally shifting our consciousness, our conservation efforts will have but limited impact. Bekoff shows that when we make the effort to not just (...) see, but to empathetically become "the seen," our perspective on animals and their habitats changes in profound ways. As we shift to acting from the inside out, our efforts move beyond simply reacting to current crises and become powerfully proactive. Ultimately, Rewilding Our Hearts invites readers to become re-enchanted with our world, and by dissolving false boundaries, to truly connect with both nature and ourselves. (shrink)