In this paper I argue that the hoary theological doctrine of divine concurrence poses no deep threat to Leibniz’s views on theodicy and creaturely activity even as those views have been traditionally understood. The first three sections examine respectively Leibniz’s views on creation, conservation and concurrence, with an eye towards showing their sys­tematic compatibility with Leibniz’s theodicy and metaphysics. The fourth section takes up remaining worries arising from the bridging principle that conservation is a continued or continuous (...) creation, and argues that they can be allayed once two readings of the prin­ciple are distinguished. What emerges from the discussion as a whole is, I hope, a clearer picture of Leibniz’s views on the nature of monadic causation, his understanding of the relationship between divine and creaturely activity, and his position with respect to later medieval and early modern debates over secondary causation. (shrink)

God is conceived in the Western theistic tradition to be both the Creator and Conservor of the universe. These two roles were typically classed as different aspects of creation, originating creation and continuing creation. On pain of incoherence, however, conservation needs to be distinguished from creation. Contrary to current analyses (such as Philip Quinn's), creation should be explicated in terms of God's bringing something into being, while conservation should be understood in terms of (...) God's preservation of something over an interval of time. The crucial difference is that while conservation presupposes an object of the divine action, creation does not. Such a construal has significant implications for a tensed theory of time. (shrink)

The traditional view of divine conservation holds that it is simply a continuation of the initial act of creation. In this essay, I defend the continuous-creation tradition against William Lane Craig's criticism that continuous creation fundamentally misconstrues the intuitive distinction between creation and conservation. According to Craig, creation is the unique causal activity of bringing new patient entities into existence, while conservation involves acting upon already existing patient entities to cause their continued (...) existence. I defend continuous creation by challenging Craig's intuitive distinction and by showing that the alternative account of creation and conservation he bases upon it is fraught with serious internal difficulties. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Initial Reservations Coming to Be and Being Self‐Sustenance Conservation Principles and Secondary Causes Divine Intervention Works cited.

The preceding account of causation reveals it as bound to the physical every bit as much as are length, breadth, and depth. This makes any conception of divine agency difficult to defend, and a further problem is to be found in the consideration that a divine act, as of creation, would have to be temporally extended. God's relation to time is discussed, and it is argued that there is no call for an appeal to a creative act to explain (...) the continuing existence of the universe. (shrink)

According to an important set of medieval arguments, it is impossible to make a distinction between creation and conservation on the assumption of a beginningless universe. The argument is that, on such an assumption, either God is never causally sufficient for the existence of the universe, or, if He is at one time causally sufficient for the existence of the universe, He is at all times causally sufficient for the universe, and occasionalism is true. I defend the claim (...) that these arguments are successful. Since Christian theology requires a distinction between creation and conservation, arguments in favour of the possible eternity of the world fail. (shrink)

This paper examines Leibniz’s views on the theistic doctrine of continual creation and considers their implications for his theory of finite substance. Three main theses are defended: (1) that Leibniz takes the traditional account of continual creation to involve the literal re-creation of all things in a successive series of instantaneous states, (2) that a straightforward commitment to the traditional account would give rise to serious problems within Leibniz’s theory of finite substance and his metaphysics more generally, (...) and (3) that Leibniz does not straightforwardly affirm the continual creation doctrine, despite certain texts that initially seem to suggest otherwise. I also present a more speculative interpretive hypothesis about what Leibniz’s considered view of creation might have been, namely that in a single act, God creates and conserves substances that are non-spatial and atemporal at the deepest level of reality. (shrink)

Every so often a book comes along that transforms one’s perspective on a major development in the history of science. Kenneth Caneva’s is one of them. Built upon decades of immersion in the primary...

In his book, "Water into Wine," Robert Larmer argues that miracles can occur as divine interventions in the world without involving any change or suspension of the laws of nature. They may do this by the direct creation or destruction of some of the basic ’stuff’ of the universe, while it continues to conform to the unaltered laws. This paper, on the contrary, claims that conservation is essential to the concept of the ’stuff’ as being basic, and that (...) changes in its total quantity therefore undermine the laws of nature just as seriously as any other conflicting evidence. (shrink)

In contrast to Christian theology that has ignored science, this essay suggests that a credible doctrine of God as creator must take into account scientific understandings of the world. The introduction of the principle of inertia into seventeenth‐century science and philosophy helped change the traditional idea of God as creator (which included divine conservation and governance) into a deist concept of God. To recapture the idea that God continually creates, it is important to affirm the contingency of the world (...) as a whole and of all events in the world. Reflecting on the interrelationship of contingency and natural law provides a framework for relating scientific theories of a universal field, the concept of emergent evolution, and the theological concept of eternal divine spirit active in all creation. (shrink)

Louis de La Forge and the Development of Occasionalism: Continuous Creation and the Activity of the Soul STEVEN NADLER THE DOCTRINE OF DIVINE CONSERVATION is a dangerous one. It is not theologi- cally dangerous, at least not in itself. From the thirteenth century onwards, and particularly with the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas, the notion of the continuous divine sustenance of the world of created things was, if not univer- sally accepted, a nonetheless common feature of theological orthodoxy, (...) Chris- tian and otherwise. Rather, the danger is philosophical in nature . The philosophical problem I am concerned with is not some logical incoherence at the heart of the doctrine; nor does it lie in any objections that can be raised against the arguments that, historically, have been given for the thesis that God, as a causa secundum esse, must continually act in order to conserve the world in being. The question I address -- and it is a pressing one for any seventeenth-century Cartesianmis whether the doctrine of divine conservation establishes too much. I believe that, under certain circumstances, it does, and that the ultimate ramifications of the doctrine for natural causality must be unacceptable to an orthodox Cartesian such as Louis de La Forge , perhaps the most strict follower of Descartes of the.. (shrink)

Creation and conservation are defined and distinguished; providence based on divine middle knowledge is defended; and miracles as naturally impossible events are defended.

On traditional theism, God is not only a creator but also a conserver. The doctrine of conservation, however, appears to face a dilemma. Either conservation is continuous re-creation with consequences inimical to diachronic identity, or conservation is an operation upon a pre-existent entity, which, because it is pre-existent, is in no clear need of conservation. This article first makes a case for the dilemma, and then proposes a way between its horns. Safe passage is possible (...) if we adopt presentist four-dimensionalism, i.e. the conjunction of presentism, according to which temporally present items alone exist, and four-dimensionalism, the doctrine that individuals are not continuants but wholes of temporal parts. (shrink)

This is the first time that the Disputations 20-22 have been translated into English. They deal with the divine action of creation, conservation and concurrence.

Malebranche’s so-called conservation is continuous creation (CCC) argument has been celebrated as a powerful and persuasive argument for Occasionalism—the claim that only God has and exercises causal powers. In this paper I want to examine the CCC argument for Occasionalism by comparing it to Jaegwon Kim’s so-called Supervenience argument against non-reductive physicalism. Because the arguments have deep similarities it is interesting and fruitful to consider them in tandem. First I argue that both the CCC argument and the Supervenience (...) argument turn on the same general principle, what Kim calls Edward’s Dictum. It is doubtful that Malebranche or Kim succeed in grounding Edward’s Dictum, though Malebranche, I think, has more resources at his disposal to make his case. Even if this worry is waived, however, I argue that the completion of Stage 1 of the Supervenience argument can be used to raise a further worry for the CCC argument that cannot easily be resolved. (shrink)

Insole claims that the Critical Kant is by and large a mere conservationist, transcendental-idealistically modified through the distinction between things in themselves and appearances. ‘Mere conservationism’ is a position within the debate about the interplay of God as the first cause and the created entities as secondary causes and belongs to the doctrine of divine concursus. For Insole, it is by virtue of this mere conservationism with regard to things in themselves as opposed to appearances, that transcendental freedom of man, (...) required in turn for Kant’s moral theory to prevail, can be upheld. I shall be focusing on two points of disagreement. These concern the so-called compatibility question regarding the threats emerging from God to human freedom. In my view, it is doubtful (i) whether, in this regard, Kant really attempted to establish that human freedom in the strong form required can be upheld by subscribing to mere conservationism regarding things in themselves in the manner Insole suggests, and whether Kant is successful in this attempt. Moreover, (ii) it is not obvious that a so-called ‘concurrentist’ view, i.e. a view according to which God’s causal activities with regard to the world exceed creation and conservation, would commit Kant to a compatibilist view in a more conventional sense. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article discusses two approaches to save the European white stork populations from extinction that emerged after 1980. Despite the shared objective to devise transnational, science-based conservation measures, the two approaches’ geographical focus was radically different. Projects by the World Wildlife Fund and the International Council for Bird Preservation focused firmly on the stork’s wintering areas on the African continent. Interventions by a second group of ornithologists at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell concentrated on the Middle (...) East as a migration bottleneck. Based on archival research, interviews and correspondence with involved ornithologists, the article examines stork representations as an important lens for investigating the professional politics of ecology and conservation. It shows that representations of white storks, the birds’ ecology, and derived conservation hotspots became part of the boundary work used by European ornithologists in the creation of changing scientific and institutional identities. (shrink)

We discuss a new theory of the universe in which the vacuum energy is of classical origin and dominates the energy content of the universe. As usual, the Einstein equations determine the metric of the universe. However, the scale factor is controlled by total energy conservation in contrast to the practice in the Robertson–Walker formulation. This theory naturally leads to an explanation for the Big Bang and is not plagued by the horizon and cosmological constant problem. It naturally accommodates (...) the notion of dark energy and proposes a possible explanation for dark matter. It leads to a dual description of the universe, which is reminiscent of the dual theory proposed by Milne in 1937. On the one hand one can describe the universe in terms of the original Einstein coordinates in which the universe is expanding, on the other hand one can describe it in terms of co-moving coordinates which feature in measurements. In the latter representation the universe looks stationary and the age of the universe appears constant. The paper describes the evolution of this universe. It starts out in a classical state with perfect symmetry and zero entropy. Due to the vacuum metric the effective energy density is infinite at the beginning, but diminishes rapidly. Once it reaches the Planck energy density of elementary particles, the formation of particles can commence. Because of the quantum nature of creation and annihilation processes spatial and temporal inhomogeneities appear in the matter distributions, resulting in residual proton (neutron) and electron densities. Hence, quantum uncertainty plays an essential role in the creation of a diversified complex universe with increasing entropy. It thus seems that quantum fluctuations play a role in cosmology similar to that of random mutations in biology. Other analogies to biological principles, such as recapitulation, are also discussed. (shrink)

The development of science, proceeding at a higher and higher speed, leads to the creation of new concepts, theories, and ideas. They constitute a progressive component of science. However, scientific development does not mean that everything that was accepted earlier has to be given up. New elements may be acquired and exist together with the old ones. Such old elements constitute a conservative component of science. That is why modern science shows itself as a wholeness constituted by the above-mentioned (...) components. (shrink)

Most accounts of the effect of the global marketplace on deforestation in Africa, Asia, and Latin America emphasize the demand for timber used in industrial processes and the conversion of tropical forests to pastures for beef cattle. In recent years, numerous scholars and policymakers have suggested that developing a market for non-timber forest products (NTFPs) might slow the pace of habitat destruction. Although increased demand for NTFPs rarely results in massive deforestation, the depletion of the raw materials needed to make (...) particular products is common.Many rural households in the Mexican state of Oaxaca have prospered over the past three decades through the sale of brightly-painted, whimsical wood carvings (alebrijes) to international tourists and the owners of ethnic arts shops in the United States, Canada, and Europe. This paper examines a promising project aimed at providing Oaxacan alebrije-makers with a reliable, legal, and sustainable supply of wood. The ecologists, artisans, merchants, and forest owners involved in the project face formidable obstacles. Gaining permission to harvest wood from land belonging to Oaxacan communities requires the negotiation of a complex social, legal, economic, and political landscape. Artisans’ decisions about where to obtain wood rest largely on price, quality, and reliability of the supplier; they are willing to pay a premium for ecologically sustainable wood only if the additional cost can be passed on to consumers. Nonetheless, a group of carvers has begun to buy sustainably harvested wood. This arrangement has economic advantages for both the alebrije-makers and the owners of the forests where the wood is produced. (shrink)

The importance and urgency of using ethical principles in the creation and content of climate change policy is well recognised. This article closely examines the World Conservation Union’s (IUCN) engagement in ethical elements of international climate policy for abatement. The primary finding is the use of narrow framing around ‘nature based solutions’. The IUCNs’ own policy references to ethical principles such as fairness and justice are not adequately applied to the content of policy or to its critique. Recommendations (...) are made on how the IUCN (and NGOs generally) could enhance its ethical engagement to act consistently with the claim of moral leadership. (shrink)

In this article, I explore Aquinas’s account of divine creative activities as a type of efficient causation. I propose that Aquinas’s works hold a framework for understanding God as an efficient cause and creating as an act of divine efficient causation that makes explicit what Aquinas views to be implicit in Aristotle’s account of efficient causation. I explore Aristotelian efficient causation in depth, offering a detailed analysis of the components of Aristotelian efficient causation. After this exploration, it is necessary to (...) address what reasons Aquinas has for viewing creation as efficient causation. I explore Aquinas’s understanding of creation and relate it to Aristotle’s analysis of efficient causation, analyzing how, precisely, Aquinas’s conception of efficient causation—which includes change, creation, and conservation—aligns with Aristotle’s. Because Aquinas’s account is derivable directly from elements in Aristotle’s account, Aquinas’s account can be understood to be implied by Aristotle’s account. (shrink)

The paper is inspired by the arguments raised recently by Grunbaum criticizing the current approaches of many cosmologists to the problem of spacetime singularity, matter creation and the origin of the universe. While agreeing with him that the currently favored cosmological ideas do not indicate the biblical notion of divine creation ex nihilo, I present my viewpoint on the same issues, which differs considerably from Grunbaum's. First I show that the symmetry principle which leads to the conservation (...) law of energy is violated when the time axis is terminated at t = 0. Next I discuss why this epoch (t = 0) is more a mathematical artifact whose supposed significance may disappear when one goes beyond the classical relativistic cosmology. This is illustrated by the example of quantum cosmology. (shrink)

The concept of continuous creation is now widely used in the context of reflections on the dialogue between science and religion. The first part of this research work seeks to understand its meaning through a twofold elaboration: (1) the historical setting of the three philosophical trends in which this concept was developed: scholastic (conservation), Cartesian (conservation through repetition of the creative act at each instant), and dynamic (interpreting the emergence of radical and contingent novelty in nature as (...) a sign of the continuity of creation); (2) a philosophical and theological critique of the concept of continuous creation regarding the question of the relationship between change and creation, in the light of its highly polymorphous contemporary use, and, in opposition, its absence within the Catholic Magisterium. This work opens the field a further step toward reflection on a renewed concept of continuous creation. (shrink)

The contemporary debate over man’s relation to his natural environment raises many complex issues which have thrown our familiar liberal and conservative political alignments into disarray. Although ecology is now generally regarded as a liberal cause with conservatives supporting commercial and industrial expansion, until very recently liberals almost unanimously championed industrialization andtechnological advance. Resistance to “progress” was the folly of only the most eccentric conservatives. Today, both liberal proponents of environmental protection and conservative defenders of business and industry argue on (...) merely prudential grounds: each side maintains that only the adoption of its own program can save human civilization from collapse, or even the race from extinction. Extremely radical environmentalists have based their arguments on nloral principle: humanity is just one species among many, and men are, therefore, morally obligated to respect the rights of other organisms and of the ecosystem as a whole. This position, however, is ultimately reducible to a self-contradictory utilitarianism. It is the reverent attitude of traditional conservatism - that man is superior to other creatures as the steward of creation, holding it not as absolute possessor but only in trust from his Creator - that promises both the most moral and the most sensible approach to environmental affairs. (shrink)

Nature conservation requires choices about what sort of nature should be protected in what areas and includes value judgments on what nature is and/or should be. This paper studies the role of differing views of nature in nature conservation. A case study on the creation of a drift sand area in the Netherlands illustrates how nature conservation disputes can be understood as a conflict in views of nature.

Malebranche presents two major arguments for occasionalism: the “no necessary connection” argument (NNC) and the “conservation is but continuous creation” argument (CCC). NNC appears prominently in his Search After Truth but virtually disappears and surrenders the spotlight to CCC in his later major work, Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion . This paper investigates the possible reasons and motivations behind this significant shift. I argue that the shift is no surprise if we consider the two ways in which (...) the CCC is preferable to NNC: it is not only more effective against opponents but also more consistent with his own views on freedom. (shrink)

Albert the Great does not regard the creation of the world as philosophically demonstrable. In this article, it is shown why this is so: because Albert regards the temporal beginning of the world as essential to the meaning of creation, and because he holds that it is impossible to demonstrate the temporal beginning of the world, he concludes that the creation of the world is philosophically indemonstrable. Albert insists that creation must imply a temporal beginning because (...) he thinks that temporal duration can only be created if it is created at a first instant. Albert’s position necessitates a sharp distinction between creation and conservation. Particular attention is given to Albert’s De causis et processu universitatis and Summa theologiae. (shrink)

The advantage ceramic of Balinese Kamasan ornament, it has a very strong Balinese identity. Therefore, the this ceramic creation was a novel creation by ceramic artists in Indonesia. Purpose this study to explain the process creation, types of products, and the meaning of ceramic craft creation the Balinese Kamasan puppet. The determination data sources by purposive sampling. Data collection methods by observation, interview, and documentation techniques. The results of creation process consisted of several stages with (...) a fairly long process, from the design to the final combustion process, which iscombusting the puppet ornaments on the ceramics surface at a temperature 10000C. The types of ceramic products produced, namely sangku and jars in several variations. Each ornament presents a snippet of a puppet story which is useful as a reflection of human life. The meaning shown from this creation was creativity, preservation, economy, and the national identity. The study finding was the ceramic creation process required a long time and high accuracy with painting techniques. The conclusion was this creation process requires patience and thoroughness and is part of the preservation of Balinese culture. (shrink)

Consumers' concerns for the environment have led to the creation of niche markets, quality certifications and labelling systems. Built by activists and NGOs, these systems were adopted by agribusiness. Such firms try to capture consumers and react to opinion campaigns, whilst appropriating the conservation (or 'fair') discourse. This leads to the rise of new forms of third-party certifications of food production based on private standards and, hence, to new forms of contract relations between producers and buyers. The nature (...) of these relationships is not always evident in these new labels or in the discourse built to justify them. This is particularly so in the case of goods produced in the South to be traded and sold in the North, as the case of Starbucks illustrates. By the end of the 1990s, Starbucks, operating through an NGO called Conservation International (CI), arrived at the region of El Triunfo, in Chiapas, and contacted the producers' cooperatives that were trying to find a market for their product. CI promoted Starbucks standards to raise the coffee quality and won the control over the production system. Meanwhile, the producers forced to sell their coffee through the largest trade company (AMSA) against whom the cooperatives were created, lost the control over their own organization. When some cooperatives refused the deal, they suffered divisions but could survive thanks the Fair Trade (FT) network in Chiapas. (shrink)

Against the historically widespread view that divine conservation is a continuation of the act of creation, William Lane Craig argues that conservation is a different kind of act since, unlike creation ex nihilo, it is diachronic and it acts on a patient. Timothy Miller poses a timing objection against Craig's view, arguing that on such a view either the existence of a conserved entity is discontinuous, or the conserving activity overdetermines its effect, or the conserving activity (...) is not continuous. The present paper explores the options that remain for a diachronic, agent-patient account of conservation. It includes several models of conservation on which divine activity is continuous but not overdetermined since its effect at each time is something less specific than the existence of a created being at a time. (shrink)

An integrable version of the Weyl-Dirac geometry is presented. This framework is a natural generalization of the Riemannian geometry, the latter being the basis of the classical general relativity theory. The integrable Weyl-Dirac theory is both coordinate covariant and gauge covariant (in the Weyl sense), and the field equations and conservation laws are derived from an action integral. In this framework matter creation by geometry is considered. It is found that a spatially confined, spherically symmetric formation made of (...) pure geometric quantities is a massive entity. This may be treated either as a fundamental particle or as a cosmic body. In an F-R-W universe at the very beginning of the expansion phase the cosmic matter is created from an initial Planckian egg made of geometry, and during the following expansion geometric fields continue to stimulate the matter production. (shrink)

Plausibly, if an object persists through time, then its later existence must be caused by its earlier existence. Many theists endorse a theory of continuous creation, according to which God is the sole cause of a creature's existence at a given time. The conjunction of these two theses rather unfortunately implies that no object distinct from God persists at all. What strategies for resolving this difficulty are available? (Published Online April 7 2006).

Thomas and Suarez understand God’s creation and conservation in a similar way: as God’s continually giving being to all creatures. The two philosophers also try to explain the way in which creaturely, secondary causality is guaranteed, but they do so in radically different ways. Suarez’s doctrine of concurrence is not a progressive development of Thomas’s doctrine of secondary, instrumental causality, with which this Suarezian innovation is incompatible. I try to show how different concurrentism is from Thomas’s doctrine of (...) secondary causality and to offer some criticism of the former by the latter. (shrink)

À l’instar d’Humpty Dumpty, le personnage de Lewis Carroll qui fête son non-anniversaire 364 jours par an, Bergson semble inscrire la discontinuité de l’événement dans la continuité de la durée. Il invite son lecteur à concevoir la nouveauté comme la trame du réel. Rien ne se répète jamais à l’identique, chaque événement est singulier et s’inscrit dans un temps irréversible. Pourtant, l’intelligence ne perçoit pas toujours cette « création continue d’imprévisible nouveauté » car elle immobilise et spatialise le réel en (...) le rendant homogène. Mais dès lors que l’esprit retrouve le caractère temporel de la réalité, le présent apparaît comme toujours inédit. Vu sous cet angle, la définition bergsonienne de l’événement semble donner au banal les caractéristiques de l’exceptionnel. Les non-anniversaires possèderaient la même consistance ontologique que les anniversaires sans pour autant disparaître dans l’homogénéité de la répétition quotidienne. L’événement serait à la fois une aspérité surgissant dans le flux de la durée et en même temps l’expression de la plus pure continuité. Pour résoudre cette apparente contradiction il faut alors se demander : comment Bergson réussit-il à concilier la nouveauté de l’événement avec la continuité de la durée? Pour répondre à cette question, nous montrerons comment Bergson introduit des différences qualitatives au sein de la continuité du devenir. Ces différences s’expriment à travers plusieurs niveaux de réalité que l’article étudie successivement. Nous partons de la métaphysique bergsonienne de la durée, capable de donner à l’événement un contenu réel et pas seulement représentatif. Grâce à l’épaisseur du devenir, l’événement se relie à la continuité spirituelle de la durée tout en conservant son caractère inédit et imprévisible. Son hétérogénéité le distingue de la pure discontinuité du fiat lux et de l’homogénéité mécaniste. La causalité des événements se révèle différente du simple mécanisme. Dans la seconde partie de l’article nous tirons les conséquences de cette métaphysique pour les appliquer à l’événement étudié sous l’angle de l’histoire. Partant d’un réexamen des apories du possible, nous examinons la valeur de l’uchronie pour ensuite décrire la manière dont Bergson théorise la connaissance historique et l’action des grands hommes. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Cybernetics, Reflexivity and Second-Order Science” by Louis H. Kauffman. Upshot: I demonstrate how Kauffman’s cogently argued article requires an act of imagination. I distinguish the act of perception, and its transformation as conception, as imagining. It is how we distinguish both the creation and exploration of our experience in context since, when we make a distinction, we also define the context, and this cannot be accomplished without circularity.

Industrialized agriculture currently substitutes many of the ecological functions of soil micro-organisms, macroinvertebrates, wild plants, and vertebrate animals with high cost inputs of pesticides and fertilizers. Enhanced biological diversity potentially offers agricultural producers a means of reducing the cost of their production. Conservation of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes may be greatly enhanced by the adoption of certain crop management practices, such as reduced pesticide usage or measures to prevent soil erosion. Still, the vast monocultures comprising the crop area in (...) many Canadian agricultural landscapes are often of limited conservation value, thus the inclusion of appropriate wildlife habitat in and around arable lands is a fundamental prerequisite for the integration of wild species within agricultural landscapes. This review of current literature considers the potential for non-crop areas within agricultural landscapes to be reservoirs of agronomically beneficial organisms including plants, invertebrates, and vertebrate species. Non-crop habitats adjacent to crop land have been identified as significant for the maintenance of plant species diversity, for the conservation of beneficial pollinating and predatory insects, and as essential habitat for birds. A key component for enhancement of biodiversity is the reintroduction of landscape heterogeneity by (1) protection and enhancement of key non-crop areas, (2) smaller fields and farms, and (3) a greater mixture of crops, through rotation, intercropping and regional diversification. The benefits of increased biodiversity within arable lands are reviewed for various species groups. In the Canadian context, any serious attempt to derive significant agronomic benefit from increased biodiversity will require considerable changes in the agricultural programs and policies which shape mainstream industrialized agriculture. The problems of crop depredation by vertebrate species, weed and insect competition, which still represent significant impediments to the creation and proper management of wildlife habitat, are also discussed. (shrink)

Entrepreneurs with social goals face various challenges; insights into how these entrepreneurs experience and appreciate their work remain a black box though. Drawing on identity, conservation of resources, and person–organization fit theories, this study examines how entrepreneurs’ social value creation beliefs relate to their work-related well-being (job satisfaction, work engagement, and lack of work burnout), as well as how this process might be influenced by social concerns with respect to the common good. Using data from the German Public (...) Value Atlas 2015 and 2019 and the Swiss Public Value Atlas 2017, a three-study design analyzes three samples of entrepreneurs in Germany and Switzerland. Study 1 reveals that entrepreneurs report higher job satisfaction when they believe their organization creates social value. Study 2 indicates that these beliefs relate negatively to work burnout; entrepreneurs’ perceptions of having meaningful work mediate this relationship. Study 3 affirms and extends these results by showing that a sense of work meaningfulness mediates the relationship between social value creation beliefs and work engagement and that this mediating role is more prominent among entrepreneurs with strong social concerns. This investigation thus identifies a critical pathway—the extent to which entrepreneurs experience their work activities as important and personally meaningful—that connects social value creation beliefs with enhanced work-related well-being, as well as how this process might vary with a personal orientation that embraces the common good. (shrink)

The author deals with conservative political philosophy by analysing its foundations and outlining the changes that this doctrine has undergone from its inception to the present day. Paradoxically, for a doctrine whose essence is scepticism about change and a belief in the known, conservatism has changed its foundations, whether we are talking about an organic understanding of society, tradition, property or religion and family values. The author argues that conservatives have lost the so-called cultural war to achieve victories in the (...) political arena, and in doing so have compromised their core beliefs. The author outlines the alliance of a conservative ideology with a neo-liberal or libertarian one, forged in the fight against etatism and communism, which resulted in the retreat of conservatism in favour of the ideas of classical liberalism. The reformation of conservatism by absorbing liberal values often led to the creation of an idea that could no longer be called conservative. The author uses examples of Anglo-American conservatism to try to confirm the thesis presented, but as a reaction to this process he also highlights the incarnation of the values of American conservatism, which had been marginalised for decades, at the beginning of the 21st century. (shrink)

This paper charts the history of the Rockefeller Foundation’s participation in the collection and long-term preservation of genetic diversity in crop plants from the 1940s through the 1970s. In the decades following the launch of its agricultural program in Mexico in 1943, the Rockefeller Foundation figured prominently in the creation of world collections of key economic crops. Through the efforts of its administrators and staff, the foundation subsequently parlayed this experience into a leadership role in international efforts to conserve (...) so-called plant genetic resources. Previous accounts of the Rockefeller Foundation’s interventions in international agricultural development have focused on the outcomes prioritized by foundation staff and administrators as they launched assistance programs and especially their characterization of the peoples and “problems” they encountered abroad. This paper highlights instead how foundation administrators and staff responded to a newly emergent international agricultural concern—the loss of crop genetic diversity. Charting the foundation’s responses to this concern, which developed only after agricultural modernization had begun and was understood to be produced by the successes of the foundation’s own agricultural assistance programs, allows for greater interrogation of how the foundation understood and projected its central position in international agricultural research activities by the 1970s. (shrink)

This article reimagines the meanings of U.S. national parks and so-called ‘natural’ places in our environmental histories and histories of science. Environmental historians have created a compelling narrative about the creation and use of U.S. national parks as places for recreation and natural resource conservation. Although these motivations were undoubtedly significant, I argue that some of the early parks were created and used for a third, often overlooked, reason: to preserve a permanent, state-sanctioned space for scientific knowledge production. (...) Deconstructing the concept of the “natural laboratory,” I show how scientists helped justify and then benefited from the creation of national parks. Hawaii National Park serves as my case study. Advocates of the national park aimed to give settler colonial scientists in the Hawaiian archipelago a permanent place for their research, while tying Hawai‘i’s exotic landscape into the sublime nature of the American West. The park was framed as a perfect laboratory for U.S. experts to study “curious” flora, fauna, and geological processes, becoming a major site of knowledge production in volcanology. Reimagining the parks in this way has ramifications for how we think about issues of access and justice. Environmental historians who have explored the ‘dark side’ of the conservation movement have yet to consider the other half of the story: the parks not only barred certain peoples and their ways of life, but also provided access to scientists – a set of actors whose work was deemed more complementary to conservationist goals than the activities of the Native Hawaiians – and marginalized local and indigenous epistemologies. Thus, the question so often asked in environmental history, “Who is nature for?” might be supplemented by the question, “Who has the power to know nature?”. (shrink)

Many environmentalists believe that religion has been a major contributor to our ecological crisis, for Judeo-Christians have been taught that they have dominion over the earth and so do not consider themselves part of a biotic community. In this book a philosopher of environmental ethics acknowledges that religion may contribute to environmental problems but argues that religion can also play an important role in solving these problems―that religion can provide an ethical context that will help people to become sensitive to (...) the environment and to elect leaders who are genuinely responsive to the ecological crisis. Examining a broad range of Western religious traditions―from conservative Christianity and orthodox Judaism to Goddess feminism and nature religion―Max Oelschlaeger provides a sociolinguistic analysis of their creation stories and finds environmentally positive aspects in each of them. He asserts that religious discourse in the public arena can offer a way for such environmental issues as biodiversity, pollution, and population to be addressed outside the realm of special-interest politics. And he urges local churches to make "caring for creation" a theme for worship in their services; the majority of Americans, says Oelschlaeger, will discover an environmental ethic only through their religious faith. (shrink)

The paper deals with the problem of divine causation in relation to created agents in general and human rational agents in particular. Beyond creation and conservation, Aquinas specifies divine contribution to created agents’ operation as application in the role of the first cause and the operation of the principal cause employing an instrumental cause. It is especially the latter which is open to varying interpretation and which might be potentially threatening to human freedom. There are different readings of (...) what it is for the secondary agent to “act through the power of the principal cause”. Either the divine cause causes only the existence of the effect of the secondary cause, or it also causes the cause to operate in the sense that it determines its outcome. The latter seems to contradict human freedom. Both readings of Aquinas were developed in the latter half of the sixteenth century within scholastic philosophy and theology. (shrink)