Environmental philosophy

Abstract

Environmental philosophy examines our relation, as human beings, to nature or our natural environment: it reviews our philosophical understandings of nature and our conception of nature's value and entitlements; it explores how we are to live with and in nature and to what degree nature is or is not implicated in our own human identity. The question whether nature and environment are useful concepts at all, or merely contribute to attitudes that pathologise our relations with our world, is also considered. Environmental philosophy includes in its scope all the core discourses of philosophy: metaphysics, our assumptions about the basic stuff and structure of things; epistemology, how we come to know and understand nature and how different epistemologies reveal different aspects of the natural world; aesthetics, the patterning that may or may not be taken to confer meaning or value on nature; and ethics, the morality of our treatment of living things and systems. Environmental inquiry also overlaps with other disciplines, such as environmental psychology and environmental politics, and is furthermore cross-cultural, since different societies understand and relate to their natural environments in different ways. In Australia two major well-articulated streams of philosophical thought concerning the natural world can be identified: the indigenous and the non-indigenous, specifically the Western. Australian Aboriginal culture is explicitly organised around 'country' and the care of it. But it is only in recent decades that Western thought, though equally deeply permeated by assumptions about nature, has started to bring these assumptions to light for analysis and review. Clearly Australia provides a fertile context for intercultural dialogue in this connection. The promise of this dialogue is yet to come to fruition, though the influence of indigenous thought on environmental thought here has arguably been profound.