Doing Environmental Ethics
In this scholarly, extensively documented volume, Traer brings the discipline of ethics to our current environmental crisis. He explores how governments, corporations, and citizens can work together to address environmental problems by reducing air and water pollution, transforming industrial agriculture, preserving endangered species, promoting urban ecology, and ending global warming—all policies that value biodiversity — and by supporting laws that regulate our use of finite natural resources. Environmental ethics took off, he says, in the 1970s, and “doing” ethics remains “a way of trying to clarify our moral reasoning” regarding our treatment of the planet by showing how patterns of ethical reasoning are derived from philosophical traditions of what is “right.” Our first goal, Traer maintains, is to achieve an environmentally sustainable economy by limiting the adverse impact of that economy on the environment. Traer manages a unique blend of the philosophical with the pragmatic, ending with a discussion of 15 strategies using existing technology that would prevent a global warming disaster within 50 years. --Deborah Donovan