Environmental Ethics and Human-Wildlife Conflicts

Exploring Environmental Ethics in Human-Wildlife Conflicts

The Polar Bear 'Problem'

The Arctic is warming, reducing sea ice and polar bear hunting grounds. Polar bears increasingly wander into human settlements searching for food, creating conflict between human safety and polar bear survival. The key question is: How should we respond to this situation?

Polar Bear Holding Facilities (Prisons)

Some towns, like Churchill, Canada, have set up "polar bear holding facilities" (informally called prisons). Bears that enter towns are trapped and placed in holding cells, sometimes for weeks. No food is provided to avoid habituation to humans, so they are starving while ‘in prison’. Bears are later released back into the wild when sea ice is back.

Ethical Standpoints

• Anthropocentrism: Human lives come first; protecting people justifies bear captivity.

• Animal Rights Ethics: Polar bears have intrinsic rights; imprisoning them without food is inhumane.

• Ecocentrism: Nature should regulate itself; human intervention disrupts the natural balance.

• Utilitarianism: The greatest good for the greatest number—does bear captivity prevent greater suffering overall?

What are we going to cover today?

Environmental problems through ethical standpoints:

• What does ethics have to do with factory farms and wolves?

• How do ethical standpoints influence environmental management decisions? (John Muir and Aldo Leopold)

• Perspectives on reintroducing wolves.

The Price of Cheap Meat

Roughly 95% of all pigs are raised on industrial factory-farms. Factory farms attempt to maximize production by raising as many animals in as little space (and time) as possible.

Arguments for and Against Factory Farms

• Pros: Factory farms use less land and free up space for other uses. Thanks to factory farming (and government subsidies) the price of meat has decreased and more families can afford to eat meat.

• Cons: Factory farms eliminate small-scale farms. Environmental pollution is caused by large numbers of animals. Animals should not be kept in this way because they are sentient beings.

Ethics

Ethics is the branch of philosophy dealing with questions of right and wrong actions. Ethics provides guiding principles for human societies including through a number of key philosophies and religions.

Environmental Ethics

Throughout much of Western philosophical tradition, ethical questions revolved around actions of people towards people (environmental justice). Environmental ethics asks what are right and wrong ways of interacting with the non-human world (e.g., is the full life of a piglet important?).

Ethical Standpoints in Western Philosophy

• Anthropocentric Standpoint: Humans are separate and superior to nature.

• Utilitarian Standpoint: Nature only has value as it is useful to humans.

Dominion Thesis

From the book of Genesis 1:28 (Old Testament): "Have dominion over the fish of the Sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the Earth." This implies an “ethical free rein” to use nature in any way deemed beneficial.

Utilitarian Views

Locke’s theory on property was well received in the US. Freedom = ability to acquire and possess property, including one’s body, labor, and nature. It inspires a utilitarian view of nature in which anything that is left unused has no value and is wasted.
From a utilitarian view, a forest cut for timber is more valuable than native forest left standing. The US American frontier was a “wasteland” and “valueless” as long as it remained “unused”. This matched ideas at the time to justify westward imperial expansion

Pinchot and the US Forest Service

Gifford Pinchot (first chief of US forest service). 30% of the land at that time belonged to the US government. Pinchot was at the heart of an ethical debate about environmental politics. He was an advocate for “conservation” – sustainable commercial use for the “greatest good for the greatest number”.

John Muir

John Muir (born in Dunbar, East Lothian 1838). Parents migrated to Wisconsin, US when he was a young boy. He was an avid walker and traveller, describing his adventures in nature. He witnessed environmental destruction first-hand, including during the Alaskan gold rush. He lived in Yosemite and became an advocate for the preservation of the area.

Muir wanted the Yosemite area to be preserved for its intrinsic values. Largely due to his efforts and lobbying, the park has the current boundaries. In 1903 he camped with Theodore Roosevelt in Yosemite.

Gifford Pinchot vs. John Muir in Yosemite, California

• Gifford Pinchot:

  • Utilitarian, conservationist – Resources can be used as long as they are used sustainably.

  • Best thing is to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

• John Muir:

  • Preservationist – Nature should be left alone as much as possible.

  • Wilderness areas that have had little human impact should be protected.

The Debate Over the Fate of Hetch Hetchy Valley

• Pinchot and the conservationists:

  • The river should be dammed to provide a steady water supply for the residents of San Francisco.

  • Leaving the area wild serves fewer people.

• Muir and the preservationists:

  • The landscape should remain unaltered so that people may enjoy it.

  • The natural landscape has intrinsic value.

Hetch Hetchy

First highly publicized debate over the fate over an area directly linked to utilitarian vs. non-utilitarian positions. It marked the division between conservation and preservation. This divide persisted largely until mid-20th century with the advent of a new ethic.

Glen Strathfarrar / Monar Dam

Opposition to the building of the dam, saying it would lead to the loss of ‘the last of the great unspoiled Glens.’ The dam was built in the 1960s leading to people having to leave the area, including a shepherd family.

A New Environmental Ethic

Aldo Leopold (trained at the Yale School of Forestry founded by Pinchot) was an environmental writer who wrote “The Land Ethic” in 1949. He integrated insights of ecology into an ethical framework.

The Land Ethic

The Land Ethic is based on:

• The field of ecology, the study of the interactions between organisms and their environment.

• Moral extensionism: the expansion of ethics beyond humans to land, plants, animals, etc.

• Placing humans as part of the environment, rather than separate from it.

Leopold’s land ethic argues that something is right if it promotes healthy ecosystem functioning, and wrong when it doesn’t. Use of the environment is not right or wrong, it depends on whether it is used sustainably. It is an ecocentric ethic – ecological concerns should come before human concerns.

Eco-centrism

An environmental ethical stance that argues that ecological concerns should (over and above human priorities) be central to decisions about right and wrong.

Critiques of Environmental Ethics

Is protecting the environment right? Is overexploiting nature – forests, animals, ecosystems – wrong? Posing environmental dilemmas in this way can make reworking environmental ethics seem like a logical first step towards reorienting society’s approach to nature.

Eco-authoritarian Critique

Critics of environmental ethics argue that if taken too far, such ethics can result in eco-authoritarianism: the protection of species and ecosystems as wholes (holism) takes precedence over parts (including individual animals and humans).

Animal Rights Ethics and Moral Extensionism

Ethical principle stating that humans should extend their sphere of moral concern beyond the human realm. Most commonly it is argued that intelligent or sentient animals are worthy ethical subjects.

Animal Liberation

The animal liberation movement argues that individual animals (wild and domestic) are worthy of moral consideration. It is a social movement named after Peter Singer’s 1975 book.

Animal Liberation

The animal liberation movement argues for the extension of ethical consideration to individual animals, in contrast to the land ethic, which focuses on an entire ecosystem or species. The suffering of sentient beings should be minimized or eliminated. Use of animals for human purposes is therefore unethical.

Freeing all animals from use by humans, including those used for food, medical testing, personal adornment, entertainment or anything else.

Critiques / Strawmen Arguments

Singer does not claim the life of a rat and the life of a human are equal, or should be treated with equal weight in questions of ethics. Critics suggest Singer would oppose the eradication of rats transmitting plague which is a strawman argument: overstated caricatures of positions that make easy targets for critics.

Animal Liberation

Almost any use of animals for human purpose is considered unethical. Not all animal rights activities are absolutist (e.g., no animals in agriculture). Veganism: advocates for animal liberation embrace veganism, but not every vegan is a proponent for animal liberation (e.g., vegan as environmental/lifestyle choice).

Applying Environmental Ethics

Environmental dilemmas are ethical dilemmas concerning the right or wrong actions of humans towards nature. This perspective applies to landscape restoration, rewilding, and particularly wolf/bear/lynx conservation.

Ecological Restoration, ‘Rewilding,’ and Species Reintroductions

Rewilding / ecological restoration is essential from an ecocentric worldview, but is controversial because it can involve the re-introduction of top predators such as wolves and lynx.

Public and Political Debate

Arguments for wolves are based in ethics (biodiversity), but also cultural aspects (the wolf belongs to these landscapes). Arguments against are often economics (costs) and sometimes also ethical considerations (individual sheep).

‘Invasive Species’ Control Dilemmas in Wildlife Management

Is it morally acceptable to kill grey squirrels in order to save red squirrels? This is the ‘Native’ vs ‘invasive’ debate.

Red Deer Management

Is it acceptable to kill deer to save the ecological integrity of a landscape? What do the different ecological standpoints tell you?