Integrating Ecology and Environmental Ethics: Earth Stewardship in the Southern End of the Americas (original) (raw)
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2020
The South American temperate and sub-Antarctic forests cover the longest latitudinal range in the Southern Hemisphere and include the world's southernmost forests. However, until now, this unique biome has been absent from global ecosystem research and monitoring networks. Moreover, the latitudinal range of between 40 degrees (°) south (S) and 60° S constitutes a conspicuous gap in the International Long-Term Ecological Research (ILTER) and other international networks. We first identify 10 globally salient attributes of biological and cultural diversity in southwestern South America. We then present the nascent Chilean Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) network, which will incorporate a new biome into ILTER. Finally, we introduce the field environmental philosophy methodology, developed by the Chilean LTSER network to integrate ecological sciences and environmental ethics into graduate education and biocultural conservation. This approach broadens the prevailing econo...
Earth Stewardship in the Southern End of the Americas
The South American temperate and sub-Antarctic forests cover the longest latitudinal range in the Southern Hemisphere and include the world’s southernmost forests. However, until now, this unique biome has been absent from global ecosystem research and monitoring networks. Moreover, the latitudinal range of between 40 degrees (°) south (S) and 60° S constitutes a conspicuous gap in the International Long-Term Ecological Research (ILTER) and other international networks. We first identify 10 globally salient attributes of biological and cultural diversity in southwestern South America. We then present the nascent Chilean Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) network, which will incorporate a new biome into ILTER. Finally, we introduce the field environmental philosophy methodology, developed by the Chilean LTSER network to integrate ecological sciences and environmental ethics into graduate education and biocultural conservation. This approach broadens the prevailing economic spectrum of social dimensions considered by LTSER programs and helps foster bioculturally diverse forms of Earth stewardship.
INTEGRATING ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS
The South American temperate and subantarctic forests cover the longest latitudinal range in the Southern Hemisphere, including the world's southernmost forests. However, until now this unique biome is absent from global ecosystem research and monitoring networks.
Integrating Ecological Sciences and Environmental Ethics into Biocultural Conservation
Environmental Ethics, 2008
This special issue of Environmental Ethics is based on the workshop "Integrating Ecological Sciences and Environmental Ethics: New Approaches to Understanding and Conserving Frontier Ecosystems," held in the temperate sub-Antarctic region of southern Chile, in March 2007. 1 The workshop was jointly organized by the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies of the University of North Texas (UNT) and the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity (IEB-Chile), in collaboration with the Center for Environmental Philosophy, and followed a three-week field graduate course, "Conservation and Society: Biocultural Diversity and Environmental Ethics," involving graduate students from the U.S. and Latin America. These events built on a decade of collaboration between UNT environmental philosophers and Chilean ecologists, and were followed by two symposia held subsequently at two annual meetings of the Ecological Society of America (2007 and 2008). 2
Earth Stewardship and the Biocultural Ethic: Latin American Perspectives
Latin America hosts a diversity of ecological worldviews and practices rooted in Amerindian cultures (e.g., Aymara, Quechua, U’wa, and Waorani) and schools of thought (e.g., geoculture, decoloniality, liberation philosophy and ecotheology) that have actual and potential value for Earth Stewardship. However, global discourses do not adequately include the diversity of languages and ethics rooted in the heterogeneous biocultural mosaic of Latin America and other regions. This is due in part to the limited inter-linguistic and inter-cultural dialogue among academics, educators, and policy makers that reside in different regions of the world. To contribute to solving this deficit, this chapter couples the conceptual frameworks of Earth stewardship and the biocultural ethic to foster: (i) inter-cultural dialogues and negotiations that fracture the current homogeneity of neoliberal global discourses through the acknowledgement and inclusion of the diversity of ecological worldviews, values, and languages, and (ii) forms of biocultural interspecies co-inhabitation embedded in the diversity of habitats and life habits. A basic principle of the biocultural ethic is that life habits are interrelated with the communities of co-in-habitants and their habitats. These “3Hs” of the biocultural ethic offer a conceptual framework that can be coupled with three terms that identify Earth Stewardship: the habitats of the Earth, the habit of stewardship, and the communities of co-inhabitants including the stewards. This coupling makes explicit the participation of diverse stewards. To better recognize the stewards’ diversity is essential to identify their differential responsibility in the genesis of global environmental change, at the same time that to visualize and value a plethora of ways of conceiving and practicing Earth stewardship.
Editors' Foreword: Contemporary Debates on Ecology, Society, and Culture in Latin America
Latin American Research Review, 2011
For the past two decades, studies on ecology, society, and culture in Latin America have multiplied rapidly, mirroring the increasing importance of ecological and environmental debates worldwide. The environment has become the object of a multidisciplinary research endeavor in which the natural sciences, policy and technical sciences, social sciences, and humanities converge. This special issue of Latin American Research Review brings together some of today's most innovative social science and humanities research on environmental issues in Latin America and aims to make it more widely known to scholars working in other elds of Latin American studies and to the public at large. Contributors come from such diverse disciplines as political science, geography, history, anthropology, and literary studies and adopt a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. From a geographical perspective, we have tried to be as broad as possible in our selection of articles to give readers a sense of contemporary environmental discussions in different parts of Latin America. Articles in this volume deal with Chile, Peru, Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina, and particularly Brazil, which receives special attention because of its important role in contemporary conservation and environmental debates. Cases examined range from islands and aquatic environments to rain forests, agricultural elds, and protected conservation areas, from the rural-urban interface to the arenas of international policy making. Latin America's historical dependency on natural resources, both for local livelihoods and to supply an evolving global market, has made environmental issues central in policy debates and in widespread contests over the meaning and use of natural species and habitats, carried out against the region's persistent legacy of inequality. Many scholars of Latin America have addressed these complex issues from the perspective of economic development and globalization, but perhaps less so through the lens of environmental conservation. Yet the two are intertwined. Conservation of protected areas has grown worldwide, as has the mobilization of citizens at different levels, often in unlikely alliances, to propose new, alternative models for the governance of natural resources that incorporate diverse perspectives and stakeholders in often complex transactions. As conservation has become internationalized, these debates have meshed with the development concerns long of interest to scholars of Latin American studies, through parallel streams