Donald S. Maier – författare

This book probes the ethical, practical, and sociopolitical implications of leveraging innovative and disruptive means to address the world’s various environmental crises.Packed with keen observations and analyses, the volume brings together research from seasoned scholars and rising stars to cast important new light on urgent issues engendered by humankind’s disruption of environments, such as climate change and biodiversity loss. It tackles the question of exactly what has been disrupted in the world—environmentally, economically, socially, and politically. It also examines an assortment of innovative interventions that aim to address disruptions and explores the question of what further disruptions may lurk behind assorted innovative interventions intended to address already existing disruptions. Chapters wrestle with the social, ethical, and ecological implications of disruptions, both pre-existing and those brought about by interventions, connected with deploying artificial gene drives, substituting robotic pollinators for living ones, synthesizing organisms to replace ones lost, installing economic regimes that work well for both citizens and the environment, making science subservient to non-scientific commitments, involving citizens in environmentally consequential decisions, choosing scientific and technological projects that most promise immediate practical payoff, and ensuring that respect for human rights is part and parcel of any technology-infused project. These discussions draw on a rich mix of science, philosophy of science, political theory, economics, sociology, network theory, ethics, and theories of justice and human rights.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental science, environmental decision-making, ecology, climate change, environmental philosophy, and the philosophy of science.

This book probes the ethical, practical, and sociopolitical implications of leveraging innovative and disruptive means to address the world’s various environmental crises.Packed with keen observations and analyses, the volume brings together research from seasoned scholars and rising stars to cast important new light on urgent issues engendered by humankind’s disruption of environments, such as climate change and biodiversity loss. It tackles the question of exactly what has been disrupted in the world—environmentally, economically, socially, and politically. It also examines an assortment of innovative interventions that aim to address disruptions and explores the question of what further disruptions may lurk behind assorted innovative interventions intended to address already existing disruptions. Chapters wrestle with the social, ethical, and ecological implications of disruptions, both pre-existing and those brought about by interventions, connected with deploying artificial gene drives, substituting robotic pollinators for living ones, synthesizing organisms to replace ones lost, installing economic regimes that work well for both citizens and the environment, making science subservient to non-scientific commitments, involving citizens in environmentally consequential decisions, choosing scientific and technological projects that most promise immediate practical payoff, and ensuring that respect for human rights is part and parcel of any technology-infused project. These discussions draw on a rich mix of science, philosophy of science, political theory, economics, sociology, network theory, ethics, and theories of justice and human rights.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental science, environmental decision-making, ecology, climate change, environmental philosophy, and the philosophy of science.

There has been a deluge of material on biodiversity, starting from a trickle back in the mid-1980's. However, this book is entirely unique in its treatment of the topic. It is unique in its meticulously crafted, scientifically informed, philosophical examination of the norms and values that are at the heart of discussions about biodiversity. And it is unique in its point of view, which is the first to comprehensively challenge prevailing views about biodiversity and its value. According to those dominant views, biodiversity is an extremely good thing – so good that it has become the emblem of natural value. The book's broader purpose is to use biodiversity as a lens through which to view the nature of natural value. It first examines, on their own terms, the arguments for why biodiversity is supposed to be a good thing. This discussion cuts a very broad and detailed swath through the scientific, economic, and environmental literature. It finds all these arguments to be seriously wanting. Worse, these arguments appear to have consequences that should dismay and perplex most environmentalists. The book then turns to a deeper analysis of these failures and suggests that they result from posing value questions from within a framework that is inappropriate for nature's value. It concludes with a novel suggestion for framing natural value. This new proposal avoids the pitfalls of the ones that prevail in the promotion of biodiversity. And it exposes the goals of conservation biology, restoration biology, and the world's largest conservation organizations as badly ill-conceived.