Muddled Facts and Values: Positivism, Egoism, and Anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene

I review biologist Chris D. Thomas’s book (2017) Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction and discuss its exposition and prescriptions. Thomas presents a fantastic exposition of the contemporary scientific literature documenting the biological gains mediated by human impacts on the nonhuman world. However, his prescriptions for a conservation ethic leave much to be desired. Thomas employs a philosophically narrow, positivist, and egoist approach to what is relevant when dealing with other sentient, sapient, and often social nonhuman beings. This culminates in an explicitly anthropocentric ethic that dismisses our moral obligations to nonhumans, both as individuals and collectives.

Economic Benefits, Local Participation, and Conservation Ethic in a Game Management Area: Evidence From Mambwe, Zambia

This study examines views on economic benefits, local participation in wildlife management and conservation ethic among 267 residents of three chiefdoms in Mambwe district, Eastern Zambia. Results show that 68% of the residents who live in the Lupande Game Management Area are not in any way involved in community wildlife management. For those involved, the main reason advanced for participating was economic benefit (79%). Only a small minority of 17% of the residents participated due to motivations to conserve wildlife. Human-wildlife conflicts induced by wild animal crop raiding, property destruction, and loss of human life, and perceived low or non-existent economic benefits seemingly precluded the development of a conservation ethic among residents. The local chiefs asserted wildlife ownership, lamented low wildlife benefits and justified its illegal uptake. Proponents of community conservation projects could encourage pro conservation attitudes among residents by addressing human-wildlife conflicts and raising awareness on intrinsic values of wildlife.

“A Vibrant National Preoccupation”: Embracing an Energy Conservation Ethic in the 1970s

This article examines the popularity of the “energy conservation ethic” in the United States during the 1970s, which environmentalists, politicians, and oil companies endorsed as a solution to the energy crisis. It demonstrates that broad support for an energy conservation ethic contained two competing paradigms: one “ecological” and the other “nationalist.” The former advocated conservation as a means to a sustainable low-carbon future, while the latter viewed the conservation ethic as a tool to eliminate dependence on foreign oil in order to reestablish the economic and geopolitical strength of the United States. Thus, in contrast to a view that traces a relatively linear transition from the utilitarian and nationalist ethos of early twentieth-century conservationism to the more holistic concern with “the environment” of the postwar environmental movement, this article underscores the persistence of utilitarian conservationist conceptions of resource stewardship in the middle of the “environmental decade.” These competing paradigms contributed to the argument for energy price deregulation as the most effective way to discipline US energy consumers. In this way, the energy crisis and the conservation debates that it evoked reflected the rightward turn of the United States in the 1980s. Current energy history tends to focus on the political, environmental, and socioeconomic histories of energy production and consumption rather than efforts to reduce demand but, as this article demonstrates, discourses of conservation can also shape political trajectories in unexpected ways.

Befriending Your Food: Pigs and People Coming of Age in the Anthropocene

Geologists and ecologists report that Earth is undergoing its sixth massive extinction event, an occasion that calls for radical revision of conservation ethics. The biologist Edward O. Wilson has proposed that conservation projects in the Anthropocene should be grounded in biophilia, an evolved, relational (or biocentric) mode of perception that activates aesthetic and affective responses to non-human life alongside cognitive understanding. Because biophilia includes non-rational modes of perception, the nurturing of biophilic conservation ethics cannot fall to ecology alone; imaginative literature, for example, can prompt readers to imagine and work to realize more environmentally friendly roles for humans and, further, can assist in cultivating a conservation ethic suited to current ecological conditions. In particular, coming-of-age novels about friendships between people and pigs offer an alternative to the industrial “pork story” that seeks to gain narrative control of relational norms between people and pigs, at the expense of biodiversity and ecological health. Three such novels published in 2017 depict human–pig friendships, a relational model created by pigs’ shift in status from food to companion animals. In presenting this realignment, the stories facilitate development of a biophilic conservation ethic.

Saving America’s Endangered Recordings:NEDCC’s Conservation Ethic for the Preservation of Significant Audio Media

Audio recordings may be the most endangered of Americas collections, due to rapidly deteriorating media material, the scarcity of equipment for playback, and the diminishing numbers of professionals who have the skills for repairing legacy equipment and reformatting audio using traditional analog methods. The evidence for the size of the problem may be found in a variety of studies prompted by the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000 (H.R.4846). The resulting National Recording Preservation Plan by the Library of Congress and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) was released in 2012.