Environmental Ethics

  Part 1 of A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold is an account of one year in Wisconsin. His writing reminds me of Changes in the Land by William Cronon, but with the sensitivity of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Leopold’s writing is gentle and ambient. It makes me want to go outside and sit there for hours while slowly taking in everything around me. It makes me want to leave my phone at home whenever I go somewhere. There were moments while reading where all of the magical outdoor places that feel important to me would pass through my mind: Waimanalo Beach on Oahu, Del Mar Heights Extension Trail in San Diego, and some of my favorite spots on campus in Colorado Springs. The way Leopold talks about animals is detailed and gentle. He describes their actions, habits, and intricacies. Specifically, when writing about the Sky Dance in April, he follows his observations with an equal amount of questions, reminding the audience that he is a visitor and just as present in t...

     In The Radical Egalitarian Case for Animal Rights by Tom Regan, Regan presents his view on why animal rights should be protected as aggressively as human rights. He presents empathy for animals and argues that if they can feel as much as humans can, then humans should treat them as well as humans. He also states that finding better ways to interact with animals isn’t the answer, but rather completely ceasing to use animals as means for the ends of humans. He writes, “morality requires nothing less than the total elimination of commercial and sport hunting and trapping” (51). Another interesting point he makes is “we do not need to know how many individuals have inherent value before we can know that some do” (61). I interpret this as meaning that the discourse on what matters is unproductive to the mission of achieving regular humane practices with animals.       Regan’s view on this issue is very extreme and not something that I can fully agree w...

  The overwhelming feature that I noticed during this observation was the wind. There are moments when it is almost completely absent and moments when it is so present that I can’t focus on anything else. The trees don’t react too differently to different amounts of wind. A big gust doesn’t seem to shake the trees any more than the less powerful, more frequent gusts. If I were to watch the trees on a silent video, not feeling the wind myself, I don’t think I would be able to identify when the gusts picked up. Most of the Tava Quad is homogeneous. I have always been interested in the intersection of monoculture and biodiversity near the labyrinth. The bright green grass meets a patch of dirt with flowers and trees that are unlike the flora on the rest of the quad. It’s almost like the changing of biomes on a miniature scale. The wind changes direction as I continue to sit outside. I haven’t noticed that specifically before. There are a lot of people on the manicured quad. Enjoyi...

  In The Green Kant by Holly Wilson, she explains Immanuel Kant’s perspective on the relationship between humans and animals, and introduces a third category, “things”. Kant believes that it is important to make a distinction between humans and animals, because it pushes humans to practice better morality. If humans view animals as a different group from themselves, there is a bigger moral responsibility to treat them with respect, since they acknowledge the power that humans hold over animals. Wilson writes that Kant thinks “Taking care of animals and not being cruel to them is good for us” (69). Furthermore, Kant thinks that since humans have more freedom and autonomy, they should use it to treat animals kindly.  This is a concept that I have considered before, but not to this degree. I often think about how, at one point, humans were as “advanced” as any other animal, but then a breakthrough happened, leading us to have things that are distinctly “human”, such as office...

  I think of the environment as a system that everything on Earth is a part of. I would consider the location of the environment to be anything that isn’t man-made, yet as a system it interacts with man-made objects. I often think about the argument of everything being natural because humans are technically just animals too, but at one point we passed the boundary of existing with the same impact as other animals, so we should be categorized differently. This is partly why I support the naming of the Anthropocene.  The aspects of the environment that matter to me are its resources and the places that I spend time in. I am passionate about doing my part to preserve the environment and treat the land with the respect it deserves. Specifically, I am very concerned about preserving the island of Oahu because I have lived there for a long time. Growing up on Oahu motivated me to become interested in various environmental issues such as climate change, invasive species, and indige...