MLA Proseminar: Global Justice and the Environment

This course examines the intersection between global justice and environmental ethics. Our basic motivating questions are as follows: how can we balance our moral duty to protect and conserve the natural environment against our obligations of justice to each other? Are the goals of environmental and wildlife conservation in tension with the demands of global justice? Or is a socially and globally just conservation achievable? We will begin the course with an introduction to some key debates and topics in contemporary global justice. In the second part of the course, we will focus on the special challenges of conservation and global justice. The normative problems we will examine include: Can we collectively respond to climate change while respecting the right of less wealthy countries to economic development? How can the burdens and benefits of global conservation be more equitably shared among different countries? Should conservation goals be adjusted against cultural and traditional practices (like indigenous hunting/whaling etc)? And how do we reconcile established conservation science with ‘traditional ecological knowledge’?