Environmental Ethics in the Midwest

Interdisciplinary Approaches

Ian Smith, Matt Ferkany

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781611864427
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628954807
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The American Midwest is environmentally rich and complex, home to some of the world's largest freshwater lakes and streams as well as cities, prairies, forests, and farmlands. Nevertheless, the unique environmental opportunities and challenges the region presents have been left underappreciated and underexplored by environmental ethicists. The close integration of the natural and built environments of the Midwest prompts interdisciplinary inquiry in a particularly pointed way. To remedy the lack of scholarly attention to this area, this volume attends to the way that the broad concerns of environmental ethics manifest in the region. These eight original essays cover a wide range of topics, including agrarian ethics and Stoicism; the Dakota access pipeline and Indigenous women's activism; philosophy of law and species classification; environmental justice and the Flint water crisis; hog farming and antimicrobial drug resistance; science education standards and climate change education; virtue ethics and ecological restoration; environmental pragmatism and the Clean Water Act; and more. Each accessibly written chapter brings multidisciplinary complexity to bear on this complex region. The authors include philosophers working in environmental ethics and other subfields of philosophy, and together with scholars in fields such as environmental sociology, American Indian studies, and environmental studies, they provide a fresh and necessary perspective on the American Midwest.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Midwest Stoicism, Agrarianism, and Environmental Virtue Ethics
• Searching for the Just Shrinking City in Flint, Michigan
• The Ethics of Women Water Warriors: #NoDAPL and an Indigenous Women’s Environmental Ethic
• Wilbur on Drugs: Antimicrobial Use in Hog CAFOs
• Prairie Dog Wars, the Philosophy of Biology, and Justice Scalia
• Another Dam Controversy: The Case of the Cuyahoga River from Stagnant Sludge to Poster Child of the Clean Water Act
• What Ohio Can Teach Us about Effective and Ethical Ecological Restoration
• Are the Next Generation Science Standards for Weather and Climate Indoctrinating?
• Contributors