12.1 INTRODUCTION: WHY BOTHER WITH ETHICS?

Living in a ‘green age’ of international environmental concern, it is easy to assume that environmental arguments are self-evident and beyond question. Actually they raise a host of moral and ethical issues which lurk (often unrecognised or unacknowledged) just below the surface of environmental decision-making. Ethics are often seen as being the preserve of philosophers or eminent advisory committees, or perhaps as being restricted to those issues which have obvious ethical dimensions such as genetic engineering or animal rights. Either way, they are commonly perceived as having little to do with the practicalities of everyday life. In fact, of course, everyone involved in making decisions about how land should (or should not) be used is consciously or unconsciously making ethical and value judgements all the time. By what criteria should such judgements be made? How should we decide that this is right and that is wrong, or (more usually) that this is better than that? Are there any solid, absolute reference points, or are we adrift in a sea of relativism? Such questions underlie all environmental decisions, yet are too rarely addressed head-on. This chapter briefly explores certain important facets of environmental thinking.Much of the subject matter is hotly contested, so few clear answers can be offered to the many questions which it raises.

However obscure and irrelevant environmental philosophy may at first appear, it is actually the unseen air which environmental management breathes. Castree (2005: xxii) even suggests that our ideas about nature are ‘as important as the realities they purport to describe and explain’ because those ideas motivate our action (or inaction). Ives and Kendal (2014: 68) similarly emphasise the central role of values: