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The Journal of Environment & Development
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The Humanity of Global Environmental Ethics

Paul Wapner

American University

Richard A. Matthew

University of California, Irvine

Over the past decade, scholars have begun to develop the discipline of global environmental ethics. In doing so, they have encountered two obstacles. First, much environmentalism cloaks itself in the discourse of prudence and security, and thus, ethical concerns are difficult to identify. Second, when scholars do recognize ethical issues, they explain them in terms of how people treat the nonhuman world and advance a biocentric or ecocentric moral sensibility. This is a problem to the degree that it neglects countless instances of environmental injustice that involve the way humans treat each other, using nature as a medium. This article illuminates the nonprudential dimensions of global environmental affairs and explains how a focus on the way humans mistreat each other can serve as a central ethical focus for understanding and addressing environmental injustice. Overall, it aims to provide a vocabulary for advancing an anthropocentric sensibility toward global environmental ethical concern.

Key Words: environmental ethics • global environmental politics • environmental philosophy • environmental morality

The Journal of Environment & Development, Vol. 18, No. 2, 203-222 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1070496509334693
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