Environmental Ethics

How should we define “responsibility” in ecological restoration when historical baselines are no longer attainable, climate trajectories are uncertain, and multiple cultural communities hold different visions for the landscape’s future? 

     When I first read Kimmerer’s essay “In the Footsteps of the White Man” I thought of the small, scruffy plantain that clusters along every Colorado Springs sidewalk. Kimmerer reminds us that Plantago major, dubbed “white man’s footstep” by the Haudenosaunee because it arrived wherever settlers trod, encapsulates a complicated legacy. Displacement braided to unexpected reciprocity. She refuses the easy binary of “native good, settler bad.” Instead, she notices how plantain’s broad leaves heal scraped skin and soothe insect bites, asking how something introduced by colonial violence can still participate in the grammar of gift.      This chapter echoes themes I traced in my post on Aldo Leopold’s “Marshland Elegy.” Leopold mourned the sandhill cranes yet urged us to attend to what remains. Kimmerer pushes further, suggesting that even the seemingly mundane remnants of colonization can teach us responsibilities. She writes, “If a foreigner shows up at your...

     One tension that stood out to me after reading Dorceta  Taylor’s “The Evolution of Environmental Justice” and Kyle  Whyte’s “Indigenous Experience, Environmental Justice and Settler Colonialism” is the distance between an environmental‑justice framework rooted in civil‑rights activism and the distinct demands for justice voiced by Indigenous peoples living under ongoing settler colonialism. Taylor traces how predominantly Black and Latinx communities organized against toxic waste, framing environmental harm as yet another layer of racial oppression. Her genealogy locates injustice in unequal exposure and unequal power, pollution lands where political leverage is weakest.      Whyte, by contrast, argues that for many Indigenous nations the central grievance is not simply disproportional pollution but the persistent erasure of relationships with land that make Indigenous life possible. He calls settler colonialism “ecological domination,” a structure tha...

     On a cool, rainy afternoon in early spring, I stood on the footbridge on the path near my apartment, watching Fountain  Creek swell beneath me. The steady rain blurred the usually sharp lines of the banks, turning fallen cottonwood leaves into drifting islands. The creek’s water, clouded by the runoff, carried twigs, catkins, and the occasional stray tennis ball, evidence of both natural rhythms and nearby human activity. Trees along the bank leaned over the current, their fresh buds shining where the rain had polished away winter dust. A few branches held beads of water that clung and dropped in steady intervals, as though counting the minutes of the season’s slow shift. Each drip echoed Aldo  Leopold’s reminder that change in the land is gradual, an accumulation of small moments rather than a single dramatic event.      Birds worked the soft ground at the edge of the path, tugging worms from the loosened soil with practiced precision. Now and then a ...

       Aldo Leopold opens “A Marshland Elegy” with fog rolling “like the white ghost of a glacier” across the peat, until a “pandemonium of trumpets” announces the dawn arrival of sandhill cranes. Their voices, he writes, are the “trumpet in the orchestra of evolution,” reminders of a past that extends back to the Eocene and a future ticking away in geological time. What strikes me is Leopold’s insistence that the cranes lend depth to the landscape: without them a marsh becomes just another wet field, its history silenced.   Rereading the essay, I thought back to my S pring Morning in Monument post, where I watched robins dart across newly greening grass and felt the tension between winter’s chill and the sun’s promise of renewal. Those robins marked the season’s turning, but Leopold asks us to feel something even grander, the weight of millennia embedded in a these calls. My observations captured a moment of change, but Leopold’s cranes reveal the continuity...

     Kant’s claim that “rational beings alone have intrinsic worth” (Groundwork II) sits uneasily beside Metz & Miller’s view that moral value is fundamentally relational. For Kant, dignity rests on autonomous rational choice: because persons can legislate the moral law for themselves, they must always be treated as ends. The theory is elegant, yet it abstracts agents from the concrete ties that shape moral life.        Metz & Miller push back by arguing that what finally matters is the quality of our connections—empathy, responsiveness, mutual recognition. A life bereft of meaningful relations is not merely lonely; it is morally stunted. Their critique of impartial ethics struck me most. Universal duties, they note, cannot explain why betraying a friend feels worse than failing a stranger. Relational ethics locates the extra moral weight in the shared history of vulnerability that friendship embodies. Kant, by contrast, insists that promising ...