A post idea I’ve been playing with recently is converting part of my practicum write-up into a blog post about the ethics of environmental restoration projects. My practicum was with the “Billion Oyster Project”, which seeks to use oyster repopulation for geoengineering/ecosystem restoration, and I spent a big chunk of my write-up worrying about the environmental ethics of this, and I’ve been thinking this worrying could be turned into a decent blogpost.
I’ll discuss welfare biology briefly, but lots of it will survey non-consequentialist possibilities, like “does non-aggression animal ethics bar us from restoration?”, “if we care about the ecosystem as a moral patient, what does it take for restoration to be creating a new patient versus aiding an existing one?”, or “does creating a new ecosystem burden us with new special obligations, and are they obligations we can actually fulfill?”
I already have a substantial amount written for this, just because I have that section of my practicum write-up already, but it’s currently a bit rough and I might modify it to be more general than just the billion oyster case, or even to expand it in the direction of discussing the ethics of terraforming other planets. This is the one I am most leaning towards posting just because I am most likely to have a substantial amount of writing done for it on time.
Moral problems for environmental restoration:
A post idea I’ve been playing with recently is converting part of my practicum write-up into a blog post about the ethics of environmental restoration projects. My practicum was with the “Billion Oyster Project”, which seeks to use oyster repopulation for geoengineering/ecosystem restoration, and I spent a big chunk of my write-up worrying about the environmental ethics of this, and I’ve been thinking this worrying could be turned into a decent blogpost.
I’ll discuss welfare biology briefly, but lots of it will survey non-consequentialist possibilities, like “does non-aggression animal ethics bar us from restoration?”, “if we care about the ecosystem as a moral patient, what does it take for restoration to be creating a new patient versus aiding an existing one?”, or “does creating a new ecosystem burden us with new special obligations, and are they obligations we can actually fulfill?”
I already have a substantial amount written for this, just because I have that section of my practicum write-up already, but it’s currently a bit rough and I might modify it to be more general than just the billion oyster case, or even to expand it in the direction of discussing the ethics of terraforming other planets. This is the one I am most leaning towards posting just because I am most likely to have a substantial amount of writing done for it on time.