Summer 2019 meeting of the International Society for Environmental Ethics

The 16thannual summer meeting of the International Society for Environmental Ethics will convene from July 10 thru July 13, 2019, at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest Research Station, nestled in the Cascade Mountains east of Eugene, Oregon.

            This call for papers solicits 500-word proposals for presentations on any topic in environmental philosophy. However, special attention will be given to proposals for talks concerning issues connected with rapid anthropogenic ecological change. Global biophysical systems have remined relatively stable across twelve thousand years of the Holocene Epoch, providing background climatic and ecological conditions for the emergence and development of human civilization as we know it. While there is convincing evidence of that the state and function of global earth systems, and thus subsequent environmental and biological conditions, have been significantly different across geologic time, alterations underway today stand out for their rapidity and anthropogenic origin. The so-called Anthropocene portends unprecedented and arguably irreversible ecological conditions arising within only a few hundred years, or less. The theme of this conference is to recognize the need for received frameworks of environmental thinking and historic environmental imaginaries to be revisited, adapted, and perhaps radically revised – or not – in response to normative, political, and existential demands precipitated by radical anthropogenic environmental change across global, regional, and local scales.

Possible subjects include the exploration of questions concerning the political and cultural conditions under which various anthropogenic drivers of global environmental change have arisen, how we should think about appropriate transformations and adaptations to already forgone and still likely greater climate and other environmental changes, the moral fabric of our relations with past and future human generations, and how to comprehend the moral dimensions of a sixth mass species extinction event. Possible topics include geoengineering, novel ecosystems, biodiversity loss, the role of humanistic representations of our place in the Anthropocene (e.g. through art, history, and narrative forms), de-growth and post-capitalist economies, justice, sustainability, human population growth, and culturally diverse worldviews.

Proposals prepared for blind review should be submitted via email to Allen Thompson, no later than March 1st, 2019. Decisions will be announced by April 1st.