Philosophy

Legitimacy and Watershed Collaborations: The Role of Public Participation Zev Trachtenberg and Will Focht In this chapter, we examine watershed policymaking from an explicitly moral point of view. Our intention is to provide a normative outlook on the descriptive framework ...

The term 'green citizenship' is used by a wide range of competing conceptions of political action toward environmental goals. But different conceptions in fact address different environmental and institutional circumstances. Green citizenship should thus be understood as complex, and should be conceived as the ability to judge what forms of political activity are called for, given the details of context. The theory of green citizenship therefore ought to provide and explain exemplary cases of the exercise of green political judgment.

Current research in the Illinois River Basin is designed to develop and test a policy formulation protocol that will foster watershed management policy that is fully legitimated (i.e., policy that is technically effective, economically efficient, administratively implementable, politically feasible, and socially acceptable). This paper describes the results of the initial baseline impact assessment that includes physical, biological, economic, legal, and social systems as well as the development of a watershed management decision support system that is used to integrate technical information and analyses, and to facilitate policy maker and stakeholder negotiation workshops. Numerically modeled and visually simulated environmental impacts serve as the basis for developing alternative policy maker scenarios for prospective watershed management policies. These scenarios, which will be subjected to stakeholder review and negotiation, will undergo iterative review and amendment by policy makers and stakeholder groups to produce a recommended watershed management policy that satisfies all five substantive legitimation criteria. Preliminary results from the baseline social impact assessment indicate that fully legitimated policy is indeed obtainable.

The Anthropocene is a newly proposed geological epoch, the age of humans [Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000]. It acknowledges that human activity is in effect a geological process, and that we are generating a physical and biological environment that is distinct from anything before and that is likely to leave a substantial trace in the geological record of Earth’s history. A long, well-established process has started to consider whether the Anthropocene should be formalized within the geological timescale, led by the Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy [Zalasiewicz et al., 2010]. If the Anthropocene is to be acknowledged as a geological epoch, the AWG must demonstrate that there is a high probability that a distinctly Anthropocene stratal unit (with its attendant distinct environmental characteristics) may be recognized by Earth scientists working today, and will be preserved in Earth’s future, and that a so-called golden spike marking the beginning ...

In this paper, I discuss a persistent problem in the legitimation of environmental policy: the proper interaction between scientific expertise and stakeholder autonomy. I refer my discussion to an ongoing project by a team of researchers, of which I am a member, from the University of Oklahoma (OU) and Oklahoma State University (OSU), to develop a management protocol for the illinois River in northeastern Oklahoma. I first review briefly the circumstances of the Illinois River watershed and summarize the OU/OSU protocol. I then discuss the increasing use in recent years of stakeholder processes in the environmental policy  arena. Next, I present a scheme that represents the ways that both scientific assessment and stakeholder processes factor into policy legitimation.  Finally, I use this scheme to illuminate the roles assigned to scientific experts and stakeholders in the OU/OSU protocol and to explore the broader question of the complex relation between those roles in general.

Although the goal of protecting the natural environment has gained increasing importance over the last generation, in recent years it has faced a number of serious challenges, not the least of which is the charge that it is inconsistent with respect for private property rights. At the federal, state, and local levels, advocates for the environment and defenders of property rights have contended with each other in courts, in legislatures, before agencies, and in the arena of public opinion. Thus, the conflict between environment and property has emerged as one of the thorniest political issues of the day, one which is national in scope, but which has immediate meaning for every community. It was with this conflict in mind that legal scholars and practitioners, academics from a range of disciplines, and members of the public came together at the University of Oklahoma on April 26, 1997 for a symposium on Environmental Protection and the Politics of Property Rights. Sponsored by OU's Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Environment program, the gathering provided a forum for exploring society's efforts to negotiate the proper boundary between private rights and public control over important features of the environment. Three invited speakers were heard: Andrew Sawyer, Assistant Chief Counsel of the California Water Resources Control Board, presented an overview of the takings implications of the famous Mono Lake case; James L. Huffman, Dean of the Northwestern School of Law, Lewis and Clark College, offered a defense of private property rights in environmental values; and John D. Echeverria, General Counsel of the National Audubon Society, gave an analysis of the present state of the political battle between environmental advocates and the property rights movement. To provide an interdisciplinary outlook, comments were provided by members of the University of Oklahoma faculty representing three different approaches to the conference topic: Drew Kershen, of the College of Law, showed how the presentations raised legal issues that are also at work in Oklahoma cases; Baxter

Feminists frequently lament the fact that women are too often viewed primarily, and in some cases exclusively, as sex objects and valued primarily or exclusively in terms of an externally dictated and generalized conception of sexiness. Sexual objectification in a male-dominated and heteronormative society functions to reduce women to objects to be used at the discretion of men.

In "Scratching an Itch," I argue that it is possible to have aesthetic experiences of basic somatic phenomena such as itches. The fact that these phenomena are private, I suggest, is no barrier to their being appropriate objects of aesthetic attention. In his reply, Brian Soucek raises three principal objections. 2 First, my argument that there can be aesthetic experiences of itches implies that there can be aesthetic experiences of brute colors, which seems an undesirable result. Second, I fall afoul of the traditional and well-founded restriction of the domain of the aesthetic to objects that are, at least in principle, publicly accessible. Third, I fail to provide sufficient motivation for my extension of the domain of the aesthetic; and in the absence of such motivation, I should be seen as changing the subject. While making some remarks in response to each of these charges, I will focus in particular on the second. Are there good reasons to think that aesthetic concepts can never apply to objects that are in principle accessible to only one person? I will argue that there are not.