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Christopher B. Barrett Raymond E. GrizzleDepartment of Economics Randall Environmental Studies CenterUtah State University Taylor UniversityLogan, UT 84322-3530 Upland, IN 46989-1001cbarrett@b202.usu.edu rygrizzle@tayloru.eduAbstract: This paper advances a holistic ecological approach based on a three-compartmentmodel. This approach favors policy initiatives that lie at the intersection of thethree major areas of concern common to most environmental controversies:environmental protection, provision of basic human needs, and advancingeconomic welfare. In support of this approach, we propose a "pluralisticstewardship” integrating core elements of anthropocentrism, biocentrism, andecocentrism. After presenting the basics of our model, we then explain why it isimportant to identify and promote a holistic ecological approach to sustainability. Here we employ the economic concept of path dependence, emphasizing that thereexist multiple paths society can follow in environmental ethics and policy but onceone has been chosen, implicitly or explicitly, there may be little opportunity toreverse such choices.

This chapter presents a Third World critique of the trend in American environmentalism known as deep ecology, analyzing each of deep ecology’s central tenets. These are the distinction between anthropocentrism and biocentrism, the focus on wilderness preservation, the invocation of Eastern traditions, and the belief that it represents the most radical trend within environmentalism. The chapter argues that the anthropocentrism/biocentrism distinction is of little use in understanding the dynamics of environmental degredation, that the implementation of the wilderness agenda is causing serious deprivation in the Third World. It outlines the environmental movement in India, a country with an ecological diversity comparable to the US, but with a radically dissimilar cultural and social history. The chapter concludes that despite its claims to universality, deep ecology is firmly rooted in American environmental and cultural history and is inappropriate when applied to the Third World.

Modern moral philosophy has taken ethical egoism as its principle foil for developing what can fairly be called a humanistic perspective on value and obligation. That is, both Kantian and Humean approaches to ethics tend to view the philosophical challenge as that of providing an epistemological and motivational generalization of an agent’s natural self-interested concern. This chapter discusses four distinctions that must be kept clear needing attention. The first is that between moral rights and moral considerability. A second distinction is that between what might be called a criterion of moral considerability and a criterion of moral significance. The third distinction turns on the difference between questions of intelligibility and questions of normative substance. The fourth is that there is another respect in which the present inquiry involves framework questions rather than questions of application.