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Identity development during emerging adulthood helps lay down the structure of values, social bonds, and decision-making patterns that help determine adult outcomes, including patterns of substance use. Managing cultural identity may pose unique challenges for American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) emerging adults in "urban" areas (away from tribal lands or reservations), who are relatively isolated from social and cultural connections. This isolation is in turn a product of cultural genocide and oppression, both historically and in the present day. This paper uses qualitative data from 13 focus groups with urban AI/AN emerging adults, parents, and providers to explore how cultural dynamics are related to substance use outcomes for urban AI/AN emerging adults. We found that cultural isolation as well as ongoing discrimination presents challenges to negotiating cultural identity, and that the AI/AN social and cultural context sometimes presented risk exposures and pathways for substance use. However, we also found that culture provided a source of strength and resilience for urban AI/AN emerging adults, and that specific cultural values and traditions - such as mindfulness, connection to nature, and a deep historical and cosmological perspective - offer "binding pathways" for positive behavioral health. We conclude with two suggestions for substance use prevention and intervention for this population: (1) incorporate these "binding pathways" for health and resilience explicitly into intervention materials; (2) emphasize and celebrate emerging adulthood itself as a sacred cultural transition.The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42844-022-00058-w.

Host silencing of transposable elements (TEs) is critical to prevent genome damage and inappropriate inflammation. However, new evidence suggests that a virus-infected host may re-activate TEs and co-opt them for antiviral defense. RNA-Seq and specialized bioinformatics have revealed the diversity of virus infections that induce TEs. Furthermore, studies with influenza virus have uncovered how infection-triggered changes to the SUMOylation of TRIM28, an epigenetic co-repressor, lead to TE de-repression. Importantly, there is a growing appreciation of how de-repressed TEs stimulate antiviral gene expression, either via cis-acting enhancer functions or via their recognition as viral mimetics by innate immune nucleic acid sensors (e.g. RIG-I, mda-5 and cGAS). Understanding how viruses trigger, and counteract, TE-based antiviral immunity should provide insights into pathogenic mechanisms.

U.S. conservation policy, both in structure and in practice, places a heavy burden on conservationists to halt development projects, rather than on advocates of development to defend their proposed actions. In this paper, we identify this structural phenomenon in several landmark environmental policies and in practice in the contemporary debate concerning oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The burdens placed on conservation can be understood in terms of constraints—as conservation ‘floors’ (or minimum standards) and degradation ‘ceilings’ (or upper limits). At base, these floors and ceilings emerge out of underlying consequentialist commitments that assume that our environmental activity can be justified by appeal primarily to ends. A series of intuition pumps guides our argument to instead shift the conservation discourse away from these consequentialist commitments to more widely justify activities on our public lands.

Recent work in applied ethics has advanced a raft of arguments regarding individual responsibilities to address collective challenges like climate change or the welfare and environmental impacts of meat production. Frequently, such arguments suggest that individual actors have a responsibility to be more conscientious with their consumption decisions, that they can and should harness the power of the market to bring about a desired outcome. A common response to these arguments, and a challenge in particular to act-consequentialist reasoning, is that it "makes no difference" if one takes conscious consumption action or not - that one is "causally impotent" to change an outcome. In this paper, I break causal impotence objections into three distinct lines of argument and present causal indeterminacy as a third, unexplored variation of much more common causal impotence lines. I suggest that the causal indeterminacy argument presents additional challenges to consequentialist moral theory because it acknowledges that individual actions can have an impact on outcome, but suggests instead that the outcome can neither be known nor secured by the action itself.

Although approximately 70% of American Indians/Alaska Natives (AI/ANs) reside in urban areas, our knowledge of risk and protective factors among AI/ANs seeking substance use treatment within urban areas is limited. We analyze substance and commercialized cigarette use, AI/AN cultural identity and involvement, physical health and cognitive functioning, and mental health symptoms among 63 AI/AN adults seeking substance use treatment within an urban area in California. Alcohol (37%), marijuana (27%), and methamphetamine (22%) were the most commonly reported substances. Sixty-two percent used commercialized tobacco use. The majority of AI/AN adults (78%) engaged in at least one traditional practice during the past month and endorsed high levels of spiritual connectedness. Those who engaged in traditional practices demonstrated significantly less depression (p = 0.007) and anxiety (p = 0.04). Medical and mental health issues were not prominent, although participants revealed high levels of cognitive impairment. Results highlight the importance of utilizing AI/AN traditional practices for AI/AN adults seeking substance use treatment within urban areas. Clinical Trials Registry Number NCT01356667.

China's presence in Africa has grown rapidly over the past two decades, as Africa's oil and minerals have become increasingly important for China's resource-hungry economy. China's network of relations with developing states began its expansion during the 1990s, and by the early Twenty First Century had become an increasing cause for concern amongst Western commentators. Critics of Chinese influence in Africa argue that China's economic relations are self-serving, and that their actions might detrimentally affect progress for democratisation, human rights, and sustainable development in Africa. Others argue that, in fact, Chinese policies aim to create long-term stability and development in African nations, on a mutually beneficial basis. This article will assess Chinese policies as implemented in the period up to 2011, in the two African nations of Sudan and Mozambique. Criticisms of Chinese relations with Africa will be considered, which commonly include that those relationships will hurt African economies, encourage corruption and authoritarianism, and threaten the security of African civilians. This article concludes that there is some truth to each of these criticisms, but that the reality is more complex, varies substantially from case to case, and does not preclude positive outcomes from these growing relations.

Alcohol and other drug (AOD) use among American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs) is a significant health issue in the United States. However, few evidence-based substance use interventions that utilize AI/AN traditional practices, such as drumming, exist. The current study is a feasibility randomized controlled trial (RCT) analyzing the potential benefits of DARTNA (Drum-Assisted Recovery Therapy for Native Americans) among 63 AI/AN adults seeking substance use treatment within an urban area in southern California. We compared DARTNA participants to usual care plus, which involved an integrated multimedia health educational program and usual care from providers for AOD use. At end of treatment, DARTNA participants reported significantly lower cognitive impairment and lower counts of physical ailments. Given that this was a feasibility trial, we also used Cohen's d = 0.20 or odds ratio = 2 or 0.5 to determine clinical significance. At end of treatment, we found promising benefits for DARTNA participants related to better physical health, fewer drinks per day, and lower odds of marijuana use in the past 30 days compared to the control group. Using these criteria, at 3-month follow-up, DARTNA participants reported less adoption of 12-step principles, less cognitive impairment, and lower anxiety with relationships. However, DARTNA participants reported more drinks per day and more cigarettes compared to the control group. Overall, this study demonstrates feasibility of conducting an RCT with AI/AN people in urban settings and highlights how a substance use treatment intervention utilizing drumming may help to meet the diverse needs of AI/AN people seeking substance use treatment.

This article introduces a non-human version of the non-identity problem and suggests that such a variation exposes weaknesses in several proposed person-focused solutions to the classic version of the problem. It suggests first that person-affecting solutions fail when applied to non-human animals and, second, that many common moral arguments against climate change should be called into question. We argue that a more inclusive version of the person-affecting principle, which we call the ‘patient-affecting principle’, captures more accurately the moral challenge posed by the non-identity problem. We argue further that the failure of person-affecting solutions to solve non-human versions of the problem lend support to impersonal solutions to the problem which avoid issues of personhood or species identity. Finally, we conclude that some environmental arguments against climate change that rely on the notion of personal harm should be recast in impersonal terms.

When Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States in November 2016, many observers in the U.S. and international environmental communities began voicing concerns about the range...

Elk overgrazing in Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP), understood largely to be a consequence of wolf extirpation, poses not only a practical problem, but also several conceptual hurdles for park managers. The current RMNP ecosystem management plan addresses overgrazing by culling elk and fencing off riparian environments. This “functionalist” view effectively substitutes the role of wolves in the ecosystem with human intervention, and implicitly conflates the role or function of wolves with wolves themselves. In this paper, we argue that such substitution logic presents a conceptual problem for restoration. Seeking a resolution for this “substitution problem,” we distinguish between “reparative restoration” and “replacement restoration.” Where reparative restoration seeks to repair damage, replacement restoration seeks more aptly to replace the function of one ecological component with another. We suggest that in many cases reparative restoration is preferable to replacement restoration, and when characterized as such, may serve to better justify wolf reintroduction.

In this paper we introduce the 'New Substitution Problem' which, on its face, presents a problem for adaptation proposals that are justified by appeal to obligations of reparation. In contrast to the standard view, which is that obligations of reparation require that one restore lost value, we propose instead that obligations to aid and assist species and ecosystems in adaptation, in particular, follow from a failure to adequately justify - either by absence, neglect, omission or malice - actions that caused, or coalesced to cause, climatic change. Because this position suggests a different reason for reparation - namely, it does not rely on the notion that an obligation to repair is contingent upon a lost good - it permits moving forward with assisted colonisation and migration, but does so without falling subject to the complications of the New Substitution Problem.

In recent years, some conservation biologists and conservation organizations have sought to refocus the field of conservation biology by de-emphasizing the goal of protecting nature for its own sake in favor of protecting the environment for its benefits to humans. This 'new conservation science' (NCS) has inspired debate among academics and conservationists and motivated fundamental changes in the world's largest conservation groups. Despite claims that NCS approaches are supported by biological and social science, NCS has limited support from either. Rather, the shift in motivations and goals associated with NCS appear to arise largely from a belief system holding that the needs and wants of humans should be prioritized over any intrinsic or inherent rights and values of nature.

Drum-Assisted Recovery Therapy for Native Americans (DARTNA) is a substance abuse treatment intervention for American Indians/Alaska Natives (AI/ANs). This article provides results from 1) an initial pretest of DARTNA provided to 10 AI/AN patients with histories of substance use disorders, and 2) three subsequent focus groups conducted among AI/AN DARTNA pretest participants, substance abuse treatment providers, and the DARTNA Community Advisory Board. These research activities were conducted to finalize the DARTNA treatment manual; participants also provided helpful feedback which will assist toward this goal. Results suggest that DARTNA may be beneficial for AI/ANs with substance use problems.

Dear David, As you know, I begin most of my emails with apologies. So first of all, I am so sorry for being late getting back to your email, and for being appallingly late with the review of M.’s latest novel. And I apologize most of all for this: I just cannot do it. This book has been an anchor around my neck ever since you sent me a galley back in the winter. I have finally clawed my way out to page 700-something and still the remaining 300-some pages loom ahead, foreboding and without promise. At some point in the more than six months it’s taken me to get this far into the book, I started forcing myself to read it by taking it to the gym with me. It made sense for the task of reading this book to accompany my trying to lose weight on the stationary cycle: both are joyless, laborious, repetitive chores done in a state of squinty-eyed perspiration and only in the distant hope that, eventually, I will finally get rid of something heavy.

This chapter seeks to firm up a distinction between actions and events, eventually motivating a more important distinction between the right and the good. The chapter contrasts the bombing of Hiroshima with the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 to suggest that actions and events are not as easy to compare as they may first appear. It then discusses decision trees and introduces “the case of the poisoning stranger,” to illustrate how difficult comparisons between actions and events can be. In doing so, it lays the groundwork to cover the distinction between the right and the good.

This chapter introduces the central trope of the book: that a key supposition of environmentalism is the idea that nature is valuable. It briefly explores questions regarding the nature of nature, but also introduces a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic value. It utilizes cases of environmental direct action to demonstrate a range of value-based arguments prevalent throughout the environmental community.

This chapter addresses the book’s core distinction by contrasting the right and the good. It utilizes a thought experiment – the Parable of Wicked and Wild – to argue that the imperative of justification is paramount to building a viable environmental ethics. Such an environmentalism would seek to build a “viridian commonwealth” in which citizens and industries act with and for reasons that are or could be subjected to the scrutiny of all citizens.

This chapter addresses different sorts of justificatory reasons – consequentialist and nonconsequentialist – with the objective of demonstrating how consequentialist reasoning has permeated the environmental discourse. It uses the cases of geoengineering and vaccination (from in imaginary deadly illness – the Schmoo) to illustrate how ethical orientations toward the good often come up short when seeking to justify complicated interventions that encroach on human lives.

This chapter seeks to make sense of motivating and justificatory reasons as different sorts of answers to “why” questions. The chapter uses the related problems of overpopulation and the irrationality of voting to first, examine the tragedy of the commons; second, to explore a response to causal impotence objections; and third, to establish the right as the justified. It also distinguishes between justification as a status and justification as a process.

This chapter argues that reasons are underdetermined and often left out of value-based discussions of nature. The chapter offers a rough sketch of Kantian moral theory – particularly the first two formulations of the Categorical Imperative – to suggest that the primary charge of environmentalism ought to be that of encouraging deeper justification of actions. It utilizes the Endangered Species Act, the argument from ecosystem services, and the case of a stolen kidney to suggest that cost-benefit analysis and related methodologies are insufficient for addressing the broad ethical considerations of environmentalists.

This chapter aims to explore actions more closely, specifically turning an eye to matters of intentional action. The chapter distinguishes instances of wanting from instances of willing, and drives a wedge between motivating and justificatory reasons that will be further explored in Chapter 7. It contrasts the case of the Appalachian Trail Murders with the Ives Bear Attack (from Chapter 2) to suggest that motivating reasons are primarily employed in explanatory arguments, but that justificatory reasons emerge as principles of the will.

The summer of 1967, the Summer of Love, was a time of increasing domestic unrest. The civil rights movement was well underway, Martin Luther King Jr. was in his final year of inspiring young upstarts to object peacefully to discrimination, the mantra that one should “make love, not war,” was emblazoned on hand-held posters and tattered bedsheets, and millions of mattresses, shorn of these selfsame sheets, were laying witness to the sexual revolution. We now know that the young man who was snapped by photographer Bernie Boston placing carnations in the barrels of automatic weapons was George Harris, a struggling actor heading off to San Francisco. Harris would later declare his homosexuality, assume the name Hibiscus, and help start a flamboyant drag troupe called the Cockettes. In the early 1990s, he would die of AIDS, a disease he contracted, arguably, thanks to the free love that had become a defining feature of his lifestyle....

Apart from the time I substituted a cup of salt for a cup of sugar, one of my first cooking misadventures occurred in the early 1990s, on a Thanksgiving trip home from college. Filled with an arsenal of ideas and a mind for social change, I was home to proselytize, eager to persuade my family that a vegetarian diet was not only the right diet but the tastiest diet as well. It was my view then that each of us is obligated to do our part to undermine the negative impacts of factory farms. Not only are such farms cruel to animals, I thought, but they are also an extremely inefficient way of providing food. I was of the mind that each American bore the burden to change his or her behavior to help put factory farms out of business. And so I took it upon myself to demonstrate that a good, healthy holiday meal needn’t be propped up by honey-baked hams and richly stuffed turkeys....

This chapter introduces the reader to philosophical and ethical inquiry by forging a distinction between descriptive and normative claims, as well as explanatory and justificatory arguments. It utilizes cases of paleontological discovery and climate communication to argue that “catastrophe reasoning” about climate change is not only politically but also ethically problematic. In this respect, it relies on the current climate discussion to frame the general argument criticized in this book: that the mere demonstration of nature’s value is enough to generate obligations to protect nature.

This chapter proposes that nature often can be disvaluable, but that many modern conveniences and technologies mediate and temper this disvalue. The chapter utilizes a series of anecdotes -- including animal attacks against humans, illness from food borne pathogens, fears of cryptids, and scorched earth warfare -- to underscore the disvalue of nature and show how technologies often mask an underlying brutality in nature.

Many geoengineering projects have been proposed to address climate change, including both solar radiation management and carbon removal techniques. Some of these methods would introduce additional compounds into the atmosphere or the ocean. This poses a difficult conundrum: Is it permissible to remediate one pollutant by introducing a second pollutant into a system that has already been damaged, threatened, or altered? We frame this conundrum as the ‘‘Problem of Permissible Pollution.’’ In this paper, we explore this problem by taking up ocean fertilization and advancing an argument that rests on three moral claims. We first observe that pollution is, in many respects, a context-dependent matter. This observation leads us to argue for a ‘‘justifiability criterion.’’ Second, we suggest that remediating actions must take into account the antecedent conditions that have given rise to their consideration. We call this second observation the ‘‘antecedent conditions criterion.’’ Finally, we observe that ocean fertilization, and other related geoengineering technologies, propose not strictly to clean up carbon emissions, but actually to move the universe to some future, unknown state. Given the introduced criteria, we impose a ‘‘future-state constraint’’. We conclude that ocean fertilization is not an acceptable solution for mitigating climate change. In attempting to shift the universe to a future state (a) geoengineering sidelines consideration of the antecedent conditions that have given rise to it —conditions, we note, that in many cases involve unjustified carbon emissions —and (b) it must appeal to an impossibly large set of affected parties.