Joel J. Kassiola

Can Environmental Ethics 'Solve' Environmental Problems and Save the World? Yes, but First We Must Recognise the Essential Normative Nature of Environmental Problems

What is the nature of environmental problems? This article attempts to illuminate this question by exploring the relationship between environmental ethics, environmental problems and their solution. It does this by examining and criticising the argument contained in a recent issue of Environmental Values asserting that environmental ethics does not have a role to play in solving environmental problems. The major point made in this rebuttal article is that environmental problems are essentially normative in nature. Therefore, normative discourse, and environmental ethics in particular, do have a crucial role to play in environmental thought and action. The discussion concludes with the judgment that a failure to recognise this essential contribution of normative discourse to environmentalism by committing to a conservative empirical reductionism of environmental problems is detrimental to the necessary ethical and social change required to save the world.

China’s Environmental Crisis and Confucianism: Proposing a Confucian Green Theory to Save the Environment

The goal of this chapter is to explain how consideration of Confucius’s philosophy and the two-and-a-half millennia and evolving tradition of commentary and development of Confucian thought can advance environmental political thinking and policy. I will maintain that Confucianism can provide an intellectual framework for changing China’s and the world’s current unsustainable path to more effective environmental thought and decision-making. This objective may provoke fundamental skepticism that needs to be addressed at the outset: why prescribe an ancient Chinese philosopher who is not part of modern Western thought nor associated with the environment? Why deviate from the longstanding practice of Western exclusivity regarding the environment and examine Confucius’s and his followers’ thought regarding this important topic?

Introduction: China’s Environmental Crisis—A Global Crisis with Chinese Characteristics: From Confucius to Cell Phones

It is our privilege to present this wide-ranging and pathbreaking collection of chapters on China’s environmental crisis. The inspiration for this book arose at the 2007 Association of Chinese Political Science (ACPS) Annual Meeting held at San Francisco State University (SFSU). One Coeditor, Sujian Guo, Professor of Political Science at SFSU, was then President of the ACPS and Organizer of the international Conference. He asked the other Coeditor and Contributor, Joel Jay Kassiola, Dean of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at SFSU, to welcome the attendees and deliver the Opening Remarks at the start of the Conference.