Environmental Ethics and Uncertainty Wrestling with Wicked Problems

This book offers a multidisciplinaryenvironmental approach to ethics in response to the contemporary challenge of climate change caused by globalized economics and consumption. This book synthesizes the incredible complexity of the problem and the necessity of action in response, highlighting the unambiguous problem facing humanity in the 21st century, but arguing that it is essential to develop an ethics housed in ambiguity in response. Environmental Ethics and Uncertainty is divided into theoretical and applied chapters, with the theoretical sections engaging in dialogue withscholars from a variety of disciplines, while the applied chapters offer insight from 20th century activists who demonstrate and/or illuminate the theory, including Martin Luther King, Rachel Carson, and Frank Lloyd Wright. This book is written for scholars and students in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies and the environmental humanities, and will appeal to courses in religion, philosophy, ethics, politics, and social theory.

Introduction The problem with knowing the answer Chapter 1 Ethical action in an ambiguous world Chapter 2 The depths of ambiguity: Ethical pluralism and wonder in Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Rachel Carson Chapter 3 Good and evil without progress Chapter 4 Complexity in action: The challenging uncertainties of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X Chapter 5 Loving the world without certainty Chapter 6 The dangers of building withoutambiguity:Spirituality and utopianismin Frank Lloyd Wright Chapter 7 Concluding ideas on ambiguous time Chapter 8 Concluding practices for an uncertain stand: Fracking, Protesting, and engineering the climate

Whitney A. Bauman is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University, USA. His books include Religion and Ecology: Developinga Planetary Ethic (2014) and, with Kevin O’Brien and Richard Bohannon, Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology, 2nd Revised Edition (2018). Kevin J. O'Brien is Professor of Religion and Dean of Humanities at Pacific Lutheran University, USA. His books include The Violence of Climate Change: Lessons of Resistance from Nonviolent Activists and, with Whitney Bauman and Richard Bohannon, Inherited Land: The Changing Grounds of Religion and Ecology.