|
Inspiration and information to protect Our |
Ocean Book of the Month Each month in 2006, The Ocean Project will highlight a book focused on our blue planet or environmental sustainability. Books for all age groups will be covered, non-fiction and fiction, prose and poetry. If you have a suggestion, please let us know.
The fact remains that the human impact on an unfathomably large area of the ocean remains relatively unregulated. In some cases, the only controls over our exploitation of marine resources lie in the collective environmental conscience. Relatively little attention has been given to the ethical issues of marine environments, and this lack of discussion on the environmental ethics of marine usage is a serious problem. Values at Sea attempts to move the debate into a broader arena. Dallmeyer has gathered fifteen papers by an interdisciplinary group of scholars. The authors include ethicists, marine scientists, anthropologists, economists, geographers, lawyers, and activists. Ranging from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Islands, as specific as coastal areas and as broad as the wide-open sea, these papers cover an expansive array of ethical issues and policy matters. Topics discussed include the valuation of marine life, indigenous peoples’ knowledge and environmental stewardship, endemic and exotic species, aquaculture, oil spills, and species protection. This land- (or, rather, sea-) mark book was the result of a two-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop the project. The grant sponsored a marine environmental ethics course, an international conference on marine environmental ethics, a book of conference papers, and a workshop for college-level instructors on incorporating marine environmental ethics into course offerings. Dallmeyer is the associate director of the University of Georgia’s Dean Rusk Center—International, Comparative, and Graduate Legal Studies, and a faculty member of the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program at the University of Georgia. She is the editor of Joining Together, Standing Apart: National Identities after NAFTA and coeditor of Rights to Oceanic Resources: Deciding and Drawing Maritime Boundaries. Values at Sea creates a broader framework of environmental ethics in order to understand the difficulties that exist in protecting the ocean the way it should be protected. Much work remains before the sea is afforded the same rights that we currently give to the land, but this book helps point us in the right direction to do so.
For any purchase you make online by linking directly from this website to either the legendary independent bookseller, Powell's, or an independent bookstore in your community participating with Book Sense (if the latter, they will prompt you for your zip code to find the closest participating bookstore), a small commission will be sent to The Ocean Project to help us continue our nonprofit educational mission, thanks to you!
|
| Visit The Ocean Project Web Site |
Values at Sea: Ethics for the Marine Environment, edited by Dorinda G. Dallmeyer, takes an important and much-needed step forward in the field of environmental ethics. The last hundred years has seen the law move light-years ahead of where it was previously, when it comes to the ethics of land use. The field of environmental ethics has thoroughly explored rights and duties for land use, stewardship, and policy. However, the advances made in the environmental ethics of land use policy have often come at the price of ignoring the other nearly ¾ of the earth’s surface: our ocean.
© 2007 The Ocean Project - All rights reserved.
Images: © 2004 Wolcott Henry