The Department of Philosophy and the McGill University School of Environment (MSE) invite applications for an Assistant Professor, tenure-track, to begin in August 2006. For this joint position, we seek an outstanding moral philosopher whose research interests centrally include the ethical issues posed by our relation to the environment. We seek candidates excellent in research and teaching, with broad philosophical interests, able to engage actively with philosophers in a broad range of research interests, above all with the theoretical ethicists already at McGill, and with colleagues from a wide range of disciplines affiliated with the MSE. The successful candidate will be expected to supervise graduate students in both units, and to play a role in the further development of programmes within the MSE. Teaching load: four (undergraduate and graduate) courses per year (two in each semester), split between the MSE and the Department of Philosophy, together with graduate and undergraduate supervision. Usual administrative responsibilities, divided between the two units. Ph.D. expected by time of appointment. Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience. Applications must contain: CV, transcript or list of graduate coursework, statement of research and teaching interests, representative sample of written work or sample publications, and three confidential letters of reference sent under separate cover by the applicant’s referees. Deadline for receipt of complete applications: December 1st, 2005.

Address:
Search Committee (Environmental Ethics)
Dept. of Philosophy, McGill University
855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 2T7
Applications and/or application materials will not be accepted by fax or by e-mail, and materials cannot be returned.

McGill University is committed to equity in employment. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents of Canada will be given priority. The language of instruction at McGill is English, but a working knowledge of French would be an asset.

The inaugural issue of Call to Earth, the official journal of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy, appeared in March, 2000.  It was sent to all members of IAEP.  To order a subscription to Call to Earth, simply become a member!

The mission of Call to Earth is the same as the mission of the Association:

• to embrace a broad understanding of environmental philosophy, including not only environmental ethics, but also environmental aesthetics, ontology, and theology, the philosophy of science, ecofeminism, and the philosophy of technology.
• to welcome a diversity of approaches to environmental issues, including the many schools of Continental Philosophy, studies in history of philosophy, and the tradition of American Philosophy.
• to encourage joining with other academic disciplines and to support interdisciplinary scholarship.
  

TABLE OF CONTENTS for Inaugural Issue, Vol. I/ No. 1 (March, 2000):

In October, 1998, IAEP co-sponsored 'Conversations with the Earth,' a symposium at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Toronto. Speakers included IAEP members Max Oelschlaeger, Albert Borgmann, Bruce V. Foltz, and Robert Frodeman, as well as Daniel Sarewitz, Christine Turner, and GSA President Victor Baker. The papers given at the conference will become part of a book, Earth Matters, to be published by Prentice-Hall in 1999.
 

The following is the first in a series of reports from IAEP's international representatives.

As in any advanced industrial (or perhaps even post-industrial) nation, we can see the rise of what we could call "ecological consciousness" in Japan in the last decade or so. I am interested in the way this rising awareness of the impact of ecological problems differs from that experienced in the West, and how it is related to the awareness of nature in general. As with many things Japanese, the view from a Western perspective may seem strangely paradoxical. Japan underwent a dramatic economic boom after the war, which changed a nation in ruins into the economic powerhouse it has become today. During this period of high growth, pollution was regarded as a necessary evil and few steps were taken to curb it; this resulted in several disasters, the most famous being the mercury poisoning in Minamata, the legal echoes of which reverberate to this day. Since the seventies, pollution controls have been much stricter, and the quality of the air in cities for example has dramatically improved. Ecological disasters in the making linked to corruption scandals continue to plague the nation, however: in 1997 a series of leaks at nuclear power stations and the subsequent cover-ups by the governmental agency responsible for safety shattered the myth of infallible security associated with the Japanese nuclear program and galvanized public opinion against nuclear plans and proposals for waste storage.

In 1998 the problem in the news is the extremely high levels of dioxin found in soil around the many small incinerators in Japan; the levels found are extremely high, amounting in some cases to several thousand times the permissible concentrations in other countries. A growing awareness of the effect of dioxin on the human food chain is forcing the Japanese government to re-examine its incinerators and waste-disposal policies. Whereas in the United States and Europe there may be instances of clear clashes between big business and the ecological awareness of consumers, as in Shell's Brent Spar episode, in Japan ecological awareness appears to be limited to civic environmental groups, which, despite their dedication, seem to have little impact on either business practices or government regulations. The Japanese Environmental Agency is a section of the General Affairs Bureau and can only enforce environmental standards if there are clear cases of the law being broken. Since there are few laws concerning environmental standards, however, the Environmental Agency can only provide guidelines which cannot be enforced. In many cases, these guidelines clash with the explicit or implicit policies of the powerful Construction and Industry and Trade (MITI) Ministries.

In terms of everyday ecological consciousness, the recycling movement has started to grow in Japan. In comparative studies, Japan tends to get high marks for industrial recycling and low marks for consumer recycling efforts. Compared with Western nations, the percentage of recycling in industry is very high, partly because of the high cost of raw materials and waste dumping space, partly because of a cultural tradition to use all available materials with the least amount of waste. Paper from magazines and newspapers is recycled efficiently. Household waste was not segregated until recently, but the rapid filling up of garbage disposal sites has prompted local governments to introduce or accelerate the recycling of glass, cans, plastic bottles and so on. Certain cultural traits, like the endless but often gorgeous wrapping of goods, or the use of disposable chopsticks, seem to impede recycling efforts, while on the other hand there has been a resurgence of "recycle shops", the fashionable name for stores selling second-hand goods.

There are also many small grassroots movements for organic farming, health-food stores and so on, but far fewer than in Europe or the United States. The Japanese attitude to nature is again rather paradoxical from a Western point of view. Japanese seem to have a profoundly ambivalent view towards nature and the natural. On the one hand there is great respect for nature: the indigenous Shinto religion, a form of animism, considers trees, rivers, rocks and earth to be sacred. Traces of that consciousness remain in everyday life. On the other hand nature has always been wild and threatening in a country where earthquakes, typhoons and floods are frequent and regular occurrences. The Japanese have tried to protect themselves from this destructive side of nature by a massive construction effort. The Japanese do not cut down their own forest, mostly because it is not cost-efficient, and most of the forest in the rugged mountainous Japanese archipelago remains. Instead, Japan uses it economical might to decimate pristine forests in Malaysia and other places. These activities have recently been exposed and confronted by group activism, and Japanese people are become more aware of their global ecological responsibility.

The construction industry in Japan, whose interests are promoted by politicians who depend on them for large donations, has "protected" and defaced more than a quarter of the Japanese coastline with large concrete pylons. The industry has built countless unnecessary tunnels, bridges and even airports; dammed all but one river in Japan, and is now busy, ludicrous as it may seem, with paving the riverbeds. Although some of these projects are justified by expanding infrastructure and the need to protect cities against flooding and coastal degradation, the scale of these projects has turned most of the natural environment in the populated areas into an artificial world. Rivers, banked and paved with concrete for tens of miles, sometimes with ornamental concrete waterfalls, look more like canals. Large corporations have co-opted the rising ecological awareness for their own purposes. TV commercials spawned an "outdoor life" boom several years ago, exhorting the Japanese people to buy a huge amount of camping gear, and to replace their compact cars with American-sized recreational vehicles which now clog narrow city streets. While there is a positive appreciation for the natural environment born from such outdoor activities, the approach is hardly ecologically sound.

This brings up another point in which the Japanese attitude to nature differs from that of the West. While European and American cities are often littered and dirty, Westerners tend to respect beaches, forests and the natural environment. The situation is reversed in Japan: cities are extremely clean, and few people litter. These compunctions are thrown by the wayside as soon as the social control of the city is gone, however. Japanese beaches are littered with cans and plastic, and riverbeds and forests are used to dump large amounts of garbage, preferably under signs expressly forbidding such activity. There is no doubt a generational gap here. Older people and country folk tend to respect the natural environment, while younger Japanese, who have been cut off from it, treat it as a playground with only recreational value.

The raising of ecological consciousness through advertising is another interesting phenomenon. The ecological message has been used in a cynical fashion to give large corporations a more caring and benign aura, and everyone from car companies to chemical manufacturers to the construction industry is flooding the market with soft-focus images of nature, of happy young children playing, of an absurdly utopian achievement of ecological renewal through even more manufactured items. Travelers at the new Kansai airport are greeted by a huge photograph of a pristine mountain environment, captioned by the slogan "Let's resonate with nature" (in Japanese). In a campaign by Mitsubishi Motors, the earth is represented by a naked baby which needs our protection, and a more efficient engine is touted as a lasting contribution to such protection. What is truly remarkable about the advertisement is the uncritical way in which this message as the earth as a helpless and vulnerable entity is presented and no doubt accepted. This means that despite the definite raising of ecological awareness in Japan in the last decade, the idea seems to be that further technological improvement is crucial to saving the environment, and even that large businesses in the chemical, oil and automobile industry are the improbable guardians of the natural environment and will provide the key to ecological renewal.

This marriage of technology and ecology, which has also been enthusiastically embraced in the United States, seems to leave the question begging as to who is destroying the environment in the first place. Car manufacturers are touting newer and more efficient cars and are experimenting with electric and hybrid cars, in a attempt to capitalize on growing ecological consciousness and capture market share, but nobody is questioning the orthodoxy of ever more cars in this saturated country. To conclude, there are promising signs that the Japanese public is becoming more aware of ecological problems within the country and of its global ecological responsibility. There is progress in recycling efforts and in the public awareness of the need for recycling. One problematic point noted above is the role of industry, and especially the big polluters, in shaping public opinion and ecological discussion through advertising.