Ethics and Sustainability: Sustainable Development and the Moral Life [Paperback]

Since the advent of environmental philosophy—sentimentally dated to the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 and actually in existence since the first Earth Day in 1970—we have wanted to join the swift-flowing pragmatic and political streams of environmentalism with the broad river of ethical theory, especially in its "applied" mode. My previous work, in both ethics and environmental philosophy, positions me well to attempt such a confluence. I would not be working alone: The courses that such a joining would take have been emerging in the literature (especially in the pages of the journal Environmental Ethics) for several years. Michael Boylan's invitation to me to contribute a work on Environmental Sustainability to his Basic Ethics in Action series broke through the hard shell of my laziness and set me to work on bringing the streams together.

I believe that this volume is the first attempt at tracing the two streams to their juncture and mapping the course of the river from that point forward. I am grateful to Michael Boylan for goading me into action on the subject, very grateful to Rocky Mountain Institute for permission to quote at length from their publication, Natural Capitalism, and infinitely grateful to my family and colleagues for their patience as this work ground on to its completion.

Lisa H. Newton, in Ethics and Sustainability, brings together the imperatives to live a good life in our own community and generation, and to preserve the natural environment for generations to come. She shows how a personal ethic of virtue must include a commitment to environmental preservation, how exciting new developments in technology make it truly possible to live and develop our communities sustainably on the earth, and how the traditional virtue of simplicity unifies environmental sensitivity with a focused and gracious life. In the simple life, "sustainable development" is an attainable goal.

Ethics and Sustainability: Sustainable Development and the Moral Life is the sixth book in the series, Basic Ethics in Action, edited by Michael Boylan, which is a major new undertaking by Prentice Hall covering several areas, including business ethics, environmental ethics, medical ethics, and social and political ethics.