Routledge Environmental Ethics
About the Book Series
Routledge Environmental Ethics
Series Editor: Benjamin Hale, University of Colorado, Boulder
The Routledge Environmental Ethics series aims to gather novel work on questions that fall at the intersection of the normative and the practical, with an eye toward conceptual issues that bear on environmental policy and environmental science. Recognizing the growing need for input from academic philosophers and political theorists in the broader environmental discourse, but also acknowledging that moral responsibilities for environmental alteration cannot be understood without rooting themselves in the practical and descriptive details, this series aims to unify contributions from within the environmental literature.
Books in this series can cover topics in a range of environmental contexts, including individual responsibility for climate change, conceptual matters affecting climate policy, the moral underpinnings of endangered species protection, complications facing wildlife management, the nature of extinction, the ethics of reintroduction and assisted migration, reparative responsibilities to restore, among many others.
We welcome book proposals from all branches of ethics, political theory, and philosophy more broadly, aiming to create a collection of work that touches on the most pressing environmental issues of our time. We favour manuscripts aimed at an international readership and written in a lively style that minimizes jargon. As our readership includes scholars and students from across the disciplinary spectrum, we also hope to support work that both brings practical relevance to theoretical questions for academics to further develop, but that also assists in conveying important conceptual insights to environmental policy makers, managers, and academics in other fields.
Please contact the Editor, Grace Harrison ([email protected]) to discuss a proposal.
Limits in Nature: A Philosophical Exploration
1st Edition
By Svein Anders Noer Lie
August 27, 2026
Adopting a fresh approach, this book explores our understanding of nature’s limits and proposes a new perspective to reframe the relationship between these limits and human freedom. Where should we look to uncover the deeper roots of today’s environmental disagreements? A common answer might be: ...
Plant-Inclusive Care Ethics: Insights from Bonsai, Tomato Plants, and Giant Sequoia Trees
1st Edition
By Kate Brelje
July 03, 2026
Examining anthropocentric assumptions and arguments in care ethics literature, this book argues that caring for plants represents a moral obligation and vital relationship between human carers and plant cared-fors. By exploring the moral value in plants and their capabilities for caring ...
Positive Duties to Wild Animals
1st Edition
Edited
By Kyle Johannsen
May 21, 2026
This book further develops the interventionist literature on wild animal suffering using different theoretical frameworks, including some that have never previously been used to ground our positive duties to wild animals. Though we’ve always known that the wild is a nasty place where predators ...
Virtue Ethics and the Environment
1st Edition
By Dominika Dzwonkowska
December 26, 2025
This book addresses one of today’s most burning issues, namely the environmental crisis, by offering an insight into the problem from the perspective of virtue ethics. Virtue ethics is an approach to ethics that centralizes the concept of moral virtue, which can be extended to environmental ethics ...
Environmental Ethics and our Collective Character
1st Edition
By David Clowney
November 21, 2025
Faced with the global crisis of human-caused environmental harm, this eloquently written text explores the connection between our individual virtues and vices and those of larger groups, such as societies, nations, and businesses. It demonstrates how this huge collective crisis is our moral problem...
Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil: Decreation for the Anthropocene
1st Edition
By Kathryn Lawson
October 27, 2025
This book places the philosophy of Simone Weil into conversation with contemporary environmental concerns in the Anthropocene. The book offers a systematic interpretation of Simone Weil, making her ethical philosophy more accessible to non-Weil scholars. Weil’s work has been influential in many ...
Critical Realism and the Objective Value of Sustainability: Philosophical and Ethical Approaches
1st Edition
By Gabriela-Lucia Sabau
June 27, 2025
Critical Realism and the Objective Value of Sustainability contributes to the growing discussion surrounding the concept of sustainability, using a critical realist approach within a transdisciplinary theoretical framework to examine how sustainability objectively occurs in the natural world and in...
The Concept of Milieu in Environmental Ethics: Individual Responsibility within an Interconnected World
1st Edition
By Laÿna Droz
September 25, 2023
The Concept of Milieu in Environmental Ethics discusses how we can come together to address current environmental problems at the planetary level, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, transborder pollution and desertification. The book recognises the embedded individual sociocultural and ...
Philosophy in the American West: A Geography of Thought
1st Edition
Edited
By Josh Hayes, Gerard Kuperus, Brian Treanor
May 31, 2023
Philosophy in the American West explores the physical, ecological, cultural, and narrative environments associated with the western United States, reflecting on the relationship between people and the places that sustain them. The American West has long been recognized as having significance. ...
Climate Justice Beyond the State
1st Edition
By Lachlan Umbers, Jeremy Moss
January 09, 2023
Virtually every figure in the climate justice literature agrees that states are presently failing to discharge their duties to take action on climate change. Few, however, have attempted to think through what follows from that fact from a moral point of view. In Climate Justice Beyond the State, ...
Sustainable Action and Motivation: Pathways for Individuals, Institutions and Humanity
1st Edition
By Roland Mees
December 13, 2021
Sustainable Action and Motivation proposes individual competencies and institutional policies that can help overcome the motivational hurdles that hamper sustainable action.Following the Paris Agreement of 2015 and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the political momentum urgently to begin ...
Philosophy and the Climate Crisis: How the Past Can Save the Present
1st Edition
By Byron Williston
October 12, 2020
This book explores how the history of philosophy can orient us to the new reality brought on by the climate crisis. If we understand the climate crisis as a deeply existential one, it can help to examine the way past philosophers responded to similar crises in their times. This book explores five ...