Environmental Pluralism

Introduction Decisions increasingly become dilemmas without obvious solutions as worldviews clash, science conflicts, politics polarize, and institutions entrench. Yet decision must be made: Should we sacrifice a species in order to build a road that increases access to health care for people in need? Should we confine pigs and chickens in feeding operations whose efficiencies preserve habitat that conserves biological diversity? Should we burn trees and bunnies to restore native species and natural fire regimes? Should we salvaged for lumber dead trees or leave them to rot and provide habitat? Should dams release water for spawning salmon and forgo opportunities to generate clean hydropower and irrigate inexpensive food? Should we subsidize biofuel industries that produce jobs, national security, and moderate climate but convert vast habitats to corn and tree monocultures? Should livers be transplanted from genetically modified pigs to extend human lives? Should exotic species of fish be poisoned so that native fish might thrive? Decision makers facing these wicked choices operate within a segmented and fractured world created by disciplinary, institutional, locale, language, and normative barriers that define communities of practice such as public-health and environmental illness, deep ecology and animal rights, organic agriculture and steady state economics, evangelical Christians and creation care, urban planning and civil engineering, and environmental justice and environmental law. Each of these communities of practice develops internally consistent and self-reinforcing rationale to explain observations of the world and defend decisions. These communities of practice, although largely autonomous, can overlap in the preferred outcomes and rationale they advance. Environmental pluralism is offered as the framework for decision-making appropriate for this context; for the purposes of this essay, it has two dimensions: moral and procedural.