The environmental crisis is global in scope, yet contemporary environmental ethics is centered predominantly in Western philosophy and religion. Earth's Insights widens the scope of environmental ethics to include the ecological teachings embedded in non-Western worldviews. J. Baird Callicott ranges broadly, exploring the sacred texts of Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Zen Buddhism, as well as the oral traditions of Polynesia, North and South America, and Australia. He also documents the attempts of various peoples to put their environmental ethics into practice. Finally, he wrestles with a question of vital importance to all people sharing the fate of this small planet: How can the world's many and diverse environmental philosophies be brought together in a complementary and consistent whole? "A lucid, original, and useful work by a fine scholar already well known in the emerging field of environmental philosophy."—David Abram, University of Kansas "A lucid, original, and useful work by a fine scholar already well known in the emerging field of environmental philosophy."―David Abram, University of Kansas J. Baird Callicott is Professor of Philosophy and Religion Studies at the Institute of Applied Sciences, University of North Texas, and author of In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (1989). Earth's Insights: A Multicultural Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback By J. Baird Callicott University of California Press Copyright © 1997 J. Baird Callicott All right reserved. ISBN: 0520085604 1 Introduction The Notion of and Need for Environmental Ethics Ethics And Environmental Ethics Since the 1960s, those Western scholars who responded professionally to industrial civilization's environmental crisis have argued that an implicit environmental ethic has existed in many indigenous and traditional cultures.1 And in the body of this study I shall sketch a variety of representative indigenous and traditional examples. Nevertheless, the term "environmental ethics" is a relatively new addition to our vocabulary, and the concept it denotes is not familiar. Here at the outset, an informal comparison of environmental ethics with the more commonplace social sort of ethics—and with the more pedestrian concept of environmental law—may help locate the coming discussion on a cognitive map and obviate misjudgment of both the enterprise and its efficacy. In his essay "The Land Ethic," the seminal classic of contemporary Western environmental ethics, the American conservationist Aldo Leopold understood ethics to impose "limitations on freedom of action in the struggle for existence."2 Though typically terse, Leopold's characterization is sound and gets at something fundamental. Our familiar social ethics would impose limitations on interpersonal freedom of action and on personal freedom in relation to society as a whole. Lying to a friend and falsifying scientific data are examples, respectively. Both are regarded as equally unethical or immoral, though in the former case the victim is an individual and in the latter a community—the scientific community, or society itself (at least, among those societies that venerate science), or, more abstractly still, the institution of science per se. Similarly, an environmental ethic would impose limitations on human freedom of action in relationship to nonhuman natural entities and to nature as a whole . The philosophical lexicon, incidentally, does not finely discriminate be- tween "ethics" and "morals," as ordinary English does. In this discussion, I will follow philosophical convention and use the two terms more or less interchangeably. "Ethics," further, in conjunction with a singular verb, may refer to a subdiscipline of philosophy—to wit, moral philosophy. In conjunction with a plural verb, it may refer to several moral systems—that is, it may simply be the plural of "ethic," which in every case refers to a more or less coherent set of moral ideas and ideals. Ethical or moral limitations, especially in Western cultural traditions, are formulated as behavioral rules or, more generally, as precepts and principles. In non-Western traditions, such limits may be articulated as behavioral expectations, customs, taboos, and rites, or implicitly exemplified in myth, story, and legend. In political cultures, the most vital moral limitations on human freedom—those on which the very existence of society rests—are encoded into statutes or laws. We may conceive of a prohibitive law as a moral injunction so broadly agreed on and perceived as so vital that it has been formally adopted and specifically sanctioned by society. Personal ethics, by contrast, may be conceived of as those restraints, rules, or principles not formally encoded but nevertheless recommended and sanctioned by social approbation. Ethics, in short, at once lie at the basis of laws and supplement la