ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Decision Making Process in Environmental Issues

Decision Making Process in Environmental Issues

Introduction

Over the past four decades, the concept of corporate environmentalism was born and redefined through multiple iterations. Driven by major environmental events such Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the Santa Barbara oil spill, the Cuyahoga River fire, Love Canal, Bhopal, the Exxon Valdez spill, the Brent Spar controversy, and many others, conceptions of corporate environmentalism as regulatory compliance in the 1970s gave way to newer management conceptions of “pollution prevention,” “total quality environmental management,” “industrial ecology,” “life-cycle analysis,” “sustainable development,” “environmental strategy,” “environmental justice,” and others.

The media focus of these conceptions expanded from air and water in the 1970s to hazardous waste, remediation, toxics, right to know, ozone, global warming, acid rain, solid waste, chlorine phase out, and environmental racism today. And with each conception came greater complexity for understanding the intersection of business activity and environmental protection. In particular, empirical data since the 1980s has raised questions about whether environmental protection and economic competitiveness can, at times, be complimentary.

Perspectives from Ethics

Scholars in the field of ethics focus on the nature and morality of human conduct. When addressing corporate activity as it relates to the environment, this field focuses on the role of the corporation within society and its responsibilities toward conserving, preserving, and utilizing natural resources. It mixes descriptions of what presently is with prescriptions of what ought to be. It is a normative discovery of human values derived from science, metaphysics, aesthetics, epistemology, philosophy, and judgments of intrinsic values. Where these fields have traditionally concerned themselves with an account of the goods of culture and of the right and wrong of interpersonal relations between man and man, environmental ethics takes traditional ethics one step forward, acknowledging that humans inhabit natural communities and expanding ethics to consider human responsibility for nature.

More specifically, it argues the thesis that human populations, nonhuman animals, and nonsentient nature are all morally considerable. They may not be counted by the same metric, but each counts in moral calculations because each has intrinsic value. Where traditional ethics places man at the center of the moral universe, environmental ethics expands the scope of that universe and man's place within it. Of particular importance in this discussion is the place of the corporation—man's dominant instrument for utilizing natural resources—within the natural environment.

Fauna and Flora International

Fauna & Flora International (FFI), formerly the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society, is an international conservation charity and non-governmental organization.

FFI was originally founded in 1903 as the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire by a group of British naturalists and American statesmen in Africa. It was then called the Fauna Preservation Society, before being renamed Fauna and Flora Preservation Society in 1981. The goal of the society was to safeguard the future of southern Africa's large mammal populations, which had declined alarmingly due to over-hunting and habitat encroachment. Working in tandem with landowners, government and sport hunters, the Society helped pass legislation which controlled hunting in vast stretches ...