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Agricultural biotechnology refers to a diverse set of industrial techniques used to produce genetically modified foods. Genetically modified (GM) foods are foods manipulated at the molecular level to enhance their value to farmers and consumers. This book is a collection of essays on the ethical dimensions of ag biotech. The essays were written over a dozen years, beginning in 1988. When I began to reflect on the subject, ag biotech was an exotic, untested, technology. Today, in the first year of the millenium, the vast majority of consumers in the United States have taken a bite of the apple. Milk produced by cows injected with a GM protein called recombinant bovine growth hormone (bGH), is found, unlabelled, on grocery shelves throughout the US. In 1999, half of the soybeans and cotton harvested in the US were GM varieties. Billions of dollars of public and private monies are being invested annually in biotech research, and commercial sales now reach into the tens of billions of dollars each year. I Whereas ag biotech once promised to change American agriculture, it now is in the process of doing so.
Autonomous Nature investigates the history of nature as an active, often unruly force in tension with nature as a rational, logical order from ancient times to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Along with subsequent advances in mechanics, hydrodynamics, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism, nature came to be perceived as an orderly, rational, physical world that could be engineered, controlled, and managed. Autonomous Nature focuses on the history of unpredictability, why it was a problem for the ancient world through the Scientific Revolution, and why it is a problem for today. The work is set in the context of vignettes about unpredictable events such as the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, the Bubonic Plague, the Lisbon Earthquake, and efforts to understand and predict the weather and natural disasters. This book is an ideal text for courses on the environment, environmental history, history of science, or the philosophy of science.
A witty, provocative, story-filled inquiry into the indispensable virtue of loyalty—a tricky ideal that gets tangled and compromised when loyalties collide (as they inevitably do), but a virtue the author, a prizewinning columnist for The Wall Street Journal, says is as essential as it is impossible. Felten illustrates the push and pull of loyalties— from the ancient Greeks to Facebook—with stories and scenarios in which conflicting would-be moral trump cards trap the unlucky in painful ethical dilemmas. The foundation of our greatest satisfactions in life, loyalty also proves to be the root of much misery. Can we escape the excruciating predicaments when loyalties are at loggerheads? Can we avoid betraying and being betrayed? When looking for love and friendship—the things that make life worthwhile—we are looking for loyalty. Who can we count on? And who can count on us? These are the essential (and uncomfortable) questions loyalty poses. Loyalty and betrayal are the stuff of the great stories that move us: Agamemnon, Huck Finn, Brutus, Antigone, Judas. When is loyalty right, and when does the virtue become a vice? As Felten writes in his thoughtful and entertaining book, loyalty is vexing. It forces us to choose who and what counts most in our lives—from siding with one friend over another to favoring our own children over others. It forces us to confront the conflicting claims of fidelity to country, community, company, church, and even ourselves. Loyalty demands we make decisions that define who we are.
In Character and Environment, Ronald L. Sandler brings together contemporary work on virtue ethics with contemporary work on environmental ethics. He demonstrates the many ways that any ethic of character can and should be informed by environmental considerations. He also develops a pluralistic, virtue-oriented environmental ethic that accommodates the richness and complexity of our relationship with the natural environment and provides effective and nuanced guidance on environmental issues.
The chemicals from plant sources, generally termed as phytochemicals, play an important role in acceptance or rejection of the plant by the pests as they could be distasteful or toxic on one hand or on the other hand specialist herbivores have the capability to feed on many such chemicals, as they are able to process these natural products in a manner that is beneficial to them. In the wake of increasing environmental degradation due to burgeoning synthetic chemicals, there has been a process going on to rediscover the usefulness of plants and herbs and a continued effort for more than 2 decades has been to study the green products for cures for several ailments and pest management. In fact, according to Indian Medicinal Plants: A Sectoral Study, the global trade for medicinal plants amounts to about US $ 60 billion and the world demand continues to grow at the rate of 7 per cent per annum. Although many such plants are known in literature, neem has been one of trees with mani-fold virtues. Indian neem tree, Azadirachta indica A. Juss, which is a large evergreen tree, is an outstanding example among plants that has been subject matter of numerous scientific studies concerning its utilization in medicine, industry and agriculture. So far neem preparations have been evaluated against more than 500 species of insects and more than 400 hundred are reported to be susceptible at different concentrations.
There are more than 6 billion people living on Earth today, and the United Nations predicts that this number will surge to 9.1 billion by the year 2050. However, the natural resources necessary to sustain the world's population-including freshwater, arabl
Integrated Resource and Environmental Management (IREM) can be defined as both a management process and a philosophy, that takes into account the many values associated with natural resources within a particular area. This book presents an overview and history of natural resource management, from a global perspective. It discusses the challenges facing IREM by examining issues such as conflict, property rights and the role of science in the management of natural resource. It also addresses the definition andapplication of IREM from several different contexts, including real-world applications, planning frameworks, and complex systems. It provides a comprehensive aid in natural resource decision-making within the context of the real world.
In an age when the nature of reality is complicated daily by advances in bioengineering, cloning, and artificial intelligence, it is easy to forget that the ever-evolving boundary between nature and technology has long been a source of ethical and scientific concern: modern anxieties about the possibility of artificial life and the dangers of tinkering with nature more generally were shared by opponents of alchemy long before genetic science delivered us a cloned sheep named Dolly. In Promethean Ambitions, William R. Newman ambitiously uses alchemy to investigate the thinning boundary between the natural and the artificial. Focusing primarily on the period between 1200 and 1700, Newman examines the labors of pioneering alchemists and the impassioned—and often negative—responses to their efforts. By the thirteenth century, Newman argues, alchemy had become a benchmark for determining the abilities of both men and demons, representing the epitome of creative power in the natural world. Newman frames the art-nature debate by contrasting the supposed transmutational power of alchemy with the merely representational abilities of the pictorial and plastic arts—a dispute which found artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy attacking alchemy as an irreligious fraud. The later assertion by the Paracelsian school that one could make an artificial human being—the homunculus—led to further disparagement of alchemy, but as Newman shows, the immense power over nature promised by the field contributed directly to the technological apologetics of Francis Bacon and his followers. By the mid-seventeenth century, the famous "father of modern chemistry," Robert Boyle, was employing the arguments of medieval alchemists to support the identity of naturally occurring substances with those manufactured by "chymical" means. In using history to highlight the art-nature debate, Newman here shows that alchemy was not an unformed and capricious precursor to chemistry; it was an art founded on coherent philosophical and empirical principles, with vocal supporters and even louder critics, that attracted individuals of first-rate intellect. The historical relationship that Newman charts between human creation and nature has innumerable implications today, and he ably links contemporary issues to alchemical debates on the natural versus the artificial.
Here's the dilemma: while traditional agricultural systems appear to be unsustainable due to their environmental impact, transgenic production seems to be a solution that could help us to make agricultural production more sustainable. This work attempts to clarify some of the concepts -such as the Precautionary Principle- that seems to govern many field of scientific research especially transgenic crops and ultimately human development. Now more than ever before, we have to face ethical challenges arising from scientific and technological developments. The genomic intervention by humans in plants, animals and microorganisms involves risks for them and, consequently, for humankind. On the other hand, if people did not interfere in the genome of these living beings, human survival could be jeopardized and the environment could be further damaged. When assessing the risks of human intervention in other living organisms, it is also essential to explore the risk of not intervening. As we develop this issue further, one essential question arises: what offers greater risk, intervention or non-intervention? Safe food, drinking water and unpolluted air are basic human needs but, if they are contaminated, they can also become hazardous to human and animal health. The paradox is that the lack of precautionary guidelines and actions can result in irreversible or serious damage to ecosystems and human health. Similarly, the erroneous application of precautionary measures, based on suspected risk, might also result in these same problems. In this book, we will explore fields such as agriculture, human health, people's effect on the environment and the resulting effect of the environment on humans. In order to explore these areas, this book is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is on the origin of the Precautionary Principle (PP), the political and social need for a new concept to stop environmental damage. The second chapter presents the search for solutions to humankind's nutritional problems. The third chapter covers the environment, the ecosystem, biodiversity, air pollution and the ethical debate on humans and their relationship with the environment. Finally, the last chapter of this book presents the most relevant issues that arise from the PP.