(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010-04)
Norton, Bryan G.
It has been argued in this journal (Callicott, et.al., 2009) that the evidence
advanced that Aldo Leopold was influenced by American Pragmatism is "imaginary,"
and that apparent textual evidence that Leopold learned key ideas from A.T. Hadley,
President of Yale University and a self-avowed Pragmatist, can be explained away. It is shown that Callicott, et. al. misunderstand pragmatism, misunderstand what
environmental pragmatists have attributed to Leopold, fail to understand either the
context or the internal argument of Leopold’s "Conservation as a Moral Issue."
Consequently, they miss important contributions that Leopold made to the philosophy of conservation.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006-10)
Norton, Bryan G.
Ecological Economics has developed as a "transdisciplinary science," but it has not taken significant steps toward a truly integrated process of evaluating anthropogenic ecological change. The emerging dominance within ecological economics of the movement to monetize "ecological services," when combined with the already well-entrenched dominance of contingent pricing as a means to evaluate impacts on amenities, has created a "monistic" approach to valuation studies. It is argued that this monistic approach to evaluating anthropogenic impacts is inconsistent with a sophisticated conception of ecology as a complex science that rests on shifting metaphors. An alternative, pluralistic and iterative approach to valuation of anthropogenic ecological change is proposed