This dissertation aims to explain the conditions under which expertise can undermine democratic decision making. I argue that the root of the conflict between expertise and democracy lies in what I call insufficiently “representative” expertise – that is forms of scientific research that are not relevant to the policy questions at hand and that fail to make visible their hidden values dimensions. I claim that the scholarly literature on the problem of expertise fails to recognize and address the issue correctly, because it does not open the black box of scientific methodologies. I maintain that only by making sense of the methodological choices of experts in the context of policy making can we determine the relevance of research and reveal the hidden socio-political values and consequences. Using the case of natural gas fracking, I demonstrate how expert contributions – even though epistemically sound – can muddle democratic policy processes. I present four case studies from controversies about fracking to show how to contextualize scientific methodologies in the pertinent political process. I argue that the common problem across all case studies is the failure of expertise to sufficiently represent stakeholders’ problems and concerns. In this context, “representation” has three criteria: (1) …

There is great expectation that oil development in Ghana will catapult the nation towards prosperity and lead to drastic improvement in the wellbeing of Ghanaians. However, there is also concern that Ghana could fail to achieve these due to the resource curse notwithstanding the fact that scholars of the curse have yet to agree on the inevitability of the curse. Resource curse scholars adduce different reasons for its occurrence or absence. One thing common among the scholars, however, is that none discusses environmental justice in the context of the curse. In this dissertation, I examine Ghana's attempts at avoiding the resource curse through policymaking and implementation using the Guidelines on Environmental Assessment and Management of Ghana's offshore oil sector as a case study. I argue that a strong environmental justice frame is required to avert the curse in Ghana. Specifically, I assess the policy process in Ghana's oil sector, the institutional framework for managing the sector, and analyze the perception of environmental justice for policymaking. The outcome of these assessments show that although the policy process requires broadening for full and effective participation, Ghana has checks and balances policies to avert the resource curse and to deliver environmental justice in …

Within the environmental aesthetics literature, there is a noticeable schism between two general approaches to understanding the aesthetic value of nature: the ambient approach and the narrative approach. Ambient thinkers focus on the character of aesthetic appreciation of nature, the way in which one is embedded in multi-sensory environment. These ambient theorists emphasize the importance of those aesthetic experiences that are difficult to articulate. Narrative thinkers argue that aesthetic appreciation of nature is enhanced and enriched by narratives that are relevant to the natural object or environment encountered. Certain narratives – usually those based on scientific knowledge – encourage a depth of appreciation that is inaccessible to those unfamiliar with the narratives. In this dissertation, I attempt to articulate an account of environmental aesthetic experience that does justice to both of these approaches by drawing on the resources of philosophical hermeneutics, and especially on the aesthetic theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer. The most important aspects of Gadamer's work for environmental aesthetics are his phenomenology of play, his revival of practical philosophy, and his emphasis on the interpretive character of all understanding. His discussion of play fleshes out the core of ambient accounts, his focus on interpretation explains the insights of narrative …

This dissertation takes up the question of the social function of philosophy. Popular accounts of the nature and value of philosophy reinforce long-standing perceptions that philosophy is useless or irrelevant to pressing societal problems. Yet, the increasingly neoliberal political-economic environment of higher education places a premium on mechanisms that link public funding for research to demonstrations of return on investment in the form of benefitting broader society. This institutional situation presents a philosophical problem warranting professional attention. This project offers a diagnosis of the problem and develops a way forward from it. Drawing from Foucauldian archaeological methods, my analysis focuses on the interplay of institutional structures and intellectual practices. Since the early 20th century, departments of philosophy on college and university campuses have been the center of gravity for professional philosophy in the US. Establishing this institutional ‘home' for philosophers drove the adoption of disciplinary practices, norms, and standards for inquiry. But the metaphilosophical assumptions underpinning disciplinarity have become problematic, I argue: they are poor guides for navigating the situation of higher education in the 21st century. Several movements within the profession of philosophy during the 1960s and 70s sought to reverse philosophers' general retreat from public affairs. Applied philosophy, …

One of the major themes in environmental philosophy in the twenty-first century has broadly focused on how we experience and value the natural world. Along those lines, the driving question I take up in this project is if our ordinary experiences are seen as interpretations, what is the significance of this for our moral claims about the environment? Drawing on the hermeneutic philosophies of Hans Georg-Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, I examine environmental interpretation as it relates particularly to identity, meaningful action, and the mediating function of the imagination. These three interconnected aspects show both our capability for new understandings related to the natural world, as well as problem of conflicting, yet equally valid, views on environmental value. To explore this tension further I consider the relevance of hermeneutic conceptions of truth and translation for environmental ethics. A hermeneutic notion of truth highlights the difficulties in making strong normative claims about the environment, while a hermeneutic view of translation is helpful in thinking about the otherness of nature and what this means for ecological values. In this project I am particularly interested in the conflict of environmental interpretation and the implications that a hermeneutic frame has for the limits of environmental …

Walter Benjamin warned in 1940 of a certain inconspicuous threat to political thinking, not least of all to materialism, that takes progress as an historical norm. Implicit in this conception is what he describes as an empty continuum of time along which the prevailing tradition chronicles its own mythic development and drains everyday life of genuine historical experience. The myth of progressive history advances insidiously today in consumeristic and technocratic attempts at reconciling cultural imagery with organic nature. In this dissertation, I pursue the contradictions of such images as they crystallize around the natural history of twenty-first century commodity society, where promises of ecological remediation, sustainable urban development, and climate change mitigation have yet to introduce a true crisis of historical experience to the ongoing environmental crisis of capitalism. A more radical way of seeing the cultural representation of nature would, I argue, penetrate its mythic determination by market forces and bear witness to the natural-historical ruins and traces that constitute, in Benjamin's terms, a single "catastrophe" where others perceive historical continuity. I argue that Benjamin's critique of progress is instructive to interpreting those utopian dreams, ablaze in consumer life and technological fantasy, that recent decades of growing environmental concern …

This dissertation provides a feminist restorative model of environmental justice that addresses the injustices found within UNICOR’s e-waste recycling operations. A feminist restorative environmental justice challenges the presupposition that grassroots efforts, law and policy, medical and scientific research, and theoretical pursuits (alone or in conjunction) are sufficient to address the emotional and relational harm of environmental injustices. To eliminate environmental harms, this model uses collaborative dialogue for interested parties to prevent environmental harm. To encourage participation, a feminist restorative model accepts many forms of knowledge and truth as ‘legitimate’ and offers an opportunity for women to share how their personal experiences of love, violence, and caring differ from men and other women and connect to larger social practices. This method of environmental justice offers opportunities for repair, reparation and reintegration that can transform perspectives on criminality, dangerous practices and structures in the PIC, and all persons who share in a restorative encounter.

Serpent and dragon symbolism are ubiquitous in the art and mythology of premodern cultures around the world. Over the centuries, conflicting hypotheses have been proposed to interpret this symbolism which, while illuminating, have proved insufficient to the task of revealing a singular meaning for the vast majority of examples. In this dissertation I argue that, in what the symbolist Rene Guenon and the historian of religions Mircea Eliade have called ‘traditional' or ‘archaic' societies, the serpent/dragon transculturally symbolizes what I term ‘matter,' a state of being that is constituted by the perception of the physical world as ‘chaotic' in comparison to what traditional peoples believed to be the ‘higher' meta-physical source of the physical world or ‘nature.' What is called ‘nature,' I argue, is also considered in ‘Tradition' to be a perception of, from a certain state of consciousness, that aspect of existence that is called samsara in the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta, which Guenon equivalently describes, from a broadly traditional perspective in The Symbolism of the Cross, as "the indefinite series of cycles of manifestation." ‘Chaos,' according to Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane, is "the amorphous and virtual…everything that has not yet acquired a ‘form.'" The following …

The majority of people on Earth now live in cities, and estimates hold that 60 percent of the world’s cities have yet to be built. Now is the time for philosophers to develop a philosophy of the city to address the forthcoming issues that urbanization will bring. In this dissertation, I respond to this need for a philosophy of the city by developing a theory of city identity, developing some of the theory’s normative implications, illustrating the theory with a case study, and outlining the nature and future of philosophy of the city more generally. Indeed, this dissertation is only a part of my larger project of founding and institutionalizing this new field of both academic and socially-engaged philosophical activity. Throughout the history of the discipline, other areas such a personal identity have received numerous considerations, along with the concept of identity as an abstraction. For example, there is a bounty of research addressing problems pertaining to how objects and people retain an identity over time and claims about identity in general. While one could argue that cities are not any different than any other object, such an account fails to consider that a city’s dynamic nature makes it dissimilar …

Ecocentrism is a philosophical position developed in the field of environmental philosophy that offers an alternative view of the complex relationships between humans and the nonhuman world. This dissertation develops an ecocentric philosophy of energy in order to account for a wider set of ethics and values dimensions involved in energy politics. It focuses especially on inter-species justice as a crucial missing element behind even those energy policies that seek to transition society from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. The goal is to develop an ecocentric philosophy of energy that accounts for the fundamental and deep ecological interdependences of human and nonhuman animals, plants, and other living and non-living beings. I start with an introduction and a summary of the chapters followed in chapter 2 by a clarification of the terms "paradigm" and "energy." In chapter 3 I offer an exploration of the origins of the "energy paradigm" or the predominant understanding of energy that emerged during modernity (18th century onwards). The modern energy paradigm progressively became a "traditional" forma mentis that is nonetheless based on flawed presuppositions about the human-energy-nature relationship. I criticize the homogeneous, colonizing and hegemonic nature of this paradigm, unveil its tacit anthropocentric and instrumental …

In 2016, An estimated 15,000 people representing 400 Indigenous Nations and non-indigenous allies gathered at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in solidarity against the Dakota Access Pipeline to protect Mni Sose, the Missouri River. They became known as the Water Protectors. This dissertation analyzes the response in environmental philosophy journals to the #noDAPL protest at Standing Rock. Even though the Stand at Standing Rock became one of the most important and monumental environmental protests of the last decade, neither Standing Rock nor the Water Protectors appear in environmental philosophy journals at all--not once. Why? I suggest a possible answer by exploring the Stand of the Water Protectors as a moment in a much longer continuous history of resistance to settler colonialism. Settler colonialism attempts to facilitate the erasure of Indigenous populations by colonial ones, in order to gain access to territory—to land. The omission of Standing Rock from environmental philosophy journals represents the ease with which environmental philosophy can become complicit in the project of settler colonial erasure and replacement through absence. Drawing on Indigenous land-based philosophies of kinship, Latin American decolonial philosophy, settler colonial theory, and frameworks of Indigenous environmental justice, I show how the geo-politics of colonialism have …

Whereas the ecological crisis has elicited a response from many quarters of American Christianity, classical (or denominational) Pentecostals have expressed almost no concern about environmental problems. The reasons for their disregard of the environment lie in the Pentecostal worldview which finds expression in their: (1) tradition; (2) view of human and natural history; (3) common theological beliefs; and (4) scriptural interpretation. All these aspects of Pentecostalism emphasize and value the supernatural--conversely viewing nature as subordinate, dependent and temporary. Therefore, the ecocrisis is not problematic because, for Pentecostals, the natural environment is: of only relative value; must serve the divine plan; and will soon be destroyed and replaced. Furthermore, Pentecostals are likely to continue their environmental disregard, since the supernaturalism which spawns it is key to Pentecostal identity.

In 2016, the Colombian Constitutional Court recognized the Atrato River as a subject of rights based on the theory of biocultural rights. This dissertation analyzes a new legal concept that aims to defend the rights to a good life for humans and other-than-human co-inhabitants who share river ecosystems, focusing on the case of the Atrato River in Colombia. The 3Hs framework of biocultural ethics is adopted to interconnect complex and interrelated historical, biophysical, cultural, and political dimensions. With this analysis, broader biocultural approaches are suggested. They could be valuable for understanding and implementing biocultural rights in other world regions. Moreover, it could transform the current situation that destroys biocultural diversity toward public policies that favor more just and sustainable forms of co-inhabiting biocultural diversity. A primary limitation of the implementation of biocultural rights is the context of a "failed state," in which the Colombian State is subject to severe problems of corruption, illegal mining, conflicts between legal and illegal armed groups, and drug trafficking. There is a need for a dialogue solution to the conflict. This requires that illegal armed groups are valued as co-inhabitants. Achieving social-environmental justice is essential for biocultural ethics. In this case, it is the condition …

Riverine avulsion is a radical divergence of a riverbed. In this dissertation, I take this movement as a paradigm for understanding the features of radical change. I develop a model for understanding the essential features of radical change. I argue that the main features involved in avulsion are tension, abandonment, and material freedom. In my analysis, tension provides the catalyst for change, such that it pressurizes complex systems of organization to the point of collapse. I use Catherine Malabou's work on denegation to understand the collapse of a system as an accident; the rupture of a system entails that it is no longer affirmed nor negated, it is abandoned by the process of becoming. Utilizing the work of Deleuze, I present the moment of rupture itself as the moment where materiality breaks free from the restrictions of an organizing system to becoming consolidated into countless new forms of organization. In my analysis of the ontology of avulsion, I employ a new materialist process of becoming to capture the complex networks of relations involved in the moment of creation. I challenge these Deleuzean and new materialist fields of philosophy over their affinity for affirmation by integrating accidental abandonment. Finally, I propose …

Ways of understanding, living, and communicating with non-human species, and more specifically endangered species, have been thought of dualistically and hierarchically in Western cultures. This type of thinking is harmful when examining environmental issues that involve more than just humans, which is arguably all environmental issues. By enforcing a nature/culture dichotomy, humans are seen as separate from nature and therefore they can ethically excuse themselves from dealing with environmental issues that happen "out there" in nature. This thesis explores two manifestations of this nature/culture separation as it continues to threaten wild orca populations in Puget Sound. The first is because of an anthropocentric culture and the second is because of the capitalist socio-economic system. The anthropocentric part of this type of thinking raises humans up on a pedestal, above all non-human species. It gives humans the excuse to only care about issues that affect them directly. The capitalistic part of this type of thinking enforces human's exploitation and commodification of nature. I argue that anthropocentrism and capitalism together create a human/nature relationship that harms nature and benefits humans. This relationship is illustrated by a small population of orcas, called the Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKW), off the coast of Washington …

Erika Cudworth's Developing Ecofeminist Theory provides a helpful foundation for a non-essentialist, properly intersectional ecofeminist account of oppression, marginalization, and domination, but her rejection of what she refers to as "postmodernism" appears to be based on a misreading of Judith Butler. I attempt to provide a synthesis of Cudworth's framework with Butler, particularly through the use of Karen Barad's agential realism, in order to provide possibility for new alliances between ecofeminism and other anti-oppressive frameworks. I then examine what it might look like to do ecofeminist praxis, given the complex view of agency, ontology, and intersectionality rendered by such a synthesis. I draw from bicycling as an example from which to extrapolate what it means to resist oppression, and then draw from the Philosophy for Children movement to consider what such resistance might look like within the classroom. This dissertation thus attempts to move from theory to practice, recognizing that "the real world" is both always at hand and also subject to performative deconstruction.

The bedrock of this dissertation is the idea that our patterns of thought, speech, and action can be distilled into two distinct approaches defined by (1) the use of things on one hand and (2) the relation to persons on the other. That first approach is represented in our life with technology and has expanded to the point of omnipresence. Being so ubiquitous, technology largely goes unexamined in the way it functions, the effect it has on us, and the effect it has on our neighbor. In this manner, the technological approach is an over-extension of the manipulation of things to the negation of the relation to persons. As a result, our capacity to relate to persons outside a narrow scope had been atrophied. This work is an attempt at renewing the relational approach within contexts shaped by and shaped for the manipulation of things, i.e., technically minded society. To that end, it is necessary to first explore the work of thinkers who have written on relationality in ways which address the over-extension of the technological approach. The thinkers I have chosen in this endeavor are Martin Buber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, and Ivan Illich, each of whom wrote thoughtfully …

According to the United Nations, two-thirds of the world's population, approximately 4 billion people, experiences water scarcity at least one month per year. To avoid the water quantity crisis experienced in many regions of the world and the United States, a path to sustainability must be forged. My research aims to identify and critique the salient features of the narrative that drives contemporary urban water decisions and practices and to provide a meta-narrative about the role of narratives as invisible lenses through which individuals see, interpret, and interact with the world often without realizing the existence of those frames. The purpose of this problem-oriented dissertation is twofold: to provide a philosophical policy analysis of contemporary water issues in the United States generally and North Central Texas in particular, and to offer a pragmatic and interdisciplinary approach to discovering a sustainable relationship to water. The intent of my research is not to produce a new metaphysical understanding of water, but to provide a pragmatic application of ideas that can be utilized in the field; ideas that can invoke a new narrative, vision, and direction for urban water issues in North Central Texas and in areas far beyond the Lone Star State. …

Wonder has had a rich and diverse history in the western philosophical tradition. Both Plato and Aristotle claim that philosophy begins in wonder, while Descartes marks it as the first of the passions and Heidegger uses it as a signpost for a new trajectory of philosophy away from idealism and nihilism. Despite such a rich history, wonder is almost always thought to be exhausted by the acquisition of knowledge. That is, wonder is thought of almost exclusively in epistemological terms and is discarded as soon as knowledge has been achieved. In this dissertation, I argue for an ontological reorientation of wonder that values wonder beyond its epistemic uses. To do this, I read the phenomenological and ontological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty through recent developments in object-oriented ontology and new materialism. Much of Merleau-Ponty's work is directed toward dissolving the distinction between subject and object. His insights regarding the mutual constitution of the world lead to the possibility of an operative wonder that occurs between subject and object. Both object-oriented ontology and new materialism radicalize these insights by articulating them in terms of a vibrant or quasi-agential material world. Objects and assemblages of objects are capable of performing the becoming of …

Farmer suicide is at crisis levels in the United States and India. This crisis is both a problem of experiential knowledge within infrastructure as well as a problem of discourse power. I argue that the logical abstraction required to conceptualize and evaluate farmer suicide cannot be separated from the overall experience of farmer suicide. Rather than existing as distinctly separate phenomena, these elements are co-constitutive. Despite the Centers' for Disease Control identification and designation of farmer suicide as complex, statistically relevant, and elevated, nearly all the policy efforts addressing farmer suicide focus on narrow economic impact and narrow economic relief. While these economic vectors are important, the problem is multifaceted and requires a broadening of policy discourse to include additional factors (e.g. philosophical, existential, psychological, etc.). Using Hannah Arendt's work on politics and the human condition, I connect the conditionality of homo faber (human fabricator/maker), animal laborans (laboring animal), and vita activa (active life) with farmer struggle and suicide. Through the work of Georges Canguilhem and Achille Mbembe, I critique and analyze the predominant discourse and framing of suicide as a disease. Last, but not least, I propose decolonial theory and degrowth theory as viable critical pathways to shift the …

This dissertation makes use of theoretical frameworks drawn from development theory, ecofeminism, climate science, environmental and distributive justice, and human rights to provide gender analysis of climate policy, including climate finance.The problem addressed is that climate impacts are exacerbating food insecurity that is women's responsibility in the global South. First, I use literature in climate science to detail the impacts of climate change on agriculture in Africa and show how this exacerbates women's poverty that is driven already by persistent socioeconomic inequalities and gender bias. I conclude that women as food producers are especially vulnerable to climate impacts on food security. Next, I assess international climate policy through gender analysis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) against other United Nations (UN) gender policies, followed by gender assessment of Ghanaian climate policy. I conclude that both international and Ghanaian policy fail adequately to address gender and women's needs, despite making advances on gender-inclusion and gender-sensitivity since the turn of the century. I then present a case study in climate finance by evaluating the capacity of an Adaptation Fund Project (AFP) in northeast Ghana to meet women farmers' needs. I gather data from Project implementers and intended beneficiaries, …

In this dissertation I address urban sustainability with a focus on loss of cultural heritage and ecological knowledge by expanding the concept “extinction of experience” (EoE). Conceptualized by conservationist Robert Michael Pyle, EoE is the loss of nature experiences leading to apathy towards biodiversity and degradation of the common habitat. I expand upon Pyle’s formulation of the concept by considering the EoE cycle as an indirect driver that amplifies biodiversity losses. Additionally, I introduce the analysis of interrelated losses of biological and cultural diversity in relation to EoE. With a biocultural approach I discuss that EoE is tied to the infrastructural inertia within the global urban economy. I propose that addressing the EoE cycle is critical in that as a complex and multi-faceted process, it cements threats to biological and cultural diversity as permanent fixtures within society by obscuring their significance in light of economic development. This cycle remains a hidden problematic in that it perpetuates the environmental crisis while making such losses invisible within day-to-day lifestyle habits, constructing an emerging urban culture within the global economy that is ignorant of ecological processes and sustainability requirements. I frame the implications of EoE with an analysis of the newly proposed revisions …

Ecofeminism is a mixture of two important contemporary schools of thought; feminism and ecology. The rhetoric generated from ecofeminism focuses on language, on its potential to reconstruct deeply embedded attitudes and beliefs. Thus, ecofeminists attempt to transform society through the redescription and redefinition of modern concepts into postmodern concepts. The rhetoric of ecofeminism, set in postmodern context, is a fusion of substantive and stylistic features that simultaneously deconstruct patriarchal structures of exploitation and domination and reconstruct lateral-collaborative structures of cooperation and liberation. In short, ecofeminist rhetoric portends a persuasive transformation of the social-natural conditions of existence.

Transhumanism is the name given to the cultural and philosophical movement which advocates radical human technological enhancement. In what follows, I use perspectives drawn from existential philosophy to problematize transhumanists' desire to recast human finitude as a series of technical problems with technical solutions. The ontological account of transhumanism offered here questions the assumed benefit and inevitability across six chapters. Following an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 introduces the key players, and present the philosophy of transhumanism and the opposing view of bioconservativism. Chapter 3 offers a narrative of transhumanism beginning with its mythical antecedents, and proceeds to describe the emergence of contemporary transhumanist institutions. Chapter 4 focuses on the challenge that transhumanists Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil present to mortality. The chapter asks whether human immortality is a coherent idea, and consider the consequences of achieving a data-driven amortality. Chapter 5 continues the analysis of transhumanism as it challenges limits to knowledge (ignorance), and limits to well-being (suffering). Ray Kurzweil is presented as a key figure of transhumanist thought, along with David Pearce, who desires to eradicate suffering through genetic engineering. The hubris of transhumanism is viewed through the lens of Friedrich Nietzsche in chapter 6. Nietzsche's critique of …