The Embodied, Experiential and Elemental Turn in Environmental Ethics

In this paper I reflect my experience of teaching “Ethics of Nature” or environmental ethics for over 15 years. Environmental ethics is the most groundbreaking branch of contemporary ethics because of its environmentally embedded and embodied conception of human beings. For a change towards a more sustainable culture to take place it is however not enough that our understanding of our place in the environment becomes more ecocentric and to realize how human life interconnected with all life. It is also not sufficient that the big economic, financial systems and production systems that constitute an unsustainable economy become less unsustainable. A change in the way we experience and sense ourselves as environmental beings also needs to happen. I respond to voices within environmental ethics that call for anthropocenean“sensibilities” like Nancy Tuana does and Donna Haraway does with her idea of “staying with the trouble.” Deborah Bird Rose also calls for a deeper sense of listening to the non-human environment. For the cultivation of practices of such sensibilities and listening I have been inspired by methodologies of embodied and enviromental thinking developed within enactivist, processual phenomenological and pragmatist philosophies, especially by Eugene Gendlin and by Claire Petitmengin. Such methodologies of embodied thinking and understanding have hence been integrated in my teaching of environmental ethics and I view them as contributing to the “Inner Development Goals” that are seen as complimentary to the UN Sustainability Development Goals.