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Editorial

Nature & Nurture

by Rick Lewis

Environmental philosophy is concerned with how we humans relate to our habitat, and how we should deal with the various problems which arise with that interaction. It’s a big territory, so we haven’t tried to cover the whole of it in this issue, but we’ve brought together a few articles to give you a taste of what it is about. But rainforest destruction? Extinctions? Pollution? Surely these are problems for scientists and politicians rather than for philosophers? Well, two philosophical questions do keep cropping up, namely, “What can we know?”, and “What should we do?” They come together in the most urgent environmental problem of the moment: global warming.

Global warming is rarely out of the news these days, the subject of international summits and political wrangling. This is because it seems to pose a real threat to civilisation.

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