Matters of environmental politics to inform geoethics

Until recently, political research and practice had been dominated by an anthropocentric ethos of environmental politics. The definition, framing, and boundary-setting of environmental problems are often the result of a top-down planetary management approach, which assumes unlimited growth and prioritizes reductive, status quo approaches and solutions. A contrasting position is a nonanthropocentric ethos of politics where all lives are considered, and “nature” is more central. In this chapter, we argue that each ethos creates a different vision for Geoethics, an emerging scientific and philosophical discipline that promotes the ethical and social role of geoscientists and society. A careful consideration of a nonanthropocentric ethos could be coordinated around a minimum ethical requirement at the crossroads of different perspectives to build a concrete ethos (e.g., ecological life-support). The establishment of such an ethos relies on two normative and procedural tools that guarantee a pluralist approach: deliberation and democracy.