Curriculum

Elective Approval Request Form

To have a course considered for inclusion in the certificate, please submit a syllabus and a brief paragraph explaining how the course fits our curriculum below.

EECP Elective Approval Request Form

The Environmental Ethics Certificate Program is the first certificate of its type in the United States, established in 1983. The EECP is an interdisciplinary program that prepares students to synthesize ideas from a wide variety of perspectives to solve complex environmental problems. The program emphasizes environmental leadership through consideration, analysis, and evaluation of various ethical schools of thought and how they inform and impact theoretical and real-world problems. The core competencies identified below provide EECP students with the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to address environmental issues in a range of disciplines.

• CTC – Critical Thinking Competency: Students will seek out and recognize relevant sources of information; will be able to interpret and question norms, practices and opinions; will reflect on their own values, perceptions and actions; and will consciously seek to develop and refine their personal environmental ethic. Students will be able to negotiate environmental values, principles, goals, and targets in the context of conflicts of interests and trade-offs, uncertain knowledge, and contradictions and will take an informed position in environmental ethics discourse.
• STC – Systems Thinking Competency: Students will be able to recognize and understand complex interactions of systems; analyze and evaluate various systems to inform decision-making; deal with uncertainty when making decisions; and understand that a complex web of interactions in social and ecological networks affects the distribution and flow of resources through systems.
• CC – Collaboration Competency: Students will be able to reflect on their own role in the local community and global society; will have the ability to be effective and productive contributors in collaborative relationships; communicate with diverse audiences in relevant ways; and value the diverse perspectives, expertise, and experience of others; will be able to diagnose challenges and identify potential partnerships; to understand that power is often not distributed equally but that their individual voice is powerful as well as the ability to empower others in collaborative problem-solving.
• AC – Anticipatory Competency: Students will be able to understand and evaluate multiple possible futures, probable and desirable; to create their own vision of the future; to apply the precautionary principle; to assess the consequences of action; to deal with risk and change; and to embrace adaptation when necessary.
• IPSC: Integrated Problem Solving Competency: Students will be able to apply different problem-solving frameworks to complex environmental problems and develop viable, inclusive, and equitable solutions that promote ethical, sustainable development and integrate the other competencies. Students will recognize that when faced with a conflict, it is imperative to keep a process moving forward through negotiation and dispute resolution; to recognize unproductive actions (denial, scapegoating, etc.) and be able to reframe issues; and identify common ground among diverse perspectives.

When creating the certificate, classes were chosen based on obvious relationships to environmental ethics. We did not look at every class offered at UGA (due to time constraints) but welcome the addition of new courses.

To have a course considered for inclusion in the Certificate, please fill out this EECP Elective Approval Request Form.

See Criteria for Course Inclusion for more information.

Absolutely! Simply make sure to specify in the proposal that your course is unique, identifying how you think it exemplifies environmental ethics and why. Be as specific as possible.

Criteria:

• A member of this Faculty shall be a regular teacher of an approved course in the Certificate Program,
• or shall have within the past two years directed a capstone project for the Certificate,
• or shall be engaged in research or publication in the area of the Certificate.

Please email [email protected] and detail what membership criteria you meet.

Please email [email protected] with your name, department, and what you’d be interested in lecturing about – we are happy to accommodate you but will likely have seminars planned a semester in advance.

Please email director Alfie Vick at [email protected].

Ethics & the Environment Journal

Editor, Piers H.G. Stephens

Managing Editor, Melissa Link

Publisher, Indiana University Press

Ethics & the Environment is an interdisciplinary forum for theoretical and practical articles, discussions, and book reviews in the broad area encompassed by environmental ethics. It was founded in 1995 by Victoria Davion, longtime Head of the Department of Philosophy who remained editor of the journal until her passing in November 2017.

Supported by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, the Philosophy Department, and the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Georgia, Ethics & the Environment is now edited by Piers H.G. Stephens, Associate Professor & Graduate Coordinator in the Department of Philosophy. The journal focuses on conceptual approaches in ethical theory and ecological philosophy, including deep ecology and ecological feminism, as they pertain to environmental issues such as environmental education and management, ecological economics, and ecosystem health. Submissions & inquiries can be sent to [email protected].

Ethics & the Environment is accessible on JSTOR

Values at Sea: Ethics for the Marine Environment

Edited by Dorinda G. Dallmeyer

The human impact on vast areas of the oceans remains relatively unregulated. Sometimes, in fact, the only controls over our exploitation of marine resources lie in our environmental consciousness. While the field of environmental ethics has explored rights and duties for land use, stewardship, and policy, relatively little attention has been given to comparable issues of marine environments.

Values at Sea makes an important step toward environmental ethics discussions into a broader framework. Gathered here are fifteen papers by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, including ethicists, marine scientists, anthropologists, economists, geographers, lawyers, and activists. From the Great Lakes to the Pacific Islands, from the open sea to coastal areas, the papers cover a broad array of ethical issues and policy matters related to such topics as the valuation of marine life, indigenous peoples’ knowledge and environmental stewardship, endemic and exotic species, aquaculture, oil spills, and species protection.

Dorinda Dallmeyer and several co-investigators were awarded a 2-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop the project “Values at Sea: Environmental Ethics for Marine Ecosystems.” The grant sponsored a marine environmental ethics course, an international conference on marine environmental ethics, a book of conference papers, and a workshop for college-level instructors on incorporating marine environmental ethics into course offerings.

Environmental Ethics and the Global Marketplace

Edited by Albert F. Ike and Dorinda G. Dallmeyer

The global market is the largest and most powerful socioeconomic institution on the planet, and as such, it demands that those who desire to benefit from it or those who seek to regulate it realize the economic and environmental consequences of their actions.

The contributors to Environmental Ethics and the Global Marketplace argue that the health of the environment is inextricably linked to the health of the economy, and economic strength depends on preserving environmental values. Ultimately, economic and environmental sciences must merge more completely if we are to arrive at ethically justified principles as the basis for national and international environmental policy processes, enabling environmental ethics to move beyond academic venues into domestic and international decision-making.

The third EECP conference, the International Conference on Environmental Ethics and the Global Marketplace was held April 27-29, 1995, at the Georgia Center. The conference focuses on the apparent divergence of interest and opinions concerning environmental and economic goals. The conference papers are gathered into a book, Environmental Ethics and the Global Marketplace (Dorinda Dallmeyer and Albert Ike, co-editors), which was published in 1998 by The University of Georgia Press.

Ethics and Environmental Policy: Theory Meets Practice

Edited by Frederick Ferré and Peter Hartel

In this collection of essays, leading environmentalists and philosophers explore the relationship between environmental ethics and policy, both in theory and practice. The first section of the book focuses on four approaches to change in ethical theory: ecological science, feminist metaphysics, Chinese philosophy, and holistic postmodern technology. In subsequent sections, the contributors emphasize the need for nontraditional solutions and attempt to expand awareness of the most pressing practical problems. Among the topics discussed are the possibilities of international cooperation, the inequitable but economically intractable issue of global gasses, the political and ethical challenges of city planning, and the growing evidence of fundamental inappropriateness in treating land as legal private property.

This volume is based on essays presented in 1992 at the Second International Conference on Ethics and Environmental Policy. The conference was held in response to the increasing need for a new ethic that would counter the traditional human-centered, dominantly individualistic approach of the industrial world toward the environment.

Janisse Ray’s only stop in Athens, GA for the release of her new book, organized by UGA’s Environmental Ethics Certificate Program (EECP).

Bestselling Author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood’s latest book explores the amazing & vanishing wild world.

Download Press Release by Trinity University Press

View the “Wild Spectacle” book reading on YouTube here.

September 15, 2021, 4:30 P.M.

Book Release: “Beauty of the Wild” by Darrel Morrison

A talk and book signing by the author.

Darrel Morrison, CED dean (1983-1991) and Professor Emeritus influenced countless students by focusing on native plants, merging art with ecology, and prioritizing ecology-based design and management. After retirement in 2005, he taught part-time at Columbia University, Rutgers University, and the New York Botanical Garden.

From Sept. 13-16, Morrison was the artist in residence at the UGA College of Environment + Design.

Co-sponsored by the College of Environment + Design (CED) and College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CAES).

View the “Beauty of the Wild” book reading on YouTube here.