Hermeneutics and Field Environmental Philosophy: Integrating Ecological Sciences and Ethics into Earth Stewardship - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 233

availability of inputs for the market economy, as critically stated by ecologist Shahid
Naeem ( 2013 ) in his chapter “Ecosystem Services: Is a Species Servicing One
Planet Likely to Function?.” In a pragmatic sense, the sustainability and the survival
of living things are a necessary, but are not a suffi cient, condition to make sense of
life and the relationships among living beings. The “Earth” (understood by Mill as
an object of exploitation) or the “biosphere” (understood by Naeem as a subject that
must be defended by an environmental ethic) require much more than a simple
physical well-being or an absence of diseases, because it also requires an axiologi-
cal sense of existence. Mark Sagoff emphasizes that a simple life can be more valu-
able than an opulent life, and that economic growth could be morally undesirable,
even if it would be ecologically sustainable (Sagoff 1995 ). A view of the biosphere
that corresponds to the biocultural ethic of a FEP will include this axiological sense.
Environmental philosophy is not a mere theoretical reconciliation. It has ethical
interests that Rozzi ( 2012 , p. 341) explains synthetically:
(a) it proposes limits of action to the prevailing neo-liberal policy (the essence of which has
been to free itself from restrictions for entrepreneurship and economic growth) and (b) it
extends the moral community beyond those who govern and benefi t from the market (to
include the majority -marginalized and oppressed human populations), and beyond the
human species (to include all beings with whom we co-inhabit in the biosphere).

The transformation and industrialization that enable economic development and
human well-being are legitimate, but in a regulated manner. So then, FEP has the
axiological mission to establish a new narrative to limit the deterioration of the bio-
sphere and to expand the benefi ts of human development to all co-inhabitants. It has
also the methodological mission of integrating environmental science and ethics in
order to achieve a genuine Earth Stewardship.

15.2.1 The Theoretical Framework and Methodology of Field

Environmental Philosophy (FEP)

FEP emerged as a proposal from the work of a Latin American Long Term Socio-
Ecological Research (LTSER) network. Based on the conceptual framework of a
biocultural ethic (Rozzi 2013 ), FEP addresses biophysical and symbolic-linguistic
levels of existence. It seeks to integrate these levels into an ethics, under a socio-
ecological approach of co-habitation within the biosphere. It provides an alternative
perspective to the one stated by Mill and economic liberalism of land use and
exploitation, which is the perspective that prevails today.
If we posed the mission of FEP in a few words, we would ask ourselves: How
can we persuade neoliberals to consider the “Earth” not as a mere natural resource
but as a “biosphere,” and to have respect for it? How can we make them see that the
biosphere should be respected in its processes of interdependence and its existential
sense? How do we convince them to abandon a view of nature that reduces it to
industrial resources? In summary, FEP addresses the question of how to establish a