I am posting this request for a colleague, Ben Hale, who is an editor for the journal Ethics, Policy, and Environment. He is looking for ecologists and conservation biologists who would write a commentary to accompany Mark Sagoffs article What does Environmental Protection Protect. See below for details.
Dan Doak Dear Colleague: This is the official solicitation for open peer commentaries for the Fall/Winter issue of Ethics, Policy, and Environment (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/cepe). For this next issue, 16.3, we have selected a Target Article by Mark Sagoff (George Mason University) titled What does Environmental Protection Protect? Here is the abstract: Abstract: This paper asks whether environmentalists can take as a meaningful goal the protection of nature or of the natural environment. It argues that while environmentalists may reasonably seek to protect places in response to aesthetic perception, moral persuasion, religious sentiment, and other normative commitments, they cannot find in the natural sciences, for example, in ecological science, any basis for determining what to protect or why to protect it. The paper offers two arguments, one empirical, the other conceptual. The empirical argument reviews the total failure of a research program the Environmental Protection Agency supported over thirty years in which ecologists and other scientists sought to measure risks to ecosystems and to define ecological endpoints for regulation. The conceptual argument asserts that ecologists cannot identify any ecological as distinct from strictly historical characteristics that allow them empirically to distinguish between 1) heirloom, co-evolved, complex adaptive systems which they presume to study, and 2) novel ecosystems including hodgepodges of plants and animals found together at a time and place but which do not share an evolutionary history. We are now soliciting approximately 5-10 open commentaries in response to this article. Potential commentators will be invited to write short 750- 1500 word responses which will be published simultaneously with the lead target article. If you would like to be considered as a peer commentator for this article or for some future article, please contact our managing editor, Clinton Herget: [email protected] to have your name added to our list. Please explain in the e-mail that you would like to be considered as a peer commentator, and specify if this particular article is one that may interest you, in which case, Clinton will send an advance version of the article back to you. For this article, we would like to have you submit a short summary of your proposed Open Peer Commentary (no more than 150 words) by 5:00 pm, MST, Tuesday, June 11. If your peer commentary is selected, you will then have until Tuesday, July 16 to submit your full commentary. Moreover, please also consider submitting a suitable article to EPE as a potential target or feature article. If you are not familiar with the unique format of our journal, feel free to read more about us here: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/cepe. Sincerely, Benjamin Hale and Andrew Light Co-editors
