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Environmental ethics
The linking of environmental ethics with tourism is a recent phenomenon and can be contextualised with its growing prominence as a sub-category of ethics. Ethical concerns about our relationship with nature arose in response to an increasing awareness of anthropogenic-driven environmental changes and fears of an environmental crisis. Environmental ethics represents a part of what Callicott (2016) terms the “Environmental Turn”, referring to a common recognition of environmental problems that has led to a re-evaluation of our relationship with nature. The interaction between the evolution of social awareness and development of environmental ethics is underlined by most environmental studies researchers being in agreement that its emergence as a discipline coincided with the social movement that inspired the world’s first “Earth Day”, which was held on 21 March 1970 (Fennell, 2000).
Environmental ethics embraces philosophical reasoning over the intrinsic value of nature and the moral issues and debates that arise from this. For Nash (1989), the idea that the human–nature relationship could be considered as a moral issue is an extraordinary development having implications for thought and behaviour equivalent to the ideal of human rights that emerged in the eighteenth century. Integral to environmental ethics is recognition that nature has an intrinsic value that is independent of any lent or granted to it by humankind. Although intrinsic value may appear an abstract concept for as Soper (1995) argues if nature truly possesses an independent value we cannot know what it is, she also reminds us that whilst the meaning of nature is culturally determined, its physicality is real, thus its intrinsic value is defined by its existence and the processes that support it.
Whilst there is shared agreement between environmental ethicists of the intrinsic value of nature, there exists contention over the prioritisation of its location. Using a civil rights approach to extend the principle of equality to a community that includes other beings besides human ones, “libertarian extensionism” advocates the right to an uninterrupted life for all ontological beings and objects (e.g. trees, plants and rocks) on the premise of them being worthy of moral consideration as a function of their existence (Vardy and Grosch, 1999). However, some philosophers such as Singer (1993) stress that to...