University of North Texas 
They recommended that I just major in English, which I did. In my junior year, however, I found that there wasn’t room for me in an honors English class I was supposed to take and I decided to switch to philosophy as my major, which I had enjoyed taking and had discovered had a more interesting philosophy honors program. When I graduated with a bachelor’s degree, I continued with the honors program in graduate school in philosophy earning a master’s degree with a focus on ethical decision making. I focused my first graduate degree on ethical decision making with special attention to the writings of an ethicist named Stephen Toulmin.
At the end of my freshman year after taking the finals in my courses, someone came into the house where I was living and asked if someone was interested in going cave exploring. I agreed and going caving became a hobby. Although I went in a lot of caves in Missouri, I eventually focused on one cave, Devil’s Icebox, about thirty miles from the University of Missouri. It is a large cave and after visiting the mapped passages I began mapping parts of the cave that had not yet been mapped, sending the results of my work to the Missouri Geological Society. I eventually became identified publicly with the cave, and eventually also became involved with the National Speleological Society (NSS) as its international secretary.
As an undergraduate at the University of Missouri, I was required to take two years of coursework in ROTC, preliminary study toward becoming a soldier in the U.S. army. I agreed to continue for two more years, which was aimed at training me to become an officer in the army. In addition, I had to spend one summer at a military base in Oklahoma. I was permitted to complete a master’s degree before going into the army. I wrote a thesis master’s thesis on ethical reasoning in connection with Stephen Toulmin’s writing on ethics. There was a war in Vietnam and I decided I would rather serve as an officer rather than as a primate. Doing so also provided me with extra money while I was studying.
When I completed my thesis, I entered the U.S. army as a second lieutenant and was sent to a military base near Stuttgart, Germany where I served for two years as the personnel officer of an American army post and as an assistant personnel manager of Seventh Corps Headquarters which supervised three divisions and a number of smaller battalions in southern Germany. At this time, I developed considerable administrative skills, which proved very useful when I became an administrator at a university later. I then stayed an additional year and a half in Stuttgart teaching English to adult Germans in a Berlitz language school and still later at a national gas company in southwestern Germany. During my time in Europe, I spent considerable time cave exploring, especially in Germany, but also visited caves in Switzerland, Austria, France, and in a country that no longer exists, Yugoslavia. I was involved with European organized cavers while in Europe and upon my return to the United States I concluded my service as the NSS international secretary by organizing an international conference in Kentucky which included a visit to Mammoth Cave National Park.
I returned to the University of Missouri to obtain a Ph.D. in philosophy. While I was writing my dissertation about my favorite philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein titled “Wittgenstein and Ethics,” I continued cave exploring. Shortly after I returned, I was informed that my favorite cave Devil’s Icebox was endangered because of plans to develop a housing development on the sinkhole plain above the cave, which would have created water pollution in the cave. Many people told me that it was my cave and that I should do something to protect the cave. I reluctantly agreed to do so and I started an NSS cave conservation program to promote the need to protect the cave.
For about three years, I actively defended the cave regularly attending the county court. When the presiding judge argued that I was only a student at the university and not an official resident of the county, members of the local chapter of the League of Women Voters began going with me to the court to make my stasis more creditable. The morning and evening newspapers began covering my activities on behalf of the cave and I was becoming publicly known as an environmental activist. Even the governor of Missouri became aware of what I was doing and he sent an environmental representative to visit with me to keep up with what I was doing. We regularly drank coffee and ate donuts together. I presented a special program at the local library to inform everyone in the county interested about the problems involved. Participants at my presentation were astonished to hear that Devil’s Icebox was the largest natural object in the county. Because of my efforts, the state of Missouri created a state park, thereby protecting the cave and ending the possibility of a housing development. The presiding judge, who owned property over the cave and had been hoping to make money off of the housing project sued me but the League of Women Voters and the philosophy department raised legal defense money, found a lawyer for me, and the court case went nowhere.
Professional environmentalists followed what I had been doing and suggested that since I was both a specialist in ethics in philosophy and an environmental activist that I do something to make environmental ethics and environmental philosophy an official subject within professional philosophy. I responded that I would think about it and would do so if I had time in the future. Upon completing my PH.D. in philosophy I got some money together from the government and went to the University of Vienna in Austria for a year doing research on the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s time as an elementary school teacher on his later philosophy. This research project had nothing to do with the environment, but I thought about environment a lot while I was there.
When I returned to the United States, it was in the middle of an academic year and so I applied and received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in Environmental Affairs to do research on the history of ethical ideas behind the arguments that my opponents and I were using when I was trying to protect Devil’s Icebox. I travelled around the country going to historical archives reading the documents left by scientists who were first exploring what became new parts of the United States when it was developed by settlers. Their concerns were mostly on agricultural and mining possibilities of the land that could be economically exploited, but they also documented unusual elements of what they discovered that were aesthetic and scientific rather than economic. Landscape artists and eventually photographers came with them on the expeditions and they brought these noneconomic aesthetic aspects of the land to the attention of the general public through their paintings and photographs.
The conflict over Devil’s Icebox had involved two kinds of opposing attitudes towards land: (1) land use attitudes and (2) aesthetic and scientific attitudes toward land. Land use attitudes can be traced back to about 100 B.C. when Germanic people entered Europe and began settling the land. The Germans were led by a small group of nobles but most of them were called freemen. The freemen were landholders who had the right to move from one political group of Germans to another without having to seek permission. Landholding was a status that preceded landowning. The freemen held land by using it. The amount that they held depended on their ability to use it. When the Germans entered Europe, they replaced the people called Celts who were already there. This continued until there was no more land to be occupied, when they reached the Atlantic Ocean. Each freeman established a freehold farmstead. The oldest son inherited the land. The younger sons went west to create more freehold farmsteads. When no more land was available for occupation, land use changed to feudal conditions, from landholding to more like landownership.
The local government of the freeman society was the shire or county court run by three people: an alderman representing the county, a sheriff representing the king, and a bishop representing the church. The county court still existed when I was defending Devil’s Icebox, but the three people in change were three elected judges. When the British started settling North America, they were still heavily influenced by freeholding of the previous centuries and the settlement of what became the United States imitated the Germanic settlement of northern Europe. Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence announcing the attempt to separate from England and who became the third president was important in establishing this approach to the settlement of the land that became the United States. It was called homesteading instead of freeholding. The law at the county level followed closely John Locke’s theory of property. It was a county court that I had to go politically to protect Devil’s Icebox.
My focus on cave exploring helped immensely in shaping my environmental views because caves had little instrumental or use value. People cared about caves for aesthetic or scientific reasons, which was exactly the values that the creation of national and state parks was primarily based on. When parks such as Yosemite and Yellowstone were first being considered in the middle of the nineteenth century, political opponents argued that because they were places that could not be settled in terms of homesteading, they were therefore worthless and therefore were not in need of protection. They said that national parks were just a matter of “show business” and nothing more.
Caves were subject to similar but stronger criticism. Protecting areas on the surface were supported to some degree by an increasing interest in protecting wildlife. Caves were not, for nearly all wildlife in caves were considered dangerous or disgusting. Bears were the most dangerous. Especially disliked were bats, who were associated with vampirism, even though vampire bats did not live in the United States. Environmental arguments for caves were more narrowly focused on aesthetic and scientific values. People trying to protect caves are not forced to combat use arguments. The use arguments against Devil’s Icebox were concerned with the possible use of the sinkhole plain above the cave, not the use of the cave itself, which was considered irrelavant.
While I was doing research on the philosophical history for and against the protection of nature at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., I learned that the National Endowment for the Humanities was supporting work on ethics and technology. I wandered over to the NEH and told them that they should support work on ethics and the environment as well. When I admitted that very little philosophical work had been done in this area and most published material that existed was by biologists, they told me I should get a group of scholars in philosophy together to produce a book of material on the subject as a first step. Finding such a group of philosophers who would be able to produce views on ethics and the environment appeared to me to be difficult. However, I had lunch at a philosophy conference one day with someone from the University of Vienna who told me that he was planning to create a journal on Austrian philosophy. As I listened to his plans, it occurred to me that it would be better to start a journal on ethics and the environment rather simply a book. Instead of finding people out of the blue for a book, people would submit material to me which I could accept or decline without advance commitment and it would be a way to promote continued regular discussion. I was helped by a nonprofit organization called the John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies which got me a job as a philosopher in the philosophy department at the University of New Mexico to teach philosophy and start a journal on environmental philosophy.
I managed to find nine philosophers who agreed to write papers and published a first issue of the journal Environmental Ethics in spring of 1979. A fairly large number of people almost immediately decided to become subscribers and the journal became from the beginning financially viable in 1979. I published the journal from the University of New Mexico for three years. At that time the philosophy department at the University of Georgia hired a new chair of the department who wanted to start an environmental philosophy journal. When he was told that such a journal already existed, he made it a condition of his employment that I and my journal come to Georgia. I taught and edited the journal there for nine years. In 1990 a biologist at the University of North Texas decided to create a graduate program on environmental biology and he asked the philosophy department if it could provide a course on environmental philosophy for his students. The department responded that they could even provide a master’s degree in environmental philosophy. To make this possible, the university decided to hire a specialist in the subject to become the new chair. The department called to ask me if they could advertise in my journal for a new chair. I agreed and thought about it for four days. I called them an told them that I would apply myself. They brought me in for an interview and decided to hire me without publishing an advertisement. I chaired the department for fourteen years, created a master’s degree and a Ph.D. program in environmental ethics and a center on environmental philosophy, and edited the journal there for another thirty years before turning it over to another philosopher. The journal called attention to the department internationally and brought students to study environmental philosophy and visiting scholars around the world interested in doing research there.
When the journal started in 1979, philosophy journals were only occasionally publishing anything on environmental philosophy and ethics and it was therefore not possible for philosophers to establish a specialty in such a field. Only a few journals published on the subject and usually only one article or so in a year. My journal made it possible for philosophers to establish themselves in the area and it provided the possibility of debates between scholars. Until then most of what had been written was by biologists and was not written specifically from a philosophical standpoint. Over the forty-five years that I was editor of the journal I encouraged authors to write on subjects that had not yet been discussed in the journal and I also occasionally wrote editorials suggesting issues that would be appropriate for publication. When a new subject appeared, more elated papers began to be submitted for publication.
The teaching of ethics in the United States has been problematic for a number of reasons. First, in the Middle Ages in Europe the Catholic Church concluded that love of nature conflicted with love of God and Europeans were encouraged to value nature for its use only and discouraged from valuing it for its own sake. In particular, the Church was opposed to thinking about gardens except in in terms of their value with regard of agricultural products derived from plants and animals. This changed partly as people began to think of God being present in some way within nature and not just beyond it. From a religious perspective gardens were supposed to be to some degree a religious symbol in connection with the garden of Adam and Eve in the Bible. The idea that nonagricultural gardens created for aesthetic purposes were beautiful developed slowly and in large part was borrowed from China when visitors to China began praising gardens that they had seen in their travels there. The first landscape gardens in Europe were called for a time Chinese gardens (although the connection to China was largely forgotten).
The second problem was a split within Christianity between Catholics and Protestants (essentially, they were protestors against Catholicism). The early immigrants to North America were mostly Protestants and their version of Christianity and ethics was taught to children in public schools. Large numbers of Catholics, however, began coming to the United States beginning in the first decade of the nineteenth century. These Catholics objected to the Protestant religion and ethics in the public schools and they created their own schools for their children. To encourage the Catholics to send their children to the public schools the teaching of religion and ethics was reduced and then eliminated from the schools by 1860. Educators became concerned that ethics was no longer being taught in the schools and psychologists proposed that since as Kant had pointed out that all minds worked the same, children could be presented with ethical problems without out being told they were ethical and they would most likely come up with correct answers. While this solution was useful, it turned ethics into ethical emotivism and separated it from a history of the evolution of social ethics and the ethical terminology that came with it. Ethics became a matter of how each individual felt emotionally without any reference to the development of ethics within society over many generations back to the Greeks. Without such references, however, more technical terminology was lost and discussion was reduced to how each person individually feels with no awareness of the social history of those feelings.
This problem continued to be a problem for the journal and for the development of the creation of the field of environmental philosophy and ethics. Although the National Endowment for the Humanities had said it would support research for ethics and the environment similar to its support for ethics and technology, the NEH in the end refused because it decided not to support summer institutes on ethics at all. I was told that even though I had produced more material on ethics and the environment than with just a book by creating an ongoing journal on environmental ethics, it was too narrow. I was trying to “indoctrinate” my personal views onto others. A year later when I said I would offer alternative views, and therefore could not be engaged in indoctrination, I was told that I would be teaching ethical relativism, involving ideas that were just irrelevant points of view. These were the two ways that teachers were attacked in the previous century when they tried to talk about ethics in primary and secondary school. The NEH had had a program on science, technology, and human values. It was replaced by a program on science and technology only, and ethics was abandoned altogether. President Ronald Reagen, a former actor in movies, had put a philosopher named William Bennett in charge of the NEH , who wanted to extend the rejection of teaching ethics in primary and secondary school to colleges and universities. The National Science Foundation remained the only government agency willing to talk about ethics. Years later the NEH did decide to begin doing a little again with ethics but never did anything with environmental ethics.
In addition, such philosophers as John Dewey started claiming that only instrumental or use values should be paid attention to and not intrinsic values. This view has become the primary view in economics and the social sciences. It goes back to people in the nineteenth century who were opposed to the creation of national parks on the grounds that that such natural areas did not have direct economic use value, for example, in terms of agriculture or mining. Intrinsic values in terms of scientific and aesthetic values are nevertheless social values that society has come to care about and even treasure, and their continuation makes the world better. I have spent a great deal of my time arguing that intrinsic values are as important as use values.
After the environmental biology program and philosophy program at the University of North Texas had firmly developed their environmental biology and philosophy graduate programs, both programs moved into a new building together. There was an education center that offered educational programs for elementary children in the summer. I frequently proposed that I be allowed to experiment with teaching these young children something about environmental philosophy. Although people expressed interest in me doing so, nevertheless, for many years there was supposedly no room or time for me to do so. Opposition to my doing so turned out to be related to the two centuries that the prohibition against teaching children something about ethics in general had been in place. Many people at the university were concerned that if I spoke about ethics to young children, the university would be sued. Eventually, however, the administrators of the center changed and the new people gave me an opportunity to provide summer programs on environmental ethics for children. It turned out to be very successful. The children liked it and no one sued the university. I asked the children at one point to think up what animal should most appropriately stand for the state of Texas, to draw a picture of that animal, and to write why that animal should be the state animal. I asked the children to make short presentations and to write the name of their selection on the board under either instrumental use value or intrinsic value. All of the children gave intrinsic value arguments except two. The two use value arguments were with regard to seeing-eye dogs who helped people cross the street and barn owls who caught mice and rats. Although they had never heard of intrinsic value in their lives, they immediately thought it was important and much more so with regard to nature than just use value alone. This experiment in the classroom showed that young children wanted to be taught ethics, that it was not controversial, that they wanted more to say than just how they personally felt in terms of ethical emotivism, and that the decision to stop teaching children ethics and rely on ethical emotivism in the nineteenth century had been a terrible mistake. The children actually understood the terminology I provided and easily remembered it. When I wrote intrinsic value on the board, I did not have to remind them what the term meant. Although they picked up ethical social values without being taught, they learned basic ethical terminology easily and remembered it very well without needing reminders. My experience suggests that children can easily be taught a lot about ethics without controversy and certainly with some basic terminology beyond “I feel” they would be better able to deal with and discuss moral problems with others in their future lives.
In this paper I have mostly focused on what as the editor of the journal Environmental Ethics I did and the problems that developed particularly in Europe and North America with regard to environmental issues as well as problems teaching ethics generally in the United States. Although many of the manuscripts in my journal were focused on Western ethics, the views of other societies around the world were covered as well. As I noted at the end of my introduction to Foundations of Environmental Ethics in 1989, there may never be a single environmental ethic that fits all countries around the world. Nevertheless, frequently positions in one society may be usefully borrowed into others as the Chinese notion of natural beauty was borrowed by the West. Furthermore, most likely focusing on the particular evolution of the history of ethics in each society is a good way for the further improvement of environmental ethics and ethics in general. Thus, independent improvement in each society with selective borrowing from other societies may be the best approach whether or not a universal environmental ethics is ever reached. In addition, while instrumental or use value should continue to be important, intrinsic or non-instrumental social values should also be included. Parts of nature that are not valuable instrumentally to humans may often be valued even more for their scientific or aesthetic value, as I learned from my early years as a cave explorer and an environmental activist.