Part V - Ethical, Religious, and Historical Approaches to Socio-Environmental Research

Summary

Ethical quandaries – such as justice and equity for under-represented communities, treatment of animals in laboratory and field research, and editing the genomes of plants, animals, and humans – are becoming ever more insistent in socio-environmental research. Accordingly, socio-environmental research requires that natural and social scientists become conversant with the humanities and that humanists actively engage, in accessible terms, the conceptual and ethical concerns arising in the sciences. Research methods in the humanities differ – where scholars begin with a thesis instead of a hypothesis – from those in the natural and social sciences. While the methodological differences between research in the humanities and the sciences render interdisciplinary cooperation and even communication between these two broad types of inquiry difficult, this section draws attention to the important contributions that ethical, religous, and historical approaches have made to understanding the reciprocal relationships between society and environment. These contributions range from scholars such as Aldo Leopold, Lynn White, and William Cronon to Vandana Shiva, Leonardo Boff, and Gregory Cajete.