A landscape framework for an environmental land use ethic

Land use practices and their expansion raise pressing questions for environmental ethics and have been identified as a key driver of biodiversity loss. In this article, we examine how well the existing environmental ethics and political philosophy approaches suit for addressing the normative questions of land use, especially when empirical knowledge about human land use impacts on nonhuman life is also considered. We point out that the current approaches typically address land use with intactness-, resource-, or integrity-based perspectives. These perspectives form a continuum between quantity-oriented and quality-oriented philosophical approaches to land use. We argue that existing approaches are insufficient for theorizing the environmental ethics of land use: what is needed is an integrative perspective that better captures the constituents of a landscape that human activities might influence. We address this gap and make a theoretical contribution by providing a framework that integrates elements from the existing philosophical approaches with landscape ecology and helps address the quality of land use and land management. This framework helps normative environmental theorizing about land use in a way that is sufficiently nuanced and empirically informed.