Time and place: April 17, 2023; 12:15–14:00 CEP; Georg Morgenstiernes Hus, Room 452 and on Zoom (link for virtual participation will be distributed via the Dynamic Territory list; to join the list email anna.wienhues@ifikk.uio.no)
Teea Kortetmäki is a researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She does research in environmental ethics/political philosophy and social sciences. Her current work focuses on just low-carbon transitions, biodiversity ethics and conservation practices.
Cohabitability and land use
Human land use covers most of Earth’s habitable land and therefore most of terrestrial land is already managed by humans. Environmental ethics is not well-equipped for responding to land management questions because its intellectual legacy emphasises questions related to the quantitative aspects and presence of human impact rather than its quality. This easily declares human-managed lands ‘a lost cause’. Given the extensiveness of land use and its unavoidability in building/habiting cities or cultivating farmland, assessing the quality of land use becomes a crucial environmental-ethical question. This requires establishing new philosophically useful concepts, with a strong ecological grounding, that capture linkages between human activities, biodiversity, and nonhuman well-being. In this presentation, I will discuss how the concept of cohabitability could serve as a focal guiding concept for addressing the environmental ethics of land use.
'DynamiTE lunchtime seminars' are a part of the project 'Dynamic Territories'. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 948964).