This project seeks to establish a new environmental ethics subfield, environmental landscape ethics, and to develop a new theory around the notion of ‘cohabitability’ as a focal analytical framework for it. Because land use for human purposes covers most of Earth’s habitable (ice-free and fertile) land, there is a pressing need to develop ethical theory to address land use. Yet, the present environmental ethics is ill-equipped for addressing land management because it largely builds on the legacy of wilderness orientation that focuses on mitigating human impacts to secure the ‘intactness’ of nature. Thus, new theories, terminology, and methods are needed. COHAB will establish environmental landscape ethics and theory of cohabitability by creating interdisciplinarily constructed, ecology-informed theoretical argumentation, methods, and conceptual tools. Cohabitability, land’s suitability for simultaneous co-habiting by many species, is an anchoring concept that connects the key research questions: (1) What are the theoretical and conceptual requirements for environmental landscape ethics? (2) What does cohabitability mean and what is it made of? (3) What are the normative implications of cohabitability? (4) Who can and should promote cohabitability and how?
Research questions yield four distinct research perspectives. RQ1 examines in detail the need for environmental landscape ethics and articulates the methodological and conceptual requirements for a sound approach in this subfield. RQ2 develops the conceptual framework for the theory of cohabitability by utilising interdisciplinary theory construction and conceptual development in philosophy. RQ3 examines the normative implications of and creates normative principles for the ethics of cohabitability. RQ4 examines action for cohabitability from both normative and empirical perspectives. Answers to RQs will together yield a theory of cohabitability and contribute to the environmental landscape ethics as a novel field. Theorising cohabitability will advance the front line of environmental ethics by making it well-equipped to respond to one of the greatest global environmental challenges, namely the ongoing biodiversity loss that is driven by land use. The project will inform how to find just ways to cohabitate the earth, focusing on the key interface where human-nonhuman interactions occur, the landscape. Thus, results and deliverables can be expected to have relevance beyond environmental ethics to the social philosophy for landscapes, and to adjacent fields including land use and planning theory, environmental humanities and social sciences, and conservation and sustainability sciences and practices.
