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Narrating the Environmental Apocalypse: How Imagining the End Facilitates Moral Reasoning Among Environmental Activists
- Ethics & the Environment
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2012
- pp. 1-23
- 10.2979/ethicsenviro.17.1.1
- Article
- Additional Information
Often assumed to induce fatalism, empirical evidence shows that environmental apocalypticism is frequently associated with activism. I suggest this is the case because the notion of imminent catastrophe reveals a moral to the environmental story, and in so doing furnishes a point of view from which people can determine what constitutes environmentally ethical behavior. Insofar as it guides behavior, this apocalyptic moral reasoning can be usefully understood as a folk version of consequentialism. Further research on how people put environmental ethics into practice would complement the significant advances environmental ethicists have made in the areas of normative and meta-ethics over the past several decades.