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Right on Chris. May I add that even if local changes are "only" environmental, as John Foster suggests, that is also a basis for ethical concern. The real issue of environmental ethics is how to conduct human life so as to best represent your local environment. Combined with certain knowledge about global issues, all environmental concerns are truly local. I still am not sure what JF's point is. After saying that ecosystems do not change, he then says that they are only conceptual. I'm not sure what that means, but there you go. I agree, if this is indeed what JF means, that ecosystems are not real in the sense that we can easily defines the boundaries of one and the next. I disagree that ecosystems are whatever you want to say they are. I think there is a body of knowledge that supports the idea that ecosystems are local in most cases and include biotic and abiotic components. I'm not sure what the significance of phyla is, actually I'm pretty sure there is no significance to ecosystems. I've started to ramble. Enough said. Steven -----Original Message----- From: Discussion forum for environmental ethics. [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Chris Perley Sent: Saturday, October 27, 2001 6:14 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Ethical implications of environmental change I thought I might add another thought relating to this apparent controvercy concerning whether the environment (or ecosystems) change. JF has suggested that either ecosystems do not actually change - or that the change is within some pattern that relates to a "climax". I think there are shades of the "balance of nature" myth in his thinking, but that is beside the point. IF the environment does not change in reality - then an environmental ethic that condemns change seems to have soem support. The implications for humans as a species are major. We breath, we eat, we excrete. Human ethical boundaries are too constrained if "no change" occurs in any sense. Every act we do is wrong because we cause an "unnatural" change. On the other hand, if we take John's view that all this flux and dynamism over geological scales is not *actually* change in some conceptual way (change only being significant if a new higher order phyla emerges - so species extinctions are not *significant*, nor the wiping out of one ecosystem because we judge it has "moved" somewhere, etc.), then how are we to judge the apparently not *actual* change when humans convert forest to pasture on the same scale that climate did it elsewhere? It seems to me that under this view, there are no meaningful boundaries to our actions - because even an asteriod hit which doesn't cause a major taxonomic change comes under the Foster definition of "no change". Thankfully the reality is there is change, and therefore a context for an environmental ethic that neither a belief in either 1. no change or 2. no substantive change unless a major evolutionary event, can provide. Chris P