In India, waste as a category in governance discourse is getting stabilized as a techno-managerial problem. This new and dominant discourse frames the solution by converting waste into resources universally applicable across urban contexts. However, in practice, this results in converting waste as materials to be disposed of. Underlying this disposability discourse is, paradoxically, a neoliberal logic of efficiency that eclipses social and political concerns. Within this framing, the role of the public is passive, that is, the public becomes a target to embody waste segregation rather than an active participant in deliberating over waste technologies and practices. By examining waste management practices and juxtaposing them with waste management policy in a peri-urban municipality, this article opens the settled category of waste. Drawing on empirical insights from surveys, interviews and ethnographic observations in a new/small/peri-urban municipality, the study examines how dominant waste management practices such as segregation at households and door-to-door collection individualize the waste problem and result in the othering of waste. By thinking critically with local context and material practices, the article shows how relations emerging in local contexts, often devalued within universalist policy frameworks, can plug waste relations into processes that are not visible in metropolitan regions. Thus, the article opens possibilities for more sustainable forms of waste governance in peri-urban regions.

Can we learn how to be better at attending from other animals? The paper argues that we can. While the call for attention to animals is increasingly heard, still few engage with attention by animals, and even fewer with animal attention, both individual and mutual, as an ethical lesson. Working with a concept of attention as inherently ethical, the paper considers four elements of attention which non-human animals can teach humans: unbiased objectivity, creativity, empathetic engagement, and shared/mutual attention. These elements will emerge through four case-studies, each illustrating an aspect of attention which a human can learn from a non-human animal. The first, taken from Iris Murdoch, reports Rainer Maria Rilke's observations of animal attention as unbiased objectivity. The second, from Emmanuel Levinas, shows a dog attending in a way that is ethically responsive and creative, identifying value where no one else sees it. The third, with the horse known as ‘Clever Hans’, observes an empathetic mode of attention in which the horse was superior to humans. The fourth and final case-study describes a cat teaching a human how to engage in shared and mutual attention through touch.

Do we have an obligation to restore historical land-caring practices as an act of moral repair? Recently, Almassi has put forward ecological restoration as a form of moral repair between humans and the environment. However, this account relies on the anthropocentric notions of ‘trust’ and ‘forgiveness’. In this article, I develop the moral repair justification using the non-anthropocentric terms of ‘flourishing’ and ‘care’. I argue historical land-caring practices involve a moral relationship of mutual dependency between humans and biotic communities, and restoring such practices can be act of moral repair. Using the example of fire-stick farming by the Martu people of the Australian Western Desert, I show that the restoration of historical land-caring satisfies a plurality of environmental ethics.

Ecological grief is a widely experienced response to the world's rapidly intensifying environmental crises and motivates people to take environmental action. Experiences of ecological grief vary, however, depending on the wider values and attitudes of the groups experiencing it. This paper describes, for the first time, the experiences of ecological grief amongst environmental activist Christians. The paper draws on findings from a survey ( n = 319) and recent qualitative interviews ( n = 62) with Christian environmental activists from six organisations in the UK. Research with these environmental activists shows that they understood ecological grief in relation to four main theological themes: (a) damaging creation, (b) wrecking a gift, (c) failing to steward well, and (d) harming divinity. This paper argues that these four areas can be gathered under the single theme of breaches in relationship with God and with extrahuman life. That is, ecological grief, for these environmental activists, involves a sense of rupture in relationship to God and other non-human lifeforms. This argument is developed and framed through theological and philosophical literature concerning gift-giving, environmental stewardship, creation theology, and divine immanence. The resulting account is a unique and relationally focused description of the experience of ecological grief.

What is left of the Great Plains shortgrass prairie landscapes is under serious threat to its ecological integrity from unhealthy land use and grazing practices on privately owned rangelands. Two different strategies have been proposed for shortgrass prairie restoration: (1) encourage ranchland owners to replace livestock-centred with biodiversity-centred cattle grazing and land management; and (2) reintroduce bison herds on tribal reservations. These two strategies offer an opportunity to address whether a land ethic to which Indigenous peoples have subscribed for millennia or of the kind authored by Aldo Leopold, can play a significant role in biodiversity conservation efforts. The essential finding of this article is that ranchland owners are sharply constrained by market forces in the application of a land ethic, but bison reintroduction on Indigenous reservation common lands is in tune with tribal purposes that reflect a spiritual relationship to all of nature's beings.

Eric Katz has recently claimed not only that rewilding is inherently paradoxical, but also that its paradoxes reveal rewilding's implication in the very mindset of anthropocentric domination against which it is floated as a partial solution. In this paper, I argue that rewilding need not in principle be committed to a pernicious anthropocentrism. With the assistance of an important distinction between ‘synchronic’ and ‘diachronic’ wildness, I firstly argue that rewilding need not be viciously paradoxical in any unequivocal sense. I then suggest, with the aid of Henry David Thoreau's account of synchronic wildness, that rewilding might rather be geared to inculcate hypersensitivity to nonhuman otherness particularly conducive to an anti-domination mindset. Hence rewilding may remain a live tool in responding to the challenges that characterise our shared world.

Hope is a disputed concept in the context of the climate movement. Basic analysis suggests that hope is important for political action – however, groups including XR have explicitly disavowed hope, and the facts of the crisis might more readily incline us to despair. Some authors, for instance Diana Stuart, have attempted to resolve this contradiction by arguing that ‘anti-hope’ climate activists are only rejecting forms of ‘false hope’, and that we should instead see their action as being motivated by other forms of hope: one oft-mentioned candidate is the ‘radical hope’ discussed by Jonathan Lear. In this paper, I aim to do two things. Firstly, I show that we should not understand climate hope as ‘radical hope’, but rather as what I call ‘spontaneous hope’ – drawing on Jonathan Gingerich's work on ‘spontaneous freedom’. Secondly, I show that there is a relationship between spontaneous hope and the feeling of (righteous) anger. This in turn can help explain empirical work which establishes a link between climate activism and anger.

Environmental philosophy – broadly conceived as using philosophical tools to develop ideas related to environmental issues – is conducted and practised in highly diverse ways in different contexts and traditions in Asia. ‘Asian environmental philosophy’ can be understood to include Asian traditions of thought as well as grassroots perspectives on environmental issues in Asia. Environmental issues have sensitive political facets tied to who has the legitimacy to decide about how natural resources are used. Because of this, the works, practices, and researchers in Asian environmental philosophy are exposed to being (mis)used by diverse stakeholders and actors to support political ends not related to environmental sustainability. Two processes are at play at the nexus of the construction of identities in relation to conceptualisations of nature: eco-orientalism and ecological nationalisms. This paper analyzes and exemplifies these dynamics through a conceptual framework that distinguishes ideological and socio-technical explanations of environmental degradation. Finally, to minimise the risks of political misuse, five pathways are presented to carefully help curate environmental, philosophical statements: contextualise, quantify uncertainty and ‘uniqueness’, downscale, confront claims with local realities and literature, and collaborate with researchers from other disciplines. Conjointly, these pathways aim at favouring intercultural collaboration while valuing diversity, thus supporting the development and exchanges in environmental philosophy in Asia and beyond.