🫨's Submission

Environmental Ethics – Wetlands Rezoning Debate Exercise 🌿🏙️ (okay I got really into this one, sorry in advance 😅🙏)

Side 1: FOR rezoning (anthropocentric / Rawlsian justice lens) 🏠✊ From an anthropocentric ethical framework — specifically one grounded in Rawls's veil of ignorance 🎭 — we have to ask: if you didn't know whether you'd be born as a low-income family needing housing OR as a wetland ecosystem 🐸🌾 (ok obviously ecosystems don't have "birth positions" lol but bear with the thought experiment), what distribution of resources would you choose?? A just society prioritizes its most vulnerable HUMAN members, and housing insecurity is a direct threat to human dignity and survival 🏚️➡️🏡. Affordable housing isn't a luxury, it's a justice issue, and from a human-centered lens, the moral weight of displaced/unhoused families arguably outweighs the instrumental value of an undeveloped wetland parcel. This is NOT me saying nature doesn't matter (see paragraph 2 where I fight myself 👇) but strictly within anthropocentrism, human welfare = the measuring stick, and right now too many cities treat affordable housing as disposable while protecting land for aesthetic or recreational reasons that mostly benefit wealthier residents anyway 💸🙄. That's an environmental justice issue too!!

Side 2: AGAINST rezoning (biocentrism / deep ecology lens) 🌎💚 BUT — shifting into a biocentric / deep ecology framework (Naess, Taylor, the whole crew 📚) — wetlands are not "empty land" waiting for human purpose, they are living systems with their OWN inherent worth, totally independent of their usefulness to us 🐟🦆🌱. Deep ecology rejects the idea that humans get to rank which forms of life "count" — every organism has a teleological center of its own good, to use Paul Taylor's phrase, and destroying a wetland erases an entire interconnected web of nonhuman stakeholders who never consented to this zoning meeting lol (they don't get a seat on the city council 😭🏛️). Wetlands ALSO perform ecological labor — flood buffering, carbon sequestration, biodiversity habitat — that protects FUTURE humans and nonhuman life from climate catastrophe, so framing this as "housing vs. nature" is honestly kind of a false binary set up by capitalism forcing us to choose between two things that should BOTH be public goods 🔥. If we let developers pick off protected ecosystems every time there's a housing shortage, we're treating deep ecological harm as an acceptable externality, which is exactly the extractive mindset this class has been teaching us to interrogate!!

honestly... I don't think I landed on a "winner" here and that stressed me out a little ngl 😬 bc both sides use frameworks we've studied and both feel TRUE to me?? I think the "real" answer is probably something like a third way — redesigning the housing development to be elevated/green infrastructure that coexists with the wetland instead of replacing it (biomimicry queen behavior 🦆💅) — but since the prompt said argue one side then the other, I kept them separate!! Professor, if you have a sec in office hours could we talk through how deep ecologists would respond to the "but people need homes NOW" urgency argument? I keep getting stuck there and want to make sure I'm not strawmanning the biocentric position 🥹🙏 attached a quick diagram I made mapping the two frameworks side by side just for my own visual processing, lmk if it's helpful or if I'm overcomplicating this lol 📊✨

Professor 😒's Feedback

👋 got it, read it twice bc the frog emoji density rivaled my own 🐸✅

Side 1: Rawls + veil of ignorance applied to housing = solid, you clocked the environmental-justice angle (rich people's aesthetic wetlands 🚩) which most students miss completely 😎. Good move.

Side 2: Taylor's teleological centers, "no seat on the city council" 😭 — biocentrism doing real work here, not just vibes. The capitalism-false-binary point is the sharpest sentence in the whole doc 🔥🎯.

Structurally you did the assignment and then quietly transcended it by refusing to pick a winner — which, fine, ethics is not a sports bracket 🫠. Your "biomimicry queen" synthesis is basically eco-modernist pragmatism and I respect it even though you wrote it like a caption for a duck photo 🦆💅.

Weak spot: you keep saying "bear with the thought experiment" instead of actually sitting in the discomfort of extending Rawls to nonhumans — that's where the interesting essay is hiding, not where you apologized for it 😅.

Deep ecology vs. urgency question: come to office hours, bring the diagram, I like diagrams 📊. Quick preview: deep ecologists don't deny urgency, they deny that urgency = unlimited moral trump card. Chew on that 🐸.

Tone it down 10% on exclamation points, keep 100% of the thinking. ✅😄

🫨's Email

Subject: office hours + the "unlimited moral trump card" line is living in my head rent free 🐸🧠✨

Hi Professor 😒,

okay first of all THANK YOU for reading it twice 😭🙏 the frog emoji density comment made me laugh out loud in the library and a guy next to me gave me a Look 💀🐸

I'm literally buzzing about the "urgency ≠ unlimited moral trump card" preview you gave me, I want to sit with that SO bad before I just nod along like I get it 📊🫡 — can I grab an office hours slot this week?? I'll bring the diagram (slightly updated, I added arrows now, it's a whole thing 🦆➡️💚) and maybe like three follow-up questions that are really just one question wearing a trench coat 🕵️‍♀️

also re: the "bear with the thought experiment" thing — you're so right and I felt that in my SOUL 😅 I think I was scared to actually extend Rawls to nonhumans bc what if it falls apart under me?? but you're saying that's literally where the good stuff is so. challenge accepted I guess?? 🎭🐸

will absolutely dial back the exclamation points 10%, keeping 100% of the thinking as instructed 🫡✅ (no promises on the ducks tho, "biomimicry queen" is forever)

lmk what times work this week — I'm free basically whenever, I will rearrange my whole schedule for this conversation ngl 😤💚

thank you thank you thank you, 🫨

Professor 😒's Reply

Subject: re: office hours + the "unlimited moral trump card" line is living in my head rent free 🐸🧠✨

👋 🫨

frog density duly noted and archived 📘🐸 the guy in the library will recover, probably, not my jurisdiction 🤷😓

office hours: Thurs 2-4, drop in whenever, trench-coat question welcome as-is, no need to undress it first 🕵️‍♀️✅

bring the ducks ⛓️‍💥➡️💚 arrows are good, arrows mean causality or at least confidence, I'll take either

Rawls + nonhumans falling apart under you is not a bug 🚩 that's the assignment basically, veil of ignorance was never built for a species-only clubhouse, go wobble it 😎

exclamation point austerity program: optional, unenforced, I trust your judgment 🫠🎯

see you Thursday 👍😄

😒

🫨's Submission

Who Gets a Seat at the Table? The Willow Creek Wetlands and the Limits of Urgency 🐸⚖️

(quick context since this one's hypothetical but modeled heavily on real cases like the Hackensack Meadowlands fights and the Standing Rock pipeline resistance 🛢️🌊 — picture a mid-sized city, "Millbrook," where a 40-acre wetland called Willow Creek sits on the edge of downtown. The city council is voting on whether to rezone it for a 600-unit affordable housing development. The wetland floods seasonally, hosts a regionally threatened salamander population, and has been informally used by a nearby low-income neighborhood for generations — foraging, fishing, kids catching frogs, the whole thing 🦎🌿. It is NOT pristine untouched wilderness; it's a working, lived-with ecosystem, which honestly makes this harder, not easier.)

My position: Millbrook should reject the full rezoning and instead approve a modified elevated-housing proposal that preserves the wetland's hydrological core — but I want to be honest that I'm not arriving here because housing doesn't matter 🏠. I'm arriving here because of how deep ecology forces us to rethink what "urgency" is allowed to justify, and because history keeps showing us what happens when we treat ecosystems as land banks for human convenience and promise we'll "get to" justice for nonhuman life later 😬.

The urgency argument, taken seriously 🚨 The strongest case FOR full rezoning isn't callous — it's Rawlsian, like I argued in the exercise. Housing insecurity is a present, documented harm to human dignity, and under a veil of ignorance you'd want a society that prioritizes the worst-off. People experiencing homelessness aren't a hypothetical future generation, they're here NOW. Professor, your comment about deep ecology and the "unlimited moral trump card" has been living in my head rent free since office hours 🐸💭, so let me actually sit in this instead of rushing past it like I did last time.

Here's the thing though: urgency gets used selectively. This is the part that convinced me. In Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council (1992), the Supreme Court sided with a landowner who argued coastal regulations preventing him from building on his beachfront lots amounted to a regulatory "taking" — essentially ruling that protecting the coastline could be outweighed by an individual's economic urgency to develop. Compare that to Just v. Marinette County (1972), where a Wisconsin court upheld wetland protections BECAUSE the wetland performed ecological functions (flood control, water filtration) that benefited the broader public — ruling that an owner has no absolute right to change the natural character of land to the detriment of the public's rights. Same basic conflict — human economic urgency vs. ecosystem integrity — opposite outcomes, decades apart. That inconsistency tells me "urgency" isn't a neutral legal/moral category, it's a lever that gets pulled depending on who's asking and who benefits 🎚️.

Why this isn't actually "housing vs. nature" 🏚️🆚🐸 is a trap Millbrook officials keep framing this as a binary — rezone or don't, help people or help salamanders. But Willow Creek performs flood mitigation for the SAME low-income neighborhood that needs housing. If the wetland is paved, the city will need stormwater infrastructure that historically costs more than preserving wetlands in the first place (this is basically the whole argument from the Army Corps of Engineers' own cost-benefit studies on wetland mitigation banking 📉). So the "urgent human need" framing is actually incomplete — it's borrowing against the SAME community's future flood safety to solve present housing shortage, and calling it a win.

Anticipating the counter: "elevated housing is just NIMBY-coded delay tactics" 🙄 I take this seriously because progressive circles I'm in IRL say this constantly about environmental review processes being weaponized by wealthy homeowners to block density (CEQA abuse is a real documented pattern in California, this isn't me strawmanning). But there's a difference between delay-as-obstruction and redesign-as-coexistence. The modified proposal isn't "no housing," it's housing on stilts/pilings above the floodplain's core zone, modeled on projects like Rotterdam's floating neighborhoods 🇳🇱🏊. It costs more upfront. It should be subsidized by the state specifically BECAUSE this is an environmental justice issue, not solved by making the wetland absorb the cost of our refusal to fund infrastructure properly.

Policy recommendation 📋✅ Millbrook should: (1) reject full rezoning, (2) approve the elevated/green-infrastructure alternative with state climate-resilience funding covering the cost differential, and (3) grant the adjacent neighborhood — the actual human stakeholders with generational ties to the land — binding decision-making power over the final design, not just a public comment period. Taylor's teleological centers of good don't get a literal vote, but the humans who've coexisted with this ecosystem longest should get MORE than a vote, because they're the ones who've already been doing the ethical work of cohabitation that the council is treating as a zoning inconvenience 🐸🏡.

Professor 😒's Feedback

👋 Willow Creek. the frogs have unionized and I respect it 🐸✊

You took the office hours thing and actually chewed on it instead of nodding politely and leaving 🤖. "Urgency isn't a neutral legal category, it's a lever" — that's the sentence. Lucas vs. Just v. Marinette as a paired case study is exactly the move I wanted and most students won't go find two contradicting precedents on their own, they'll just cite the one that agrees with them 🚩. You didn't. Gold star. Several frogs' worth of gold stars 🏅🐸🐸🐸.

The flood-infrastructure-cost reframe is the quietly devastating part — "borrowing against the same community's future to solve its present" should be embroidered on a throw pillow in some city planner's office they're too uncomfortable to sit on 🛋️😬.

Elevated housing as "redesign-as-coexistence" vs. "delay-as-obstruction" — good, clean distinction, Rotterdam shoutout earns points, though I will note you're one Dutch floating-neighborhood reference away from becoming an urbanist Twitter account 🇳🇱📱😄.

Policy rec: giving the neighborhood binding power instead of a comment period is the actual ethics, not garnish. "They've already been doing the cohabitation work the council treats as an inconvenience" — chef's kiss, mic drop, frog ribbit 🐸🎤.

Nitpick, gentle: Taylor's teleological centers show up for one sentence and then leave like they forgot their jacket 🧥. You gestured at biocentrism instead of letting it argue back at you. Not a flaw, just unfinished business — maybe for the next draft of your brain.

Word count's fine, structure's fine, citations are real and doing work not just decorating. You didn't apologize for the discomfort this time, you sat in it. That's the whole assignment, honestly ✅😎.

Grade: A-. The minus is just so the salamanders don't get complacent 🐸⛓️‍💥