Eco-Feminists’ View Eco-Feminists, a related group of thinkers, see the key form of hierarchy connected to the destruction of the environment as the domination of women by men.

They believe that there are important connections between the domination of women and the domination of nature–patterns of thinking, which justify and perpetuate the subordination.

Dualisms This logic of domination sets up dualisms (artificial and natural, male and female) where one of the pair is seen as stronger and more important. To solve our ecological problems, we must first change these destructive modes of thinking.

Ethics of Care & The Problem According to the ethics of caring, the destruction of nature that has accompanied male domination must be replaced with caring for and nurturing our relationships with nature and other living things.

Ethics of Care & The Problem Nature must be seen as an "other" that must be cared for, not tamed or dominated. Thought-provoking as these approaches are, they are still too new and undeveloped to give us specific direction.

The Ethics of Conserving Depletable Resources Conservation refers to the saving or rationing of natural resources for later use. In fact, even pollution control can be seen as a form of conservation, since pollution consumes air and water.

Conservation However, generally, conservation refers to the saving of finite, depletable resources. The only source of such resources is what has been left over from previous generations.

Conservation As we deplete the world's resources, there is unavoidably a smaller amount of them left for future generations. If future generations have an equal right to the world's resources, then by depleting them, we are stealing what is actually theirs.

Future generations and Ethicists A number of writers have claimed that it is a mistake to think that future generations have rights. They advance three main reasons to show this:

Objection One First, future generations cannot intelligently be said to have rights because they do not now exist and may never exist. I may be able to think about future people, but I cannot hit them, punish them, injure them, or treat them wrongly. Future people exist only in the imagination, and imaginary entities cannot be acted on in any way whatsoever except in the imagination.

Similarly, we cannot say that future people possess things now when they do not yet exist to possess or have them. Because there is a possibility that future generations may never exist, they cannot "possess" rights.

Second Objection Second, if future generations did have rights, we might be led to the absurd conclusion that we must sacrifice our entire civilization for their sake. Suppose that each of the infinite number of future generations had an equal right to the world's supply of oil.

Then we would have to divide the oil equally among them all, and our share would be a few quarts at the most. We would then be put in the absurd position of having to shut down our entire Western civilization so that each future person might be able to possess a few quarts of oil.

Third Objection Third, we can say that someone has a certain right only if we know that he or she has a certain interest that right protects. The purpose of a right, after all, is to protect the interests of the right holder, but we are virtually ignorant of what interests future generations will have. What wants will they have?