J. Baird Callicott
1941 –
Inducted 2025
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Baird Callicott is often credited with founding the field of environmental ethics. Beginning by teaching the world’s first course in
environmental ethics in 1971 at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, Callicott’s scholarship over the next five decades simultaneously advanced across four main fronts: theoretical environmental ethics; comparative environmental ethics and philosophy; the philosophy of ecology and conservation policy; and biocomplexity in the environment, coupled natural and human systems (the latter two occasionally sponsored by the National Science Foundation). Callicott is perhaps best known as the leading contemporary exponent of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic and has more recently explored an Aldo Leopold Earth Ethic in response to global climate change. (See J. Baird Callicott, Thinking Like a Planet: The Land Ethic and the Earth Ethic, published by Oxford University Press in 2013.) He is co-Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy and author or editor of a score of books and author of dozens of journal articles, encyclopedia articles, and book chapters in environmental philosophy and ethics. Callicott has served the International Society for Environmental Ethics as President and Yale University as Bioethicist-in-Residence, and he has served the UNT Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies as chair. For the last ten years Callicott has served as the Senior Assigning Editor of the Journal of Conservation Biology. In this role, he has shaped the discussions and their coalescence into concrete guidelines around several key topics, including human-wildlife conflict, equity in conservation research and practice, animal rights, trophy hunting, wilderness, the concept of intrinsic value, and the status of non-native species. He has refereed some very challenging positions and divisive opinions, in turn substantially enhancing conservation policy and conservation-oriented research on conservation science.
RESOURCES:
UWSP Newsletter documenting 50 Years of Philosophy 380: Environmental Ethics
M. Nelson article J. Baird Callicott for Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment
Short Video: Title: The Aldo Leopold Foundation, Date: 2022, Professor Callicott interprets the Leopold land ethic through the lens of classical virtue ethics. Credit: Jackson Newman, ALF Fellow 2021-2022.
Interview of Professor Callicott recorded in the gardens of the National Museum of Natural History located in the fifth arrondissement of Paris in 2012. Credit: Patrick DesGeorges of the French Portal of Environmental Humanities.