At the end of the 2015 Academy Award-winning film The Big Short, which explores the origins of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, a caption notes that the Wall Street investor protagonist of the film who predicted the collapse of the United States (US) housing market would now be ‘focused on one commodity: water’. Water is sometimes described in popular culture as ‘the new oil’ or ‘more valuable than gold’. It is predicted to be the subject of increasing uncertainty, competition, conflict, and even war, as increasing demand from a growing human population and development meets reduced supply as a result of poor management, overuse, and climate change.

Sites of ancient woodland in the United Kingdom (UK) are diminishing rapidly and the multifunctional forest management system with its fragmented approach fails effectively to protect such woodland. In the face of reports on the destruction of ancient woodland, the HS2 High-Speed train project in the UK signifies the extent of trade-offs among the key stakeholders. Such large infrastructure projects typically come with high environmental and social costs, including deforestation, habitat fragmentation, biodiversity loss, and social disruption. This article examines the protection of ancient woodland in the UK and assesses the challenges in applying the ecosystem approach, an internationally recognized sustainability strategy, in the context of such protection. A better understanding of the ecosystem approach to manage ancient woodland is critical for promoting sustainable forestry practices in the UK and informs the discussion in this article of the importance of conserving ancient woodland globally. Lessons learned from UK woodland policies and certification schemes include the need to have in place strong regulatory frameworks, introduce clear indicators, and recognize pluralistic value systems alongside economic considerations. The article concludes that the protection of ancient woodland in the UK requires distinct and strong laws that reflect multiple values of this resource, acknowledge the trade-offs among stakeholders, and adopt an inclusive approach to reduce power asymmetries.

Legislation emerging from Treaty of Waitangi settlements provide Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, with new opportunities to destabilize and decolonize the colonial knowledge, processes and practices that contribute towards negative material and metaphysical impacts on their rohe [traditional lands and waters]. In this article we focus our attention on the Nga Wai o Maniapoto (Waipa River) Act 2012 and the Deed of Settlement signed between the Crown (the New Zealand government) and Ngāti Maniapoto (the tribal group with ancestral authority over the Waipā River) as an example of how the law in Aotearoa New Zealand is increasingly stretched beyond settler-colonial confines to embrace legal and ontological pluralism. We illustrate how this Act serves as the foundation upon which Ngāti Maniapoto are seeking to restore, manage, and enhance the health of their river. Such legislation, we argue, provides a far higher degree of recognition of Māori rights and interests both as an outcome of the settlement process and by strengthening provisions under the Resource Management Act 1991 regarding the role of Māori in resource management. We conclude by suggesting that co-governance and co-management arrangements hold great potential for transforming river management by recognizing and accommodating ontological and epistemological pluralism, which moves Aotearoa New Zealand closer to achieving sustainable and just river futures for all.

Commonsense morality seems to feature both agent-neutral and agent-relative elements. For a long time, the core debate between consequentialists and deontologists was which of these features should take centerstage. With the introduction of the consequentializing project and agent-relative value, however, agent-neutrality has been left behind. While I likewise favor an agent-relative view, agent-neutral views capture important features of commonsense morality.

This article investigates whether an agent-relative view can maintain what is attractive about typical agent-neutral views. In particular, I argue that the agent-relative reasons-wielding deontologist is ultimately able to capture those features ordinarily associated with agent-neutral views, while the agent-relative value wielding consequentialist is left with a dilemma. The consequentializer either succumbs to the concerns of her agent-neutral opponents or else abandons the distinctive and attractive features of her view. Either way, I conclude that agent-relative value is best left behind.

There is little agreement among moral and political philosophers when it comes to determining what it is that makes adaptive preferences problematic. The large number of competing explanations offered by philosophers illustrates the absence of any consensus. The most prominent versions of these explanations have recently come under attack by Dale Dorsey, who argues that adaptive preferences are a red herring: the problematic nature of adaptive preferences is not explained by the fact of adaptation but by an appeal to some other normative consideration. In this article I offer an account of adaptive preferences that both accommodates the thought that only some of our adaptive preferences are problematic and responds to the skeptical challenge pressed by Dorsey. I argue that some adaptive preferences are prima facie irrational as they exhibit a peculiar error in reasoning where individuals change the semantic content of the reasons underpinning the new preference.

For Karol Berger

This article begins with an analysis of the ‘F.A.E. Sonata’ (fall 1853), a work for violin and piano composed jointly by Robert Schumann (movements 2 and 4), Albert Dietrich (first movement), and Johannes Brahms, for their returning friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim. The title of the work derives from the musical motto that Joachim had chosen as his own, representing the words ‘Frei aber einsam’ (free but alone). The analysis identifies the unifying elements of the movements; allusions play a role, especially regarding Beethoven.

The study then proposes that Wagner's 1850 essay ‘The Artwork of the Future’ inspired this collegial effort as a rebuttal to several ideas, suggesting that Joachim took his personal motto as a contradiction of Wagner's statement: ‘The solitary individual is unfree’ (Der Einsame ist unfrei). One of the more intriguing sections for Schumann and his followers was likely the chapter entitled ‘The Artist of the Future’. There he asserts that individuality will never be as consequential as a collective effort, proclaiming that ‘the free artistic community is therefore the basic prerequisite for the artwork itself’. Schumann challenged his devoted disciples to take Wagner at his word and compose something as a collective. The stakes of the dispute between Schumann and Wagner were high: a path into the future that best continued the line connecting both of them to Beethoven. This sonata was composed at the same time as Schumann's article, ‘New Paths’ (Neue Bahnen), which also constitutes a response to Wagner's The Artwork of the Future.

This article examines the social and political effects produced by the most recent wave of emigration in postwar Bosnia, widely understood to be the result of continued political instability and economic decline that followed the 1992–95 war. Drawing on ethnographic research in a deindustrialized Bosnian town and analysis of popular discourses seeking to make sense of this new wave of departures, I show how the phenomenon of postwar exit impacts those staying behind and inspires new forms of reflection that link past histories of violence to more recent forms of dispossession. The emergence of such forms of historical consciousness reveals that postwar migration is haunted both by the memory of wartime expulsions and ethnic cleansing, as well as by the often-unacknowledged violence of postwar economic restructuring glossed as the postsocialist transition. In asking what happens to nationalist regimes, as well as scholarship on nationalist politics, when the “people” leave, I demonstrate the need to analyze the ongoing out-migration both in terms of Bosnia’s historical specificity and global political-economic dynamics. In so doing, I show how absences created by these departures create new vantage points that bring to light and expose unsettling political configurations left behind by the Bosnian war.