Vol. 9, No. 3: "Health and Ecological Destruction: Fracking and Beyond"
The deadline for submission for this issue is September 1, 2015.
Laura Purdy and Wendy Lynne Lee

“Which questions moral philosophers choose to study—and choose not to  
study—is itself a moral issue,” wrote Virginia Warren in her  
groundbreaking 1979 article. Indeed, bioethics has often focused on  
important, but relatively narrow issues based on the assumption that  
health is a natural lottery and that the chief moral questions have to do  
with the quality of care, and fair access to it, or with the implications  
of new technologies to treat or cure, and questions about reproduction and  
death. Of course, some writing has always acknowledged many influences on  
health and thus longevity, encouraged, no doubt, by scholarship in  
epidemiology, the social determinants of health, interest in  
food/agriculture issues, and concern about occupational and environmental  
pollution.

This special issue of IJFAB aims to examine, through a feminist lens,  
human activities such as fracking, that, by negatively impacting the  
environment, threaten health.

Science fiction, such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, abounds with  
post-apocalyptic nightmares, but rarely devotes any attention to how they  
came about or whether they could have been prevented.

  Yet, as ever more paths to environmental disaster are opened up by  
corporate and governmental decisions, the preventable is being touted as  
inevitable, natural, and good.

Many of us now live in disbelief at the deliberate dismantling of the  
conditions required for human (and nonhuman) flourishing by people  
apparently oblivious or disdainful of the consequences. If these forces  
continue to prevail, it is only a matter of time before the consequences  
of widespread lack of access to clean water, air and land pollution,  
desertification, and deforestation, will drastically reduce human life  
spans, and quite possibly lead to human extinction. The process will  
exacerbate the fight for survival at all levels, from the individual to  
the national.
We encourage readers to think about the many ways human activities are  
putting at risk human health, shortening lives, and risking species  
suicide.

Possible Topics:

Basic Theories/Concepts:
Public good vs. Property Rights
Precautionary Principle vs. Cost/Risk/Benefit
Environment/Ecology
Industrialized extraction
Feminist environmental bioethics
Thriveability/Flourishing

Focus:
Climate Change
Energy Production Policy
Food/Agriculture Issues
Environmental/Health Legislation
Drugs (Legal and Illegal)
Exploitation of Public Assets
Wildlife Preservation
Our main goal is to evaluate the health consequences of activities  
intended to maintain and expand dependence on fossil fuels, and technology  
in general, especially that held to be necessary for sustaining rapidly  
growing populations, no matter at what cost to the environment. These  
goals, in turn, reflect the needs and interests of continued western  
hegemony. We encourage potential contributors to contact us for a more  
detailed description of possible topics. In addition, we hope for  
submissions on the many related topics not listed here, such as mountain  
top removal, tar sands development, or as yet unidentified threats.



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