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Partnership is a word that is experiencing a renascence in the discourse of the business and environmental communities. Successful environmental partnerships, focused on resolving policy conflicts surrounding local issues, are forming among corporations, local communities, government agencies, and environmental organizations. Trees, rivers, endangered species, tribal groups, minority coalitions, and citizen activists all find represention along with business at the negotiating table. The partnership process offers a new approach to collaboration.1
Equally innovative is the idea that partners refer not only to societal entities and institutions, but to individuals and even natural entities. Domestic partners with legal status may include not only married couples but stable relationships between men and women, women and women, and men and men. A partnership ethic may offer guidelines for moving beyond the rhetoric of environmental conflict and toward a discourse of cooperation. And as I will argue here, the term partner can also be used to represent gnatcatchers, coho salmon, grizzly bears, and checkerspot butterflies. Indeed nonhuman nature itself can be our partner.
Partnership ethics differs from the three major forms of environmental ethics that currently dominate human-environment relations-egocentric, homocentric, and ecocentric. Each ethic reflects a different discourse stemming from conflicts among underlying modernist institutions. The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro illustrates the underlying assumptions of the three ethical frameworks and their associated discourses. The egocentric ethic is exemplified by GATT-the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; the homocentric by UNCED-the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development and its Agenda 21 program; and the ecocentric by many environmental organizations involved in sustainable development. While conflicts arise from the different discourses associated with the institutional arrangements of capitalism, the state, and environmentalism, a new transcendent ethic of partnership may help to resolve them. Partnership should include not only human-human relationships, but human-nature interactions as well.2
Egocentric ethics: The Uruguay round of GATT, which began in 1986 and by 1994 was concluded and undergoing ratification, assumes a free market model of world trade and an egocentric ethic. Based on the idea of trickledown economic benefits, an egocentric ethic is the idea that what is good for the individual, or the corporation acting as an individual, is good for society as a whole. Here a discourse of individual freedom to...