I came to the UCF Department of Philosophy in the fall of 1994, shortly after receiving my PhD in philosophy; my first love, however, would always be biology—the science of Life—which impelled me to earn a bachelor’s degree in zoology, followed by a degree in human medicine, and provided me with a perspective that would continue to inform my research and my teaching for the rest of my career in academia. Looking back, what I most appreciated about my time at UCF was having the freedom to explore issues involving the biological and ecological sciences that raised philosophical questions, both in my writing and my teaching. My research concerns were and still are largely focused on what we humans are doing to the other forms of life with which we share the planet—specifically, the ongoing anthropogenic extinction of nonhuman species, recently re-conceived as the “biodiversity crisis,” which rivals or exceeds the better-known “climate crisis” in its eventual consequences for our own species. Certain historical as well as contemporary trends in western philosophical thinking provide fertile grounds for analyzing the conceptual underpinnings of our exploitative approach to the natural world, and can point toward another, more sustainable path. Courses I taught included environmental philosophy, bioethics, philosophy of science, and existentialism, in all of which I aspired to impart some measure of appreciation for our responsibility to care for nature and recognition of our ability, as human beings, to bring about positive change. There was an ethical emphasis in most of my teaching, and I took part in preparing UCF students for the regional Ethics Bowl, hoping to awaken them to the relevance of ethical thinking in daily life. How successful I was with this is debatable, however; I was always sorry that, during my tenure there, the Department was not given the go-ahead to develop its own graduate program, one that could have attracted students seriously motivated to work individually with senior faculty.       

My thoughts did find expression in publications, however—not a large number of them, but papers that I hope might prove influential over time. Perhaps my best known is an old one, “Ecofeminism and Nonhumans: Continuity, Difference, Dualism, and Domination” published in Hypatia (1998), that is still garnering citations in the environmental philosophy literature. I’m also proud of my “Intergroup Justice: Taking Responsibility for Intraspecific and Interspecific Oppressions” (1998) and “Seeing Ourselves as Primates” (2002), both in Ethics & the Environment, from the early years. Another fairly widely cited paper, “Cultural Whaling, Commodification, and Culture Change” came out in Environmental Ethics in 2001, and “Extending Plumwood’s Critique of Rationalism Through Imagery and Metaphor” was published in Ethics & the Environment in 2009. I also had fun playing devil’s advocate at a number of conferences, both home and away, including one hosted by the Department that generated “Heresy-Hammering, Group Selection, and Collective Self-Deception,” slightly re-named for the Florida Philosophical Review in 2008. I’m surprised to find, however, looking through my stack of reprints now, that my most productive years for publishing came after my retirement in 2011, a time when I finally had time to write, and was clearly writing not to add to my year-end activity report but simply out of a sense of having something to say.

“Perceiving Overpopulation” came out in Cafaro and Crist’s Life on the Brink in 2012; I was invited to contribute a chapter to Lautensach & Lautensach’s Human Security in World Affairs entitled “Our War Against Nature” by 2013, and in that year I also contributed to Campbell & Bruno’s The Science, Politics, and Ontology of Life-Philosophy the paper “Your Money or Your Life: Using Nietzsche’s Critique of Mechanism and Platonism to Defend the Biosphere,” while In 2014 I spoke out against the banishment of the Deep Ecology section from the Zimmerman anthology I had been using in my environmental philosophy class with the very critical “Why Deep Ecology Had to Die” in the Trumpeter, a “Journal of Ecosophy.” I also presented “Upstream of Ethics: Examining the Social Ontology of Development” at a meeting of the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA) that was held in San Jose, Costa Rica that same year. Shifting gears toward more “biomedical” concerns, however, I wrote “Facing Up to Complexity: Implications for Our Social Experiments,” which appeared in Science and Engineering Ethics in 2015, and I came out with “Anthropocentrism, Logocentrism, and Neural Networks” for a tribute issue to Victoria Davion in Ethics & the Environment in 2018. That year was also when the second edition of the Human Security in World Affairs volume came out as an e-book, and this time my contribution was expanded to two chapters, Ch 11, Our War Against Nature: Ontology, Cognition, and a Constricting Paradigm (https://opentextbc.ca/humansecurity/chapter/war-against-nature-ontology/), and Ch 12, Our War Against Nature: Letters from the Front (https://opentextbc.ca/humansecurity/chapter/war-against-nature-letters/). Doing the research for the second chapter really opened my eyes to how much our assault on nature has accelerated since the first edition came out, documented in sections with headings from “Animal Armageddon” and “The Fraying of Food Webs” to “Plastic, Microplastic and Nanoparticulate Pollution,” and “The Human Footprint: Population and Consumption”; it has added to the urgency I feel in continuing to address these issues. I continued to write throughout the COVID crisis, coming out with “Thinking Longer, Looking Deeper” in Animal Sentience (2020), and I’m working now on an in-depth examination of LIFE as a surprisingly under-theorized phenomenon, both biologically and philosophically. So—perhaps I had more going on than was ever apparent while I was at UCF.

After my retirement in 2011, my husband and I began visiting Costa Rica, which I had been fortunate to see for the first time while in graduate school under the auspices of the OTS (Organization for Tropical Studies) program. It’s a biologically rich tropical country (see my review of Costa Rica: A Journey through Nature in Biological Conservation, 2014) but one also dealing with now-worldwide problems like continuing deforestation, illegal hunting and trapping for the international wildlife trade—seeing it up close and personal has kept me in the “environmental philosophy” mode much of the time. But for someone who simply loves the natural, living world, Costa Rica is full of wonders. Where else might you be awakened in the morning by a three-toed sloth scrambling across a metal roof? Very different from Florida, the inland terrain is up-and-down, with vistas of cloud-kissed mountains and valleys flanking the highways and many beckoning rock-and-gravel roads that lead to cascading waterfalls and other tucked-away treasures lying outside of the major cities, which are few. At an elevation of around 3000 meters there is no need for heating or for air-conditioning in the year-round mild temperatures, though one must be prepared for a short dry season in the spring and then a very long rainy season most of the rest of the year; hurricanes are not a problem, but there are occasional earthquakes, and heavy rains can be counted on to engorge the rivers, wash out roads and bridges and flood the low lands several times a year.

Luxurious tropical vegetation abounds in areas that remain heavily forested; there are many broad-leaved evergreens growing up to 40-50 meters in height, some festooned with native orchids and bromeliads or lianas, vines often reaching to the forest floor, while majestic tree ferns, wild gingers and a variety of fruiting and flowering trees and shrubs may dot the landscape. Wildlife is still abundant where people, cars and dogs are scarce. Iguanas and basilisks (the “walk-on-water” lizards) abound near river systems, while white-faced capuchin monkeys and squirrels in colors from red to shiny black frisk among the treetops. Most mammals are shy and inconspicuous, however, with woolly opossums and the occasional tayra sometimes allowing a glimpse in the wild, while tapirs and spotted jungle cats are likely to be seen only in national forests, nature preserves or rehab centers. Serious birdwatchers can add trogons, oropendolas, three-wattled bellbirds, and of course resplendent quetzals to their life-lists, and Costa Rica boasts 53 species of hummingbirds in brilliant iridescent colors, lighting up the countryside like little flying jewels. Meanwhile, backyard feeding stations routinely attract fruit-eating birds in amazing colors, shapes and sizes, from fiery-billed aracaris to blue-crowned motmots, yellow-breasted flycatchers, a plethora of tanagers ranging from emerald green to scarlet-and-black, and a dimorphic species of honeycreeper with grass-green females and black-masked turquoise males, seasonally joined by orange-breasted Baltimore orioles and bright red summer tanagers who’ve survived the perilous journey across the Gulf of Mexico to sit out the northern winter in this tropical paradise. For a reminder that there is much more to LIFE beyond the human species, Costa Rica can’t be beat—we would encourage other nature-loving Floridians to consider making the trip!

I am grateful to Professor Stanlick for offering me this opportunity to reflect and take stock of my time at UCF and afterward.

—Ronnie Hawkins, November 2023