There are several distinctive features of environmental ethics that deserve our attention. First, environmental ethics is extended. Traditional ethics mainly concerns intra- human duties, especially duties among contemporaries. Environmental ethics extends the scope of ethical concerns beyond one’s community and nation to

include not only all people everywhere, but also animals and the whole of nature– the biosphere – both now and beyond the imminent future to include future generations. Second, environmental ethics is interdisciplinary. There are many over lapping concerns and areas of consensus among environmental ethics, environmental politics, environmental economics, environmental sciences and environmental literature, for example. The distinctive perspectives and methodologies of these disciplines provide important inspiration for environmental ethics, and environmental ethics offers value foundations for these disciplines. They reinforce, influence and support each other. Third, environmental ethics is plural. From the moment it was born, environmental ethics has been an area in which different ideas and perspectives compete with each other. Anthropocentrism, animal liberation/rights theory, biocentrism and ecocentrism all provide unique and, in some sense, reasonable ethical justifications for environmental protection. Their approaches are different, but their goals are by and large the same,