Environmental Citizenship:Integrating Civic Rights,Obligations And Virtues

As China’s major environmental problems, environmental pollution and environmental risk events not only cause serious damage to nature, but also bring many economic and social problems. The enhance of the citizens’ environmental awareness also makes environmental issues gain wider attention. Environmental rights, obligations and virtues of the citizens, enterprises and government have become the focus of discussions.Based on the theory of traditional citizenship, this paper firstly analyzes the development of environmental citizenship and its theoretical connotation in different perspectives, integrating individual citizen’s environmental rights, obligations and virtues into a more complete interpretation of the concept of environmental citizenship. Additionally, this paper attempts to integrate environmental rights and obligations into environmental virtues, which provides a viable path for the practice of specific environmental virtues. From the perspective of environmental ethics, this paper defines and classifies the concept of the environment host more clearly. All human beings are defined as environmental agent, which is specifically divided into citizens, enterprises and government. Based on this theory, this paper focuses on the analysis of the causes of the PX events and the reactions and response measures of different environmental agents. According to the characteristics of different environmental agents, different principles of environmental virtue should be proposed to guide environmental agents’ environmental rights and obligations, which offers a new train of thought to solve the specific environmental problems.