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Theory of the environmental ethics of land use

The project of Assistant Professor Teea Kortetmäki, from the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, is named Environmental landscape ethics: a theory of cohabitability (COHAB). It examines change in land use, which is one of the main reasons for biodiversity loss.

The funded COHAB project creates a new kind of theory for the environmental ethics of land use, in which land use and its ethical sustainability is viewed using the tools of environmental ethics. Environmental ethics is a field of research that examines the ethical sustainability of human activity from the perspective of non-human nature.

Prior to this, environmental ethics has approached land use mostly from a quantitative viewpoint, asking how much and for what purposes it is ethically acceptable to use land. “Due to the lack of a qualitative viewpoint, most land area on the globe has fallen outside of environmental ethics research, which is an unsustainable situation,” says Kortetmäki.

Research in the environmental ethics of land use requires new concepts and methods. To develop these methods, the project takes a cross-disciplinary approach making use of, for example, research in landscape ecology.

The study is anchored around a new concept, cohabitability. The basic assumption is that ethically acceptable land use secures and promotes the cohabitability of different land areas for large groups of species. Therefore, the land area used by humans is also observed as a cohabited living environment, in which humans are habitants and land users among other species.

Mysterious giant phages

The project Life of Giant Phages (GIAPHAGE), led by PhD Elina Laanto from the Department of Biological and Environmental Science, studies the biology and ecology of giant phages. Phages are viruses that infect bacteria and they are some of the most diverse and prevalent creatures on earth. Even though they are invisible to eye, they play a significant role in maintaining the diversity of life.

The giant phage, or the megaphage, has a genome of more than 600,000 base pairs and until now they have been recognised only using sequencing methods. To date, no isolated giant phage populations have existed. This project utilises the world’s first isolated giant phages found in Finnish lakes and rivers.

“With the giant phage populations, it is possible to find answers to many unsolved mysteries,” says Laanto. “What do they look like? How do they infect bacteria? How does a giant phage, which has occupied the machinery of a bacteria cell, change the functioning and metabolism of the cell? How does this impact the environment?

Laanto’s project also clarifies the competition between giant phages and ordinary phages. It has been found that the genomes of isolated giant phages carry CRISPRCas immune defence machineries, which are the same systems bacteria are known to possess. Therefore, one of the goals of the study is to clarify if giant phages utilise this machinery in competition between phages.

“Through research, we can collect new pieces to the puzzle of phage diversity,” Laanto says. “The knowledge produced by the study may have a significant impact on how the role of phages in the environment is understood. Because giant phages have a large amount of genetic material that has not been described earlier, the study may also open doors to new microbiological innovations.”

Further information:

• Researcher Elina Laanto, elina.laanto@jyu.fi, +358 50 433 9850
• Assistant Professor Teea Kortetmäki, teea.t.kortetmaki@jyu.fi, +358401834918
• Press release of the European Research Council (ERC):