Environmental ethics is a sub-discipline of practical philosophy that seeks to evaluate human interaction with non-human nature according to generalisable standards and to justify these evaluations. Within this broader framework, the Chair of Environmental Ethics addresses practical questions of nature and species conservation, topics such as wilderness, climate change and sustainable development, as well as the philosophy of nature, philosophy of science, history of ecology, and ecological utopias. The chair was established at the Institute of Botany in 1997 to teach students of Landscape Ecology and Nature Conservation how to construct value-based arguments. Since then, it has also sought to engage students of philosophy, sustainable geography, biology, psychology, and other disciplines in the dialogue between the humanities and natural sciences.